Top Ten Volume 1 and 2 Graphic Novels

Comic books are literature, whether we like it or not. Comics were treated as juvenile reading material for decades, until they finally received the appreciation of adult audiences since the eighties. One of the breakout writers of that time is Alan Moore, whose 12-issue series Watchmen was designed with an adult audience, and put superheroes in a real world. Moore is also the author of V for Vendetta, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all of which have been made into feature films.

In Top Ten, Moore plays with superhero conventions once again, but with a less believable of a city where everyone is a superhero. In Neopolis, superheroes, robots, aliens, gods, and other comic-book machinery all reside together in a single town that is policed by a precinct called Top Ten. Except for the odd cast of costumed characters, Top Ten looks like any other police force in a big city that is understaffed, underfunded, and loaded with bureaucracy. As far as why these "science-heroes" and other such fantastical beings stay in this one town is not known, and there is little explanation as to why the outside world put them all there in the first place. In fact, the world outside of Neopolis is curiously never seen.

Also missing in Top Ten is the origin story of the characters, which is usually a requirement for any superhero book. For example, Sergeant Ceasar is a talking Doberman Pincsher with a robotic suit that allows him to walk like a man with the head of a dog. How is it that Ceasar can talk? Why does he choose to walk around in this body suit? Who cares. It's just there, along with the rest of the oddities. Knowing his origin would just complicate a story that is already purposely complicated.

The complicated storyline actually makes the story very lifelike, even in the world of Top Ten. It is more of a jumble of storylines including an alien serial killer, a corrupt commissioner, and a superhero sidekick pedophilia ring. (Yeah, this isn't a comic for the kids all right.)

Occasionally, an issue will focus on one story, but there really isn't any centralized character. The first issue focused on Toybox, a young girl who has robotic toys similar to Sid from Toy Story. Her partner, Smax, has had his own limited series that looks like it takes place out of the Top Ten world. I honestly don't want to read Smax, because there are sometimes where branching out does not work. I have read Top Ten: The Forty-Niners, which discusses the beginning days of Neopolis in 1949. I haven't read Top Ten: Beyond the Farthest Precinct which has an entirely different writer and artist.

Often the changing of a creative team can cause a comic to "jump the shark" or completely remove the quality. Moore created a brilliant world where essentially practically anything can happen, and Gene Ha's artwork is equally brilliant. The artists created a world of fantastic tall buildings with a cast of thousands of superhero extras which a reader can get completely lost in. The amount of creativity to create a world such as this is simply astounding, and a challenge for any artist. I like to look at some of the bystanders and see if I can identify other comic book characters. There are many times when the artist takes a short cut, and you'll notice that cast of Futurama or Stargate:SG-1 in the background, doing nothing more than taking up space. Sometimes you'll also see a funny detail in Neopolis, like a movie poster for Businessman: You Will Believe that a Man Can't Fly.

Top Ten is an excellent alternative to DC and Marvel comics, whose storylines are just as complicated, if not more complicated than anything in Top Ten. DC has just completed a storyline called Infinite Crisis that spanned practically every title they had. Marvel also did a similar act with its Civil War plotline. All of these mega-storylines are the result of when the worlds of mutants, gods, and superheroes live together. Moore satirizes this unreasonable concept with Top Ten, showing that the existence of the fantastic realistically creates a world that barely holds together.

Top Ten has won many comic book awards, and deserves to be read by audiences everywhere. Hopefully, they will not try to make a movie out of this graphic novel. If they do, then they better have a huge effects budget. You are better off to read this book before the movie.