While you're here I will point you towards the
real best of 09 list. Sandy over at I Love Rob Liefeld has put together the always interesting
Meta-List for the best comics of the year. He's put an amazing amount of effort into it so go have a look. It's scientific! At the bottom there's also a huge list of other best of 09 lists from loads of comics internet people and that should make for good reading if you like best of the year lists as much as I do. And if you didn't catch it first time, last week I posted my list of the
Best Superhero Comics of 2009.
Meanwhile! My list! The Best of the Year!
10) The Squirrel Machine (Hans Rickheit)Hans Rickheit's story about the inventors and brothers Torpor is packed with the kind of haunting, disturbing imagery that stays with you for ages. It's all in the details, you see. The Squirrel Machine is meticulously rendered. The designs, like those of the complex musical instruments built around animal carcasses, are outlandish enough to be fascinatingly evocative, yet still functional-looking enough to have one foot firmly in the realms of plausibility, of what-ifs, to feel real enough to be horrifying. The mindboggling attention to detail doesn't establish an emotional tether between the work and the reader so much as serve as an invitation for exploration, because that's what the Squirrel Machine is about. The young brothers have permanent expressions of curiosity on their faces; their pursuit of art is really for the sake of pursuit itself. The art, meanwhile, brings no comfort, or perhaps the brothers simply don't let it. There's just exploration, often terrifying and so, so weird, of wherever Edmund finds himself waking, of the secret rooms within the house and the wild mess of stuff therein, of sex, of human relationships in general. Is that it? Does it even matter? The Squirrel Machine is a book that forces you to face it rather than passively observe, so that you can find out for yourself.
9) Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye (Grant Morrison, Cameron Stewart, Dave Stewart, Todd Klein)Them haters'll tell you otherwise, but
this was the best Morrison comic of the year. Nothing else had his authorial voice shine through as strongly; his rush of ideas spewing off the page, his deft characterisation, and his uncanny way of wrapping up a narrative, of convincing you, no matter how many hundreds of things are going on, that it all matters. Perfectly balanced, too: the cynicism about the futility of changing the system hits you just as hard as the careless optimism. There are the arguments for Final Crisis and the lovely first three issues of BatRob, of course, but those things all be damned: Seaguy had Cameron Stewart and with this miniseries he's proved that he can stand right next to Frank Quitely as the best thing to happen to Grant Morrison comics. His style is clear, very appealing, carefully detailed, and it makes Seaguy so
easy - to understand, to love, to laugh at, to be quietly afraid of. Seaguy has got weird stuff in it, sure, but it's not just "weird". That word is dismissive and chucked around with annoying regularity as an excuse for not having an opinion. But fuck it - it's their loss. This is a fantastic comic.
8) Ōoku: The Inner Chambers (Fumi Yoshinaga)In this comic, seventy-five percent of the male population are killed off within eighty years by an incurable disease and the gender roles have more or less been reversed, with women taking on traditionally masculine roles like farming, and men becoming a valued resource in the babymaking department. But that's not really what the comic's
about. It's a behind-the-silk-curtain story of the politics of Edo Palace, an 18th Century Japan costume drama about history, romance, and gender roles. It deals with the gender roles very subtly, weaving its commentary in and out of another plotline. And as you read further you slowly get the sense that despite sweeping changes that appear to have turned everything on its head, gender expectations haven't changed all that much. Yoshinaga's cartooning doesn't draw attention to itself; it's formally not very inventive, but there's a palpable attention to detail, and pacing that's tight enough to get the sometimes exposition-heavy plot across as effectively and unintrusively as possible. And, hey, I quite enjoyed the faux-medieval speech patterns, actually. I found they flowed very nicely and continually functioned as a reminder that the characters were using formal language as part of their upper class upbringing. It's great once you get used to it and there's plenty of room for wit and sharp back-and-forths. And, no, there really isn't any manporn in here.
7) Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter (Darwyn Cooke, assisted slightly by Donald Westlake)And here we have the baddest, hardest book of the year. Darwyn Cooke's take on the classic crime character is as cold and spartan as the prose that inspired it, his skill with clear, precise storytelling gelling nicely with Richard Stark's succinct style. The book is awash with Cooke's expressive brush strokes, but they're in a sterile, dated, steely blue, and it's through these tinted lenses that we see Parker flicker between being a man and a machine. It's subtle, though - maybe the harsh, metallic streets of Cooke's 60s New York City really
is obscuring our vision. When he walks down the bridge and through the city he's a force of nature, an undeniable, mechanical figure fueled by anger and nothing else. Then he looks in the mirror - at you! at me! - and we can see that it's a
human anger. And after that it becomes backwards. Now he's got a human goal - revenge - but he himself cleans up and goes about it like an efficient, polished machine. And he sets about severing his emotional connections one by one until his objective becomes something as cold as the manner in which he goes about it. He becomes the objective. No more face in the mirror, just the hands driving the car into the distance. And they know exactly where they're going.
6) The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror #15 (Jeffrey Brown, C.F., Jordan Crane, Sammy Harkham, Tim Hensley, Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones, John Kerschbaum, Ted May, Will Sweeney, Matt Thurber, Jon Vermilyea, Dan Zettwoch, possibly Matt Groening also)This. It astounds me how this works. And yet it's so simple! You've got a gaggle of dangerously skilled cartoonists doing work-for-hire for a successful commercial property and they're all forced to draw their comics in a generally similar style. In terms of aesthetic design you'll never mistake the flowers in this anthology for anything other than the Simpsons. And despite this restriction (or maybe
because of it?) the cartoonists bounce wildly around in the boxes they're given to produce Simpsons stories that are also unmistakeably theirs. It's worth noting that this is helped by the creators here all seeming exceedingly comfortable with the Simpsons not just in aesthetics but also in what we've come to expect from different members of the cast and from the tone of the series in general. But what am I going on about? It's simple, too - this is the real deal, and it's fucking funny.
5) Ball Peen Hammer (Adam Rapp, George O'Connor)
Sharp, brutal, subversive, there was not a look at a post-apocalyptic future this year quite as harsh as this. Post-apocalyptic, now there's a blanket term. This story has got a more specific timeframe. I'd describe it as after the apocalyptic event, long enough that people are used to what's happening, and just before things start to get better. What would that be? Slightly-pre-post-post-apocalyptic? Whatever. It's a very depressing thing to read, mostly because of an almost claustrophobic scale. Most of the book takes place in either of two small rooms, with four characters with interconnected stories, and hints dropped here and there about the world outside through the very smooth dialogue, and we wind up knowing not very much, but enough to be able to fill in the blanks ourselves, enough that we think we do. And these people, they're all there is. They've got no control over the shitstorm outside. They've just got each other, and their art, and they watch their art evolve and harden like it's got a survival instinct of its own and take them to places they would never go, because the post-apocalypticism isn't giving them a choice. That crippling sense of insignificance, that hopeless inevitability, it's slopped generously throughout the whole book, and it builds up. The silent scream gets louder. And the ending is that much more of a crushing blow for it.
4) Phonogram: The Singles Club (Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson)
It took till the start of the second series for Phonogram to coalesce, for Gillen to focus his story, for McKelvie's art to look not just superbly competent but effortlessly pretty. And such! Focus! A single night in a club, and seven more or less related people. And it's
the people that drive the comic, more so than the music or the magic, and it works because we
know these people. The Gillen McKelvie unit tread on a carefully drawn line. The people we're introduced to come across as familiar; not stereotypical but alive - in their tastes in music, speech patterns, body language, fashion senses, decisions, dancing ability, everything. It resonates and engages and reminds us the things music can do to lift us up and fuck with our shit, in ways that make it timeless and dated at the same time. Let it dance with you. It'll be alright.
3) Asterios Polyp (David Mazzuccheli)
Read this any way you like. Mazzuccheli has created an entirely new graphic language in this single work and he's letting everyone in on it. It's extremely accessible. This is a comic that is going to be studied in classrooms and shit for its formal boundary-pushing. The choice of colour, the individual character designs right down to the fonts in their speech bubbles, the cartooning tricks that Mazzuccheli creates and begins to use as a visual shorthand within the covers of the book - it's all amazing. If "tour de force" means what I think it means, then Asterios Polyp qualifies. Probably nothing else this year has been so readable yet so endlessly fascinating, so
rereadable, and examination of the art and the formal techniques end up being about how it works, how it appeals on such a broad level. Themes! Visual symbolism! If you want to read this sucker real close it's extremely rewarding, and as I said, you can do it however you wish. Me, I associate Asterios with Asterius, the mythical Greek minotaur, which makes sense since the book is structured similarly to a Greek tragedy. He's stuck in a dark labyrinth, you see, totally blind while pretending to be its master, with nothing to navigate with but the two horns - his ideas about strict universal duality. Of course, it's only by discovering the use of his third horn that he can truly be free. And that, my friends, is what Asterios Polyp is all about.
2) Pluto: Urasawa X Tezuka (Naoki Urasawa, with a bit of help from Osamu Tezuka)
This thing is many things. It's a balls-of-steel attempt to reimagine the most popular and beloved creation of manga's most revered creator. It's a science fiction story with touches of horror dancing about the edges, a suspenseful detective mystery with a political subplot about the Iraq War running deep through it. It's social commentary that, not wholly originally, uses robots as a tool, with the old "what it means to be human" thing popping up here and there. It's all of these things and none of them. It's Atom crying in a diner. It's the killer robot playing his song as he explodes in the sky. Urasawa demonstrates why he's a master of suspenseful page-turners, while making use of every tool he can in his not inconsiderable visual vocabulary to make you
feel, and all this without feeling like he's simply unloading his arsenal or crossing off cartooning tricks off a checklist. From moving sequences of robots hanging on to a semblance of the idea of family, to the chilling image of a teddy behind the president's shoulder, to the ferociously rendered jagged lines of the villain-without-a-face in the form of a surrealist tornado, nothing else this year hit me in the face this much and in these many ways.
1) Prison Pit Book One (Johnny Ryan)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland filtered through Johnny Ryan's electric brain and turned into a over-the-top drugtripping jizzpunching skullcracking brainmunching cocklicking bloodfest. In the third act our nameless hero utters the magic words, "I'm through fucking around", in the same way that other inhabitants of Wonderland did in the earlier chapters, and he becomes one of them. So did I. Prison Pit sucks you in but it never ever spits you back out. When I'm old and shitty and I look back at my teenage years, I'll be looking at Prison Pit and it'll be looking right back at me because it's gonna live forever.
