By Shaenon K. Garrity
My Five Favorite Print Comics of 2007
1.
Bookhunter, by
Jason Shiga
Not to pimp for a buddy (and while I'm at it, my friends Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm put out a heck of a great book,
Good as Lily, for Minx), but
Bookhunter is everything you didn't realize you needed in a comic. A 1970s-style action thriller about library police—yes, the people who come after you if you don't pay your fines—tracking down a stolen rare book, it's equal parts pulpy, tongue-in-cheek, and chockablock with actual information about the library system, inserted Tom Clancy-style into the action. Nice library-book cover design, too.
2.
Castle Waiting, by Linda Medley
I was so happy to see this gentle, curiously absorbing fairy-tale riff start up again after a long hiatus. Nothing ever happens in
Castle Waiting; months-long storylines can grow out of a shopping trip or a visit from some dwarfs, and usually the characters don't do much besides explore their rambling castle home. But each issue is like stopping in to spend an afternoon with old friends. And Medley can draw the hell out of castle stuff.
3.
Alias the Cat, by Kim Deitch
Deitch often gets overlooked on lists like this because he's so consistently good that it's easy to take him for granted, and because there is a certain sameness to his work: he's always delving into forgotten old American pop culture, building creepy, dreamlike structures from the debris.
Alias the Cat is no different, but it's damn good even by Deitch's high standards; I think it's my favorite of his recent books. The midget bakery village alone beats virtually anything you could see in another comic this year.
4.
Biff-Bam-Pow!, by Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer
Tom Spurgeon, as usual, said it best: in a healthy comics industry, this would be a perfectly normal, middle-of-the-road comic. Top creators would occasionally do goofy, action-packed one-offs just for fun or to make a little bread on the side, and nobody would think anything of it. But in the comics industry we've got, this is one of the best pamphlets of the year. Beyond that, I'm a huge fan of both Dorkin and Dyer, and I love seeing new work from them. Runner-up in the "slapstick riff from top cartoonist" category: Kyle Baker's
Special Forces.
5.
Shazam! and the Monster Society of Evil, by Jeff Smith
I'm such a sucker for Captain Marvel. Bonus superhero runner-up: the final issue of
Nextwave, with the Elvis MODOKs.
My Five Favorite Webcomics of 2007
1.
Achewood, by Chris Onstad (achewood.com)
Time named
Achewood the #1 graphic novel of the year, despite it not actually being a graphic novel. Of course,
Marvel Zombies was also on that list, so you kind of have to take it with a grain of salt. But when even a strip's bonus character blogs are funnier and more interesting than anything going on in any other comic (the Dude and Catastrophe, people), you know you're dealing with a special case.
Achewood takes the ingredients of a bad webcomic—the art's crude (but effective), it's rife with cut-and-paste shortcuts, it's about cartoon animals saying naughty things—and turns them into something sublime. Every couple of months, another of my friends discovers it and goes on an evangelical freak out, and all I can do is nod along and agree that, yes, it really is that brilliant. And every writer has to envy Onstad's gonzo imagination and ability to make sweet, funky love to language.
2.
Templar, Arizona, by Spike (templaraz.com)
Over on WebComicsNation, the #1 comic of the day, every day, is
Templar, Arizona, and with good reason. In her usual big, bold brushstrokes, Spike plots out an imaginary mid-sized Southwestern city in a world just slightly askew from our own. There isn't much plot to speak of, which is fine with me. Mostly, Spike just pilots her increasingly motley crew of characters, with shy writer Ben and his filthy-minded neighbor lady Reagan roughly at center, through the detailed, darkly funny alternative culture she's created.
3.
Cat and Girl, by Dorothy Gambrell (catandgirl.com)
Gambrell's philosophical po-mo strip has been running for years and just keeps getting better, but when the time comes to tally the best comics on the Web, it's all too often forgotten. Suffice to say that it's consistently funny, consistently smart, and consistently able to coax great material out of characters who could be one-note gags (Grrl, Bad Decision Dinosaur). A recent strip described college as "Like summer camp, but with drinking." (Girl's response: "College just upholds the American oligarchy while calling it a meritocracy." Cat: "With drinking!") Beat that, print comics!
4.
Family Man, by Dylan Meconis (projectkooky.com/dylan/familyman)
Back when Dylan Meconis was drawing her first comic,
Bite Me, I thought she was the strongest writer (along with Vera Brosgol) but the weakest artist of the Pants Press cartoonist collective. That was before I learned that
Bite Me was Meconis drawing very quickly in her spare time. She now churns out page after lush, detailed, gracefully sepia-toned page of
Family Man, a
Bite Me spinoff about Luther, a young eighteenth-century Bavarian intellectual with a disturbingly long (but apparently hereditary) nose. And, yes, this was probably the only comic of the past year about eighteenth-century Bavarian intellectuals. And vampires.
5.
American Elf, by James Kochalka (americanelf.com)
I was going to bump this off the top five for
Girl Genius, but Kochalka had to go and up the ante by having another kid. Also, his first son is now about four, which means that pretty soon he's going to pass his father's intellectual age, and I can't wait for that to happen.
My Five Favorite Reprint Projects of 2007
1.
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks, by Fletcher Hanks, edited by Paul Karasik
This is some kind of put-on, isn't it? This is some kind of elaborate hoax. Surely nothing this wonderfully, weirdly deranged ever really existed. I don't care. I love it. I waited on tenterhooks for this book to come out after reading the Fletcher Hanks material in
Art Out of Time, and it did not even begin to disappoint.
2.
The Fourth World Omnibus, by Jack Kirby
Invaluable because Volume 2 has the
Jimmy Olsens with guest star Don Rickles.
3.
Goodnight, Irene, by Carol Lay
Lay's early indie comic
Good Girls is one of my private back-issue-bin obsessions, so this collection of the Irene Van De Kamp stories from
Good Girls made my year. Irene is a wealthy heiress whose love life is forever complicated by the extreme facial sculpting she received as a child in a remote African village, and her adventures comment on beauty and femininity between bouts of balls-out weirdness. If you know Lay through her weekly strips
Story Minute and
WayLay, her art on this will throw you for a loop.
4.
Terr'ble Thompson, by Gene Deitch
There are more good comic-strip reprint projects going on than I could list:
Peanuts, Walt and Skeezix, Dick Tracy, Dennis the Menace. But the very fact that somebody (well, Fantagraphics) was willing to put out a collection of this forgotten, short-lived 1955 strip by the great cartoonist and animator Gene Deitch gives me hope that someday every single comic strip in history will be available for my purchase and enjoyment. Anyway, the art's great, showcasing Deitch's breezy mastery of 1950s modernist design.
5.
Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, by Frank King
I haven't actually read this. I'm just putting it on the list in the hope that someone will buy it for me.
My Five Favorite Manga of 2007
1.
Flower of Life, by Fumi Yoshinaga
Flower of Life is in danger of unseating
Antique Bakery as my favorite Yoshinaga manga, and that's saying a lot. Great despite being Yoshinaga's least homoerotic work, this dramedy about a slightly nerdy group of high-school students (much space is devoted to the class manga club) is as witty and absorbing as any of her work, and the characters are hilariously written.
2.
To Terra and
Andromeda Stories, by Keiko Takemiya
How marvelous it is to live in a world where key 1970s shojo manga artists like Keiko Takemiya are being translated into English! If someone would just get around to Moto Hagio, my head would explode from pure pleasure. These dreamy, emotional sci-fi epics come to us from a time when mainstream manga was quirkier, more purely the expression of the artist's personal obsessions, and often very beautiful and strange.
3.
The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, by Eiji Ohtsuka and Housui Yamazaki
The English serialization started in late 2006, but I only discovered it about a month ago (thanks, Carl!). It turns out that Dark Horse has been quietly publishing a manga designed exactly to fit my personal tastes. One story in Volume 4 invokes both the urban legend about the bride who's kidnapped from her honeymoon and turned into a sideshow freak
and the Japanese version of the "Bodyworlds" corpse-art exhibition. Also, one of the characters channels an alien intelligence through a hand puppet. Could it be any more perfectly tailored to me? Add a rewrite by the great Carl Horn, and you've got happiness in
tankobon form.
4.
Yotsuba&!, by Kiyohiko Azuma
Okay, this one's just fun. And cute. And fun.
5.
Nana, by Ai Yazawa
Volume 7. That's where the emo gets cranked up to eleven. This is the best soap opera ever, churning with punk rockers and midnight confessions and sexy, sexy bad decisions, and it just keeps getting refined into a purer and purer form of manga crack.
Previous:
#4, Lynda Barry
Next:
#6, Top 5 lists, part two
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
