Here is a list of the best comics I read this year. They didn't all come out this year, but I am okay with that. I hope you are too.
1. Sword of my mouth by Jim Munroe and Shannon Gerard. It's a freaky, post-rapture, pro-urban agriculture fable, and the illustrations are so gorgeous and detailed and vaguely 1970s. It also features a mutant baby!
2. Moving Pictures by Kathryn and Stuart Immonen. This one has the feel of a film noir masterpiece and is about the Nazis trying to steal paintings, and the plucky museum staff who try to stop them. An angel dropped it into my lap one very long day and it kept me busy sitting in the emergency room.
3. Undeleted Scenes by Jeffrey Brown. I just love him. He captures the mundane details of his own life in this sweet cartoony way. He draws like a very mature ten year old. And kitties feature prominently in many of his comics. Look! Christmas Kitties!
4. Mercury by Hope Larson. This one jumps back and forth between the present, where a teenage girl is struggling to live her life while her mother is far away, and the past, where one of her ancestors is visited by a mysterious stranger during the Gold Rush. The two stories eventually intersect and the results are strange and unexpected and creepy and lovely.
5. Wilson by Daniel Clowes. It's about a real asshole, basically. Clowes' greatest gift is, in my opinion, his ability to create these truly horrible people and then inhabit them so completely that your sympathy for them runs parallel to your disgust. And his drawings are just so perfect--the different versions of Wilson from chapter to chapter, the silent pages, the pauses between words. It's gorgeous.
Now tell me yours.
Blacksad! BlacksadBlacksadBlacksadBlacksadBlacksad!
ReplyDeleteI loved Blacksad. Very noir. Great drawing. Really compelling stories. So good.
http://www.darkhorse.com/Books/16-361/Blacksad-HC - conveniently it is currently available at your local library.
Also loved Moving Pictures.
I really liked Mercury - have you read Larson's "Chiggers"? You probably would dig it.
Others:
Artichoke tales by Megan Kelso has great style
Iron West by Doug TenNapel was neat.
The Fables books are good. (The 1st is better than the Second.)
Unwritten (Tommy Taylor) was interesting.
You have killed me - another noir one.
Richard Stark's Parker, The Hunter - ditto
Luna Park was cool. So was Jeff Lemire's The Nobody - I am reading the first book in his Essex County series now & it is really good.
Wow. I, too, read a lot of comics this year (that is only a partial list - there was a fair amount of batman going on). Thx for the Jeffrey Brown rec - I have been meaning to read that for a while. Also Sword of my Mouth - I hadn't heard about it before.
dude you'll really like sword of my mouth. it's the second in a quasi-series, too, and i just put in an order for numero uno.
ReplyDeletei love megan kelso (squirrel mother--so good) but haven't read artichoke tales yet!