It's 2062 and everything's alright: TCJ comics of 2025
The annual colossal round-up of notable comics and related business from contributors to The Comics Journal, including a handful of items from me.
In 2025 a reprint of Pat Mills and Clint Langley's American Reaper couldn't feel more like a product of 2011 if it arrived bagged with a copy of FHM. Everything about the overheated Photoshop manipulations of photographs and the face-pulling of the individuals in them threatens to become anti-comics at any moment—or it would in the hands of anyone less committed to comics' singular affect than Langley, who runs his pages much as James Cameron runs his movies. The satire about authenticity and pretence gave the queasy fake-realism of the art some elbow room at the time. Now it stands there in its garish fake-real aura and invites generative algorithms to take their shot if they want.
American Reaper was in the Judge Dredd Megazine and so was Childhood's End from 1993, also on my list, a high water mark of the Psi-Judge Cassandra Anderson character and so a high water mark for writer Alan Grant too. Rebellion has given up collecting the Anderson stories in chronological reprints in favour of the selective Essential books, which futzes with Grant's masterful long arc of character development, constructed over decades with watertight craft. Essential #3 puts Childhood's End next to Grant's very last Anderson stories from 26 years later, by which time the writer had either been told to turn the creative wick down or felt he had served his time in the salt mines. Probably one then the other.
