Putting the graphic back in graphic novels.

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.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November.

Here's what I like to do in November.

1. Listen to Sufjan Stevens. I am pulling the hipster, I Liked Him Before He Was Really Big And Am Not Too Keen On His New Album card on this one and wholeheartedly recommend you go all the way back to Michigan, my personal favourite soundtrack for mooning around the house because it's too cold to go outside.



Fun fact 1a: This song was on the episode of the OC where Johnny, the surfer from the wrong side of the tracks, fell off a really high rock and died. Fun fact 1b: I was really into the OC. "COHEN!"

2. Read Jeffrey Brown. A fan of all things autobiographical and graphical, I discovered Clumsy, possibly my favourite comic memoir, on the shelf of the first library I worked at in Ottawa. Clumsy tells the story of Jeffrey Brown's long-distance romance with a girl from Florida named Theresa. His drawing style reminds me of the tiny, scribbly, incredibly detailed doodles that this gifted guy in my elementary school class used to draw in the margins of his notebooks--stick figures doing intense things. Every page is comprised of six panels of heartbreak. It is a really beautiful book.

Fun Fact 2a: The library just bought his newest book, a collection called Undeleted Scenes which includes some of his best strips and also some random new stories. I am very sad to report that he has written a story about his wife and baby, which I guess means I need to cross him off the Secret Husband list.

3. Watch Brideshead Revisited. The cold gloomy weather at this time of year gets me jonesing for England, and there's no better way to indulge this feeling than to unplug the telephone (just kidding! I don't even answer it when it's plugged in!), turn on the television (ie. laptop) and cozy up for ten solid hours of the decline and fall of the archetypal upper class on the other side of the pond. Like most Brit Lit-loving nerds who went to Gothic Revival style university colleges, I have held Brideshead close to my heart for a very long time. It represents a very particular, dysfunctional dream of academia and intellectualism and the good life that I always thought I might enjoy but never really believed in, the kind of life where you wear tuxes to dinner and a divorce in the family could ruin everything. It is a tragicomedy of manners in which I would like to be a fly on the cocktail tray. It has a very evocative soundtrack which always makes me cry a little.

Fun fact 3a: I've also been watching the Up! Series, which I cannot recommend highly enough, and which I will write more about later, and one of the men profiled blames the failure of his life on putting too much stock in books like Brideshead Revisited. I think I know exactly what he is talking about.

Let's take it out on a little more gentle folk rock. Sufjan covering Dylan? I think my heart just stopped.

All this town needs is a ten-minute nail place.

Because brevity truly is the soul of wit, and because I wasted most of my lunch hour walking around looking for a place to get an express pedicure (seriously Kingston, what the hell?), a brief and undoubtedly witty list.

Favourite items my new library has that my old library didn't.

My New York Diary by Julie Doucet. Something about the way she draws can make a roach-infested Harlem squat look cozy and appealing. And her slightly-off quebecois english diction is adorable.

A scrapbook of uncollected sketches and stories by Adrian Tomine, my favourite comic artist to read when you kind of feel like you might kill yourself and need someone to push you off the ledge, or at least feel pretty miserable about the state of humanity. I love comics, partly because there's something inherently lonely about the artists I read. I don't know what it is about the medium that's so navel-gazey and personally nostalgic for the writers, but I love it. If you haven't read anything by Tomine, start with Summer Blonde.

Veronica Mars. Okay, in truth I borrowed this from a fellow librarian, but we have it at the library too! This! Show! Is! Amazing! It has elements of so many things I love, from My So-Called Life to Nancy Drew to noir-ish detective fiction. And cute boys. SWOON.

Dawson's Creek on DVD. Secret shame alert. I have not borrowed this yet but when I saw it on the shelf I had a flash in my head of a weekend in February when I will unplug the phone, plug in the DVD player, and not leave my house for days.

I cannot put enough emphasis on how exciting it is to have a whole new library collection to explore. It is Nerd Christmas, friends.

Vacation, all I ever wanted. Vacation, had to get away.

So I'm about to embark on a week's vacation because I need to use up my time off before the Man rips it out from under me when I give Ottawa the keys to the street later this month. I am pretty stoked, because ever since I made all those big life decisions a little while ago, I've been in an annoying state of cat-like readiness that has compounded my usual insomniac tendencies to the point where I laid awake last night until 4 AM listening to the wind whip around my windows and worrying that it was going to knock down a hanging basket on my fire escape which would then fall and hit my car. I also had a brief fear that there was a vampire in my storage closet because my cat was acting sort of funny. This is how I roll, people. I need some sleep, the kind of sleep I only get on the foldout couch in my parents' basement. There's something soporific about their house. Maybe it's the cable TV.

Anyway, when I finally gave up on actually trying to sleep, I started reading All The Wrong People Have Self-Esteem by Laurie Rosenwald, an incredible, delightfully neurotic collection of advice-ridden collages for teenage girls. I'd never heard of Laurie Rosenwald until a friend recommended this book to me, but she is fantastic. She combines old photos and magazine clippings and wicked typeface to rail against women's magazines, worry about her lack of activism, and generally obsess about the details of her daily life. I could not sympathize more. I love books that are stuck in the heads of their creators, particularly those that delve into girlhood and the awkwardness of the transformation from girl to woman. Rosenwald's book belongs alongside Lynda Barry's One! Hundred! Demons! and Lauren R. Weinstein's Girl Stories, graphic books that are funny, heartbreaking, and endlessly self-reflexive. Books that make me wish I could draw, or do better collages than the ones I ripped apart my Sassy back issues to create back in 1996. Books that make neuroses-fuelled insomnia feel pretty okay.

Speaking of comic books, tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day. Call your local comic store or library to find out more. Or just listen to Wolverine.