Zack Handlen, Jason Heller, Noel Murray, Keith Phipps, Leonard Pierce, and Tasha Robinson over at the AV Club offer up their opinions on the best comics of the '00s.
"The '00s were a turbulent time for the comic-book business, as mainstream publishers like DC and Marvel suffered the sales declines affecting nearly all print-purveyors, while publishers of what used to be known as "alternative" comics saw some of their products hitting bestseller lists and turning up on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. Superheroes were more popular at the multiplex, but in terms of readership and buzz, the story of the decade was how a handful of high-profile non-genre books helped advance the medium's standing in literary society. And there were other big stories over the past 10 years: the inroads made by online comics, the ascendancy of writers at "the big two," the proliferation of outstanding archival collections of classic comics, and so on. Below, The A.V. Club's regular Comics Panel team tries to touch on all the above, via our picks for the 25 best comics of the decade and the five best archival projects. These lists are presented alphabetically, and contain a mix of graphic novels, ongoing series, comic strips, and single issues. Limiting ourselves to 25 meant reluctantly leaving out a lot of our favorite titles (no Hernandez brothers, no Walking Dead, no Scott Pilgrim, no Astro City)."
"The '00s were a turbulent time for the comic-book business, as mainstream publishers like DC and Marvel suffered the sales declines affecting nearly all print-purveyors, while publishers of what used to be known as "alternative" comics saw some of their products hitting bestseller lists and turning up on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. Superheroes were more popular at the multiplex, but in terms of readership and buzz, the story of the decade was how a handful of high-profile non-genre books helped advance the medium's standing in literary society. And there were other big stories over the past 10 years: the inroads made by online comics, the ascendancy of writers at "the big two," the proliferation of outstanding archival collections of classic comics, and so on. Below, The A.V. Club's regular Comics Panel team tries to touch on all the above, via our picks for the 25 best comics of the decade and the five best archival projects. These lists are presented alphabetically, and contain a mix of graphic novels, ongoing series, comic strips, and single issues. Limiting ourselves to 25 meant reluctantly leaving out a lot of our favorite titles (no Hernandez brothers, no Walking Dead, no Scott Pilgrim, no Astro City)."
