Best Mini-Series of 2007

Doom DeLuise says: Trials of Shazam!

It may only come out once every few months, but it’s still really pretty awesome, and the art is beyond sweet. I have a lot of complaints about this mini-series, but I had more complaints about every other mini-series, so this is the one I chose as best, sort of as a default. It’s pretty good, but not super great or anything. Everything else is just straight-up worse.

Jim Doom says: Captain America: Fallen Son!

The best way to make a huge even seem insignificant is to let it happen without much fanfare. Captain America getting killed is a huge event, and planning a miniseries around the various stages of grief featuring Captain America’s closest friends and colleagues was a great editorial decision.

The stories weren’t always homeruns, and the series wasn’t without its flaws. I acknowledged at a few points in the series that the framework they’d built for themselves almost required that the series lose momentum. But for the most part, it was very well executed, and most importantly, it treated the death of Captain America as an event that affected the entire Marvel Universe.

Honorable Mention: New Avengers: Illuminati
This book pretty much existed in the background this year, but it was a great read and it was vitally important to laying the groundwork for the upcoming Skrull invasion, including revealing the first major hero to have been replaced by a Skrull and teasing several more.

Honorable Mention: Astro City: The Dark Age: Book Two #4
The comic tied for most colons with Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America: (Insert Chapter Name Here) will probably have a representative near the top of this category every year it’s eligible. Great stuff.

Doominator says: Eternals! Or maybe Doctor Strange: The Oath!

Eternals was really cool, I thought. Sure, it kind of borders between this and last year, but so what? Neil Gaiman still has it. Doctor Strange: The Oath was very good as well.

Fin Fang Doom says: Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born!

The comic book adventures of the characters from Stephen King’s series of novels surprised me in a lot of ways in 2007. I really enjoyed the voice of the narrator for the series, who really became a character in and of itself thanks to the talented Peter David scripting the series. Jae Lee, whose art has always been very hit or miss for me, was at the top of his game in the series. The extra prose stories at the end of the standard story gave a lot more life to the world of the Gunslinger, explaining the mythology to new readers and even expanding on plot points introduced in the main story. But perhaps most surprising of all is that despite featuring A-list creators and extra-sized issues, Gunslinger managed to actually ship seven issues in seven months.

Hey! Check out what we had to say about this category in 2006 and 2005!