I read a comic recently (I won’t say which one!) that made me think of really good creative teams, and I wondered if there are any in this new millennium that will have the resonance of Lee/Kirby or Lee/Ditko or Claremont/Byrne or Wolfman/Pérez or any number of others who made their mark back in the olden century. Therefore, I want to know what your favorite creative team of the 2000s is. Now, I have some rules, just so you don’t say that one time Grant Morrison and Walt Simonson teamed up for that issue in which the Outsiders (led, naturally, by Looker) visited the real world. You can’t pick that one! I thought about it, and I think I came up with two good rules, or, I guess, two rules, but only one of which need apply. First, the team must have done a minimum of 15 issues together. This, I think, is a decent number — it excludes a mini-series that brought them together once but doesn’t put a burden on them to create a long series. Rule #2: They must have worked on two different series. BUT! If they worked on two different series, they need not add up to 15 issues. Therefore, if they did two 6-issue mini-series together, that counts. If they only did one series together, they have to have done 15 issues. S’alright? S’alright. I mean, this is completely arbitrary, of course. If you want to claim that Jonathan Hickman’s one issue of Betty & Veronica that he did with Bill Sienkiewicz is the best creative team of this century, I’ll allow it — I won’t be happy about it and will make fun of you, but whatever. I do want to make you think a bit, though, which is why I put the rules in there. Of course, you can’t pick a person who writes and draws. That would defeat the purpose. Teams, people!
Anyway, there are a lot of cool creative teams this century, I think we can all agree. The explosion of independent comics in the 1980s led to a much more DIY aesthetic and a lot more companies, so, I think, there are a lot more comics out there and so a lot more creators. Conversely, Marvel and DC seem to want to flood the market, so it becomes harder to keep artists on books, which is a bummer, as we don’t get the classic teams like we did back in the day who spent a while on a book. However, there are still a lot of cool creators out there who hook up with each other (in a strictly professional sense, come on!) and give us neat comics. One of my favorite artists these days in Juan Ferreyra, and his work with Arvid Nelson on Rex Mundi would certainly count, as they did 20 issues together. Gail Simone and Nicola Scott have done a bunch of comics together, so that would count. Bendis and Maleev did a revolutionary run on Daredevil, and that weird Moon Knight thing. I think Ellis and Cassaday on Planetary counts, as a good deal of it came out in the 2000s. I don’t know if Morrison and Quitely and Morrison and Burnham have done enough issues together, but they’re in the mix. Some people really liked Snyder and Capullo on Batman — I did not, but they do qualify! Hickman and Dragotta did East of West, which is a tremendous series. You get the damned idea!!!!
As much as I love a lot of different comics, I quickly narrowed this down to two creative teams. Brubaker and Phillips have done so many excellent comics over the past quarter-century or so, from Criminal (of course) to Reckless, but, I mean, they also did Fatale and Incognito and Kill or Be Killed and The Fade Out a bunch of standalone books, one of which, Where the Body Was, still might be my favorite work they’ve done together. Just a really impressive body of work, and they work so well together. They’re not my answer, though.
Come on, you know my answer: It’s Gillen and McKelvie! Phonogram is one of my favorite comics of this or any other century, and then they did Young Avengers together, where McKelvie really astonished on the art, and then they did The Wicked + The Divine, which is another amazing work. Their production is not as prodigious as Brubillips, certainly, but what they do produce is superb, and I just love it and hope they do more together in the future. Gillen always seems to get good artists to work with (he is, of course, currently working on something with Stephanie Hans and something with Caspar Wijngaard, two excellent artists in their own right), but his work with McKelvie is on another level.
So that’s my answer. I know I didn’t mention a lot of others whom I might really like (none more than Gillen and McKelvie, though, I don’t think), but that’s why we have an open forum, so you can chime in! Let me know your favorite teams of this century in the comments! Have a nice day!
