Now that our Best Of 2008 for Best Shots is up, I’m going to do a few more Best-of’s here on the blog, since I had a few other categories that I wanted to mention that didn’t quite fit into our top-three format over there.
One of those is Best Writer/Artist Team, and I say it’s Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly.
As if Local, one of my best books of the year, wasn’t enough, 2008 gave me two other Wood/Kelly books to drool over. The jump from Local to the cute-girliness of New York Four wasn’t much of a stretch, drawing on the same focus on nuances of character and loving connection to setting and the same willingness to let young women be young women–that is, to screw up, learn from their mistakes, and then make more.
But moving on to Northlanders, where urban landscapes gave way to open spaces, and roommate conflict to bloody battles, well, it’s hard to picture these being the same guys. Yet there’s still the same attention paid to every tiny detail, whether it’s a note stuck to Megan’s fridge or the wear on Ragnar’s armor, and the same weight given to location, time, and relationships.
Kelly’s splash pages are as gorgeous whether they’re forest scenes or cityscapes, and Wood excels at getting out of his artist’s way. The work these two creators have done together has been some of the best stuff I’ve read in a while.
So…when do we get a Ryan Kelly DMZ guest spot? Huh?
