This page collects all of the books I gave a rating of "Strongly Recommended" or better to come out during 2009. Books which I Strongly Recommended to limited groups are generally not included, but those with mature readers caveats are. You may notice some "Books of Note" aren't mentioned here, because they were notable for reasons other than necessarily being really good (i.e. an intriguing idea with iffy execution). Boldfaced books got a rating higher than Strongly Recommended.

    So, here it is, broken down by the month I actually read them (Diamond got REALLY bad about mis-ships this year). Be warned that this reflects my reading habits, there may well have been some excellent titles out there I didn't read for whatever reason. Sometimes I forgot to note the artist, and didn't really feel like digging it up. :) In those cases, I'll say "and ??", otherwise it's a single creator doing writing and art.

    Amazing Spider-Man continues to feature some really good work, showing that even tainted fruit can bear healthy trees, with 8 issues making this list. True, that's eight out of several dozen, the quality isn't as consistently high as Love & Capes or Atomic Robo. The Marvel Adventures line fared pretty well at the start of the year, but then most of it got cancelled...and the imprint won't be making it very far into 2010. Hercules is getting cancelled in 2010, but it looks like Pak and Van Lente will continue to write Hercules books in various formats (miniseries, specials, backups) for a while anyway.

    What about 2008's strong showers? Well, DC managed to cancel just about every book they put out that I really liked, their only entry here was from January, a book that ended early in the year. Renaissance Press was something of an anomaly in 2008, with Gownley putting out more work than usual (and me getting some back stock). Sturges and McDuffie continued to work in 2009, but it wasn't up to their 2008 standards.