Archive for January 4, 2012

Carnival of Souls Post-Holiday Special #4: Everything Else

January 4, 2012

* Though I think I’ve only ever played the original and Ocarina of Time, I love that Legend of Zelda continuity is so convoluted and contradictory that people theorized it must involve divergent timelines; I love even more that they were right.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates has what ought to be the final word on the vices and virtues of Louis Farrakhan Ron Paul. I don’t know why I never thought of Paul advocacy in messianic terms before, but of course that’s what’s going on; the support of noted Great Man enthusiast Andrew Sullivan, who appears to have retracted his recent retraction of his slightly less recent endorsement of Paul for the Republican Party presidential nomination, is surely evidence of that. The problem is with seeing individual politicians, with all their flaws (and in most cases “flaws” is putting it mildly, whether you’re talking about States’ Rights dogwhistler and gold bug Ron Paul or indefinite-detainer and non-due-process-assassinator and Skynet-activator Barack Obama), in memetic-engineering terms — “If we support this person we’ll change the conversation and steer the nation toward the good” — fails to consider the systemic nature of successfully implementing change, and dismisses a host of hugely problematic issues with any given candidate in a rush to paint an Alex Ross version of their portrait. And again, no one’s forcing anyone to endorse anyone; doing so as an act of supposed bravery but downplaying your candidate of choice’s problems is in fact an act of cowardice.

* Related thought triggered by Coates’s material on Farrakhan: All religions are completely crazy in terms of their “supernatural history,” if you will; it’s just that we’ve been hearing about the major ones for so many centuries that receiving celestial instructions from a brushfire or rising from the dead and then flying up to Heaven no longer seem quite as crazy as more recent developments like the Angel Moroni or Intergalactic Warlord Xenu do. That said, I feel like between Mormonism, Scientology, and the Nation of Islam, America has cooked up some uniquely science-fictional cults-cum-full-fledged-denominations, and I wonder if anyone’s ever stacked them up side to side as such.

* Jim Henley wrote a song for America; they told him it was clever.

* I hadn’t been super enthused for Ridley Scott’s yes-no-maybe-probably-yeah-definitely Alien prequel Prometheus, because it’s 2012 and it’s Ridley Scott. Then I saw this trailer. Any knucklehead can make a compelling trailer, but pacing and music and title font treatment aside, you simply don’t see scary cosmic monoliths like you did in ’70s SF anymore. Seeing that giant whatever-it-is on that alien planet was like coming home.

* In case you missed it, my favorite fantasy franchises gave us several Christmas presents:

** Here’s a sample chapter from George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter. (SPOILERS, of course!) The great Elio & Linda of Westeros.org discuss it here.

** Here’s a trailer for Season Two of Game of Thrones. Everyone looks great and Stannis sounds great.

** And here once again is the trailer for The Hobbit, which I suppose I should get used to calling The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey for the purposes of this first film. The chills I got when the Dwarves started singing their song! Straight-up outreach to everyone who was raised on the Rankin-Bass cartoon, and successful outreach at that. BTW, I saw a lot of talented artists complaining about what they perceived to be fussy, overly toyetic, off-brand Dwarf designs, but let’s face it, the filmmakers had to help the audience be able to differentiate between thirteen axe-wielding beardos, because it’s not really like Tolkien himself even tried!

Carnival of Souls Post-Holiday Special #3: Comics and Art

January 3, 2012

* Best Comics of 2011 Lists I Whiffed On #1-2: Tucker Stone contributed two different, very fine lists, one to comiXology and one to FlavorWire. The latter is couched as “the year’s most buzzworthy books” (somehow that explains the slideshow format to me), but Tucker’s writing strictly about whether they were any good. You could use these two as a shopping list and be really happy with your purchases, I suspect. If ComicsAlliance’s list was the best-looking best-of, these are the best-written ones, at least as far as I’ve seen. (The FlavorWire link comes via Dan Nadel.)

* Best Comics of 2011 Lists I Whiffed On #3: Frank Santoro at The Comics Journal. I really could have sworn Puke Force was from 2010 or it would have made my list this year.

* Speaking of Frank, he’s launching his Comics Correspondence Course’s spring session.

* Perfect listening for the next time my baby decides to spend 1am-3am refusing to go to sleep whenever I put her down: Tom Spurgeon talks Gilbert Hernandez on the Deconstructing Comics podcast.

* Dylan Williams’s friends and family have created a tribute blog for him, archiving everything from Amazon reviews he wrote to zine art he drew to personal photos of him.

* In light of recent events in the series, I’m glad to hear from Mike Mignola about his plans for Hellboy, because the nature of those plans makes me slightly less irritated about having said events spoiled for me by PR. Also this looks an awful lot like the BPRD versus the Loch Ness Monster, which gets MY FULL SUPPORT. (Via Robot 6.)

* Hey, it’s a video trailer for Chuck Forsman’s excellent minicomic series The End of the Fucking World.

* Did you know that Zak Smith/Sabbath has a sketchblog, by which he means a finishedartblog? I sure didn’t.

* Speaking of crazily maximalist art for which the term “sketch” is wholly insufficient, Theo Ellsworth will be drawing a sketchbook page before bed every night for a year.

* I don’t really care about Harry Potter — perfectly nice but hugely flawed books with a rotten ending that I probably wouldn’t have ever thought of again after finishing them if not for the fact that they’re a world-historical publishing and film phenomenon, and also Emma Watson — but I certainly care about Sam Bosma’s set of Harry Potter character portraits.

* I think this is just a recolored panel from “Jeepers Jacobs,” but I sure hope it’s a sign of where Kevin Huizenga is headed with his palette.

* Oooh, look: Tales Designed to Thrizzle Volume Two!

* Never change, Jonny Negron.


* Nor you, Dave Kiersh.

* Wow Cool has opened up a special Press Gang store in honor of the new Portland small-press operation, and just added a whole bunch of other stuff besides.

* Kevin Czap continues reviewing his BCGF haul.

* William Cardini presents an Austin, Texas Scene Report for Frank Santoro’s Comics Journal column.

* Finally, a belated Merry Christmas from Kate Beaton!

Carnival of Souls Post-Holiday Special #2: Best-Ofs and Blowouts

January 3, 2012

* I bookmarked enough year-end best-of lists and special-feature marathons to merit their very own Carnival. I hope you’re hungry!

* Here’s CBR’s Top 100 Comics of 2011 master list. My own top 10 was factored into the voting. While superhero comics are more dominant toward the top than they were last year, and while I don’t really understand why people would vote for half a story which is basically all that all of DC’s New 52 comics have produced so far, I’m still happy to see books like Love and Rockets, Garden, and Big Questions make the Top 5, Top 20, and Top 25 respectively on a staff-voted list for a superhero-driven site like CBR. Lists like these are also useful for seeing which non-superhero books were “the one” that superhero readers not only felt behooved to read but enjoyed as well — this year it looks like Hark! A Vagrant and Habibi take that title.

* You can also find my personal 20 Best Comics of 2011 list among Robot 6’s favorite comics of 2011. Unsurprisingly to me I’m most simpatico with Chris Mautner’s strong list, but I I’m interested in it as much for the difference as for the similarities: I just couldn’t get into Yuichi Yokoyama’s Color Engineering (his painted work has little visual appeal for me and the decision to relegate the translation of the text to literal footnotes completely negated his comics’ normal immersive appeal), I didn’t include any archival reprints, there are certain old-school-style alt-comics that didn’t hit me in the same way, and I never got to read that Winshluss Pinocchio, to my chagrin. However, the real gamechanger in this post is Matt Seneca, who ranks his own comic as the year’s third best, behind only Yokoyama’s Color Engineering and Garden and seven slots ahead of Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. In this light I wonder if I should revise my list to include my webcomic Destructor, which using the Seneca scale of “Los Bros + 7” would rank as the Negative Sixth Best Comic of the Year. On the other hand, perhaps I should follow Matt’s lead and allow that as many as two comics published in 2011 might well have been better than my own. I wouldn’t want to be gauche!

* Robot 6 celebrated its third anniversary with a comically massive amount of very exciting interviews and previews and news and so on. You can find the complete list of anniversary posts here. I’ve already linked to my contributions; here are some of the highlights from my colleagues.

** Tim O’Shea interviews Tom Scioli about his webcomic and forthcoming AdHouse collection American Barbarian. Though I’d never thought of this in quite this way before, this quote is dead on:

AdHouse’s line seemed to me to be carefully curated. Each release really counts. It’s gotten to a point where each new AdHouse book is kind of an event, you know? The Josh Cotter books, then Afrodisiac, then Duncan the Wonder Dog, Pope Hats, Forming. I feel like AdHouse has had this great track record of quality, where I’m benefitting from that goodwill, that American Barbarian is the next AdHouse book and that that means something. I think it’s a great way to have your work presented.

** Here’s an exclusive preview of Fantagraphics’ stunning-looking Is That All There Is? by Joost Swarte. Super-excited to see a near-comprehensive Swarte collection in English.

** And here’s an exclusive preview of Fantagraphics’ equally comprehensive collection of Diane Noomin’s DiDi Glitz comics, Glitz-2-Go. I love how unapologetically underground it looks.

** AND here’s an exclusive preview of Fantagraphics’ latest big Jason hardcover, Athos in America, an all-new collection that contains a prequel to The Last Musketeer.

** Read Ross Campbell’s Mountain Girl #2 in its entirety.

** Finally, Robot 6 asked a plethora of critics and creators what they’re most looking forward to in 2012. The responses from Campbell, Inkstuds’ Robin McConnell, and Rub the Blood co-editor Ian Harker stood out to me. On a personal note, my friends Ben Morse, Justin Aclin, Jim Gibbons, Rick Marshall, and Ryan Penagos also all weighed in.

* My Comics Journal overlords Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler listed their favorite posts from their first year running TCJ.com. Interviews, reviews, features, columns, journalism, you name it — it’s a terrific selection from a huge range of writers. Just don’t read the comment thread, wherein TCJ.com message board Lost Causers make like Faulkner writing about the last moments before Pickett’s Charge.

* Tom Spurgeon’s holiday interview series continued all week long, and you can find the complete list here. I’ve already linked to some early favorites; here are a few more.

** Tom interviewed Peter Birkemoe of the acclaimed Toronto comics shop/art dealership/TCAF co-sponsor The Beguiling. It’s easy to see Birkemoe as one of those people involved in the retail end of comics who has created a center of gravity around which a whole vision of comics can coalesce, like a Rory Root or Tony Shenton. However, as I pointed out on Robot 6, he also sounds a warning bell about how digital comics and books will take a toll even on an enlightened shop like his.

** Tom interviewed Kim Thompson of Fantagraphics, primarily but by no means solely about his efforts in translating and publishing European comics. Getting Jacques Tardi over with American audiences is a Top 20 achievement in comics publishing since the turn of the century, for sure. (Man I love the way Tardi drew Julie in You Are There. Hubba hubba.)

** Tom interviewed Secret Acres co-publishers Barry Matthews and Leon Avelino. I had no idea that Avelino was a Highwater Books baby like Randy Chang, or in all honesty like I like to sit around daydreaming that I myself was. The picture that emerges from both men is one of intense consideration and thoughtfulness in terms of what books they publish, the way they work with their authors, and their relationship to the comics market.

** Finally, Tom interviewed my Robot 6 and Comics Journal colleague Chris Mautner about the year in alternative and art comics. I found this interview truly reinvigorating. It’s pretty much a list of a couple dozen reasons to be excited by comics right now and explains why they’re exciting, and those reasons once again run the gamut from old hands to new blood. (On a personal note, I’m also pleased to see I helped get Jonny Negron on his radar.) I like Tucker Stone a lot, and his straightforward comics writing is among the best in the business, but his his vituperative interview with Tom about the year in mainstream comics knocked the wind out of my sails like you wouldn’t believe. Immoral and unethical business practices are one thing, but the Kirby/Shuster/Friederich 2011 hat trick of horror aside I just don’t associate the act of reading comics, or interacting with people involved in their production and reception, with misery and rage like he does. It’s a conception of the art form and interacting with it as a critic (especially since it seems so closely tied to really going after individual artists whose work is seen not to pass muster) that’s totally alien and unpleasant to me, even when I’m writing about comics I don’t like and explaining why. It’s even more dispiriting when I see how many critics and cartoonists seem to love that approach and feel the same. Plus, Tucker’s such an incongruously sweet guy in person that it just makes me want to make like Wesley and rescue his Princess Buttercup from the Prince Humperdink of daily interaction with a business and its products he hates. After all that, Chris’s interview really felt like the wind beneath my wings. (And it’s not as though he minces words about the stuff he doesn’t like, mind you — the overall tone is just so much less geared toward what an Imperial official might refer to as finding a weak point and exploiting it until the whole thing blows up.)

* Any list that names the actual best comic of 2011 as the best comic of 2011 deserves our support, and as such I’m happy to direct you to ComicsAlliance’s 11 Best Comics of 2011, which ranks Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 at Number One. Like the CBR list it’s insufficiently snobby for my pinky-in-the-air tastes — the titles run along CA’s usual lines of “I’m not a regular nerd, I’m a cool nerd,” i.e. smarter genre work from the Big Four publishers plus accessible work from the arthouses — but each entry is passionately and intelligently argued, and illustrated with well-selected and beautiful art samples. It’s probably the best looking of all the best-of lists I’ve seen; Laura Hudson’s picks for Finder in particular are a “hey, I should check this out” batch. And even though I disagree with writer Jason Michelitch’s argument that you absolutely should not read New Stories #4 until you’ve read all of Jaime’s Locas work, I’m psyched that he made that argument and really went to bat for it. There are a lot of ways to approach that book and it’s exciting to see them explored in a rigorous way like that, especially since the comic’s so emotionally moving (see Mitchelitch’s write-up for an example) that you could get away with just cheering for it.

* At the Cool Kids Table, Ben Morse picks his (mostly) Big Two best.

* Finally, George R.R. Martin looks back on his amazing year. It started with him in the hospital after nearly dying, and ended with him married, with the best sales and best reviews of his career, and with both TV and publishing phenomena to his name, and with more personal moments of recognition that clearly meant a lot to him. It all makes for heartwarming reading.

Carnival of Souls Post-Holiday Special #1: My Stuff

January 3, 2012

* I hope you enjoyed your holidays! While you were out, I kept pretty busy. Here are some links to what I’ve been doing.

* I posted my list of the 20 Best Comics of 2011. It’s exciting to me that old established Grand Masters are about as well represented on it as people whose first comics came out after Obama was elected, and of course there are plenty of people in between as well. It’s also exciting to me that many of the cartoonists represented there are creating huge, consistently high-quality bodies of work without a regularly published solo series as their main venue or even as any venue at all, instead or in addition turning to anthologies, minicomics, and the Internet to get their work to the public. And I haven’t felt this blessed by an abundance of genuinely bizarre and powerful sex-horror stuff since I first discovered Clive Barker’s Books of Blood in 1994.

* Robot 6 celebrated its third anniversary with a massive two-day blowout of exclusive interviews, previews, and assorted other features. I contributed several pieces.

** I interviewed Sammy Harkham about Kramers Ergot 8. I think this is my favorite interview of all the ones I conducted last year. Sammy and I slowly circled around the thinking at the core of the book before finally plunging right into it. It was an exciting conversation to have. (That’s from Takeshi Murata’s contribution to the book below.)

** I interviewed Michael DeForge about the absolutely tremendous 2011 he had, specifically about Ant Comic, Open Country, “Dog 2070” from Lose #3, and “College Girl by Night” from Thickness. I asked a lot of questions about influence and intent, which is a hit or miss proposition, but I think Michael delivered.

** I interviewed the Press Gang triumvirate of Jason Leivian, Zack Soto, and François Vigneault about their plans for their publishing collective. They gave me a lot of exclusive announcements and previews; I think the top announcement is that Soto’s Study Group Comic Books is absorbing Randy Chang’s Bodega Books and taking over publication of The Mourning Star, but beyond that, Leivian’s publishing a book on magick, Vigneault’s Elfworld #3 looks rock-solid, and the line-up of creators contributing to Soto’s soon-to-launch sg12.com webcomics portal is just sick. (There’s no escaping DeForge!) (The page below is from the full-color Danger Country by Levon Jihanian that will be running on sg12.com.)

** And Annie Koyama announced some of her 2012 titles, including new books from Michael DeForge (natch), Julia Wertz, Dustin Harbin, Jesse Jacobs, and Tin Can Forest. You can see covers for the last three at the link.

* In case you missed it, I posted a four-volume mix of the best songs of 2011. (If you were wondering, songs from Underworld and the Game of Thrones soundtrack were cut due to time constraints, because as it turns out the time limit on CD-Rs is actually 79:50, NOT EIGHTY, YOU LIARS, while “Dance (A$$) Remix” was disqualified for the use of the word “anorexic” as a compliment.)

* Finally, I started an A Song of Ice and Fire podcast shortly before Christmas. I’ve posted three episodes so far, in which I’m joined by the Tower of the Hand’s Stefan Sasse in a discussion of honor, morality, and power in Westeros (and Essos). You can find links to all three episodes here. If you like the essays I’ve written about the books or the show, this should be up your alley.

You’ll love it with leather

January 2, 2012

The third episode of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast with Stefan Sasse, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, is up on my Game of Thrones blog at boiledleather.com. This week we end up focusing on the difference between 21st-century morality and faux-medieval morality, and what that means for the reader’s experience of the books. I was really looking forward to having this discussion. Hope you enjoy it!

The 20 Best Comics of 2011

January 1, 2012

20. Uncanny X-Force (Rick Remender and Jerome Opeña, Marvel): In a year when the ugliness of the superhero comics business became harder than ever to ignore, it’s fitting that the best superhero comic is about the ugliness of being a superhero. Remender uses the inherent excess of the X-men’s most extreme team to tell a tale of how solving problems through violence in fact solves nothing at all. (It has this in common with most of the best superhero comics of the past decade: Morrison/Quitely/etc. New X-Men, Bendis/Maleev Daredevil, Brubaker/Epting/etc. Captain America, Mignola/Arcudi/Fegredo/Davis Hellboy/BPRD, Kirkman/Walker/Ottley Invincible, Lewis/Leon The Winter Men…) Opeña’s Euro-cosmic art and Dean White’s twilit color palette (the great unifier for fill-in artists on the title) could handle Remender’s apocalyptic continuity mining easily, but it was in silent reflection on the weight of all this death that they were truly uncanny.

19. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3: Century #2: 1969 (Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, Top Shelf/Knockabout): I’ll admit I’m somewhat surprised to be listing this here; I’ve always enjoyed this last surviving outpost of Moore’s comics career but never thought I loved it. But in this installment, Moore and O’Neill’s intrepid heroes — who’ve previously overcome Professor Moriarty, Fu Manchu, and the Martian war machine — finally succumb to their own excesses and jealousies in Swinging London, allowing a sneering occult villain to tear them apart with almost casual ease. It’s nasty, ugly, and sad, and it’s sticking with me like Moore’s best work.

18. The comics of Lisa Hanawalt (various publishers): As I put it when I saw her drawing of some kind of tree-dwelling primate wearing a multicolored hat made of three human skulls stacked on top of one another, Lisa Hanawalt has a strange imagination. And it’s a totally unpredictable one, which is what makes her comics – whether they’re reasonably straightforward movie lampoons or the extravagantly bizarre sex comic she contributed to Michael DeForge and Ryan Sands’s Thickness anthology, as dark and damp as the soil in which its earthworm ingénue must live – a highlight of any given day a new one pops up.

17. Daybreak (Brian Ralph, Drawn and Quarterly): Fort Thunder’s single most accessible offspring also proves to be its bleakest, thanks to an extended collected edition that converts a rollicking first-person zombie/post-apocalypse thriller into a troubling meditation on the power of the gaze. Future artcomics takes on this subgenre have a high bar to clear.

16. Habibi (Craig Thompson, Pantheon): It’s undermined by its central characters, who exist mainly as a hanger on which this violent, erotic, conflicted, curious, complex, endlessly inventive coat of many colors is hung. But as a pure riot of creative energy from an artist unafraid to wrestle with his demons even if the demons end up winning in the end, Habibi lives up to its ambitions as a personal epic. You could dive into its shifting sands and come up with something different every time.

15. Ganges #4 (Kevin Huizenga, Coconino/Fantagraphics): Huizenga wrings a second great book out of his everyman character’s insomnia. It’s quite simple how, really: He makes comics about things you’d never thought comics could be about, by doing things you never thought comics could do to show you them. Best of all, there’s still the sense that his best work is ahead of him, waiting like dawn in the distance.

14. The Congress of the Animals (Jim Woodring, Fantagraphics): The potential for change explored by the hapless Manhog in last year’s Weathercraft is actualized by the meandering mischief-maker Frank this time around. While I didn’t quite connect with Frank’s travails as deeply as I did with Manhog’s, the payoff still feels like a weight has been lifted from Woodring’s strange world, while the route he takes to get there is illustrated so beautifully it’s almost superhuman. It’s the happy ending he’s spent most of his career earning.

13. Mister Wonderful (Daniel Clowes, Pantheon): Speaking of happy endings an altcomix luminary has spent most of his career earning! Clowes’s contribution to the late, largely unlamented Funny Pages section of The New York Times Magazine is briefly expanded and thoroughly improved in this collected edition. Clowes reformats the broadsheet pages into landscape strips, eases off the punchlines and cliffhangers, blows individual images up to heretofore unseen scales, and walks us through a self-sabotaging doofus’s shitty night into a brighter tomorrow.

12. The comics of Gabrielle Bell (various publishers): Bell is mastering the autobiography genre; her deadpan character designs and body language make everything she says so easy to buy – not that that would be a challenge with comics as insightful as her journey into nerd culture’s beating heart, San Diego Diary, just by way of a for instance. But she’s also reinventing the autobiography genre, by sliding seamlessly into fictionalized distortions of it; her black-strewn images give a somber, thoughtful weight to any flight of fancy she throws at us. What a performance, all year long.

11. The Armed Garden and Other Stories (David B., Fantagraphics): Religious fundamentalism is a dreary, oppressive constant in its ability to bend sexuality to mania and hammer lives into weapons devoted to killing. But it has worn a thousand faces in a millennia-long carnevale procession of war and weirdness, and David B. paints portraits of three of its masks with bloody brilliance. Focusing on long-forgotten heresies and treating the most outlandish legends about them as fact, B.’s high-contrast linework sets them all alight with their own incandescent madness.

10. Too Dark to See (Julia Gfrörer, Thuban Press): It was a dark year for comics, at least for the comics that moved me the most. And no one harnessed that darkness to relatable, emotional effect better than Julia Gfrörer. Her very contemporary take on the legend of the succubus was frank and explicit in its treatment of sexuality, rigorously well-observed in its cataloguing of the spirit-sapping modern-day indignities that can feed depression and destroy relationships, and delicately, almost tenderly drawn. It’s like she held her finger to the air, sensed all the things that can make life rotten, and cast them onto the pages. She made something quite beautiful out of all that ugly.

9. The comics and pixel art of Uno Moralez (self-published on the web at unomoralez.com): What if an 8-bit NES cut-scene could kill? The digital artwork of Uno Moralez — some of it standard illustrations, some of it animated gifs, some of it full-fledged comics — shares its aesthetic with The Ring‘s videotape or Al Columbia’s Pim & Francie: a horror so cosmically black, images so unbearably wrong, that they appear to have leaked into and corrupted their very medium of transmission. Moralez fuses crosses the streams of supernatural trash from a variety of cultures — the legends and Soviet art of his native Russia, the horror and porn manga of Japan, the B-movies and horror stories of the States, the formless sensation aesthetic of the Internet itself — into a series of images that is impossible to predict in its weirdness but totally unflagging in its sense that you’d be better off if you’d never laid eyes on it. I can’t wait to see more.

8. The comics of Michael DeForge (various publishers): The last time you saw a cartoonist this good and this unique this young, you were probably reading the UT Austin student newspaper comics section and stumbling across a guy named Chris Ware. All four of DeForge’s best-ever comics — his divorced dad story in Lose #3, his shape-shifting/gender-bending erotica in Thickness #2, his self-published art-world fantasia Open Country, and his gorgeously colored body-horror webcomic Ant Comic — came out this year, none of them looking anything at all like anything you could picture before seeing your first Michael DeForge comic. It’s almost frightening to think where he’ll be five years from now, ten years from now…or even just this time next year.

7. The comics and art of Jonny Negron (various publishers): What if someone took Christina Hendricks’s walk across the parking lot and trip to the bathroom in Drive and made an entire comics career out of them? That is an enormously facile and reductive way to describe the disturbing, stylish, sexy, singular work of Jonny Negron, the breakout cartoonist of the year, but it at least points you in the right direction. No one’s ever thought to combine his muscular yet curiously dispassionate bullet-time approach to action and violence, his Yokoyama-esque spatial geometry, his attention to retrofuturistic fashion and style, his obvious love of the female body in all its shapes and sizes, and his ambient Lynchian terror; even if they had, it’d be tough to conceive of anyone building up his remarkable body of work in such a short period of time. Open up your Tumblr dashboard or crack an anthology (Thickness, Mould Map, Study Group, Smoke Signal, Negron and Jesse Balmer’s own Chameleon), and chances are good that Negron was the weirdest, best, most coldly beautiful thing in it. It’s like a raw, pure transmission from a fascinating brain.

6. The Wolf (Tom Neely, I Will Destroy You): Neely’s wordless, painted, at-times pornographic graphic novel feels like the successful final draft to various other prestigious projects’ false starts. It’s a far less didactic, more genuinely erotic attempt at high-art smut than Dave McKean’s Celluloid; a less self-conscious, more direct attempt at frankly depicting both the destructive and creative effects of sex on a relationship via symbolism than Craig Thompson’s Habibi; a blend of sex and horror and narrative and visual poetry and ugly shit and a happy ending that succeeds in each of these things where many comics choose to focus on only one or two.

5. The Cardboard Valise (Ben Katchor, Pantheon): Prep your time capsules, folks: You’d be hard pressed to find an artifact that better conveys our national predicament than Ben Katchor’s latest comic-strip collection, a series of intertwined vignettes created largely before the Great Recession and our political class’s utter failure to adequately address it, but which nonetheless appears to anticipate it. Its message — that blind nationalism is the prestige of the magic trick used by hucksters to financially and culturally ruin societies for their own profit — is delightfully easy to miss amid Katchor’s remarkable depictions of lost fads, trends, jobs, tourist attractions, and other detritus of the dying American Century. He’s the very most funnest Cassandra around.

4. Love from the Shadows (Gilbert Hernandez, Fantagraphics): I picture Gilbert Hernandez approaching his drawing board these days like Lawrence of Arabia approaching a Turkish convoy: “NO PRISONERS! NO PRISONERS!” In a year suffused with comics funneling pitch-black darkness through a combination of sex and horror, none were blacker, sexier, or more horrific than this gender-bending exploitation flick from Beto’s “Fritz-verse.” None also functioned as a rejection of the work that made its creator famous like this one did, either. Not a crowd-pleaser like his brother, but every bit as brilliant, every bit as fearless.

3. Garden (Yuichi Yokoyama, PictureBox): Like a theme park ride in comics form — with the strange events it chronicles themselves resembling a theme park ride — Yokoyama’s book is a breathtaking, breathless experience. Alongside his anonymous but extravagantly costumed non-characters, we simply go along for the ride, exploring Yokoyama’s prodigious, mysterious imagination as he concocts a seemingly endless stream of increasingly strange interfaces between man and machine, nature and artifice. As a metaphor for our increasingly out-of-control modern life it’s tough to top. As pure thrilling kinetic cartooning it’s equally tough to top.

2. Big Questions (Anders Nilsen, Drawn & Quarterly): Last year, I wrote that if the collected edition of Nilsen’s long-running parable of philosophically minded birds and the plane crash that turns their lives upside-down didn’t top my list whenever it came out, it must have been some kind of miracle year. Turns out that it was. But you’d pretty much have to create a flawless capstone to a thirty-year storyline of neer-peerless intelligence and artistry to top this colossal achievement. Nilsen’s painstaking, pointillist cartooning and ruthless examination of just how little regard the workings of the world have for any given life, human or otherwise, marks him as the best comics artist of his generation, and solidifies Big Questions‘ claim as the finest “funny animal” comic since Maus.

1. Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 (Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Fantagraphics): Gilbert got his due elsewhere on my list, so let’s ignore his contribution to this issue, which advance the saga of his bosomy, frequently abused protagonist Fritz Martinez both on and off the sleazy silver screen. Instead, let’s add to the chorus praising Jaime’s “The Love Bunglers” as one of the greatest comics of all time, the point toward which one of the greatest comics series of all time has been hurtling for thirty years. In a single two-page spread Jaime nearly crushes both his lovable, walking-disaster main characters Maggie and Ray with the accumulated weight of all their decades of life, before emerging from beneath it like Spider-Man pushing up from out of that Ditko machinery. You can count the number of cartoonists able to wed style to substance, form to function, this seamlessly on one hand with fingers to spare. A masterpiece.