No, the top ten isn't on here, so if you're planning—as I often do—to scroll down to the bottom of the page and find out what got selected as the number one so that you can immediately laugh and say "What a moron!", you'll have to come back next week. There's a word-limit on how long these Ships can be, and that word limit is policed by a group of corporate types far more intimidating than a room full of so many Norman Osborns.
What we've got here is the top 30 comics, this being numbers 30-11. While I prefer my reading of lists to just get into it without introduction, I do want to say that, despite what you may have heard, 2008 was a demon of a year in comics—great work from all quarters, the indie, the corporate, the dude in a garage—and while the publishing end certainly seems to have run into problems (remember when that paper company went bankrupt?), the creative end still seemed to have their act together every once in a while.
Coming up with a top 30 that best represents what I liked about comics was both easier and harder than I thought—easier because as soon as I ended up with the sixty or so comics I thought were the best, the top 30 fell into place, harder because it was difficult to select those original sixty out of the boxes, websites, shelves and stacks. There's some stuff mentioned last week that won't be here, but the most notable exception is the hardcover reprints of newspaper strips—excepting one, I spent most of the year reading newspaper strip collections from previous years.
As with any lists, these things are designed not to create canons, but to reflect
personal taste, excitement, and joy—and the best thing that can come out of them is when you see something on them and say to yourself, "no, that's not
right," and go off and come up with the best possible reasons and arguments why your favorite belongs there. Art deserves a passionate audience, because otherwise—otherwise you're just a useless little idiot who eats whatever you're given. Comics can only get better as long as the audience—you—demand that they do.
So if you see something on here that is just flat out wrong, and I guarantee you will, get it together and come up with your own. For those of you waiting for a magic comic-reading cyborg to read it all and tell you what is or isn't the best work—well, I feel sorry for you, and I hope that your mom comes by soon to change your diaper. For the rest, it's been fun. Have a great holiday.
IGNITION
30) Three Shadows, by Cyril Pedrosa. Published by First Second.
Pedrosa, a talented former Disney animator who worked on
Hercules and
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, hasn't been making comics for long, but you're unlikely to pick up on that when reading
Three Shadows. An attractively designed book that stands out even amongst a great year for book design, the 267 page story reads like a dream—a painful one about a father's attempts to rescue his son from death. While one of the subplots near the end drags on too long, the primary story is one that's so easily relatable—the desire to escape tragedy—that upon reading the comic, it's difficult to forget even a second of it.
It may be painful for some—the central tragedy is difficult to bear—but it's a thoroughly positive work, and the closing epilogue earns the sentiment it creates. Due in no small part to Pedrosa's previous work for Disney, the comic has an attractive cartoonish sensibility to it, but the shading and black-out work on many of the more ethereal pages is far closer to something Eric Drooker might do.
29) Wolverine: Origins # 24, by Daniel Way & Steve Dillon. Published by Marvel Comics.
No, I'm not kidding. There's two things that
Wolverine: Origins did right—one, it had Steve Dillon on board. Two—it didn't care. It didn't care that it was the second-rate Marvel series designed solely to exploit the popularity of Marvel's most over-used and under-thought character, it didn't care that it was knee-deep in a story that no one could possibly care about (that being the story of NO ONE CARES Wolverine's kid), it didn't care that it was silly, it didn't care, best of all, that it was a comic book.
While the entire storyline that surrounded the issue played with the ideas of using Wolverine and Deadpool as a couple of Wile E. Coyote types going after each other with Acme level attacks like dropping a grand piano on a giant red X, issue 24—which opens with the hallucinations of Wolverine as he and Deadpool have a (no joke) race to see who has the fastest healing factor—was the perfect little diamond of what a 2008 comic book can still be when it wants to.
Funny, silly, and completely sarcastic,
Wolverine: Origins was the sort of comic you'd expect somebody at a non-Marvel, non-DC company to put out—because it looked around at the universe that surrounded it and said "There's no way in hell I'm going to take this job seriously." While both the story arc and this issue had to eventually go about the business of dealing with the terribly generic story of Logan's no-reason-for-existing son, there isn't anything that could erase the first three pages of this issue, which are as smart and funny as anything else that super-hero comics did this year.
28) All Star Batman & Robin The Boy Wonder # 9, by Frank Miller & Jim Lee. Published by DC Comics.
Without a doubt one of the weirdest arguments for how impossible it is to do something so wrong with an iconic super-hero character that said character breaks, the Miller & Lee version of Batman continues to screw up expectations for what is or isn't "acceptable" amongst a certain niche portion of its fans, some of whom seem to be keeping up with the series solely for the purpose of lambasting it.
Is it the last gasp of a comics creator who hopes to ply his storytelling trade permanently alongside Eva Mendes, Rosario Dawson & Scarlett Johannson? Is it a magnificent joke about the idiocy inherent in taking super-heroes too seriously? Who knows. Who cares?
Issue 9 saw Batman and Robin paint themselves yellow, sit down with a cold glass of lemonade, and proceed to beat the hell out of a dweebish Hal Jordan. While it may not have been the "set the standard we all will follow" call to arms some people were hoping for, it is—if you're in the right kind of mood—a hell of a good time.
27) Lucky Volume 2, # 2, by Gabrielle Bell. Published by Drawn & Quarterly.
The stereotype of the autobiographical comic where the cartoonist talks about their dreary life is such an overly ridiculed one that, in 2008, it almost seems a heroic act of defiance for an artist to actually go ahead and put one out, and have it published by the precocious Drawn & Quarterly to boot, a company that seems to pride itself on being a little more wistful and yearn-heavy in attitude than is humanly tolerable.
Of course, this is Gabrielle Bell we're talking about, so it's not like you're going to have to read some idiotic discussion featuring coffee-slurping elitist whites discussing what
The Wire meant to them while a folk singer drawls out the story of "the working man." Bell's intelligence and self-deprecating smirk shines through, and while it will probably be another year or so before she decides to put something else out, there's plenty of great stuff here to chew on.
26) Punisher: The Long Cold Dark, by Garth Ennis, Goran Parlov & Howard Chaykin. Published by Marvel Comics.
The first time I break my own rule for what can make the list—there will be two—is what I'd argue served as the true conclusion for Garth Ennis' take on the Marvel character for their MAX line, which usually translates to "gore and breasts." But with the gloves of pretending to appeal to children off, Ennis was able to take the character to a level of excitement and solidly-constructed thriller writing that I'd never have imagined possible. I've been a fan of Ennis for years, but it wasn't until after reading some of the Internet supporters of the book that I gave the character a chance.
The experience of keeping up with an ongoing comic in trade was a first for me, and it's hard to imagine what this book read like in single issues, as it moves—with zero repetition and a passionate speed—through each of its bloody, unsettling tales. This is a difficult story, the emotional climax for a character so disengaged from emotion that it actually requires the on-panel cutting of an infant's face to bring about some type of feeling in him beyond his standard, which is a variation on "broody depressiveness."
The sequence that follows that terrifying moment is one that even Ennis and Parlov knew they couldn't do justice too, so
they skipped right past it, dealing it out in a sort of highlight reel by way of an attending doctor listing the injuries Frank Castle received. The climax of the story is a startling attempt to humanize a character by showing how little his overall background differs from Frank Castle's. The story ends with one of the only moments of the series where Frank, exhausted, angry, and completely fed up, looks deeply into what he truly is—an only slightly more disciplined version of Barracuda's purely hedonistic take on ultraviolence. And he responds the only way he can: by shooting him as many times as he can.
After that, Frank—broken down in a fashion that is only comparable in his entire history to the moment his family died and he was reborn—looks upon the one decent product of his horrible existence, a child created at a moment that's probably as close as he can get to love, and then has to make sure that the child never has a way to find him. While the character will have to live on—he's far too profitable for Marvel, no matter how lousy his crappy movies do—the simple truth is that when Frank Castle takes his baby and returns it to the woman who has taken on the responsibility of raising it, he dies completely. Unlike that day in Central Park that shaped his existence, this time, his solitude is one he forced upon himself. It's easy to see why Garth Ennis walked away. After this, there aren't any more stories worth telling.
25) Nocturnal Conspiracies, by David B. Published by NBM/Comicslit.
Don't let the back end page description of NBM's Comicslit sway you into assuming that the material they present is anywhere near as pretentious as they describe themselves:
Novels in the true sense about exploring our lives, our feelings, our experiences. In comic art. In graphic novels. At times uplifting, at times controversial – always insightful and enriching. Here are the most intelligent comics the world has to offer.
Yeah, no. Whoever wrote that? You make me, and comics, want to throw up. But the vagaries of overwrought publishers aside, new David B is new David B, and although this treads the line of how much I'm willing to take—it is, at its most basic description, a collection of dream comics—it's a gorgeous book that never rests too long in the wilds of being something only the author could care about. There are a lot of reasons why David B is such a big deal—
Nocturnal Conspiracies, even if it's your first experience with him, will give you at least five more.
24) Omega The Unknown # 7, by Jonathan Lethem, Gary Panter & Farel Dalyrmple. Published by Marvel Comics.
While there's something inherently stupid in the way that Marvel Comics welcomes vacationing writers from other industries to moonlight at comics writing, as the track record includes unfinished stuff like
Daredevil: The Target and
Ultimate Hulk With a Harem, He Rips Wolverine In Half, everything went right for this series, a Lethem-curated take on the Steve Gerber character.
It's nothing like what one might expect from the guy who wrote
Motherless Brooklyn or
Fortress of Solitude—far more experimental, with the volume for bare-breasted passion turned way down—but when finished, it ended up standing out as one of the most impressive call-out line-in-the-sand comics that Marvel has published. A comic that, because of the characters used, could only work if it came from the House of Ideas, but one that looked at the random attempts by non-corporate companies to tell "mature" spandex stories and showed them how far off the mark they were.
While Fantagraphics can rely on the Hernandez brothers to do a damn fine hero-type tale, most of the time the only people who can do these things right are the corporate behemoths. This issue—the one where Gary Panter reminded everybody why he's such a fearsome legend—was my favorite. Hope you have just as hard a time picking your own—they were all fantastic.
23) RASL # 2, by Jeff Smith. Published by Cartoon Books. (Which means published by Jeff Smith and his wife.)
Whereas all of
RASL was great, the first issue had to go about the business of introducing the series, shut up anybody who was looking for
Bone: the Next Generation, and issue 3 had to deal with back-story and origin, the second issue—a scary tale about the kind of damage the main character leaves behind as he treks across a multitude of worlds—was pure comic, pure cartooning, pure Jeff Smith.
While it may have become popular to set Smith as some type of unattainable ideal, a guy who is successful at comics and publishing just because of magic, luck and intelligent business sense,
RASL puts it all to the lie: this is a guy who cares about his craft, cares about his story, and cares about what he puts out there. While
RASL probably won't end up making it to all the same homes that
Bone did—it's a bit too gritty for the Scholastic Books set—it's on track to be the best ongoing series in years. On top of that: self-publishing. Man up, everybody. Smith ain't keeping secrets.
22) The Amazing, Remarkable Monsieur Leotard, by Eddie Campbell & Dan Best. Published by First Second.
I've written about this comic previously for comiXology, and what I said about it then—that it was great—remains true now, if not more so. While my personal preference with Eddie Campbell will always be for more
Alec work, Campbell and Best pulled off one of the best graphic novels of the year, a funny look at a guy who ended up succeeding, over and over again, despite being a pretty miserable failure at everything he tried to do.
21) MOME # 12, by David B., Al Columbia, Sophie Crumb, Sara Edward-Corbett, Ray Fenwick, Paul Hornschemeier, Tom Kaczynski, Killoffer, Nate Neal, Olivier Shrauwen, Dash Shaw, Derek Van Gieson & Jon Vermilyea. Published by Fantagraphics.
Wait, seriously? You can look at that line-up and still need to find out why I thought it was good? God, you gotta slow down on the drinking. What is it, 11 in the morning? Just buy
MOME, it's always great. Every single time, and seriously: I hate anthologies.
Hate.
20) Paul Goes Fishing, by Michel Rabagliati. Published by First Second.
There's a whole lot of—what's that called? Whining, that kind of stuff in
Paul Goes Fishing. Until I read it, I wasn't aware that you could do whining in a way that doesn't make me want to claw my throat out. All that aside, there's a nice level of incoherence to this story, one that may not even be supposed to be there. It's a lively book, with a narrator/protagonist who seems to have overvalued his own estimation of those around him, a man who seems oblivious to his own contradictory impulses (sounds familiar, I know), a man who seems to be painted in the most positive of lights simply because he's some kind of authorial stand-in.
He's refreshingly honest, is the thing, and so is
Paul Goes Fishing—it's a book that's less about anything specific, and more about a dirty little roll through life, where intelligence struggles with chance to lay meaning and connection over things that have no bearing on one another. Along with some of the other books on this list o' mine,
Paul Goes Fishing was one of those comics that, mostly due to art, I found myself going back to over and over again. Each time I came away feeling vastly different about the characters it contained and the story it told. For me, that can be a pretty reliable definition of what makes something worthy of putting on, well, "A List of Things."
19) Injury # 2, by Ted May, M. Jason Robards & Jeff Wilson. Published by Buenaventura Press.
While it may be 2008 for some, it's all about taking a ride on the wayback machine for
Injury—not only is it an "alternative comic" that sticks to the standard super-hero sizing specs, the characters operate in some far-gone world, rocking it to Nazareth and settling their differences in alley punchouts, all the while being depicted in a style that might best be described as what would happen if the current Bongo artists were hired by Stan Lee to draw the original
Hulk issues.
While the thing about comics these days seems to be the constant infighting of acquired tastes versus claims of elitism,
Injury # 2 is a refreshingly populist work, mostly because it just sits there scowling at you, as if it's saying "I don't care whether you like me or not, but you will respect Black Sabbath." Times may be bad for some—but not these guys.
18) B.P.R.D. 1946, by Mike Mignola, Josh Dysart & Paul Azaceta. Published by Dark Horse Comics.
I'd posit this as the second rule-breaker of my own device, in that it's actually five comics, and none of these issues, taken in and of themselves, stand as one of the greatest comics of the year. But read in totality—which is clearly how they are intended to be read—this rock-solid tale, a military escapade laced with Mignola's mastery over simple horror stories, is one of the best to come out of the impressive Mignola-verse of
Hellboy/B.P.R.D. material. Without more than a nod to any of the regular characters, the comic, ably illustrated by Paul Azaceta at what seems to be the peak of his powers (this guy made a terrible
Foolkiller comic readable this year, and that's something), tells the story of a ragtag team (there is no other kind) of American and Soviet soldiers who follow the erstwhile and brilliantly named "Professor Trevor Bruttenholm" in a search for—well, what do you think? Vampires, demons, all that kind of stuff. Assisted, in her own fashion, by the scariest little girl you'll find in a comic book, it's a bloody little thrill ride that teems with more intelligence than many of its contemporaries. Oh, and if it matters to you? It's what they call "stand-alone."
17) Jessica Farm, by Josh Simmons. Published by Fantagraphics.
Will
Jessica Farm finish? I don't know, I have about as much faith in that happening as I do in Sufjan Stevens finishing the "50 States Project," and that idea is not one based on a schedule that can't reach its climax for another 42 years. This does have a "1" on the side though. With something like
Jessica Farm—an eight-years-in-the-making comic where the author did one page a month—and somebody like Simmons, you're guaranteed that what is produced will be worth looking at. What's surprising about it is how good it actually is, even if you're not looking at it as a weirdly scheduled art ritual. Not everything in here "makes sense," so if that's what you require, ask your mom for some more
Archie and go away until the adults are finished talking. But if you're down for some weird Alice In Wonderland-type stuff, if you can handle a penis or two—check this mutha out. You've got until 2016 to get caught up.
16) Drifting Classroom Vol. 10, by Kazuo Umezu. Published by Viz.
What manga fan doesn't get up everyday and say "man, I'm really glad those idiots at TokyoPop and those censor freaks at CMX didn't get their hands on
Drifting Classroom."? Thankfully, they didn't, and as of earlier this year, all 11 volumes of Umezu's magnum fantasticus are available, and yes: it's as good—and as insane—as you've heard. This volume, containing the portions of the
Classroom story that were originally published in Japan over 33 years ago, is a classic journey through the story of the hapless unlucky children of Yamato Elementary School.
By this point—and yes, here be spoilers—a nice solid majority of the children have been killed by various freak occurrences, all but one of the adults dead long before, and those that remain are split into two groups, one who has decided to start cooking and eating others, and one who clings to the idea that they'll find a way to survive in the post-apocalyptic wasteland they've ended up in. While the 11th volume suffered—only a bit—through having to resolve the story as well as having a lower page count, volume 10 is full-tilt horror, from the portion where the sixth graders (did I mention these are all sixth graders or younger?) throw the crippled girl across a gaping chasm to the nasty spear battle between the two pre-teen leaders of the various groups.
It ends, like every volume of the series, with a fearsome cliffhanger, but even if number 11 had failed to arrive, it stands head and shoulders amongst its contemporaries. While the other big Umezu release of the year, the monolithic
Cat-Eyed Boy collections, suffered a bit under both weight of expectation and the sheer length,
Drifting Classroom stayed as tight as possible, never belaboring a point, never inserting dialog when a scream of pain would work, and never letting a character live longer than a spear through the face would allow.
15) Angry Youth Comix # 14, by Johnny Ryan. Published by Fantagraphics.
It's Boobs Pooter in one of those rare stories where Johnny Ryan actually spends the entire length of a comic on one actual narrative. It's called "Boobs Pooter in the World's Funniest Joke." It includes…you know what? I'm not going to tell you. I will tell you that the first fan letter published on the inside cover contains the line "gay boring nerds like Chris Ware and Art Speigelman." That should make you aware of what you're getting into.
OK, OK. The comic includes going to the bathroom on the street. We on the same page now?
14) Core of Caligua, by CF. Published Picturebox.
I'll never understand the popularity of people claiming that "they could do that" when they look at a comic. Could you? Could you really? Well, why don't you? While you're at it, why don't you find out if you can ingest oven cleaner and get to work on time? The simple reason why most—fine, I won't say "all"—can't pull off what CF does is because, and
you may not like this, because they aren't as smart as he is. The guy has a mastery over doing simple design work that, without any instruction, takes the reader's eye and moves it across the page.
His decision to lay out the page in distinct frames, to do away with things like gutters, to only violate the symmetry of the panel layout when the story requires it—these aren't the sort of things the guy does lightly, even in something like
Core of Caligua's eight pages. While the majority of mini-comics that I end up reading are, nearly across the board, indigestible garbage that keeps me praying every night that there's a poison scare at my Brooklyn coffee shop,
Core of Caligua was the gem of the crop, a work I even ended up liking more than the almost-as-fantastic
Powr Mastrs from the same artist. If you can track it down, do so. Oh, there's a penis in it, so—I don't know, don't give it to a kid or something.
13) Nana Volume 12, by Ai Yazawa. Published by Viz.
Where to begin?
Nana is one of the most infectious, addictive ongoing series I've read in years, one that has transitioned from what originally seemed (to me) to be a well-made soap opera about a pair of young Japanese women going through the pains and pangs of growing up to one of the most intelligent, nuanced fictional studies of relationship and emotion that I can remember coming out of comics. It's pointed that it's
fictional—there are plenty of comics that examine the strange logic of dating, falling in love, but most of the time, it's either something that's more auto-biographical or it's done in the pursuit of theme—Yazawa's manga is one that places heightened emotive relationship as it's central engine, and this volume is one of the finest.
Opening with what the reader has to assume is the future of one of the characters, possibly the same time that portions of the series have been narrated from, it segues into the moments before a fireworks show where two of the many star-crossed lovers dance as close to the edge of a reunion as possible before one decides—due to confusion, due to fear—to ignore a knock at the door. While it's merely a delaying tactic, and the remainder of the book explores the varying machinations of a record company's desire to exploit another relationship as well as the emotional politics of who attends parties,
Nana 12 serves as both a superb example of what this series does so well, and as a primary example of how Yazawa can integrate negative space into her art to both accentuate and obscure her portrayals of love and desire.
The woman's ability to manipulate the standard shojo traits of her characters—the spindly limbs, the gigantic eyeballs—is one that is, as far as I've found in this category of manga tales, unparalleled. A lot of people in manga can draw with exceptional skill. Yazawa takes that same skill, and goes even further—she draws so well that the art isn't something you look at. It's something you feel. That she pulls all this off while, at the most basic level, telling nothing more than a standard soap opera about young women in love? That's about as impressive as it can get.
12) Travel, by Yuichi Yokoyama. Published by Picturebox.
While there was a lot of great manga that came out this year from all kinds of different companies, one of the most fascinating works had to be
Travel—besides challenging just about everything I had expected out of manga, besides showcasing what Igort spoke about earlier this year (the desire by so many Japanese cartoonists to explore the potentials of "silent" comics) it's one of the most attractive and eminently rewarding reads of this, or any, year. While the propensity for some art comics seems to be their desire to be as off-putting in tone as possible, ignoring the reality that the purpose of the avant-garde has never been just to stand proudly and say "look at how the many do not like me,"
Travel was a comic that came and, while being defiantly "different," still struck at the same heartstrings that so many other more mainstream comics reach for—it's exciting, it's compelling, and it's a fevered experience that demands you don't put it down until you've reached the final page.
11) Love & Rockets New Stories # 1, by Jamie, Gilbert & Mario Hernandez. Published by Fantagraphics.
The first of the Barnes & Noble-ready collections of new
Love & Rockets stories, designed so it can be lined up alongside the recent seven-volume reprint of the first volume of one of the finest comic runs of all time, it would almost seem an afterthought that there's great comics involved. After all, the decision by Los Bros Hernandez and Fantagraphics to take their entire output and reprint it, again, but this time in a fashion that would capitalize on the obvious best commercial outlet for the work—well, that was a big enough deal on its own, and to follow it up by abandoning the entire serialized comic book format as well? That wasn't a decision that could have been made lightly. But these are the Hernandez Brothers were talking about. As comics go, these guys are some of the top-ten living-legend types, this isn't a fly-by-night make-some-comics/bob-for-apples type operation. This is the Real Deal Holyfield, back before he got his ear bit off and we all realized that God was just a mortal. And while it kills me, oh god it kills me stone dead, to have to say it: this right here?
This Love & Rockets New Stories?
This shit is bananas.Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
