1. Performing as a backup hoochie in Jason Shiga's rap act.

2. Co-curating the "Art and Flair of Mary Blair" show at the Cartoon Art Museum, which included spending a long afternoon at the house of Blair's son Kevin, poring over animation art by Mary, Lee, and Preston Blair. And, yes, I know Mary Blair was an animation artist and illustrator, and thus does not technically belong on a list of comics-related moments. Bite me.

3. Dinner with Carol Lay at Stumptown.

4. Watching an emotional Gene Yang, sleepy kid in his arms, accept his Eisner for American Born Chinese at the very end of the evening. (It was also worth sitting through the Eisners to see Jonathan Ross kiss Neil Gaiman.)

5. Starting a new daily strip (skin-horse.com). It's a little scary, how much of a relief it is to get back on the horse.

5. Spider-Man: Reign, by Kaare Andrews
I couldn't get past the first issue of this attempt to create a Dark Knight Returns for Spider-Man (you know, to return Spider-Man to his dark, pulpy roots in 1930s crime fiction and get away from the campy, wisecracking 1960s version), so I didn't even make it to the part for which it will always be remembered: Mary Jane dying of cancer caused by radioactive spider semen! Such lulz, as the kids say these days. I did eventually read the issue featuring the big revelation, but unfortunately it's so confusingly written and drawn that it's not nearly as funny as it should be.

4. Spent, by Joe Matt
So there was this cartoonist named Joe Matt. He drew cheerfully cynical indie comics about himself and his cute punk girlfriend and his funny quirks, like his legendary cheapness and his fondness for porn. As his life rolled on, his comics got less cheerful and more cynical. The quirks turned into eccentricities, then borderline psychoses. He drew himself hitting his girlfriend, and his girlfriend leaving him. He drew himself getting so cheap that he pissed into the kitchen sink rather than flush his toilet, and so crazy about porn that it sank his relationships with real women. And now we've dipped all the way down to Spent, in which, for 120 pages, Joe Matt's cartoon doppelganger does absolutely nothing but buy porn, trade porn, watch porn, and splice it into personal porn highlight tapes…all depicted in meticulous, plotless, pointless detail.
Many cartoonists have descended into madness over the course of their careers, but usually, as with Dave Sim and Cerebus or Steve Ditko and anything, it's to the obvious detriment of the work. The thing about Joe Matt is that he becomes a better and better cartoonist as he becomes a worse and worse human being. It's the most skillfully drawn chronicle of obsession outside of Robert Crumb, but at the same time it's hard to say why it exists or whom it's supposed to entertain. (Bonus points off for the self-congratulatory "women are too dumb and shallow to appreciate my sensitive genius" cartoon on the back cover. Attention, every male cartoonist in the world: I'm sorry no cheerleaders spontaneously volunteered to blow you while you were in high school. There, you've got your apology. You're like 40 now. Get over it.)

3. Funky Winkerbean, by Tom Batiuk
I don't know how to feel about Funky Winkerbean. On one hand, both the year-long cancer storyline and the ten-year leap forward were, for the most part, handled gracefully, often movingly. On the other hand, I cannot get away from the sheer weirdness of solemn, humorless, even bleak storylines featuring characters whose biggest concerns used to be "Battle of the Bands" and playing frozen pizzas on a record player. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just…strange. Like something a webcomic would do. (In fact a webcomic, David Willis's Shortpacked, produced the best Funky parody of the year, "Funky Cancercancer"…and yet Shortpacked itself has the same tendency to take sudden right swerves from wacky comedy into Victorian melodrama.) And Funky really has become a nigh-unrelenting downer. I was half-expecting the "ten years later" setting to be a blasted, radioactive wasteland, Westview having been ground zero for the nuclear strike that ushered in World War III. Or maybe something out of the Left Behind books.

4. Marvel Zombies, by Robert Kirkman, Sean Phillips, and others
This is a terrible comic by any sane measure, but I have to admit that I admire its sheer audacity (especially around the time Galactus shows up and gets jumped by ALL THE SUPERPOWERED ZOMBIES IN THE WORLD). And the covers are pretty funny. So maybe this slot should be filled by All-Star Batman and Robin, but I feel like I've said my piece on All-Star Batman and Robin.

5. Amazing Spider-Man: One More Day, by J. Michael Straczynski and Joe Quesada
I haven't been reading many superhero comics lately, just watching and re-watching Justice League Unlimited to remind myself that stories about people in circus costumes punching crooks can be, you know, fun. But sometimes my husband gets into fights with people on the John Byrne Forum, and then he tries to explain why he's all riled up, and then I end up wearing that expression I know he hates. You know, the look of mingled horror and repulsion, such as would appear on the face of the luckless narrator of a Lovecraft story.
In this case, apparently Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane is in the process of being magically undone by Satan (okay, Mephisto, which is what he calls himself while visiting the Marvel Universe to make confusing and frequently self-defeating Dan'l Webster-style bargains with superheroes) so that the writers can do stories about Spider-Man as a swingle again. I bet you didn't even know Satan had divorce powers. (He also has "introduce you to your strangely elderly-looking daughter from an alternate future" powers, but that's a whole other story.)
The one good thing about this comic is that it has a scene were Peter Parker meets a fat alternate-universe version of himself who plays video games all day. I would write the entire miniseries about that guy.

1. Marriage magically dissolved by Satan in One More Day

2. Abdomen devoured by undead Spider-Man on Marvel Zombies cover later reproduced as popular resin statuette

3. Triple pain of spine-cracking pose, thong wedgie, and acute embarrassment in popular "Erotic Laundry-Folding MJ" resin statuette

4. Slow, cancerous death by radioactive Spider-Sperm in Spider-Man: Reign

5. Spider-Man 3

1. My Favorite Ending of 2007: Death Note, by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata
That was one hell of a meltdown, is all I can say.

2. My Favorite Comics Mystery of 2007: "Erotic Laundry-Folding MJ" Statuette
Not for the sexism or the skankiness, but for the question of who buys these things. Supposedly it sold out before it even hit stores, and in addition to being designed specifically to scare women away from your home, it's a really ugly hunk of plastic. It's also $125.00. Why is this happening? Who is responsible? If you own this item, or the one of Zombie Spider-Man devouring Zombie Mary Jane, could you write to me and explain why? There could be a future column in this.

3. My Favorite Perry Bible Fellowship of 2007: "The Unforgiving Tree"

4. My Favorite New Comic Character of 2007: The Dumb Teenage Girl Who Shouts, "DUDE! YOU ARE SO EMO!" At the Miserable, Defeated Old Man Feeding Pigeons on One of the Chris Ware New Yorker Thanksgiving Covers
There is no Chris Ware comic that would not be improved by Photoshopping that girl in. Jimmy Corrigan? "DUDE! YOU ARE SO EMO!" Rusty Brown? "DUDE! YOU ARE SO EMO!" The only problem is that Ware apparently thinks her attitude is somehow inappropriate.

5. My Favorite Comment Made By Jason Thompson, Author of Manga: The Complete Guide, Regarding a Rival Manga Critic: "I ought to slap his face with a fucking slice of French bread."
I have no idea what that meant.

1. What It Is, by Lynda Barry
Lynda Barry is one of my all-time favorite cartoonists, and her previous book, One Hundred Demons, is one of my all-time favorite graphic novels (or however you want to categorize it). My only concern is that no comic produced by mortal hands could possibly live up to my stratospherically high expectations for What It Is.

2. Explainers, by Jules Feiffer
A ten-year retrospective of Feiffer's self-titled weekly strip? The only mystery here is why it took so long for a publisher to leap onto a project like this. All the Feiffer strips are either long out of print or have never been reprinted at all, so this collection should be a revelation.

3. Black Jack, by Osamu Tezuka
For years, the English-speaking world's only exposure to Black Jack, arguably Tezuka's most popular work in Japan, has been two long-out-of-print volumes from Viz. Now Vertical, which apparently sets aside at least an hour each day to carefully consider which manga Shaenon K. Garrity would like to read, is publishing the complete 17-volume series. In the Viz editorial offices, there was much rejoicing, coupled with sorrow that none of us would personally get to work on it.

4. Moomin, Volume 2, by Tove Janssen
This is already out, but I haven't read it yet, so it's something to look forward to next year. The first volume blew my little mind.

5. The Complete Pogo, by Walt Kelly
Fantagraphics is taking another stab at producing the complete Pogo, a noble endeavor, although, as I said in a previous column, Pogo is one of the few classic comic strips that's always been easy to find in reprints. I'm still waiting for that complete Barnaby.

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