Welcome to The Corner Box with David Hedgecock and John Barber. With decades of experience in all aspects of comic book production, David, John, and their guests will give you an in-depth, and insightful look at the past, present, and future of the most exciting medium on the planet—comics—and everything related to it.

[00:24] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Corner Box, a couple of good time pals, chuckling it up about comic books, and having fun. I'm one of your hosts, David Hedgecock, and with me, as always, is my very good friend.

[00:36] John Barber: It's me, Iceland--I mean, John Barber. Damn, it is easy to do that. 

[00:42] David: A radio DJ host, and you completely derailed me, John. That was fantastic.

[00:47] John: I thought you were going to keep going with it. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to--

[00:50] David: No, I can't now. I've only got so much of that in me anyway. We’ve got some fun stuff for you planned this week. We're going to continue on our Best of 2025. I'd like to reiterate, to those listening, John, this is the only true valid list of Best of 2025 that's out there, certainly in the podcast arena for comic books, and the reason is because we waited.

[01:16] John: Yeah.

[01:18] David: Until the end of 2025 before we started compiling our list. Everyone else is doing these things before the year's even over, but here we are. It's almost the end of January, as we're recording this, and it'll probably be well into February by the time people are listening to this. So, we gave things enough time to simmer. Everything, all the way through December 31st, has been considered, evaluated, and thoroughly chewed over, John. We do the homework around here.

[01:44] John: For next year's list, we should do 1987.

[01:48] David: I'm probably more qualified to do 1987 than just about any other thing. So, let's do a quick recap. I think we did our Best Original Graphic Novel last year. Yours, I believe, was Drome by Jesse Lonergan. Mine was--it wasn't a graphic novel, but I just used my limited series as my graphic novel. So, mine was Death of Copra by Michel Fiffe. Best Collection for you last year was Tongues by Anders Nilsen. My Best Collection of material last year was Helen of Wyndhorn by Tom King, and more importantly, Bilquis Evely. I've talked about Best New Series of the Year, and for me, that was Battle Beasts, but John, I don't remember what your--did you have a Best New Series? Did you do that one?

[02:41] John: I did. Assorted Crisis Events.

[02:44] David: Oh, Assorted Crisis Events. You had read it as the trade paperback, but you were like, “I'm going to read this in floppies moving forward.” Did we do Best New Artist, favorite artist?

[02:54] John: Yes, we did.

[02:54] David: We did Favorite Artist of the Year. Mine was Jason Fabok, who is currently on Rook: Exodus, and yours was David Finch, Skinbreaker.

[03:04] John: Some of those that I said even take me by surprise. That's a particular look of things that we both went for on our favorite artist, that is not similar to a lot of the other categories we went on.

[03:15] David: Well, hopefully people, if they haven't listened to it already, they go back, and listen to it, because I think we had some incredibly great insights on all of these books and material, and why they were best. People really do need to go out and listen to that episode. That was last week, John. We're out with the old, in with the new. Now, let's continue forward with our Best of 2025. Any other caveats before we get going?

[03:33] John: We'll probably have some runners up that we should have said. The one comic that would have really been vying with the Assorted Crisis Events, for me, was Supergirl, which I've been enjoying the heck out of, the Sophie Campbell Supergirl. I'll be honest, it snuck up on me, how much I was enjoying it, and I didn't really realize it until I was a little ways into it, and then I'm like, “man, I really like having this every month, and just checking in with Kara.” It's a low-key superhero story, exactly like Sophie would dream of writing. Her art's great, and the fill-in artists have been all stellar. Really a nice one. I like it.

[04:07] David: I'm with you on that. I'm really enjoying that series, too. I just love Sophie Campbell's art, and the story is, like you say, exactly what you would expect from Sophie. I'm enjoying that one, too. That could have been a tough book to be a part of, and she's really made it something fun and interesting, and it's a nice little relaxing read.

[04:27] John: Yeah, especially coming off of an all-time great Supergirl book with Tom King.

[04:31] David: Right. That could be an intimidating follow.

[04:34] John: Yeah. Best Collection of Classic Material or Older Material. This one had a lot of good ones, for me. One of them, I think, maybe fits in this, I'll bring up separately. I do want to throw out that the Complete Megaton Man Universe Volume 1: The 1980s by Don Simpson was revelatory, for me, and that was really cool, and really interesting. I’d happened into an issue of Megaton Man last year, and I was just like, “wow, this is really good.” I think it came out on Kickstarter. Fantagraphics is or has published it, but it's a very thorough, black and white, real high quality, and then you get to the end notes, and you're just like, “man, everybody in indie comics in the 1980s was a lunatic,” and there's these grudges that he clearly still has, that he clearly still thinks he is so clearly correct about, that get brought up in those things, and it's just like, “wow, I get what you're saying, but I don't know if that's a 40 years’ worth hold on to being mad that Denis Kitchen wanted to have a bunch of #1s, and people didn't really get what was going on behind the surface of Megaton Man.”

[05:48] David: Fantastic. I thought I'd got that one, John, but I think maybe I got another Megaton Man Kickstarter. There was Multimensions.

[05:56] John: It's funny. I think we passed in the night and got separate ones. I inadvertently didn't get that one. I need to track that down. I still haven't finished […] that first one. It was the one with different artists, right?

[06:06] David: Yeah, and I enjoyed it. I thought it was really fun. Why I think I picked it up is because friend of the show, Kirt Burdick, had done a one- or three-pager in there. I can't remember. I read it, but he had done a couple pages in there, and I was curious to see how he handled somebody else's property, which by the way, Kirt Burdick, Mr. Death of Power himself, has a Kickstarter going right now for Issue #8 of Death of Power. I'm very excited. It ends on January 31st. So, people will be listening to this too late, but did you see the thing that he did? He's doing, basically, reprint mini comics of all the previous issues, and that son of a gun is going to get more money out of me, because I totally want to get those.

[06:49] John: Yeah.

[06:50] David: That's a good one, John.

[06:51] John: That was my runner-up.

[06:52] David: Oh, that was your runner-up?

[06:53] John: I apologize. I just got excited, and wanted to get to that bit about the footnotes. My #1, […] that's really funny about this--that was going to be my choice, and in December, I was thinking, “man, there's a series that I really like, and it hasn't been reprinted. I've got a lot of the issues, but I'm missing some of them. Maybe I should just bite the bullet, and even though they're pretty expensive, buy the ones that I don't have in my garage,” even though at one point, I've had all these issues. So, as I'm thinking that, unbeknownst to me, the series starts getting reprinted in high quality books from 23rd Street Press, the adult side of First Second.

[07:27] David: Oh, First Second.

[07:29] John: Who also published Drome. So, the comic is Total THB Volume 1 by Paul Pope.

[07:35] David: Nice. I didn't know that was coming around.

[07:38] John: Well, I remember when they announced it, when I was around 30.

[07:42] David: So, 12 months ago?

[07:43] John: 12 months from now. That thing got announced, no joke, decades ago. I'm probably not exaggerating when I said that. If anything, I'm probably selling short how long this thing has been supposedly going to come out. So, the idea that it actually came out--I don't know what would have made me believe it was really there, but I have a copy of it, the first volume. It's going to be 3 volumes with a theoretical 4th volume ending the story, which has never ended. I can't tell you how much I love the comics that are reprinted in there. Quality of the printing is terrific. The book’s a nice format. It isn't like a Super Deluxe Megaton Man #1, but I've talked a few times about how much--well, I don't speak for anybody else--how much I appreciate Walt Simonson's Thor run as being a great example of what just doing issue-by-issue comics leads to, where you get Frog Thor, in a way that, if you're planning out a 60-issue arc, you're not going to do that. You're not going to just throw that in the middle of a different story, and there's 99 examples you can find of things working really poorly, by just planning one issue at a time, or just a couple issues, or whatever, but that's the shining example of the thing you lose by not having it, in my mind. There's probably other ones that are just as good. THB, to me, it came out of the self-publishing movement of the mid-90s. So, at that point, most of the big publishers were aggressively pursuing aggressively commercial superhero comics, to one degree.

[09:06] David: Aggressively commercial superhero comics. I just want to put an emphasis on that. That's a perfect explanation of early and mid-90s Marvel/DC.

[09:18] John: Yeah, and DC had Vertigo, at that point. You had Dark Horse. They were doing the other thing you could take from Image, which was a group of high-profile artists working together in some collective form, but everything was still very largely locked into that superhero paradigm, while at the same time, if you were a fan of Chris Ware or Dan Clowes, you were going to comic bookstores, because that was the only place you could get that stuff. If you want to follow the Adventures of Jimmy Corrigan or see what's next for Enid Coleslaw, you had to go to a comic bookstore. That's crazy now.

[09:56] David: Right.

[09:57] John: But that was happening at the same time, and the lines were not maybe as super clear even, but right in the middle of that, you had Dave Sim from Cerebus leading the self-publishing movement, getting people to follow him, in that milieu of just publishing your own stuff.

[10:11] David: I think you also had a new darling of the moment too, with Jeff Smith's Bone. Those things were playing off each other, in that moment.

[10:19] John: And you had a complete creative freedom, at that point. If you were self-publishing stuff, nobody was going to tell you it wasn't good enough, it wasn't the right thing, it wasn't commercial enough, or whatever. So, you had a lot of weird stuff coming out, at that point--not as much as you'd want, but you had Steve Bissett from Swamp Thing, and publisher of Taboo, which is the life story of a Tyrannosaurus Rex starting when he's an egg.

[10:42] David: And a whole issue burned on that egg, too.

[10:44] John: Yeah.

[10:45] David: Fantastic.

[10:46] John: Right, yeah. Rick Veitch drawing his dream comics, Eddie Campbell completing Bacchus, all the stuff like that. In the middle of that drops THB by Paul Pope, which is the story of this girl named HR, who's a teenage girl living on Mars in the future, and her dad is an industrialist. As a bodyguard, they give her this little rubber ball that, when it gets wet, turns into a probably-sentient rubber robot, called THB, that can protect her, and the forward momentum, the propulsion of this story--in a world where you hadn't seen Paul Pope before. He'd done a couple self-published graphic novels. He was still in his early 20s, though. Based on the introduction--I didn't know this--He was either in or just out of college when he started THB.

He describes it like Thoreau at Walden, where he's just walled off in an apartment drawing this stuff. You really get the impression that that's right, and you can see him going through different materials, trying to figure out how to draw this. You'll get to page 12, or something, and be like, “well, maybe I should be using ink washes.” So, from page 12 on, it's got ink washes, until he decides “maybe I should just be shooting this from the pencils. Maybe that's the right way to do it,” and then finally it's like, “no, it should be a brush,” and then it starts to look like Paul Pope, and you can see this developing on there, but there wasn't any going back and redoing the pages. There's just this pure pulp speed of “I needed to get 3 pages done today. So, I got 3 pages done today.” He's super talented. So, it works in there, but it's amazing to see that laid out now, in a world where he used to draw Batman. DC had him doing covers for series.

[12:20] David: He's done all-ages graphic novels, at this point.

[12:23] John: Yeah, it's so indie, so pulpy, so much fun, and just that creative freedom of--and the thing that's interesting--Bone was the biggest thing to come out of there, but if you pitch Bone to a publisher, even in that era, it's a reasonable comic to publish. It's immaculately drawn. The story is super good. It's a fantasy story. It fits in a genre that makes sense, but it's a unique, fun take on it. The biggest thing you're going to get out of it, nowadays, is “Phoney can't be smoking a cigar. There's no way any publisher would let that go,” but at the time, this was being picked up by Disney, and you start getting it in supermarket checkout lines. Nobody was going to listen to or see, or find out about THB, and think, “that's a sure thing. Let's do that.” The laid-back pace of it, where you might just get 8 pages of the bad guys’ bureaucracy, of just them having to deal with going to the rooms that you have to fill out the forms for them to chase after HR, it's terrific and fun, and the art's so kinetic, and then when things start moving, it's amazing.

At one point, Paul Pope went back and redrew parts of Issue #1 for the second print of #1. This one actually reprints the original versions of it. The whole thing's been re-lettered, based on Paul Pope's handwriting. The original lettering was messy. My first publication in comics was a letter to THB, in which I mentioned that I think the lettering is sh!tty. So, I would be a real phony if I pretended some amount of purity towards wishing that the original lettering were there.

[14:01] David: That is the most comic book nerd of comic book nerd things to do, is to write your first letter, and be complaining about sh!t. Fantastic.

[14:08] John: It was very complimentary.

[14:10] David: And then there's the backhanded compliment of “everything's so great. Why does the lettering suck so bad?”

[14:15] John: I think it was something along the lines of “usually the messy lettering will turn me off, but here it really adds to the flavor of it. The story really pulled me in, and then I came to love it.” I don't know. That's what I meant.

[14:27] David: Yeah. Paul Pope, man, he was laying down a manifesto. We need more of it in comic books, in my opinion. I've been actually working on a manifesto myself, for the last couple months, trying to figure out what it is exactly I'm trying to say with comic books, but I think we need more manifestos, man. When Paul Pope came out with all that energy, I just feel like he--did he lay down a manifesto, or did he give himself a specific name to his art style? I just feel like I was more interested in Paul Pope as an artistic force of nature than it was about anything he was actually doing. It was more the potential celebrity of Paul Pope than the actual comic books that he was making. That's not to say I didn't love THP, because I did, but he was pushing the envelope, not in just what he was doing, but in how he was handling his career, in those early days. He wasn't trying to do anything, but be an Artist, with a capital A. That's what it felt like. He was like, “my stuff's going to be shown in galleries,” not in a pretentious way, but just in a, “this is legitimate art, and I am producing art.” I really admired that, and I don't even know if that's something I just put on him, or if that's what he was actually thinking or doing. I don't know.

[15:44] John: Yeah, I mean, in the introduction in this book, he talks about, he's in art school, in a world where comics were totally looked down upon, and nobody wanted him to be doing comic stuff. There was one professor that did it, and now he talks about how now that school has a whole school of comic book art. He was right. It was a fascinating type of celebrity that he was posing himself as. It was 90s alternative celebrity.

[16:07] David: Yeah.

[16:07] John: It wasn't celebrity in the sense now, where it’s some OnlyFans thing, or something. He would be one of the handful of comic book creators that probably had pictures of him with his shirt off in his comics, and can you imagine if Incredible Hulk had that?

[16:22] David: Peter David.

[16:23] John: Yeah.

[16:23] David: Everybody in comics.

[16:24] John: Yeah. He set himself up, and positioned it in a way that was exuding cool, and talking about Nick Cave, and stuff like that, in the same breath that he's talking about Moebius and Hugo Pratt. I remember, one of the magazines he did has an interview with him. I think it's him, Bissette, Jeff Smith, maybe somebody else, and it's even giving that impression that the comic book world is these cool guys that make cool comics, and then they get together, and they talk about comics, and talk about the art of it. It's like somebody looked at all the Moebius stuff, and is like, “this guy's just making the comics he wants to make. So, that's what I'm going to do,” and he does it, and the reality that Moebius, his entire life, was drawing Blueberry, the Western. There's a youthful exuberance to it, and every single page, just like every Paul Pope project, which is probably the biggest criticism maybe you can make about Paul Pope, everything is just pure potentiality. There's so much potential in all of this.

[17:26] David: Yes, that was the attraction, is the potential. Couldn't agree more.

[17:31] John: Yeah, and I think he's made some spectacular books. I mean, Batman: Year 100, Heavy Liquid, they all felt like “the next one's going to come, and that's going to be his big thing.”

[17:41] David: That's going to be the signature. That's going to be Dark Knight Returns. Yeah, it felt like something like that was going to happen. I don't know that it ever really did, in a way that I thought it was going to, but certainly, he had a fine career, and made some really quality stuff, and continues to be an interesting voice in the medium, for sure.

[18:00] John: He's the opposite of Dave Stevens, or somebody that made 48 very good pages. There’s thousands of pages […]. Are they all winners? No, but there's 1000 of them. To me, it's like Michael Moorcock's work, or something. You can take any one Michael Moorcock novel, and it does not compare well to Dostoevsky, or Donna Tartt, or something, but you take the whole thing together, and man, it's a real piece of work altogether.

[18:28] David: I like that. Some people just do To Kill a Mockingbird, and other people create 100 issues of Fantastic Four. Just a difference of how you want to approach your art, I guess. So, your archival collection caught me slightly off guard, but as we've been talking, I've been pouring through my last year of stuff, and I think I'm going to go with a book that's near and dear to my heart, and also happened to be the largest-earning comic book in the history of Kickstarter, which is the G.I. Joe Compendium Archive.

[19:04] John: Was that this year?

[19:05] David: I think that was this year. Oh, geez, no. You know what? It wasn't. That was 2024. Ah, man. It was at the end of 2024.

[19:12] John: Well, you can count it. Whatever.

[19:14] David: All right. I actually don't know that I got my physical copies until 2025. So, I think that's maybe why I'm doing that.

[19:21] John: That's valid.

[19:22] David: Okay. G.I. Joe: Real American Hero, as written by Larry Hama, and drawn by a whole cadre of interesting artists. Skybound put together a massive archive of all of the Marvel run. Interestingly enough, it's the last few issues of that series, once you start getting past #80 or #90, where it really starts getting hard to collect this stuff. So, having this collection was really nice to have, and seeing how it all got wrapped up, and they do a great job of presenting the material. It's really clean. I don't know if they were able to shoot this stuff from the original film, or where they got the film from. I'm guessing some of it was probably from IDW. In any case, it's just really nice to have the presentation of the physical packages, just really nice and top-notch, and they gave you an option of either getting the G.I. Joe version or the Cobra version, and I got the Cobra version, and it came with a bunch of cool, fun bells and whistles, really top-notch packaging, a nice box, and the presentation of the material is great.

So, I really enjoyed it, and it really was nice to be able to go back and read those books. I'm actually still in the first volume, but it's been really nice to be able to go back and read those books, and just have it all in one place, because even to this day, I never actually collected the entire G.I. Joe original Marvel run. I mean, the books are so prohibitively expensive now that I don't think I could, because I'm just not going to spend $30 on an Andrew Wildman-drawn G.I. Joe comic book. I refuse. So, no offense to Andrew, but come on. So, it's nice to have everything in one place. It's really cool to read, and just reading how Larry Hama, in the meantime, he's done more non-Marvel issues of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero than he did of the original series, at this point. So inventive, and so fun and interesting, and some great artists on there, too. Just some really great art, especially in those first 80 issues, or so. Really enjoying that.

It particularly hit my nostalgia sweet button, because G.I. Joe: American Hero #21 was actually the first issue of G.I. Joe I ever “read.” The silent issue. That was very early in my comic book collecting days. I was just, at that point, getting into understanding that the numbers on the corner meant things, and things like that. So, I was only a few years, at most, into turning into a collector of comics, I guess, for lack of a better term. That package was really nice. Really enjoyed it. The Kickstarter, I think, made $5 million, or something like that, and I hope that Larry got half of it, but either way, well-earned, well-deserved, and really enjoyed that one. So, that's my 2024/25 Archival Best of Collection.

[22:17] John: I mean, that was the comic that really got me into comics. Picking up those collections, they're so nice. The paper quality feels really good. They're light and readable, in a way that big omnibuses--there's definitely stuff that I've got that I’m like, “I don't want to sit there with that omnibus.”

[22:32] David: Yeah, it's not that. I agree.

[22:35] John: It maintains that same pulpy feel that adds to the feel for those books. Yeah, no, that's awesome.

[22:47] David: Next up, we're going to get back into a little more recent work. I thought it'd be fun to pick a Favorite Cover Artist of 2025, and I was slightly surprised by who my ultimate pick was, but I'm really happy with it, and I don't want to ruin his name, but it's Dike Ruan. Dike Ruan has been doing a lot of Miles Morales: Spider-Man covers, but he's done a bunch of other stuff for both companies recently, and his work is really cool and dynamic. It's like he's doing an ink wash with his inks, but then he's coloring it. It's almost like watercolors. It has a little bit of this interesting watercolor effect, but then he's also got this cool colored pencil thing that he's got, and I'm sure he's doing a lot of it digitally, but the end product is just really great, and his anatomy of the characters is spectacular. He's just got a really great understanding of anatomy, and the ideas that he's putting forth in the compositions themselves are just amazing.

He did a piece of Storm Shadow, where she's got the white hair, and the hair is coming off her head, and cutting the cover in half. So, half the cover at an angle is just white space, just this big block of negative space, and then there's lightning bolts coming out of her hair, around her, and behind her, and she's just got this really cool pose. He's done a lot of covers for Ultimates, which is I think probably where I first saw him or recognized him. I see him a lot on Spider-Man. I believe he did a Flash cover. That was so good. I think that was him. So, he's all over the place. Really love his stuff, and in 2025, I just really feel like he made his presence felt. I'm guessing that he's going to get bigger and bigger as we move forward. I don't know that he's done any interiors. If he has, I haven't seen them, but I really like his stuff. So, that's my 2025 Cover Artist of the Year, John. Dike Ruan.

[25:00] John: That stuff’s great. I'm bad at cover artists.

[25:06] David: The things that interest me in 2025 for covers has changed a little bit, or I'm just sampling new guys. I'm falling more in love with that Derek Chua style of art. It's like a good girl art, but with a little more energy behind it. Derek Chua, he's the epitome of what I'm thinking of. There's a couple guys that are like him that are producing covers that I'm really enjoying lately. I feel like Dike Ruan is in that vein, but I don't know, next-leveling it for me, in a way that I find really interesting. He's got a really great grasp of negative space. I'm really enjoying that aspect, I think, of his work. My runner-up, I think, for this year is another artist, Rose Besch. Have you heard of her?

[25:57] John: Rose Besch, no.

[25:59] David: Rose's been doing mostly DC stuff, but I think she's done some Marvel stuff too, but she's usually on the C/D/E covers. She's not normally doing the A cover, and Rose Besch has a really cool--I don't want to say it's a chibi style, but it's got a little bit of a chibi feel to it. Very much a manga-heavy influence to her work. The thing that stands out for me with Rose Besch is, her choice of colors is really fantastic, and she has a fantastic way of putting colors together that would normally be garish and off-putting to me, but the way she combines them, it has the opposite effect. It's really pleasing to my eye, at least, and I really like what she's doing with her stuff.

The other runner-up for me was our friend, Nicoletta Baldari. Nicoletta continues to be, I think, one of the most interesting cover artists working today. She's done a lot. I was really thrilled, because she had more than a few Spider-Boy covers. I buy a lot of Nicoletta Baldari covers. So, it was nice to not have to just get a book that I didn't really want just because Nicoletta did the cover. So, it was fun. She did some fun comic books this year, and her style is so fun and interesting. She really has embraced that Spider-Man movie/animated movie look and feel to her work. She was already headed in that direction, but she's really embraced that style. I'm enjoying her work now, as much, or more than I ever have. She's fantastic. So, there you go, John. Cover Artist of the Year.

[27:41] John: I might go with Edwin Galmon. This is definitely a thing that I am not super good at, me going out, as a reader, and picking out covers that I really like. There's people I like working with, that I know could always deliver really good covers, and that I like looking at, and a few artists that are just all-timers, have great sets of covers or great cover artists, or something. Galmon's got a neat color sense. I think when he does the whole thing, it's got a cool vibrancy to it, for me.

[28:08] David: I really like his Cyborg cover. The cover to Issue #1 of Cyborg Dawn of DC. That's a nice one. Looks like he did some Power Company stuff. Looks like he's done a lot of DC stuff.

[28:18] John: Yeah.

[28:19] David: Some of his Aquaman covers are amazing. Yeah. Nice choice, John. I like it.

[28:25] John: All right. I’ve got a category that bridges the gap between the archival and the new, which is Favorite Comeback of the year.

[28:38] David: I was going to do that one. That's fantastic. All right. I'm totally ready for this one.

[28:42] John: I won't say my runners up in case you happen to pick one of those.

[28:46] David: No, go ahead. It's fine.

[28:47] John: No, that's good. Better to throw it out afterwards. For me, this could be a person, a comic, whatever. In my case, I was mostly just thinking of sets of comics, but the one for me that I'm almost surprised by how excited I am to read it every month when it comes out is Powers 25 by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. When Robert Scott, the late proprietor of Kamikaze Comics, told me to buy Sam & Twitch #1, that was the first time I had ever read any Brian Michael Bendis. Robert was dead-on that this is somebody I was going to like, because two of the things I was super into right then, and still am--well, sorry, maybe not as into at least one of them as I used to be--but I was really into David Mamet dialogue and Howard Chaykin layouts. Man, so was Brian Michael Bendis. He was doing layouts in Sam & Twitch originally, and you could tell Angel Medina was not the right artist to be drawing those scripts, but they both did a good job on it. It wasn't that Angel did a bad job on it at all, but you could tell those weren't Angel Medina layouts, and several issues into it, Alex Maleev comes on, and it's like, “this is the right guy for this.”

These two people paired together create a symbiosis that's different than either of them, and totally in tune, and the other guy that really did that with Bendis, especially early on, was Oeming on Powers, doing a much more Bruce Timm-y style that really is super far away from what Maleev was doing, even though they're both doing these superhero crime comics, and that series went on forever. I worked with Bendis on a bunch of stuff. Eventually, the series ended, and it wasn't a big hole in my life, at that point. I stopped reading it. I read the whole thing eventually, but Powers 25 is a lot of fun. It takes place however many years later it is. Deena Pilgrim from the original series is the lieutenant or the police commissioner, or whatever. It's new, younger recruits doing Power stuff. It doesn't rely on your knowledge of the old series, but that stuff does inform it, and if you've never read it, you just know that Deena has this crazy backstory for why she's in charge, and that's fine. It's almost like the other series could be telling you why the commissioner is the commissioner. It's a lot of fun to get a monthly Bendis comic, especially one that's really locked on, really right for his voice.

I feel like that was one of the things that was difficult with him at DC, and I don't really know why, but where his voice seemed really right to Marvel in the 2000s. Him at DC in the late 2010s didn't jibe just right, I think. This totally does. Powers, it's him, it's them. Really enjoy it. Really enjoy checking in with those characters in that world every month.

[31:38] David: I just saw a solicitation for whatever the latest issue is, and I was like, “oh man. I didn't actually know it had started up again,” but I think I might want to check that out. I really enjoyed Powers when it first came out, and I was on it for, I think, almost the entirety of the first volume of that book, but at some point, I think it started getting delayed, and I just couldn't keep up. I think there's a couple volumes of that that I probably need to check out. I wonder if there's a large compendium of that stuff that one could find.

[32:13] John: Yeah, I'm not even sure where that's at anymore, but yeah, there definitely are. To be honest, I don't remember everything that happened in Powers, and Powers 25 really doesn't rely on you having to know all that stuff. Just remembering that a bunch of big stuff happened in the past. Christian Walker was an important figure in the history of the city.

[32:36] David: That's all you need to know?

[32:37] John: That's all you need to know.

[32:38] David: Oh, okay. Maybe I'll just jump right back into it.

[32:40] John: The new characters have their own back stories, and stuff that we're finding out, like we did in the original. Yeah, it's nice.

[32:47] David: My Comeback of the Year is not going to be any surprise, whatsoever. It's going to be exactly who you think it is. I'm not going to disappoint the audience. This is my one chance. So, my Comeback of the Year is Rob Liefeld's return to Youngblood. Rob has not gone away from comic books. He's been producing, I don't know, anywhere between 5 and probably 8 issues worth of material a year, for the last couple of years, at least. Doing a lot of Deadpool stuff, but Deadpool's never been my favorite thing. I've always been way more interested in Rob Liefeld's creator-owned stuff than I have in his work at Marvel, or DC, I guess, for that matter. I was really excited to see him putting his focus and energy back on the stuff that he created and owned, or at least co-owns, and I have not been disappointed, whatsoever. The new Youngblood series has been super fun. I'm 3 issues into it, and a Giant-Sized Youngblood that came out last summer, and couldn't be more entertained. Having a great time with it. Rob's doing exactly what I expect and hope for him to do. I'm enjoying the fun ride.

As far as comebacks, I can only think of one comeback of the year that probably sold better, which is Jim Lee's return to Batman. That would be one of my runners-up for the year, but the problem with Jim Lee on Batman is that I never liked Jim Lee on Batman. I really like Jim Lee's stuff, but I've never really been that interested in Jim Lee doing Batman. Jim Lee doing WildC.A.T.S, Jim Lee doing X-Men, I'm all about that. I love seeing that stuff, but his Batman is just, I don't know, it's boring. His take on Batman is just not that exciting to me, and the Rogue's Gallery, I don't know, it doesn't play the same for some reason. I know that book sold wildly. I'm sure it did great, and I've been enjoying it. Not to say I haven't been enjoying Hush 2, but I don't know. I wasn't as excited about that in the first place as I was about something like Youngblood.

[34:48] John: My other runners-up would have been Nocturnals, because we've mentioned a couple times. Big Dan Brereton--

[34:54] David: Yeah, Dan Brereton.

[34:55] John: The actual story of the actual comic, when it came to Powers, was better, for me. I read every issue of Nocturnals, and enjoy it, but man, Powers just knocked it out of the park, for me. I honestly enjoyed having a couple Jeph Loeb Batman comics a month. It was one of those things that, I didn't think that would happen again. I didn't even read any of those when they were originally coming out. So, for me, it was the first time of like, “well, let's see how a Long Halloween-type story comes out monthly, and great showcase for artists,” and I pretty much agree with you on Jim Lee. I love Jim Lee, but I'd rather see him doing what this new Youngblood series is doing, and I'd like to see that with some of the other old Image stuff. It's strange, but this isn't what they usually do, which is pick up Youngblood like it was X-Men. A bunch of time passed since the 90s--Not 30 years. The characters aren't all in their 50s and 60s now, but time's passed, and now you're dealing with where they are now. Here's where Supreme shows up. What's he been up to the last, well, however long it was since whatever the last comic that counts was? Usually, they'll be just a radical reboot of the premises. Sometimes, that's cool, but I have no inherent interest in any of the WildStorm characters, as they exist in the DC Universe, but I would love to see what the real WildC.A.T.S in the WildStorm Universe are doing now.

[36:25] David: Right. Yeah, I totally understand what you're saying, and I couldn't agree more.

[36:29] John: Youngblood's my top read on the weeks it comes out. That's the first thing.

[36:35] David: Nice. I'm surprised that he seems to have been able to keep the momentum up. I think he's got at least four issues that'll be out. Issue #100 is being solicited, and it seems like things are going. So, I'm hoping he can keep some momentum. I was thinking the other day, the one thing that I've never seen from Rob Liefeld, and probably never will, but I am interested in seeing it, would be him actually doing a consecutive 24-issue run, a consecutive run of something. He sort of did that with New Mutants back in the day, but not really. A run in the same way that you get a Walt Simonson run, where he's doing the whole thing, he's writing it and drawing it, and we get a big, nice chunk of a reading experience. I just don't know that Liefeld has that in his DNA. I don't know that he's capable of that. I'm not saying that disparagingly. I just don't think that's how he operates. I don't think that's how he thinks, as a creator. He's all about the big, exciting thing--the big, exciting moment. It's harder to do that when you're on Issue #20 of a two-year run of things. Not that you can't do it, but I think it's harder to do that, and I'm not sure he's got that in his--just because I want it doesn't mean he wants it, which is fine. I'm happy to get Youngblood however it comes out, and Rob Liefeld work, I'm happy to get it, however it comes out. I've long ago accepted the way Rob Liefeld makes comic books. It's fine by me.

[38:02] John: That is one of the things that I think makes the New Mutants/X-Force run really interesting and special. It doesn't exactly lead to an end, or anything, but you could sit down with the Post-X-Tinction Agenda, New Mutants #98, and read through the issue before Capullo comes on X-Force. It tells a story.

[38:22] David: He has so many cool ideas that he sets up, I'd really love to see him set those up, and then also knock those down.

[38:27] John: Yes.

[38:28] David: He never fully knocked down the Strife storyline in a timely fashion. I think he actually did eventually do something with that. Again, I would love to see just a big chunk, all in one, where every month, we're getting another installment of this grand story that he's throwing out. The guy knows how to set up a lot of different plots and ideas, and I'd love to see him take the time to bake it and deliver some satisfying endings in one chunk. Again, I'm not saying that he doesn't do that over time. I'd love to see it as one consecutive run in a shorter period of time. So, anyway, Youngblood's my choice. Great comeback. I think he really threw a ton of energy into promoting Youngblood and getting the word out that it was coming back, and it so far has paid off, and I'm really enjoying it.

So, probably the granddaddy of the awards, I feel like we haven't touched on yet, at least direct market, which is Best Continuing Series of 2025. What is the anchor holding the entire industry down for you, John? What is the thing that's bringing you back, month after month, to the comic bookshop? By the way, I wanted to ask you, now that Southern California Comics is shut down, where are you going to buy your comic books?

[39:45] John: It's funny, I actually started alternating going over to Kamikaze again. They have different specialties, or they had different specialties, but I've just been going to Kamikaze since then. The thing that was cool about SoCal is they had such a great cheap back issue section, and I would dig through there, and then find some stupid amount of stuff to come home with. I think there was one day where I got 50 issues of The Spirit for $20, or whatever.

[40:13] David: That's fantastic.

[40:14] John: Yeah, it's great. It's going to fuel me reading The Spirit for a while. I'm not going to sit down and read Spirit, whatever, #1 through #50, but I'll read one this week, and then, in a couple of weeks, maybe I'll pick up another one, or I'll read a story here and there. So, I have a big backstock of that. So, I'm not exactly missing that now, but I do miss that, and I miss the folks there, seeing everybody there. Kamikaze, there are big pluses. I think they carry everything. You can go in there right now, and buy all your Halloween Boy issues that you're missing.

[40:46] David: I'm not missing any Halloween Boy issues.

[40:48] John: Right. There you go.

[40:49] David: By the way, Davey Bakes, they announced a new book. He and Nicole Goux have a new book coming out.

[40:55] John: Nicole Month at IDW, because they've got that book coming out from Top Shelf in the same solicit cycle that Nicole is writing and drawing an issue of Twilight Zone. I'm looking forward to that, and I'm also thinking I should have been checking out Twilight Zone a little harder than I was.

[41:12] David: No, you might be right. So, anyway, small digression, for those listeners who aren't in San Diego, all five of you, Kamikaze is literally across the street from where SoCal Comics was. It's maybe a block away. Is it even a block away from where SoCal Comics was?

[41:31] John: It's more than a block, and it's more difficult to get to than it ought to be, from one location to the other. You can only enter the Kamikaze parking lot from one direction. Currently, there are no signs there, because they're remodeling everything. That's legitimate. Not a bad thing about that place. They're just fixing it up.

[41:47] David: And then across the freeway, and down the road just a little bit, but on the same street is Yesteryear. Have you been to Yesteryear?

[41:55] John: Not for a little while. I need to go back there.

[41:57] David: Yeah. Last time I went, it was so tight in there, I could barely walk around, and I was getting claustrophobia. I was like, “I’ve got to get out of here.” I couldn't easily look through the comics. There wasn't enough room to bend down to see what was on the lower shelves. So, I was like, “okay, I think I'm going to be done with this place for a little while.” Hopefully, that's gotten fixed a little bit. That store used to be fantastic. It used to be my favorite store, but the weight of backstock brought them down.

[42:24] John: Yeah, did a couple signings there with Livio.

[42:27] David: Yeah, I think we coordinated a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle signing there one time too, back in the day. Let's get back to the real meat of the thing. We're going to close out our Best of 2025, John, with the best, for me at least--You can pick a different category--but I'm closing out my Best of 2025 with the Best Continuing Series of 2025, and again, I think there's going to be a very little surprise here, because we've talked about this book quite a bit, and we're always saying how it's of the best quality. I do have other choices that are non-direct market, non-superhero-y, but I thought for Best Continuing Series, we should just stick with monthly ongoings and the traditional superhero direct market stuff. So, my Best Continuing Series of 2025, Absolute Wonder Woman.

[43:19] John: Spoiler alert, mine too.

[43:22] David: Okay, good. I think that Kelly Thompson, she's just been on a tear, man. She's probably Top 5 best writer in all of the industry right now. Everything she's doing is just great. She leveled up in the last couple of years. She just really leveled up, and everything she touches is gold, and Absolute Wonder Woman just seems to be a perfect fit for her. Maybe it's because she built it from scratch, but it's super fun. I love the stories, and Hayden Sherman, where did that come from? A complete revelation. That guy just, for me, came out of nowhere, and his design sense, his storytelling ability, the way he's laying out pages, everything is just breathtaking. Truly, a massive win for DC. Editorial teams should be patting themselves on the back from now until the end of time for the choices they've made for this project. I think Jordie Bellaire is the colorist on the book. Did I get that right? I think it's Jordie Bellaire, and Jordie is one of the best in the industry. Multiple Eisner award-winning colorist, and is perfect for Hayden Sherman's work. Man, is there some heavy lifting going on, because Hayden Sherman's work, he does not shy away from the detail, at all. Just a really amazing reimagining of Wonder Woman's mythology. An inspired idea to make her, instead of the Princess of Themyscira, she's the Princess of Hell, and what a cool, inspired choice to flip that origin on its head, but it's still Wonder Woman, at her core.

[45:01] John: It's not her as a dark character that's the evil version of Wonder Woman. It's her being a positive, good force, but in Hell, not in paradise.

[45:11] David: That's the part of it that's so refreshing and inventive, is that they don't lose the core of her, that she's still this good person, this good being, even in the most potentially abject and horrific of places, and Hayden Sherman, especially in the first few issues where we see Wonder Woman growing up--we get a lot of Wonder Woman growing up--Hayden Sherman's ability to tell a story within the story--the dialogue and the captions aren't really focusing on it--but as we go through Wonder Woman's childhood, she's slowly making friends with all these fiends and demons, and stuff, and they're starting to be her pets, essentially, and the place that she's living in goes from this dreary, hellish hole in the ground to this delightful little hovel home that she's helped create. So, it's little things like that, even from the very start. It's just really an amazing piece of work, and we're 15 issues into this thing, and I'm still super invested. I can't wait for the next issue.

[46:12] John: Yeah, it was funny bringing that up, bringing up Supergirl early on, as we started this episode, the Jem creative team of Kelly and Sophie on different DC books, and the thing with both of them is, these books feel like they made them, in a way that I haven't always thought that about Kelly's stuff at Marvel, and I don't know if that's my imagination. I don't know if that's editorial stuff. I don't know if that was something internal, but I remember when she started writing Captain Marvel, which I thought she did a really nice run on Captain Marvel. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I think I even told her, and I meant this in a positive way, and I still do, except now we've seen cooler stuff from her in the last couple years, and maybe it was just a straight up level up. Maybe that was it. The thing with writing Captain Marvel, on a year when Captain Marvel was coming out in a movie, is that that's a technical exercise that you have to follow through, where you're telling a good, meaningful story within the context of a larger comic book universe, referring to, or aware of the fact that there's this outside thing that is fairly similar to the version of the character that exists in the universe, but is the one that most people are going to see, and that if they're coming in to pick up the comic, are probably most going to expect, and I thought she threaded that needle really well, but seeing the Absolute Wonder Woman, where it's a twist on Wonder Woman, but it's also “what would you do with Wonder Woman?” and it's great. It isn't constrained by trying to be the DCU Wonder Woman, or even the Wonder Woman that appears in more than three or four other comics. I mean, in the same universe. I think the Absolute Line overall, just terrific.

[47:50] David: The thing about the Absolute Line, for me, in general, going away from Wonder Woman just for a second, is that the company clearly took some risks with these projects, especially on the art side. They clearly took some risks. This is what we've wanted, as fans of comic books. People have been screaming for this for a while, and to finally see a big company take some risks again, and be a little edgy, and don't be afraid to break the mold a little bit. We're supposed to be on the cutting edge. We're supposed to be the thing that's a little unsafe. That hasn't been comics for a long time. To see DC finally doing a little bit of that, and seeing it pay off, I hope the right lessons are being taken away from this, and we're getting more of this from the Big 2 as we move forward.

[48:36] John: Yeah. Love it.

[48:41] David: Well, I'm going to ruin our closing here, but I do want to mention that, because I have to, I did have a runner up to my Best Comeback of the Year, and it almost won out, actually, believe it or not, John, and that is Kelley Jones and Wagner on Dracula. I think the first volume came out in 2025. The second volume certainly did.

[49:03] John: They come out every Halloween.

[49:04] David: And getting new, big chunks of Kelley Jones artwork, there is nothing better than that, and that series, the story's great, the art is fantastic, and the collaboration between these two guys just is a good pairing all around, and to have regular Kelley Jones essentially back in 2025, it is so nice, and I am loving that book so much. I know they're making a ton of money, because those Kickstarters are doing $500,000, which is fantastic, because hopefully that means we're going to see a lot more of these, and maybe some other stuff from Kelley Jones, over the course of the next couple of years. I haven't seen Kelley Jones on anything in a while. So, that was nice.

[49:45] John: Yeah. I definitely love that. The other ones that I wanted to throw out there, that we didn't mention anywhere, Goes Like This by Jordan Crane, anthology comic. Beautifully designed. Just absolute crazy design. It looks like a hardcover, but with the hardcover ripped off.

[49:59] David: I think we talked about that this year.

[50:01] John: Yeah, we did.

[50:01] David: Yeah, that sounded really cool.

[50:03] John: I like that one a lot. This Place Kills Me by previously mentioned Nicole Goux.

[50:08] David: Mariko Tamaki.

[50:09] John: That's who wrote it. Yes, indeed. Thank you. Dog Man: Big Jim Begins. Still digging the Dog Man.

[50:15] David: I'm jealous that we have aged out of Dog Man over here, and I am sad about it.

[50:20] John: Right now, if my son said he'd stopped reading it, I'd still buy the next one for myself. Cornelius, another dog-related book that's a European album about a dog who covers up a kidnapping at his workplace, but it's drawn in different comic strip styles, page by page.

[50:36] David: That sounds ambitious.

[50:38] John: Yeah, and I don't know whether it all exactly lives up to it, especially when you get to the footnotes, but still very enjoyable. We mentioned Absolute Batman, but Absolute Batman Annual was spectacular, the Daniel Warren Johnson one, and then Batman/Deadpool, I also loved as a single issue this year.

[50:53] David: Yeah, that was good. Unsurprisingly, almost too heady for me, but I think I followed it, and I really did enjoy it. I'm trying to remember, there was one other honorable mention for me, which would have fallen in the collection category of some sort. There was Stardust the Super Wizard, the Kickstarter that reimagined the superhero for 2025, and had just a really great list of creative talent working on short stories for that book. Oh, it wasn't Kickstarter. It was Zoop, but an incredibly cool piece, with all kinds of really great and interesting creators. You got guys like Mike Allred and Pete Woods, and Ron Marz, and Zander Cannon, and Jesse Lonergan, and Jeff Parker, Tom Fowler, just a great collection of short stories, all around the idea of reimagining this Stardust the Super Wizard for 2025, and Stardust the Super Wizard was a character created in the early 40s, John, late 40s, something like that, by Fletcher Hanks. The other interesting piece of that collection was that Fletcher Hanks' grandson, Ian Hanks, has a piece at the end, which I thought was a really cool and interesting comic book story.

[52:01] John: Usually, when you have like, “it's the grandson of somebody doing the story,” it's just like, “oh, yeah, grandpa did whatever.” Fletcher Hanks froze to death on a bench.

[52:11] David: That's how he died, yeah. Oh, brutal.

[52:13] John: There you go. That's not going to be your typical--

[52:18] David: Yeah, it's not going to be the usual reminisce by a grandson for that one, and it is not. It was an interesting and revealing piece, for sure. So, all around, I thought Stardust as an anthology collection was worth us mentioning one more time.

[52:32] John: One last thing. I'm sorry, I forgot, because […] collections. This is another collection. This is the one I forgot. The Essential Peanuts written by mascot of the show, Mark Evanier--I don't know--but this is a gorgeous book. I got it for Christmas. I just spent Christmas Day, and the other days, just reading this thing. The idea of it is that it takes 75 strips from the 75 years that it's been since Peanuts started. It takes 75 different strips, and then has related strips to it. So, if it's Charlie Brown flying a kite, if that's one of them, here's him flying a kite throughout the history of this trip, to give you context for it, with essays, and then Mark Evanier writing a lengthy history of the comic strip in there. It's a really beautiful way to go through this history of Peanuts, and the evolution of it, and then it's got a box full of goodies, a replica of the Apollo 10 mission patch, which had Snoopy on it, a facsimile of an issue of Peanuts comic book that wasn't by Charles Schulz, but was really interesting to read, postcards, all sorts of cool stuff. It's just a really nice, fun book.

[53:39] David: Is that Fantagraphics that put that out?

[53:41] John: No, it's Abrams Comics Art.

[53:43] David: Abrams Comics Art. Oh, okay. That sounds really cool.

[53:46] John: It's real nice.

[53:47] David: 2025 was a pretty good year for comic books, John.

[53:49] John: And everything else, right? I don't know. I haven't really been paying attention to the news. I think also, I guess, probably--

[53:54] David: Just stick with comics, John. Just stick with the comics. Just keep your head in that comic book sandbox. It's going to be fine. Thanks, everybody, for listening. That's our Best of 2025 show. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope you found some things to read and check out here in 2026. All this stuff that we've been talking about is easy to find and collect from your local comic shop, or if you have to, get on eBay and on the interwebs, and find it there. All right. I think that's it, John. Anything else?

[54:23] John: Nope, that's it for me.

[54:24] David: Thanks for coming, everybody. It's nice to have you here. We'll see you next week on The Corner Box. Bye.

[54:30] John: Bye.

This has been The Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five-star rating. It really helps. Join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.