Way Better Than Vol. 1 I was dissappointed with vol. 1, but it all fit into place with this one. The art is amazing, but with maybe too much details. Alan shows again why he's the greatest comic's writer of all time (for me, that is). Great read.
Up There with the Best There is always one problem with Moore: He needs someone to paint the pretty pictures. I still haven't read some of the more prominent stuff like From Hell or LoEG, though I must have thumbed through them at least a dozen of times.
This however, is different. While it is difficult to detach from the powerful overall impact of Watchmen, Top Ten might have the best graphics of any Moore work. This may not even be due to the principle artists; I think the color makes the difference.
Top 10 has an end-of-scale premise, but it gets obvious very soon that this is about the characters, not their powers. This is especially true for Joe Pi. Entering the story about halfway, he has a hard time because he is a replacement for a very popular officer who died in the line of duty. How the people react to him and how he manages to connect is among the best stories in comics.
It's only a small story though: This is not about any single person, the team is always the most important thing. You learn to love and hate more than one of them during the two books and will wish for more after you finished this one.
Cop Stories for Nerds Moore/Cannon/Ha's Top Ten series is one of my top three favorites of all time. The writing is fantastic; I cared about the characters from the beginning and when I finished the series, I wanted more (sequel Smax is awesome, though radically different in style, prequel The Forty-Niners is a masterpiece in itself though there's only one Top Ten character in it, Beyond the Farthest Precinct is an inferior work, though it was so good to revisit this world again).
What makes Top Ten such a great comic is how every issue, no matter how fantastically treated, is a human issue that most of us can relate to, whether it's Smax' despair and inability to reach out to his friends, Kemlo's forbidden (or not) love, or Duane's annoyance at his partner's racism.
Moore especially is at the top of his game with Top Ten, mixing dead-on humor, comic references that span all genres, action, and drama into what would be an insufferable mess in anyone else's hands.
Graphic SF Reader One of the fabulous things about the Top 10 series is the incredible amount of detail that Gene Ha put into the backgrounds. There are all sorts of cool things you can find there, while browsing.
Zatanna and Black Canary pulling in fish nets, for one.
Then as far as the main story goes, Ultra-Mice Crisis is just hilarious.
A wonderful followup to the first set. Connecting more on the human level than any other comic series I have seen, Moore's Top 10 book two shows that even though the future may create new groups of people to stereotype, the stereotypes are no truer in the future than they have been in the past.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
