Though Hollywood’s Year of the Superhero was not much remarked on at the 2009 Oscars, it was hard for the costume not to come clattering out of the closet with Wolverine hosting and Heath Ledger taking the first truly prestige award for a comicbook movie. Though Huge Jagoff, I mean, Hugh Jackman’s desperate corn seemed less like one long promo for the upcoming X-flick and more like an audition for George Sprott: The Movie. This at least keeps it in the family; still, I found myself unexpectedly musing on what a seasoned trouper New Jersey cult-cable fave Floyd Vivino is, and, in a recession, how much cheaper he could’ve filled the tux.

At least Hugh *was* desperate, of course; everyone else but Bill Maher and Will Smith seemed to have just woken up and be reading the teleprompters for the first time. I don’t know if there’s been a directors’ strike they all thought it best not to worry us about, but I’ve been to student riots that were better rehearsed than this show. For a while I thought the Academy was at least making up for the *writers’* strike by giving excess make-work to Hollywood scribes with the strange testimonial-dinner format of the show, in which, instead of film clips, five rehab-parolees and plastic-surgery disasters who’ve won past awards each stood up to introduce one new nominee with a little tribute speech. But as the night wore on it became increasingly clear that they’d skimped on writers’ fees by getting the stars to come up with it themselves. (Either that or Adrien Brody was doing method-acting practice for a role as a drunken Best Man — I mean, “you’re instantly recognizable but I’m glad you’re getting recognition”? Two-Face would scratch up *both* sides of his coin for that kinda nonsense.)

Unlike the warmed-over celebs, some horses were so dead it took me a full 24 hours to remember to beat them; i.e., perennial world-music reprocessor Peter Gabriel getting his @$$ handed to him by an actual Indian superstar in the Best Song category. Or to borrow the instantly famous phrasing of Philippe Batshitte Petit, YESSSSSS!

But we’re here to dish comics, and the loser for Best Foreign Film deserves a place on the talk-show couch. With its juxtaposed images and expressionistic shadows, Waltz With Bashir owed more to the sequential than animated visual vocabulary, and played more like a motion-comic than a full cartoon. And it managed to be the anti-action film that Watchmen may only try to be. You’d think stuff about a colonial power questioning itself (I’m Jewish, don’t send letters) would be big this year, especially at the least Republican convention on TV, but amidst the (well-taken) calls for civil rights whenever Milk won anything, the snub of this difficult and important flick seems to mark off the limits of the Academy’s courage — either that or a belated impulse to leave foreign policy to those who took PoliSci rather that acting class.

It fell to Heath Ledger to redeem our honor. And yeah, in my own parallel continuity he gets nominated for Best Actor (’cuz let’s face it, Christian Bale’s the nominal star but that Aussie boy was fookin’ distractin’) and loses to Jeffrey Wright (in Cadillac Records) while Gary Oldman’s Jim Gordon takes Best Supporting and Dark Knight gets Best Picture. But Ledger’s embodiment of the terror-era fears we’re ready to face and taunting reminders of the lost soul we’re ready to reclaim was a big part of what made this the movie of the year, no matter what the Academy’s ready to admit.

As it was, my heart couldn’t resist melting as much as anyone’s to see the little kids from Slumdog and seemingly half of London and Mumbai crowd the podium for a victory dance — though I couldn’t help but worry that it was more like a danse macabre for the Indian Century that, only eight years in, seems to have been shut down by the Fin(anci)al Crisis emanating outward from Wall Street’s dark heart. Better to seek refuge in the past, and see if it can be done any better. Meet ya at Watchmen.

Things are worth any wait when they’re the best they could possibly be, and the launch of Agents of Atlas’ ongoing last week was the equal of every year’s anticipation since their already-classic miniseries in 2006. These characters are rooted in the post-WWII realism that centered heroism on the common person who’d just saved the world right as the caped crusaders not uncoincidentally faded from popularity in print. We’d seen that supervillains could be toppled by ordinary folk making extraordinary effort, like Secret Agent Jimmy Woo; our taste in pop fiction turned to romance icons like Venus, unexplored worlds like Namora’s Atlantis, uncharted areas like Gorilla Man’s jungle and the only threats that still felt bigger than us, like Marvel Boy’s outer space and the uncertain future of mechanical intelligences like M-11. The Agents of Atlas cast retain the folkloric sturdiness of the fondly-remembered nursery — mermaid, goddess, spaceman, etc. — and the plausibility of what illusions were left for young adults who’d come through hell and left superheroes back with their adolescent innocence at the time this new comic’s characters were first published. As written by Jeff Parker, they take on three dimensions like few comic heroes have; there’s a narrative authority here that, as the Agents say about sole unpowered human member and team leader Jimmy Woo, makes readers follow Parker and new artist Carlo Pagulayan anywhere.

It’s the power of editor Mark Paniccia’s books in general and Parker’s in particular that I’m caring about “continuity” for the first time since my own long-gone teen years; I’ve been dying to know how the Agents’ anonymity squares with Namora’s conspicuous alliance with the Hulk’s revolution in Greg Pak’s run on that book, and in Issue 1 the Agents’ entire timeline is sorted out with one of the deftest expository scenes on record, as new master-of-the-world Norman Osborn flaunts his intelligence-gathering to tell Venus what he knows about her group. The status-quo 2.0 of the team having taken control of a shadowy world-guiding agency of their own is handled fascinatingly, with the fairytale promise of all those old-school hidden-society movie-serials brought to full bloom. Between dazzling globe-hopping action sequences and great character-driven interludes, the true story here is the compromises of power and the need to make the right decision the first time while using spy techniques and reserving worldshaking force. We’ve now got an endlessly optimistic, sternly resourceful guy in charge of the real world’s powder keg just like the relentlessly decent, steel-nerved Jimmy Woo at the top of his secret empire, and each drama’s gonna be worth watching every minute of.

Speaking of widescreen crises and undercover saviors from a classic era, I picked up the most ambitious indie sci-fi/superhero saga in recent memory at the New York Comic Con this weekend. The Outer Space Men GN is based on the legendary late-1960s toy line, and sets the bar star-high for planet-spanning adventures and clashes of great ideas. The bendable action figures, one from each world in our solar system but Earth and Mercury, came with smart background synopses on their packages and launched a thousand stories in the imaginations of their young fans. They also each orbited slightly under the copyright radar of a famous 1950s sci-fi monster — “man from Pluto” Electron+ was The Man From Planet X; “man from Uranus” Orbitron was the Metaluna mutant from This Island Earth, etc. — a fact unknown to us kids and delightful as we grew into adulthood amidst the postmodern mash-up. From the humble raw materials of pop homage creator Mel Birnkrant came up with one of the first groups of pop archetypes.

It stuck in the mind of marketer Gary Schaeffer like a suppressed alien abduction, and he licensed the characters’ rights and got scripter Eric C. Hayes and artist Rudolf Montemayor to work on a GN. The result is a spectacular philosophical page-turner, a popcorn blockbuster on paper. The Outer Space Men are an interplanetary council who neutralize threats to the solar system like a raygun-wielding U.N. with extreme prejudice yet cool, alien calculation. In this first of a series of GNs they face a threat from within the Earth itself that its surface inhabitants know nothing of; there’s a hidden race at the planet’s core whose origin is an ingenious device I’ll leave to new readers to discover but which affords an engrossing modern take and meta-scientific spin on the origin of demon legends from Milton’s Hell to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. Refreshingly, the Outer Space Men are unhesitant and unapologetic interventionists; at the end of Frank Miller’s DK2 he has Superman and Batman decide that they are gods who should start acting like it for everyone’s good, but no one in comics ’til now has followed through on both the grand and scary implications of that attitude.

Wisely, Hayes has drawn as much on astrology as astronomy, using at least as much mysticism as science and likening the cast not so much to a pantheon as is often done with the JLA but to the zodiac, in which of course the protagonists’ home planets all figure and which represents not the heavens’ ruling class but their natural order. Consequently, we get a novel Darwinian interpretation of very cerebral characters’ attitudes and actions. The Outer Space Men may be highly evolved, but they understand their place in the evolutionary scheme, and the conflicting impulses of their varied planetary species play out in intriguing ways on a quest to maintain a solar system-wide sustainability more important than any individual life involved — which very much includes the opponents’ lives they dispatch and the lives of their own they unhesitantly gamble. Rather than the timeworn team-member friction we see in many ensemble superhero strips, these characters are like an uneasy yet ultimately complementary ecological system in microcosm, even including their main antagonist Mystron, who is repeatedly described, unfavorably yet matter-of-factly, as simply and immutably following his nature. With locales that conjure everything from Kubrick to Dante, this book bursts with imagination, and Montemayor’s art translates the once well-known toy figures’ physiques and personalities into plausible and workable modern interpretations.

The book has its share of dialogue malapropisms, occasionally weak anatomy, and transitions which fall flat or are confusing due to momentarily under-prepared exposition or over-intricate art. But for the most part, the GN’s ambitious 150 pages (with a bizarrely brilliant, almost Beat-poetry-style introduction by creator Birnkrant) have a range of current-events and fantasy-canon sources, character-shading, pulp pacing, visual scope and fullness and a palette of fantastic environments that take readers where no comic has gone before and make them want to sign up for as many tours as this team can envision. [www.theouterspacemen.com]

Comics can be “controversial” ‘cuz fanboys can never be satisfied, but an editorial decision of DC’s at the end of Final Crisis managed to leave most everyone with something to be desired. Stop reading now if you haven’t finished reading FC Issue 7 and would rather do that first, but as most fanfolk know, Batman dies in Issue 6 and seems to be back, somewhere, by the end of Number 7 (who knew that it wasn’t Clark Kent but really Bruce Wayne who’s faster than Barry Allen?). The months leading up to this found both FC writer Grant Morrison and Detective Comics’ Paul Dini movingly putting Batman-as-we-knew him through the most fundamental challenges ever to who he is and what he means to be; either one of these could have signaled “R.I.P.” but both surprisingly resolved themselves in time for Batman to be quickly captured by Apokolips and become the purified, tempered weapon of Humanity who finally faces down Darkseid in FC, both succeeding and dying as a consequence.

This Batman finds a way to kill death itself as personified in Darkseid, but since that still makes Darkseid a person, it represents Batman’s single exception to his vow never to kill, and the implication (to me, anyway) is that Batman has to be sacrificed along with his principle to make it an even deal. At the same time, Morrison and Dini have just spent months demonstrating definitively how durable Batman is as a concept, and the immortality he seems to attain at the very end of FC is on the plane of ideas. We see an unidentified shamanic elder tending a flame which, like the burning bush of Biblical communication, represents the spark of story, through which humans’ history inscribes itself. This old man comes to his own end, and a younger figure enters his cave to take his place. Seen mostly from behind, we know who it is from the shirtless, stubbled figure’s gray leggings and blue boots — and the bat he starts to draw in charcoal on the wall of the cave.

The grapevine — though not Grant — tells me that this epilogue was not his first choice. And needless to say, it’s got its problems. The Big Two have learned to let their A-list casualties stay dead at least long enough not to drain all emotional resonance from the initial event (and deny dollars for the next epic that promises big changes). So this was not necessarily a surprise of the nice kind. And more to the point (for the former disappointment is probably inevitable), it seems archetypally shaky — Batman is a Pluto or, just maybe, an Athena archetype — he’s the down-to-earth dissenter amidst the JLA pantheon’s all-powerful certainty, like Pluto to the Olympian gods, and perhaps he’s the mix of wise(wo)man and warrior we see in Athena. He’s not really a Thoth figure, the personified spark of thought, communication and creativity, which seems to be the role he’s being given here. Still, Final Crisis was about transcending every adversity conceivable, and conceiving past even the adversity that’s beyond belief, and Morrison characteristically took an editorial onus and turned it into a beautiful summation of his career to date and an eloquent comicbook-haiku of serene persistence.

And maybe it folklorically fits after all. I thought from the start that DC was leaving itself a legitimate way out by showing Batman — though charred and hollowed in physical form — succumb at first to the Omega Effect, which Kirby-cultists know can just as likely remove you to another dimension as actually un-create you. So Batman’s spirit could always have gone somewhere (like the scientifically transubstantiated Barry Allen, whose return in this book was handled with great warmth and substance). And since Batman does have the tireless analytical alertness of an Athena, it makes sense that he could have been transferred in frequency to the continuum of legend — as all of us are, in a way, when we die for real but our story stays in someone’s mind — and in his case be aware that he’s there. “Batman thinks of everything” was the refrain in Morrison’s latest run on the character’s book, and here perhaps we see Bruce thinking of how best to guide his successor narrative by starting to scrawl a bat totem and its subsequent story in the primal cave at the center of consciousness. He finds himself in this new existence, unable to respond with combat, but takes up the tools available to keep the balance in the world he vowed to serve, and so, perhaps, graduates not to the ill-fitting role of sage and scribe (that’s more for Tom Strong and Billy Batson, as certain fanfolk know), but rather ascends from battle to vigil. It happened to Barbara Gordon 20 years ago; it matches the mythic idea, from Greek constellations to the Christian deity, of being fixed in the heavens, away but not gone; and, as with all acceptable continuity, it fits, maybe even without having to be made to.