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Pop Songs from Another World

Set in the fantastically cosmopolitan yet socially backwards city of Neopolis, Top 10 revolves around the day-to-day lives of the police officers at the 10th Precinct Police Station. The population of Neopolis consists of humans and animals with superpowers, robots, cyborgs, gods, monsters, beings from other dimensions - you name it. Not an easy place to police, to be sure, but to the officers at the 10th Precinct all this is business as usual.

Above all, Top 10 is a textbook example of worldbuilding done right. Alan Moore and Gene Ha throw the reader right into the hustle and bustle of their fictional universe, immediately bringing it to life with complex and relatable characters, believable social hierarchies, and countless convincingly rendered details: pop-song lyrics that commercially exploit the fears and dreams of Neopolis, forms of prejudice and discrimination that make perfect sense in their social context, drug use that hints at the city's social problems and coping mechanisms, bizarre forms of pornography and prostitution that shed light on its dirty underbelly.

Yet while the concrete details of life in Neopolis differ from those of our own world, its daily routines and struggles - on a more abstract level - in many ways resemble our own everyday experiences. This tension between strangeness and familiarity is crucial to the title's appeal, as it allows for tongue-in-cheek commentary on social phenomena we are all too familiar with, making even the most alien situations relatable.