* Links to new pages of comics on What Things Do don’t really work, but I assure you that Jordan Crane’s morbid, masterful Keeping Two updated this week.

* Bryan Lee O’Malley is posting some very rough roughs from his upcoming project Seconds.

* Frank Quitely does Star Wars.

* Gorgeous short weird fiction from Sam Bosma.

* Woof–this page by Leiji Matsumoto explains why Ryan Cecil Smith was moved to do an Emeraldas tribute comic.

* Golly, these Arthur Rachkam Alice illustrations are stunning. James Jean city. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Kiel Phegley talks to Jeffrey Brown about the movie he co-wrote, the forthcoming Lizzy Caplan/Alison Brie wedding comedy (not to each other, alas) Save the Date.

* Tom Spurgeon lobbies for his Eisner Hall of Fame picks this year: Bill Blackbeard, Jesse Marsh, Mort Meskin and Gilbert Shelton.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates continues his crowdsourced debunking of claims that the Civil War could have been avoided, this time focusing on other anti-slavery wars.

* Woop! Woop!

* America: We’re #47! (Scroll down.) This post also contains this quote, which should be tattooed on my forehead: “Convincing well-intentioned people to support a war in order to depose a wretched tyrant is an easy thing to do — alas, it’s probably too easy to do, since it’s usually what leads to great mischief, human suffering, and even more tyranny under a new name.”

* I assure you, Nitsuh Abebe, there are those of us who have not forgotten Hooverphonic. The North Remembers.

* Sometimes I like to picture an alternate timeline in which Pearl Jam made a video for “Black.”

* Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!

* Finally, my friend and collaborator Matt Rota has a show coming up: It will contain art that looks like this.

The latest installment of my interview column for The Comics Journal features Julia Gfrörer, author of Too Dark to See, one of the ten best comics of 2011.

* Sparkplug has announced that Katie Skelly’s Nurse Nurse is to be their first new comic. Best of luck to both halves of this arrangement.

* Oh look, Lisa Hanawalt may have just done her best weirdo strip ever and best gag strip ever, back to back.

* It took me a while to find it, but Zack Soto and Milo George’s relaunched Study Group website has a blog component with its own RSS feed that you should certainly consider subscribing too. Highlights thus far include a Noah Butkus spotlight (Jesus Christ, “Forces”!) and an interview with cartoonist Maré Odomo, who cites writer and ADDXSTC fave Kevin Fanning as an influence, which was unexpected and exciting to see. Odomo also cites the influence of Blaise Larmee and Aidan Koch, but in terms of the beauty of their pencil art rather than any of Larmee’s theory trolling, which until relatively recently was rarely made manifest in his comics themselves.

* John Mejias draws our attention to an upcoming Shawn Cheng art show. He’s a printmaking master, and he’s doing stuff you don’t see any other cartoonist/printmakers doing, I don’t think.

* Anders Nilsen responds to his critics.

* At a certain point pulling art from Michael DeForge’s Ant Comic in order to show you how horrible and beautiful it is becomes a waste of time: Surely you already know how horrible and beautiful it is. At any rate, here’s the latest Ant Comic.

* Rickey Purdin has been posting nightmarish little sketches unlike any art I’ve seen from him before. This one’s called “All the Weapons You Needed Were Over Here.”

* The Ashcan All-Stars group art blog, staffed mostly by interesting mainstream/genre artists, is doing a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe week, and it’s been pretty glorious. Below are contributions from Nick Pitarra and Aaron Kuder.

* The Mindless Ones’ Amypoodle has begun annotating Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes.

* Jeez, this Jason Karns fellow is a goddamn gold mine.

* It’s The Best of Zak Smith/Sabbath’s Playing D&D with Porn Stars! I can barely conceive of what a timesuck following all those links would be.

* I’m just waiting very patiently for the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit Lego videogames.

* God bless Uno Moralez.

Who wants to talk comics? Tweet me a book or name or creator or critic or topic or whatever and I’ll tell you what I think. #tgif

* Dang, Ken Parille’s Comics Journal year-in-review piece tackles Habibi, 1-800-MICE, Holy Terror, Optic Nerve #12, The Death-Ray, Mister Wonderful, Crack Comics #63, and Ganges #4 as well as any individual review of any of them has done. (And I say that as a person who wrote about 5/8 of those books for the Journal myself.) Parille’s writing is like a really delicious sampler platter — you get the sense he just picked the tastiest morsels of insight on any given book and presented them to you for your delectation, but that there’s a whole lot more where that came from.

* Wonderful piece on Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve #12 by Tim Hodler. I like what he says about the unique characteristics of structuring a longer story as a series of funnypages-style strips, and this: “his storytelling displays a subtlety so far beyond most of what’s being published at the current moment.” Ayup. As alternative comics has begun looking less like RAW and more like Heavy Metal, we’ve lost something in exchange.

* I don’t know why, but a day or two ago the feed for Jessica Abel & Matt Madden’s Drawing Words and Writing Pictures blog dumped like half a dozen posts on me all at once, and there were gems galore in there: Rundowns of their Best American Comics series’s 2010 Notables and 2011 Notables (aka honorable mentions/bigger-picture selections), and notes on Asterios Polyp and Ice Haven.

* Not that I’m opposed to all the Heavy Metal stuff. Duh. I mean, Lane Milburn, holy shit, look at his next book Mors Ultima Ratio:

* On a similar note I suppose, I just happened to really like the drawing of what looks to me like Grendel and Beowulf by Thomas Yeates that Tom Spurgeon selected for his birthday post on the artist. I am a sucker for big monsters in the Hulk/Rawhead Rex vein, admittedly.

* Still on that same note, Sam Bosma reminds me of a lesson I once learned the hard way: Never trust a Mindflayer.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates lets Jay-Z off the hook for his avowed intention to continue using the word “bitch” in his lyrics. While Coates is correct in saying that the context of the use of the b-word in rap is part of the problem, he’s wrong to say “Rap’s ‘bitch’ problem has never been about the word itself” — of course it is. It’s about that among other things, but it’s certainly still about that. Coates does that sort of thing throughout the post: “There is a whole school of thought that holds racism is impossible unless attended by the word ‘nigger.’ And there are plenty of ways to regard a women as bitches, without ever saying the word.” Certainly. But just because Newt Gingrich can go on national television and receive standing ovations and become the presidential frontrunner for a major political party by saying enormously racist things without using period-piece movie-villain epithets doesn’t mean you should ignore it when people do use them. And just because hip-hop and pop culture generally’s misogyny runs deeper than calling women bitches, you still shouldn’t do it. The way to disprove that “bitch” is problematic in and of itself would be to provide examples of a non-problematic, non-sexist way to use it in hip-hop. Coates goes straight for the strawman of “I have never wanted a world where white people were forever banned from using the word nigger,” but of course no one’s actually arguing for expurgating hip-hop’s theoretical equivalent of Huck Finn, because the difference between saying these words and using them is crystal-clear. I guess the closest Jay-Z has come to that sort of thing is “That’s My Bitch,” but for me that isn’t close enough. The long and short of it for me is that there’s no need for bitch as an insult when “asshole” exists, and even less of a need for it as a simple term for “woman” when “woman” exists; continuing to use it despite these genderless equivalents indicates a problem with that gender. I’d be interested to hear of cases where this didn’t hold.

* Tom Ewing and Matthew Perpetua on Lana Del Rey and the issue of “authenticity” in art. Man, are sneer-quotes ever called for there. I thought that most of the controversy around Del Rey centered on whether or not she was any good, and whether or not her sexual politics were retrograde, and the degree to which a major record label was involved in her initial burst of ostensibly organic/viral/indie success. Those are rubrics I can understand: hype vs. talent, and anti-sexism, and not wanting to be lied to by a giant corporation. But I was quite aghast to learn that apparently some people were holding it against her that she used to perform under a different name with a different sound and look and vibe. A world where artists must emerge fully formed in their teens or early twenties with their first quasi-professionally recorded work and then remain preserved in amber for all eternity is a scary, scary world. A Bowie-free, Beatles-free, Dr. Dre-free, Underworld-free, P-Funk-free, Ministry-free, Gaga-free world! Not to compare LDR to any of those artists on a qualitative basis, mind you — see the three aforementioned potential issues with her work — but all I can tell you is rejecting the notion of the authentic self is one of the top five best things ever to happen to me, not just as a consumer and sometimes maker of art, but as a person. By all means try on personae like clothes in a dressing room until you find one that fits you, and take it off and put on new ones whenever you feel like it. What on earth is the harm in that?

(Related: I can’t help but wonder if the backlash against LDR specifically is tied to the phenomenon Scott Plagenhoef addresses in online music culture’s quest to be the first to seize upon a new artist within very narrow, inoffensive aesthetic parameters. If that’s the filter for your interaction with music, a person who radically changes very early on in her career, and changes into a very divisive mode of presentation, is anathema.)

* Chris Ware, Building Stories, Pantheon, Fall 2012. Start clearing out that #1 slot on your year-ender list.

* Game of Thrones Season Two, HBO, April 1 2012. Start clearing out that Sunday night slot on your DVR.

* Whoa: Zack Soto’s StudyGroupComics.com has launched with a gorgeous line-up of mostly alt-fantasy strips, including previous ADDXSTC faves The Mourning Star by Kazimir Strzepek, Doppelganger by Tom Neely, and Danger Country by Levon Jihanian; strips from Press Gang co-founders Soto, Jason Leivian, and Francois Vigneault; UTU by Malachi Ward (below) and more. Ambitious and impressive.

* I love Dave Kiersh’s work…

…so I’m happy to pitch into the Kickstarter for his next book, Afterschool Special. $20 puts you down as a pre-order for the finished product.

* The Pizza Island comics studio is calling it a day. Lots of good comics came out of that outfit, as did many funny tweets.

* I have very little experience with or interest in any of the cartoonists covered in this post (okay, maybe I’m interested in Manara), but I was still totally fascinated with Dan Nadel’s seemingly off-the-cuff post on high-end genre cartoonists Milo Manara, Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff, and Richard Sala — that’s how good Dan is at what he does.

* Gabrielle Bell’s latest strip concludes, with a weirdo rhythm and tone all its own.

* Robert Beatty: the sensational character find of Kramers Ergot 8! (Via Sammy Harkham, appropriately enough.)

* Junji Ito, ladies and gentlemen.

* A collection of Bruce Timm’s good girl art? Don’t mind as I do.

* Tim O’Neil has strong words for the militarized superhero. The pop sociology books-about-comics from 30 years from now truly write themselves. It’s to the point where Warren Ellis can funnel his contempt for the genre and its audience into a wink-wink-nudge-nudge endorsement of torture by Captain freaking America in a recent Secret Avengers issue and no one in a position to know better and ask for something different from him even notices. On the scale of cosmic injustice it’s not as bad as mistreating Jack Kirby and his family, but that’s a low bar to clear.

* One day Blue Ivy Carter will turn to Jay-Z and ask “What did you do during the Sean T. Collins/Shit Comics War, Daddy?”

Kramers Ergot 8
Robert Beatty, Gabrielle Bell, Chris Cilla, Anya Davidson, Ron Embleton, C.F., Sammy Harkham, Tim Hensley, Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones, Frederic Mullalley, Takeshi Murata, Gary Panter, Johnny Ryan, Leon Sadler, Frank Santoro, Dash Shaw, Ian Svenonius, writers/artists
Sammy Harkham, editor
PictureBox, January 2012
232 pages, hardcover
$32.95
Buy it from PictureBox
Buy it from Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

* Wow: Fantagraphics is publishing two books about Love and Rockets this year. One’s a companion volume with interviews, unpublished art, character guides, family trees, and so forth; one’s a Love and Rockets Reader with essays by Marc Sobel. Pretty great timing given that the series is getting as much attention now in its 30th year as it ever has, because it’s as good as it ever was.

* Marvel beat DC in dollar share and market share in the direct market in December. Think for a moment about everything that changed not just at DC but across the entire industry — some for the good, some for the bad, some for the “jury’s still out” — in the name of what amounted to a three-month sales goose. Same-day digital pretty much industry-wide, new continuity, new costumes, all the redundancies and obsolescences created by same in everything from licensing to ongoing storylines to planned and abandoned storylines to licensing images to the recently launched DC MMORPG, a new business model in terms of release schedules for DC, a competing new business model in terms of release schedules for Marvel, a new way of working with talent, new internal procedures for editing and trafficking books, various controversies over race and gender and sex, hirings and firings of creative personnel, new baselines for page count and price point, big-name writers carving out little bubbles of continuity-independence for their books, major media pushes, a shaky retail sector adjusting on the fly to all of the above…and Marvel beat DC in December. Really, really, really remarkable. Tom Spurgeon has more analysis, including the always welcome remonstrance that publishers who complain about the inaccuracy of publicly available sales estimates have it within their power to provide more accurate numbers in seconds, and on a basis more comprehensive than crowing about sellouts when it suits them.

* Speaking of Spurge, I enjoyed quite a few of his final “holiday” posts, including his interviews with Laura Hudson and Chester Brown and his New Year’s resolutions, at least two of which can be summed up with “Don’t be an asshole.”

* I have a pretty low tolerance for other people’s opinions on David Bowie’s songs — through no fault of its own there are few things I’d rather read less than that one blog that’s writing about every single Bowie song in order — but I sure did enjoy Matthew Perpetua’s take on “TVC-15.”

* Michael DeForge’s latest Ant Comic manages to be the most awful one yet.

* Gorgeous cover for SF Supplementary File #2C by Ryan Cecil Smith.

* Lisa Hanawalt does War Horse.

* Plenty of interesting work being discussed in Kevin Czap’s fifth and final BCGF haul roundup.

* Panels of 2011 is an accurately named and visually compelling new tumblr.

* Kali Ciesemier sketches Robyn.

* I’m historically not the biggest fan of the writer doing the adaptation, but the coming Conan comic being illustrated by Becky Cloonan will at least look as good as Conan comics have ever looked.

* Man did I like that one At the Drive-In record, a pretty peerless effort in terms of coming up with lyrics that demand to be shouted. DANCING ON THE CORPSES’ ASHES!!! Glad they’re getting back together.

* Real Life Horror: When is terrorism not terrorism? Related: I wish I’d bookmarked the post where he first made this connection, but in light of the apparent secret campaign of orchestrated murder against Iranian scientists it’s worth reiterating Greenwald’s contention that the wall of state secrecy behind which the United States hides violent overseas acts like these assassinations and our multinational drone wars is in every important way equivalent to the more voluble propaganda to which our despotic enemy regimes subject their populace, propaganda which we never fail to decry when we see it in others. The North Korean who believes the birds are crying over the death of internationally revered statesman Kim Jong-Il is not a world apart from the American who doesn’t know about all the children slaughtered by our army of flying killer robots.

* Gary Groth on his dinner with Christopher Hitchens.

* Go home and get your fuckin’ shinebox, AMC.

* Finally, behold the awesome power of Pizza Boomerang.

Here’s a six-page profile of Fantagraphics I wrote for Wizard a few years back, tracing it all the way from Gary Groth’s dorm room to its post-Peanuts, post-graphic-novel-boom salad days and featuring appearances by Gary Groth, Kim Thompson, Daniel Clowes, Jaime Hernandez, Paul Hornschemeier, Brian K. Vaughan, and lots and lots of guns. Click the images below to read, or download the whole thing as a PDF. Enjoy!

* Chris Mautner lists “The Six Most Criminally Ignored Books of 2011.” Shame on me for not having read Pure Pajamas yet, that’s for damn sure. (Noel Freibert’s Weird, too.)

* Fantagraphics is showing off covers for R. Crumb’s The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat and Jaime Hernandez’s God & Science: Return of the Ti-Girls. (I think my favorite thing about Jaime’s superhero team is how fans would no doubt debate how to properly pronounce their team name, a la Magneeto/Magnetto, Naymor/Nahmor, etc.)

* It wasn’t until I grabbed the jpg of Gabrielle Bell’s latest comic in order to drag it to my desktop and crop out a panel for posting here that I saw just how lovely the background colors look in relation to one another. See what I mean?

* Grant Morrison talks about Dr. Octagon.

* Ben Morse’s Big Two(ish) Best-Of continues.

* Finally, Monster Brains has unleashed the Furie with a beautiful Matt Furie gallery and a spiffy new Furie-designed logo.

* 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!

* 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.

* 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.

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.

I contributed several more write-ups to CBR’s Top 100 Comics of 2011 list:

#70: Gilbert Hernandez’s Love From the Shadows
#38: Michael DeForge’s Lose #3
#20: Yuichi Yokoyama’s Garden
#4: Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets: New Stories #4

The second episode of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, is up! This time out Stefan Sasse and I discuss morality, leadership, and reform in the context of such august personages as Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei Lannister, Roose Bolton, and Tywin Lannister. Enjoy it with your leftovers.

Meanwhile, I contributed a couple of entries to the first installment of Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2011 countdown: Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise at #80 and Tom Neely’s The Wolf at #78. Enjoy them with your gift cards.

The Armed Garden and Other Stories
David B., writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2011
112 pages, hardcover
$19.99
Read a 10-page preview and buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

About the only things impeding my completely unfettered enjoyment of and admiration for everything David B. achieves in The Armed Garden and Other Stories are familiarity — all three of the stories collected here appeared in the late, lamented Mome anthology at some point; and, because I am a morose and unpleasant person, the happy-ish ending — after a book of unremitting, near-ecstatic horror and slaughter, ending on a wistful up-note felt not so much unearned as simply unwanted.

But that’s it. Other than that, this collection is absolutely marvelous, a gorgeous and searing series of comics from an artist who earns the description “freakishly talented” as completely as anyone this side of his trans-Atlantic fellow in crafting dreamy/nightmarish parables of violent spirituality, Jim Woodring. These comics are just as lovely and just as frightening, and just as singularly the work of their creator and no other.

For one thing, they’re beyond gorgeous. B. has developed a form of expressionism that relies on curves rather than angles; simultaneously he’s fleshed out the stark intensity of his high-contrast black-and-white brush art with a lush duotone gold. The result is battle scenes that have the sharpness and savagery of a woodcut and the graphic simplicity of a Dark Ages tapestry, tied to prophetic visions and hedonistic reveries among the faithful peopled by characters you want to reach out and hug, so sensuous and inviting they seem. It’s almost unfair that the same guy who’s developed a visual language for battle that eloquently reduces its participants to interlocking graphic elements, a nigh-undifferentiated sea of swords, spears, grimaces, and gouts of blood, also maybe draws the sexiest pale naked women I’ve ever seen in a comic. But from a thematic perspective these stories are all about the way that religious fervor lends an air of all-consuming certainty and nobility to mankind’s most animalistic pursuits, from fucking to killing, so I suppose it’s only fitting.

Each of The Armed Garden‘s three stories — “The Veiled Prophet,” the title tale, and “The Drum Who Fell in Love” — is a transmission from the heightened reality of the legends surrounding various medieval religious cults, one from Arab Islam and two warring ones from European Christianity. As I mentioned when the first of these, “The Veiled Prophet,” hit our shores in Mome, they at first appear to all the world like an expressionistically drawn work of historical fiction, until the supernatural elements slowly take over. By focusing on the individual actors in each drama rather than the overall sweep of the history surrounding them, B. allows the reader to experience the awe and terror of divine/demonic intervention as a first-hand phenomenon; within the world of the stories, it’s as easy to swallow as are the more run of the mill sources of conflict with rival Popes and caliphs and so on. We get swept up in the madness and terror along with everyone else. And in all three cases, the fire of divinity burns too bright, consuming those who fan its flames. Provided you don’t buy its actual intervention in actual real life — and by situating each story within rejected, discredited cults, B. effectively removes the need to consider the more popular and lasting religions in this light — the message is clear: Belief in this shit, actualized into violence, will drive you as crazy and destroy you as completely as the real deal will. Gazing beneath the veil of the prophet, building your own paradise on earth, peering into the secrets of creation, communing with the dead, slaughtering out a path for God to tread — these things will kill you, blind you, drive you insane, leave you stranded with only the music of your mind for company. Ugly truths, presented as beautifully as is humanly possible.

* Pyongyang author Guy Delisle takes a few parting shots at Kim Jong-il.

* Charles Burns beer!

* Brian Chippendale, ladies and gentlemen.

* Okay, Lala Albert’s definitely on the radar now. Thanks, Same Hat!

* The 5 Best Things about Pitchfork’s Guest List Best of 2011 feature:

5. The weird way in which Colin Stetson runs down like four or five of my favorite deep cuts from my music library, including the Aphex Twin song during which I discovered that my baby daughter loves to dance
4. One of the Fleet Foxes really likes the X-Men books
3. Seeing which beloved indie rock acts let humanity down by listing Chris Brown songs
2. Seeing which of the Big Three chillwave acts each of the other Big Three chillwave acts does or doesn’t list
1. The concluding paragraph of the list from Ishmael Butler from Shabazz Palaces

* I should have noted this last week, but I lost the link in my RSS reader: Captain America co-creator Joe Simon has died. In addition to his achievements as a writer, artist, and editor, and his role as one of Jack Kirby’s first and finest collaborators, as a font of first-hand information about the dawn of comic books — I interviewed him myself a couple of years ago; the sensation was like getting to ask Peter about the Last Supper — he was invaluable to journalists and historians. He also tenaciously fought Marvel Comics for his best-known creation very late in his life, and appears to have won, as he would define it. An inspiring figure.

* The Inkstuds Best of 2011 Critics Roundtable, featuring Tim Hodler, Joe McCulloch, Matt Seneca, and host Robin McConnell, could easily make a Best Comics Criticism of 2011 roundtable somewhere else. Radio really suits all four figures, and the discussion is lively, with each critic clearly springboarding off the others’ ideas.

* Tom Spurgeon’s Holiday Interview series has begun! This is seriously one of my favorite things about the holidays now — curling up on the couch with my in-laws’ dogs and reading one of the best in the business interview some of the best in the business. First up this year is Art Spiegelman and Tom Neely, Emily Nilsson, and Virginia Paine of Sparkplug Comic Books.

* Guy Delisle on Kim Jong-il. I need to re-read Pyongyang.

* Frank Miller on late capitalism (unintentionally). (PS: Jesus were he and Lynn Varley ahead of their time, artistically.)

* Happy ninth birthday, AdHouse Books!

* Matt Furie and Lisa Hanawalt are doing children’s books for McSweeney’s. My daughter seems to love froggies, so I’m thinking I’ll check these out.

* It’s the Cindy & Biscuit Christmas Special! Dan White is crazy talented.

* “Marvel already seems to have origin series galore; they just don’t seem very interested in keeping them in print.” So true. Every Christmas I think about trying to snap up the great Silver Age runs in some easy way — through the giant omnibuses; through the trade paperback versions of the Marvel Masterworks collections — and every year I discover this is next to impossible because nothing’s ever kept in print. You can’t go on Amazon and buy the entire Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four or Lee/Ditko Amazing Spider-Man in a handful of clicks, and that’s a crime. You in fact can’t do it at all, which is worse than a crime, as they say.

* Tom Brevoort’s Formspring has yielded the clearest encapsulation of fannish desire for fiction to work like a rulebook that I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading. I dunno how he puts up with these folks.

* I love that Tom Kaczynski loves the ladies.

* And on the flipside of the loveliness coin — although they do have the crazy eyes in common — this is some strikingly gross art from Lala Albert.

* Finally, Uno Moralez’s comic from Chameleon #2 is now up on his LiveJournal. It’s as luminous and odd as everything he does.

Mome Vol. 22: Fall 2011
Zak Sally, Kurt Wolfgang, Jordan Crane, Chuck Forsman, Steven Weissman, Sara Edward-Corbett, Laura Park, Tom Kaczynski, Joe Kimball, Jesse Moynihan, Josh Simmons, The Partridge in the Pear Tree, Malachi Ward, Eleanor Davis, James Romberger, Derek Van Gieson, Michael Jada, Tim Lane, Nate Neal, Wendy Chin, Anders Nilsen, Tim Hensley, Lilli Carré, T. Edward Bak, Nick Drnaso, Joseph Lambert, Paul Hornschemeier, Sergio Ponchione, Nick Thorburn, Dash Shaw, Ted Stearn, Jim Rugg, Victor Kerlow, Noah Van Sciver, Gabrielle Bell, writers/artists
Eric Reynolds, editor
Fantagraphics, 2011
240 pages
$19.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.