10) The Boys # 19, by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson. Published by Dynamite Entertainment.
The distance with which Time Warner & DC Comics treated
The Boys hadn't been enough, and even though the first issues of the series did little more than poke fun, the comic ended up in the hands of Dynamite Entertainment. It wasn't, really, until issue 19 that one could see why something like this was too intimidating for Wildstorm to make money off of—which, unlike everything that the Wildstorm imprint has done in the past few years, is exactly what
The Boys does. It sells, when everything else they put out doesn't.
It wasn't but seven years ago that DC & Marvel responded to 9/11 by putting out collections of comic book responses—some overly emotive, like Frank Miller's bludgeon towards religion and patriotism, some touching and funny, like Brian Azzarello's "don't root for the Yankees, no matter what", and some completely repellent (i.e. anything involving super-heroes crying.) Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's version came out this year, and not only was it the best—not a quibble or an argument, just statement of fact—piece of super-hero as storm and fire action comic, but it was also the final answer to one of the questions first posed back in Alan Moore's
Watchmen: this is what happens, this is what it looks like, when you want to make your super-hero comics "realistic."
This is what it looks like when you take regular people, dress them in spandex, give them fancy codenames, and throw them into the meat grinder of actual horror and tragedy. Neither poetic nor subtle, it's an ugly way to look at things—the Superman stand-in (going by the cynical, yet appropriate, name of "Homelander") doesn't know a thing about landing planes or stopping bad guys, the child who most believes in larger-than-life style heroics is the first to die—the 19th issue of
The Boys wasn't just the best of the series, it was pretty much a public service.
Using ground-level emotional realism for super-hero stories has worked well for specific stories and creator-based runs, but when it takes on the concepts of using these stories to go further, when it takes a product that only the most forgiving reader doesn't recognize as a future toy or television cartoon, and tries to put it into our world—the result is something garish, stupid and, ultimately, far more offensive than foul language.
As the story's narrator puts it at the close of the issue—which is far funnier than anybody could have imagined it being—"That's what you get when a bunch of f**** in tights trying save the godd*** day." The Boys may be ugly, and it might be blunt, but the idea that subtlety will get the point across is one that super-hero comics have long proved to be completely absurd.
Slam away, Mr. Ennis.
9) All Star Superman # 10, by Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely. Published by DC Comics.
Like something out of a dream, All Star Superman # 10 covered absolutely everything that the series had done before—a magical take on the character, a study of his omnipotence, a taste of what would be lost when the final two issues came and closed the door—and it did so in such a fashion that it stood head and shoulders above the super-hero comics it was surrounded by. The difference between this and something from the same genre—something like
Watchmen, something like
Dark Knight Returns—is that
All Star Superman didn't look around at the field it lived in and judge it from above, but existed alongside its peers, lifting the oft-criticized stories of men in tights to a level which many—myself included—didn't think they'd be capable of.
It was a super-hero comic that didn't just refuse to join its contemporaries, but one that welcomed all of them—especially the silly ones that DC seems to be embarrassed by—with open arms. The surprise with
All Star Superman was never whether it was going to be any good—Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely don't often fail when they work together—but that it was going to be something this pure, this playful, this much of an embrace. Thankfully, DC Comics agreed with the decision to end the series at twelve, thus maintaining the level of care for product quality that seems to escape them with the rest of their output. For now, hopefully forever,
All Star Superman stands finished. It will be missed.
8) Tales Designed To Thrizzle # 4, by Michael Kupperman. Published by Fantagraphics.
Why does comedy get ignored when it comes time to talk about great current comics? (Unless you're talking about webcomics.) Many of the best cartoonists, the legends and the heroes, made funny, funny stuff, and they became celebrities over it. Nowadays, the comic heroes seem to be—and this is a gross oversimplification dependent on stereotype—moody, cocky folk who write moody, cocky fare, or, if you just look at mainstream super-heroes, it's stunted children churning out hacky potboilers built around raw-dog violence.
Meanwhile, a guy like Kupperman shows up and either because his work is usually stuck in the "that's for snobs" category by showing up at Fantagraphics and the "Was it always this pretentious?"
Believer magazine or just because comics readers hate joy, nobody seems to care. Why? Even on the scale of 2008, where we had great humor comics and great humor reprints, nobody brought the funny the way Kupperman did, and unlike most of the humor stuff available on the web, nobody did it with this kind of artistic skill. Unless you require everything you read to be sad and angst-y, unless everything that makes its way home with you has to be as boundary-pushing as Finnish banjo music, missing out on the
Thrizzle—that's just plain stupid.
7) Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby, by Takashi Nemoto. Published by PictureBox.
There's no two ways about it—regardless of how much you love cartooning, comics, all that blah blah art stuff, you need to have a certain kind of stomach to get into Bureiko Lullaby. Besides things like rape, masturbation, murder, nudity, an infant sneaking in between his mother and father to take over the whole intercourse thing—you read that correctly—the most touching thing in here is the coming of the age of an oversized sentient sperm produced by a future serial rapist who was masturbating when exposed to an atomic blast.
This isn't subject matter for the faint of heart, the weak of stomach, the quick to offend. It's for people who can handle Haneke and
Salo, people who don't get upset by Johnny Ryan, and, yes, people who are looking into shock only to see if this is what puts them past the edge. (If you want to keep score, my personal ceiling for tolerance is set at the film
Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer and those
Lord of the Rings movies—
Bureiko failed to upset me as much of either of those things, so I'm pretty much okay with it.)
If you get past the subject matter, and you can just get into the comic, then you'll find something that was startlingly good. Most of the time, shocking stuff is just that—it's just shock, and that's it. You see a woman do something horrifying to her own body, you see a man have sex with a corpse, you see a steadi-cam torture flick shot in some horror make-up artist's basement, and you walk away feeling like all you've done is test your limits. You didn't throw up! You win a prize, a prize called "other people who did throw up now think you are weird and don't want to go camping with you." Some of what's in
Bureiko is like that—it fails to hit any mark beyond being pretty gross. It shows a guy who flips himself upside down, his penis becomes his face, he wanders around and gets a job. Santa drops a different kind of treasure onto the pillows of children, parents are upset. That's grade school stuff. Gross and silly.
But the closing story—the story of the sentient sperm, his struggles with his sexual identity, his place in the world, his tortured relationship with his horrible father—it's something else. Going so far past the realm of what's considered normative and acceptable, drawn in a fashion that Nemoto claims was "too polished" to appear as spontaneous as he wanted, it's a comic story unlike anything I've ever read—despite the fact that it is, at its most basic description, a coming-of-age story….which everybody has read, watched or heard far too many of already.
It works so effectively because Nemoto is (apparently, if his discussion of personal work method is to be believed) such a natural cartoonist. Portions of the collection have to split his page into columns, due to their original publication, yet they read with zero confusion. Characters are often depicted only with specific features—notably eyeballs—when necessary, and yet the ongoing absence of specificity never runs into the problems that lesser manga or Western comics artists do, with multiple characters only distinguishable by text or coloring. Nemoto's cartooning style—scratchy, graphic, and intense—imbues his characters with life.
And while this makes some of the more awful portions—like the multiple rape scenes—that much more unsettling, it's done in the service of the story. Whether or not the story needed to be told isn't a question that interests me, but what I found so worthwhile about
Monster Men was that it ended up being a story that, despite the graphic offense it contained, was funny, well constructed and completely and totally unique amongst the comics that were released this year. I can't imagine that PictureBox will find a huge amount of success with this type of material—but if success was the gauge used for this list, than I'd have to talk about
Secret Invasion.
I think I'd rather kill myself.
6) Criminal: A Wolf Among Wolves, by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips. Published by Icon/Marvel Comics.
It's tempting to separate the Ed Brubaker who writes
Criminal from the one who handles
Captain America &
Daredevil, or to gloss over Sean Phillips' participation in the
Marvel Zombies franchise. To slough those off as the mercenary work done for the sake of the art, the paycheck that allows the more "adult" work to have a home. It's tempting—I know I do it myself sometimes—to treat the work as if its "creator-owned" status somehow speaks to it automatically being in a higher class than something that's owned by a corporation with a history of treating its employees on a scale that usually tops out around "tolerable."
It's tempting…but it isn't really fair. While some writers have an obvious laziness to the work when it comes time to make the donuts on a Batman cross-over, neither Brubaker or Phillips have shown anything less than a commitment that says "If my name's going on it, I'm going to do my best." That's all well and good for the reader—
Captain America,
Daredevil, and anything Sean Phillips draws are pretty solid works, and they speak well for what a corporate comic can look and read like when it's done by professionals.
Still…even when the temptation is ignored, and
Criminal is cast against the work of both men's careers, it's difficult not to hold it in such high estimation. It took less than a year after the initial publication of the first issue of the series for it become the most emblematic work of both men's careers: a series that spoke to Brubaker's obsession with tightly structured narratives that operate as if chaos surrounds them at all times, with random violence and the vagaries of human weakness always threatening to destroy the plans of its very mortal characters, a series that gave Sean Phillips the opportunity to display a range of emotional-based storytelling that could fill in all the gaps that Brubaker allowed to leave open and untold.
Criminal, like all great art/writer team-ups, is a comic that could not work without both of these creators—it wouldn't just be un-workable, it would be unfathomable as to why one would try.
Wolf Among Wolves, the second chapter in a three-part story called
The Dead and the Dying, explores the world of a binge-drinking veteran, home to discover a new family he's too broken to relate with, a huge Macguffin of a debt he cannot pay, and a years-old conflict involving a woman that will use him as its bloody fulcrum. Tearing itself through nights of violence, drunkenness, shame, betrayal and murder, the story is one that speaks to the power of a single comic book—albeit one with a slightly higher page count—to create an entire alternate world, introduce the reader to its players and laws, and then take those constructions and shake it to the core.
While no issue of the series that came out in 2008 could be referred to as bad, it was this chapter that showed how far the series could go—more than just another well-done noir, it was a story that encapsulated everything about what it is for a man to bend his own concepts of what he will or will not do when he truly believes he has no other choice. It took characters that the reader cared about and showed how little that caring mattered to the stranger with a gun who just walked in the door. It took death, and it took hate, and it took fear, and it showed it at its most naked—and it did all that in a comic book. If you read too many of these things, it's easy to forget that's possible. Here's hoping that Brubaker and Phillips never stop reminding us that it can be.
5) Skyscrapers Of The Midwest, by Joshua Cotter. Published by Adhouse Books.
Originally serialized in 2007, this hardcover collection served as the best indication that the triumvirate of Top Shelf, Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly no longer have the corner on the comics market for non-super-hero talent. Fired off like a warning shot by Adhouse, alongside the excellent
Mesmo Delivery and the well-received
Superior Showcase comics,
Skyscrapers of the Midwest is one of those hardcover collections of an artist at his best.
Whether it's the hilarious collapse of advice column master/moonshine enthusiast "Skinny Kenny" or the adventures of Nova Stealth (dismissed by a mean kid as "some fag robot"), Joshua Cotter's short gag segue ways have more wit, charm and beauty than a six foot stack of 2008's alt-comics output, and those moments aren't even where all the pathos comes in. Like a Chris Ware character gone after-school-adorable, Cotter's primary story—about some young, anthropomorphized animal characters and their not-so-wonderful struggles with growing up—is one that toys with how serious it wants to be while at the same time engendering love for everyone contained within it. Neither tossed off nor amateurish, it's a comic that lives in the worlds between the perfectionist control of an
Acme Novelty Library, the whimsy and playfulness of a
Bone, and the tough-as-nails satirical riffing found in Johnny Ryan. Nobody did the tightrope act as well as Cotter this year, and even those that tried didn't make it this fun.
4) Acme Novelty Library #19, by Chris Ware. Published by…hey, published by Chris Ware.
Is there anything left to say about Chris Ware that hasn't been said at this point? He just might be the greatest working cartoonist of his generation, of this reader's—and even if that isn't something that can be proved aesthetically accurate, his work and craft certainly merits any respectable top ten countdown when it comes to "what comics you should be reading." Even those who aren't fans seem willing to acknowledge him as a singular talent.
The latest chapter in the ongoing Rusty Brown narrative,
Acme Novelty Library is split into two stories, both of which speak to each other in various metafictional ways—the sci-fi story of the first being written and read in the second, the marriage of a world through broken glasses with a view from a frozen space helmet, the tragedy of being a mistreated dog—but little of that is a surprise. Ware's work has always been something that, taken in serial or full cloth, is always guaranteed to have a resonantly well-planned structure. No, the only surprise here is that he can do this—this attractive, readable thing that doesn't rest on words, image or design—and speak in a fashion that demands that a comic be viewed as more than just a film-in-storyboard.
Work like this changes the way a reader sees comics, it forces a different experience, one that's unique—not to Ware—but to comics. It is work that only fits in one field, work that would look at the success of a Hollywood contract or a sideline book deal and would be unable to find worthwhile connection. The moments—and the book is full of them—where it all just screams "comics" are many. (The broken cry as a spaceman pets a dog, the dawning realization that betrayal is met, the sight of a man failing to grasp why his boss has walked out of a woman's house—those are only a few.) Sure, there's a fastidiousness to it, an undisguised worship at the altar of solipsistic perfectionism—it wouldn't be the best idea for all cartoonists to spend an entire year only producing one slim volume and have that be their annual output—but with Ware, it seems to be his best possible option.
The temptation in recent years has been to place Ware in an ivory tower, to look at him as if he's a fossilized piece of the arcana already—to speak about his work as if the impact of it has already been fully realized and seen.
Bullshit.
It'll be years—long ones, decades—before somebody, a critic, a cartoonist, a generation of readers who will make the great comics of the next century begins to unravel what it was that Chris Ware and the
Acme Novelty Library means and does to comics. All today's audience can offer right now is a home for these things—we'll all be long dead before their greatness can be fully measured.
3) Bottomless Belly Button, By Dash Shaw. Published by Fantagraphics.
Ah, here it is: the most intimidating of the comics, the 720-page story of a family reunion brought about by the announcement of divorce. If there was ever going to be a comic/graphic novel/cartoon collection/god comics have the worst terminology that stood in as a punching bag, it's this, right? Isn't this too long, isn't it too simple, isn't it…god forbid—cloying and sentimental?
No. Not at all. Neither attributable only to art or story, Shaw's
Bottomless Belly Button ended up being everything it had been rumored to be before it arrived—it's a comic that stands out by its weight and size, that stands out because of the brilliant, expressionistic faces of its characters, by Shaw's mastery for atmosphere and design, a comic that frankly, sweetly and admirably, wasn't embarrassed to bare itself completely and tell an astonishingly complex story about the unbreakable bonds of blood relation, a story that stands emblematically amongst so much of the work in the field without carrying the slightest bit of pretense. While
Bottomless Belly Button was—easily—one of the best comics of the year, it wasn't a comic that carried itself like one. Instead, it just arrived and offered itself for those who were interested. Those of us who were, ended up with an experience that promises to only grow better as the years drag on.
2) Good-Bye, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Published by Drawn & Quarterly.
Whereas the manga money seems to be firmly on the side of their shonen and shojo brothers, companies like Drawn & Quarterly and Vertical continue to seek out the classics, bringing them to American shores in attractively designed collections that ably fit their contents.
Good-Bye, the third Adrian Tomine-designed volume of Tatsumi stories is no less than what's come before—there's still plenty of stories here about unattractive-looking men going through sexual frustrations, none of which are in the least disappointing—but there are three that stand out.
"Hell", the story that opens the book, struggles to match the emotional component of what we determine an image to mean versus what type of horror brought it about, ably sidestepping the temptation to make it any more than a subtle reference to the atomic bomb it operates in the thrall of; "Sky Burial", the near-plotless glance at the life of a young man too far into the embrace of solitude to acknowledge how far he's left humanity behind; and the story the collection takes the title from, "Good-Bye"—which is a story too painful to summarize.
While
Good-Bye doesn't do anything to shake the stigma attached to a lot of 2008's best comics, that they are upsetting and sad works, it shouldn't have to. If comics are to be an art form, if they are to be treated and respected as one, than the time has to come where some of them—certainly not all—abandon the pretense that they should serve primarily as "entertainment." While
Good-Bye—and to some extent, everything that's been translated of Tatsumi's work so far—fails to achieve some sort of hyperbolic thrill in the way that a pop song (or pop comic) might, it's a book that came out of an author who had grown up in the shadow of a still-visible concept of mass death that almost none of its new American audience can possibly fathom. That it can translate these sorts of feelings—of the degradation of what it might have been to be an old Japanese soldier, a young man facing an uncertain future or an artist who had seen his rediscovered belief in hope and love completely annihilated—into an art that is both subtle and achingly beautiful to look at?
That's the exact sort of response that some art is supposed to inspire. It may hurt, and it may not necessarily be pleasant—but it's something that is so rare as to be far and above worthy of the best praise that can be managed.
1) Ganges # 2, by Kevin Huizenga. Published by Fantagraphics.
Back in March, when I first read this comic and felt the need to attempt reviewing it, this is what I had to say about it:
Opening with an imaginative portrayal of one of those Mortal Kombat style fighting games, this one populated by Huizenga's cartoon rendition of what looks like Larry Marder's Beanworld
characters combined with a pantheon of Hindu deities, Ganges
eventually settles into a pretty straight-ahead anecdotal story about main character Glenn's employment at a dot com start up in the late 90's, and the predilection of its employees for another video game, a first person shooter called Pulverize. You can pretty much rest assured that this is the sort of comic that will be mentioned as one of the best of the year next January, and it deserves the name--Huizenga, an artist who is more welcoming and easier to embrace than an Adrian Tomine or a Joe Matt, continues to be one of the most exciting voices in any description of what people call comics. Whether it's the touching moment of affection thrown out for a soon-to-be-fired employee, or the pointless dishonesty of the protagonist in his attempts to conceal his current addiction to late-night video game parties from his girlfriend, Huizenga is able to maturely detail something that's truthful, funny, and gorgeous to look at. Ganges # 2
: it's as good as you hoped it would be.
I've spent the last nine months expecting something to come along and knock this comic off my personal top spot. The only time it came close was in the month-long build up to when I started working on this list for comiXology. Having never made a "best of" list for comics before, I played it my own way, which was to sit back and re-read every single one of the comics that went up here, as well as the 30-odd others that didn't make it. The only time period when I thought "maybe it won't be
Ganges #2" was when I was re-reading
Good-Bye and
Acme Novelty Library #19. After going back to Huizenga again?
Not a chance. There was nothing that came out this year that brought about the same level of excitement for keeping up with comics the way
Ganges #2 did. While that's—obviously—not any sort of fact-based rationale for picking a comic, it's not one based in aesthetics or the culture of line study, while it isn't a reason for anyone to pick up the comic based off my recommendation, it's the truth. I read
Ganges #2, and I don't just think "Wow, Kevin Huizenga is a great cartoonist" or "Man,
Ganges #2 is better than Green Lantern".
I think about how wonderful it is that Fantagraphics puts out material in this sort of large-sized format, I think how awesome it is to have gotten a chance to read this when it first came out, I think how lucky the consumer is to have a chance at seeing something like this. It's funny, sure. It's serious or whatever, sure. But mostly—like every one of the comics in this top ten—it's something that only comics can do. It's something that doesn't steal dialog schtick and narrative reveals from film, it doesn't hijack its imagery from pulp covers, it's just—it's an otherworldly artistic experience that can only happen when a cartoonist comes along and seamlessly marries language and art.
Ganges #2 is the sort of thing that I'm looking forward to—not collecting—but reading and experiencing for the rest of however much time I have. While it's the sort of comic that yes, makes a whole lot of others look far worse, it's also one that makes the entire medium, and its practitioners, look exactly like they should: one of the greatest forms of art available.
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
