As comic fans we go to battle against the rest of the stubbornly judgmental population armed always with one sturdy, steady sword: “it’s a medium not a genre,” we growl endlessly at the skeptical onlookers confused by our funny fascination with funny books. Comics are anything, we shout. They’re film, paint, words, notes; Read McCloud. Read Spieglman, Ware, Gaiman, Robinson, Moore, the other Moore, a dozen more. Comics are not colorful men in colorful outfits beating up other colorful men colorfully, or at least they’re not just that.
And while all that’s pretty much apriori true, most of us mostly read comics about all them colorful men in their colorful outfits. We venture outside this form frequently and with great joy, but like all our heroes month after month, we always come back to the super fist in the villainous face. So yes, comics is a medium not a genre, sure, why not; but it’s also primarily used (in America) as the medium for capes comics.
What’s worth aknowledging and defending is the diversity not just to be found in the medium of comics but in the so called “superhero genre”. Which brings us (finally) to this annual. How would you classify the exact genre of this issue? It takes place in Hell (horror) and on a cricket field (sports); it centers around the journey of a magical creature through a magical land (fantasy) and the dreams of a jock about his love of a beautiful girl (romance); it ends with an armormed man traveling to the moon (science fiction) and begins with a doting reference to Cooke’s New Frontier (fanboy fiction).

Like all quality superhero comics, the annual defies the easy catorgization that is easily heaped on art stemming from other popular mediums (with exceptions, of course). And this is the true bliss of the comics most of us mostly read. Comics are a medium not a genre, yes, but, now, so are superhero comics. Over the past 25 years superhero comics have risen from their childish origins to become a true palimpsest upon which a group of very odd creators has inscribed anything and everything. Unimpaired by the monetary and traditional restrictions that have jammed other entertainment forms into strict consumable categories, superhero comics are running wild.

As long as a guy in a leotard fights some other dude, anything’s possible. Want a superhero comic? Cool. Want a Greek God talking to a magical gypsy who hangs with super powered X-type mutants, is the former lover of the symbol of English heroism, and is currently confronting five different devils from five different mythologies. Why not. And after that how ‘bout a different artist showing a bunch of uncostumed guys playing sport, which creates an exact parallel to all that hell bound nonsense. Duh. What else would you do? This all so expectedly spectacular, and it is all so shockingly mundane. This is what superhero comics are now; it’s the art form that throws in the kitchen sink first.

So along with saying comics are a medium not a genre, let’s also remember to tell these folks (who go to superhero movies that truly do conform to a set genre) that even within the form they perceive as being associated with comics there are no limitations to the stories that can be told. Super heroes too are film, paint, words, notes, and this annual is proof of that case.

Oh, and the art was fine but not great.

–T. King