Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Moving up to the first tier

Birds of Prey scribe Gail Simone is taking over Wonder Woman. According to the NYT, she's the first woman to serve as the writer of the Wonder Woman comic.

I'm not a huge Wonder Woman fan (although rumor is that Joss Whedon is), but I first bumped into Ms. Simone's writing in an episode of the excellent Justice League Unlimited cartoon, and recommend her unhesitatingly.

Which gets me to thinking, who are the really interesting comic book writers working today? For the purposes of this question I'd exclude non-superhero graphic novelists, who have been getting some well-deserved attention of their own lately, but that still leaves Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and, for the moment, the aforementioned Joss Whedon, who has been writing an X-men storyline and producing a Buffy comic. Who else is out there? What comics do you still read, wordwrighters? Or what comics do you remember from your comic reading days?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, now this is a conversation I can really get into.

Two names occur to me right away - Mike Mignola and Mike Carey. Mike Mignola writes the Hellboy comics, a personal favorite of mine. Mike Carey has worked on Fantastic Four and X-Men, but I prefer his Lucifer series. It's a spin-off from Neil Gaiman's Sandman. The Prince of Darkness, in an attempt to thwart Dream's plans, abdicates his throne and throws the gates of hell open. Lucifer chronicles what happens to the Morningstar afterward and is, in my opinion, a better comic than Sandman (though I do love Sandman a great deal).

Abandoning the non-superhero limitation (or perhaps just stretching it a bit), I would add to my list Bill Willingham of Fables fame.

Gavin said...

I like Mignola a lot, and have read a handful of Hellboy (a Right-hand-of-doom-ful, perhaps?), but on the whole, I'm more familiar with Mignola's art than his writing. (The Amzazing Screw-On Head is pretty cool, too though.)

I'm a bit pleased that while Neil Gaiman has worked his way into this conversation, as I expected he would, he wasn't the first name that got thrown out. I don't dislike him (I've read hardly any of his work), but I've never been much interested in Sandman. At all. In the realm of supernatural mythology comics, Hellboy is much more up my alley.