Top 10 Book 1 cover
Welcome to Neopolis! If you could hang your cape over here, the local teleportation system will bring you to your destined lair, cave or hideaway. Please avoid using your super-powers during travel. Thank you!
By the time Alan Moore started the America’s Best Comics imprint in WildStorm, he was already a comics legend. With such accomplishments as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell and Supreme under his belt, expectations were naturally high. And Moore – whom I suspect is incapable of producing bad work – certainly delivered with four new series (and several spinoffs): The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promothea, Tom Strong and Top 10.
Top 10 is how the local police headquarters, Precinct Ten by official Alter-Earth designation, is known in the city of Neopolis. Police work is never easy, but in Neopolis it’s more complicated than usual: every inhabitant of the city – including the pets and vermin – has super-powers. How do you control such teeming masses of super-people? Robyn Slinger, fresh out of the police academy, is about to find out. Teeming up with Smax, a blue-skinned, pig-headed giant, she goes to work with the rest of the cast – aromr-suited Irma Geddon, colorful and athletic Girl-One, electrically bigotted Shock Headed Peter and his partner with the twelver-shooters, The Dust Devil and many others. Arresting mad Nazi scientists, preventing giant monsters from drowning the city in radioactive puke, a psychokinetic Santa – it’s all in a day’s work in Neopolis.
Moore uses an old trick in order to introduce the readers to the characters and their world: he makes it an initiation story for Slinger – a.k.a. “Toybox” – and things are revealed to us as she learns about them. It works well, and allows Moore to achieve an impressive feat: with all of its wonders, Neopolis feels plausible, even realistic. This is also accomplished by Moore’s trademark characterization: all the characters seem to have back-storys (whether we learn of them or not) and distinct personalities, and interact with each other along reliable lines of personal likes and dislikes. This is not to say that Moore stops at creating a reliable – and fascinating – world: the story involves much tension, detective work and even the occasional action sequence.
Alex Ross' cover for the first Top 10 issue
The two artists behind the series, Gene Ha and Zander Cannon, bring Neopolis to splendid, radiant life, with detailed backgrounds, reliable urban topography and excellent character design which avoid – or exploits – clichés. Fans of comics, science fiction and fantasy can spend hours of fun just location all the tongue-in-cheek references hidden in the panels – without all of the other readers missing out on anything important.
The series won multiple Eisner Awards but ended after issue 12. Two trade paperbacks were released, covering the complete run of the series – and this is book 1, covering issues 1-7. Some cases are solved, but many story-arcs continue into the next trade paperback. The series also spawned three spin-offs, two written by Moore and one by Paul Di Filippo.
Top 10: Book 1 is one of Moore’s most standard books: no post-modern references to the super-human myth (see Supreme for those), no intricate juggling of multiple plots or political debates (see V for Vendetta for the latter and Watchmen for both), nothing too complex. He’s just telling a good story, with interesting characters set in a unique world – and the end result is such a fun read than one can only hope Moore will, one day, come back to mainstream comics.
