Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010 — or in this case, a comic from 2009 I did not read until 2010. Today’s comic is Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco, published by Metropolitan — the comics journalist’s abyss-gazes-also moment.

[One of the strongest sequences in the book is a] reminiscence by an old woman, recalling how she found her husband in the chaos after the book’s central round-up took place. Two panels show him fleeing for his very life, panicked and paranoid, mouth agape, eyes darting to and fro, a look of raw animal terror on his face–until in the third panel his wife literally catches him as he runs, looking up at him plaintively as he turns toward her mid-stride, the fact that he’s been grabbed by the woman he loves and not by…someone else clearly still not having registered. In that moment I tried to imagine what it would be like for my wife to see that look on my face, the look of all other thought and emotion and sentience out of my eyes, the look of a lifeform’s basic, primordial desire just to survive the next moment.

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Swanlights by Antony & the Johnsons, released by Secretly Canadian — an album recorded to sound like you’re sitting in a room around a fire listening to live music, only it’s coming from the fire.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Young Lions by Blaise Larmee, self-published with a Xeric Grant — the emergence of an aesthetic is a joy to behold.

…when I said Larmee is dragging the beauty of this art style forward, I meant that literally: As opposed to CF’s side-scrolling distance, we’re in constant close-up close quarters with this quartet. Their reclining bodies occupy entire panels, their upturned, closed-eye’d faces appear inches away from our own, the background details are all but nonexistent. It’s tough to stand in judgement of people you’re seeing primarily through the POV you’d get if you were about to make out with them, you know?

It’s that intimacy that makes Young Lions successful, that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, these are assholes. But who–especially among artists and arts-interested people of the sort who’d buy a Xeric-winning self-published graphic novel such as this one–hasn’t been an asshole? Who hasn’t been friends with assholes, worked with assholes, been impressed by the creative output of assholes, been disappointed with the creative output of assholes, fallen in and out of love with assholes?

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Disconnect from Desire by School of Seven Bells, released by Ghostly — dreampop fundamentally without flaw.

Click here for a full review; click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Werewolves of Montpellier by Jason, published by Fantagraphics — to quote an Album of the Year of the Day, everybody knows he’s a motherfuckin’ monster.

You have to be a real expert in Jason-character physiognomy to even be able to tell that the lonely expat main character in Werewolves of Montpellier is sometimes wearing a werewolf mask. After all, the guy’s an anthropomorphized dog at the best of times. In the end, that ends up being the gag. You’re not some uniquely unlovable monster, you’re just a guy with problems, like anyone else…

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s albums is Light and Gold by Eric Whitacre, released by Decca — choral music for people who (like me) don’t listen to choral music, or: it’s not just a clever title.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Lose #2 by Michael DeForge, published by Koyama — the breakout artist of the year.

DeForge’s actual comics, as contained in these two issues, are straightforward, funny, and sharp as a knife. Inside, he wields a precise line to create character designs that read like a slightly more avant-garde version of what you might see on a post-millennial Nickelodeon cartoon. The storytelling and punchlines are always crystal-clear even as the material bounces back and forth between long-form, surreal horror stories and laser-precise gag strips….In issue #2, virtually all the page space is devoted to a long and no-fucking-around nasty horror story about a little kid who manages to domesticate a large spider whose brethren are simultaneously ushering in a quite lethal and disgusting plague-style demise for his uncaring family and abusive classmates. Imagine Skyscrapers of the Midwest weaponized and you’re almost there….DeForge has landed himself on my must-watch list.

Click here for a full review; unfortunately, this comic is out of print and unavailable.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Black City by Matthew Dear, released by Ghostly — perfect for when all you want your music to do is quietly bounce, bubble, and brood.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Love and Rockets: New Stories #3 by Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez, published by Fantagraphics — career-best work from cartoonists with two of the best careers in the medium.

On Jaime’s “Browntown”/”The Love Bunglers”:

…ever since I read it, when I think of it, I just keep thinking to myself, “Poor [name]. Poor, poor [name].” It makes me want to cry! Cry for an imaginary person I’d never read about until a few pages earlier. (It’s the flipside of feeling proud of the entirely imaginary Hopey Glass for becoming a teacher’s assistant, I guess.) Such power!…I will never forget reading this book.

On Gilbert’s “Scarlet by Starlight”/”Killer * Sad Girl * Star”:

the brutal exploitation of children at the center of “Scarlet by Starlight” — delivered in a grotesquely matter-of-fact panel, savagely angry and awful — is echoed by the far milder but still insidious sexualization of “Killer * Sad Girl * Star” later on in issue #3…and, of course, it compliments and reinforces Jaime’s “Browntown”/”The Love Bunglers” suite in that same volume.

Click here for a full review of Jaime’s contributions to the issue and click here for a full review of Gilbert’s contributions to the issue; click either one for purchasing information.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is A Reality Tour by David Bowie, released by Epic — a double-live retrospective of pretty much every single phase of a career that may well now be over, performed with evident glee.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is High Soft Lisp by Gilbert Hernandez, published by Fantagraphics — Gilbert Hernandez vs. Gilbert Hernandez, to the death.

I’ve never seen a cartoonist so thoroughly dismantle–discredit–his own artistic preoccupations.

In High Soft Lisp, Gilbert traces the relationship history of Fritz Martinez, the ultimate sex goddess in a career full of them, and in so doing reveals that her every fetish outfit and sexual free-for-all is fruit from the poisoned tree. Lots of characters in this book enjoy the living shit out of Fritz’s sexuality, not least Fritz herself, but to a man and woman they’re revealed to be creepily predatory about it, embracing the worst in themselves and encouraging the worst in Fritz. And here’s the thing: What have we been doing over the hundreds of pages we’ve spent watching Fritz adorably and kinkily fuck her way through the post-Palomar cast of Beto’s comics? What has Beto been doing? What does that say about all of us?

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is The ACME Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware, published by Drawn & Quarterly — the single best comic I have ever read.

What makes a life? Is it the narrative we assemble in retrospect from the sights and sounds we remember best? Is it like comics in that regard, a combination of words and pictures stacked together to tell a story? To what degree do we act as our own cartoonists, then, picking and choosing the right combination of words and pictures to tell the story of ourselves we most want to hear? Is it possible that the way we misremember things tells us more of that story? What about the words and pictures we skip entirely?

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Autumn, Again by A Sunny Day in Glasgow, self-released — a little cauldron out of which love songs are poured.

Click here for a full review of the song “Drink drank drunk”; click here to download the entire album for free from A Sunny Day in Glasgow.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Death Trap by Lane Milburn, self-published with a Xeric Grant — looks like a creature feature, feels like something far more unsettling.

Everything he does well, he does as well as he’s ever done it here: Immersive environments, crosshatched and “lit” to look like they were constructed from solid smoke. Weird, ugly monster designs that connote some sort of infectious sickness of reality as much as they do simply somethin’ scary….And perhaps the most finely tuned sense of queasy, bottom-just-dropped-out horror and madness you’ll find in comics this side of Al Columbia.

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is The Social Network by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, released by the Null Corporation — Reznor’s finest instrumental suite yet is both warm and cold, like a computer rotting.

Click here for a full review of both the album and the movie for which it forms the soundtrack; click here to download a free sampler or the full album from the Null Corporation.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi, published by Fantagraphics — a furious comic, furiously cartooned.

With the exception of the introductory story, this entire book features three tiered panels per page. In superhero comics this format is known as “widescreen”; it connotes power. It’s powerful here, too, but it’s a power to oppress and crush rather than soar or punch in action-movie style. They’re like miniature trenches.

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Wilson by Daniel Clowes, published by Drawn & Quarterly — a comedy-of-cruelty masterpiece.

I don’t think the kaleidoscopic array of styles in which Daniel Clowes drew Wilson says much of anything. I think that’s the gag….Draw it how you will: Wilson’s always there, in medium close-up more often than not, a wide-eyed and open-mouthed expression of guileless wonder on his face more often than not, saying something fucking horrible almost constantly. No matter how you shake and dance, the last two drops go in your pants; no matter whether he’s detailed or abstracted or realistic or cartoony or full-color or two-tone or black-and-white or whatever the hell, Wilson is a massive, massive tool.

Click here for a full review and purchasing information; click here for a roundtable discussion of the book with the Savage Critics.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is There Is Love in You by Four Tet, released by Domino — as full in its restraint as How to Dress Well is barren in its release.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Curio Cabinet by John Brodowski, published by Secret Acres — quietly ecstatic horror.

I’ve been writing about the similarity between the horrific and the sublime for (God help me) over a decade now, but it’s rare for me to come across a comic that makes that connection as frequently and as subtly as John Brodowski’s Curio Cabinet….The message is both troubling and comforting: It implies a connection between the individual horrors we experience and the very fabric of existence, yet it also suggests that perhaps an enlightenment is possible whereby this waking nightmare can be appreciated, if never fully understood. More like this, please.

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Strange Weather, Isn’t It? by !!!, released by Warp — if this album had existed while I was in college, I don’t think my house full of white funkateers would ever have thrown a party to anything else.

Click here to download it from Amazon.