Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #270876 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Customer Reviews

The best of the (America's) best (comics).
Let's get straight to the point about what is good about Top 10. Ready?

Everyone is a superhero.

The Top 10 are the police in a futuristic city called Neopolis, but not only do they have special powers, so does everyone in the city. The reason this concept is so brilliant is that, traditionally, comic book superhero stories play on the superhero having special powers, in a normal world, where all the main characters are unrealistically buff gentlemen and similarly unrealistically large-breasted ladies, with normal people depicted as ugly, pathetic weaklings. Come on, most people don't want to read something like that! In fact, such comics are almost solely responsible for the graphic novel medium often being viewed as immature.

Therein lies the beauty of Top 10: you feel you could be part of the world it depicts. Indeed, you feel you are part of the world in Top Ten, that it is really just our own world, through an everyone-has-super-powers filter.

Top Ten tackles themes that are important and relevant in our society today: sexuality, racism, drug abuse, mortality, and many others. However, the way to which these familiar themes are alluded is so clever that you do not notice parallels immediately and are happily drawn into the mysteries and adventures by which the cops find their lives made so hectic. Relationships between the members of Top Ten are an integral point of interest, with almost everyone having a crush on another member, and several close partnerships evolving through the series. This is perhaps best seen in the development of Toy Box: a punk girl with an army of vicious robot toys; and Jeff Smax: and a tall, dark, blue brick wall of a man.

The art is drawn in a gritty, realistic way that adds greatly to the fleshing out of characters. Toy Box and Jeff Smax are beautiful, to name but two, though I couldn't mention beauty without dropping Jackie Phantom's name. It is not that the art itself is drawn in an erotic or sexy fashion (has that ever done anything but lowered the tone of a comic?) but that the characters look realistic so you become attached to them emotionally.

A joyous series.

Great fun - superheroes do the police TV series.
What if the lid blew off the superhero (or "science hero") population after WW2, and the world had more people with weird powers and gadgets than it knew what to do with? Not to mention the aliens, monsters and what-have-you... What you do is put them all together in their own city, which means they need a superhuman police force too - enter Top Ten. This book (I read the paperback edition) collects issues 1-7. The style is similar to US drama series like NYPD Blue and ER, e.g. it's "shot" so that we follow one character for a while then jump to another as they pass in the hall. Artwork is good, but the tones are muted rather than bright - these are ordinary people with strange abilities and quirks, not godlike worldsavers. There are interweaving plotlines resolved over several issues, and some still ongoing at the end of the collection. There are characters we want to know more about. There are some extremely funny and weird moments - ideas flow thick and fast, the dialogue is sharp and it's important to watch the backgrounds carefully for little touches.

Alan Moore's best since Watchmen?
Well, what to say?

Top 10 is about a city full of super-powered people, with all that entails. I highly doubt that anybody but Alan Moore or perhaps Neil Gaiman could pull this off.

It is funny, it is philosohical (but never boring), it has more ideas per page than most comics has in a whole series.

Read it.