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THE BEST COMICS OF 2009*,**
*If you're going to make a list, lay it on the table: yes, you think these comics are better than everything else.
**And you should make up your own rules but not explain them.
25. Detective Comics, DC
Art by JH Williams III, Written by Greg Rucka
Greg Rucka's script for
Detective Comics doesn't make for the sort of experience that demands the building of churches--a super-hero meets her arch enemy, the reader learns the hero's origin--but that's actually a credit in his favor. Text, words, plot--these things were necessary, but the smartest thing Rucka did in 2009 was to get out of the way, to provide the framework that could let JH Williams III explore the oldest story these comics tell. Using a revolving cabinet of style, paying homage to high water mark hero comics, JH Williams III took a standard opportunity and turned it into something more--refinement & innovation, working in tandem. There's no issue so far that left one wondering where the reader was going to end up. But there hasn't been a moment when we were sure how we'd get there.
24. 100 Bullets # 100, Vertigo
Art by Eduardo Risso, Written by Brian Azzarello
Confident, sarcastic, and brutal. Azzarello & Risso spent the majority of the final
100 Bullets arc killing off lots of major characters, but there were still plenty of them to pound into the sand in the final issue. But between those moments of finality, amidst those fights, gunshots and explosions, every major theme of the series could be found. The arrogance of the master plan, life's brutal answer to black/white logic, the inexhaustible nihilism of revenge, the lust for power, the desire to be clean and free again--100 Bullets wasn't ever going to close up shop without a lot of carnage. But look at Loop, giving up on his father's legacy, look at him running away. That's the kicker, the thing that Cole, Graves and Lono never understood. You can always walk away from this. It's always been up to you.
23. Grotesque # 3, Fantagraphics
By Sergio Ponchione
Grotesque is an Italian comic, which automatically makes me a jerk for liking it as much as I do. It has a bunch of characters that look like they should be in
Dick Tracy, except Dick Tracy would wet his yellow pants and cry like The Notebook if he ran into them. They live in a weird city, they curse, and one of them gets in a fight with a living headstone. The art looks like the offspring of Seth and Jim Woodring, but considering its country of origin, it's probably wrapped up in a legacy only the bilingual could explain. It doesn't happen every week, it's not even on a monthly schedule, but every once in a while, I get a reminder how vast the world of comics really is.
Grotesque--European, unusual, brilliant--was one of those, an experimental passport to another universe.
21/22. Night Business # 2 & Gangsta Rap Posse, Traditional
By Benjamin Marra
There's always a couple of comics that bubble up out of nowhere, comics that come bearing descriptions they seem incapable of living up to.
Night Business &
Gangsta Rap Posse--both the product of Benjamin Marra and his Traditional Comics publishing house--were those two. Could a Skinemax movie delivered in pure Paul Gulacy style really be that good? Did the comics landscape really need to see what would happen inside the wet dreams of an N.W.A. fan? That's what I was asking myself before I read them. Afterwards, all I wanted to know was why the hell these comics weren't being published on the sides of an army of blimps, all of which were hovering over every wi-fi capable coffeehouse in the country. This is how all contemporary fiction should read.
20. Boy's Club # 3, Buenaventura
By Matt Furie
In 2008, Johnny Ryan delivered a wall-to-wall narrative, a comic book that had a beginning, middle, and oh-so-glorious end. This year, it was Matt Furie who made the move--after successfully bringing the funny with his anthology of fratboy anecdotes, he turned the latest issue of
Boy's Club into one long shaggy dog story, all about the time that a bro tried to smoke the biggest joint of all, only to find out that the joint was actually a yule log. Now, part of growing up means you stop having dealbreaker arguments--no more drunken monologues about how "you'll only date girls who like,
lurrrve DJ Shadow"--but let's be honest: you've got a heart of stone if you don't smirk a bit when you see a couple of stoned Muppets fall in love with the world's biggest Number Two.
19. Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye, Vertigo
Art by Cameron Stewart, Written by Grant Morrison
The economies of scale and the requirements of contract may force Grant Morrison to serve up so many pies before their time, but Seaguy 2 didn't have such problems. At times bitter, at times funny, the mini-series may have necessitated a bit of research to comprehend, but it only asked for attention to excite. A fully realized story, as purely super-hero as one could ask for,
Seaguy was more old school than its reputation implies--like
All Star Superman, this was a slapdang comic worth returning to. God bless you, Bearded Lady.
18. 20th Century Boys #1-6, Viz
By Naoki Urasawa
An old detective, murdered. A swarm of cult members in a tiny convenience store. A manga artist and a badass plotting their prison escape.
Pluto may have been my favorite Urasawa entry of the year, but that doesn't detract from how good
20th Century Boys was, and how much better it's getting.
17. Hellboy: The Wild Hunt, Dark Horse
Art by Duncan Fegredo, Written by Mike Mignola
This one surprised me--up until 2009, I've preferred the
B.P.R.D. series over
Hellboy proper on a consistent basis. And while this past year saw both
Black Goddess and
1947 bring the visuals, it was the bitter, delayed conclusion of
The Wild Hunt that most resonated with me. Putting a nail into the one thing that the character loves--violence--
The Wild Hunt had more character development in those two pages of realization than most serial fiction can manage in an entire year.
16. Special Forces, Image
By Kyle Baker
2008 might have seen the first three issues of
Special Forces, but 2009 brought out the fourth, and with it, a digest-sized collection of Kyle Baker's trenchant take on America's contemporary wars. The last page: "This book is solemnly dedicated to the memories of the countless, nameless, unspeakably brave mentally handicapped and/or felons who have given their lives in service of Freedom. We hope someday to be worthy of your sacrifice."
Political content, satire, et all: if you can't draw, you're better off writing a blog post.
Dude, Kyle Baker can draw like
hell.
15. Scott Pilgrim # 5, Oni
By Brian Lee O'Malley
I've read two volumes of this series, this one and the first. Can I still have it on my list? I really liked it. Hell, I liked it more than other comics. See? I put it in the middle.
14. Cold Heat, Picturebox
Art by Frank Santoro, Written by Ben Jones
Returning to the scene after what some had assumed was a technical knockout, Jones & Santoro spent 2009 releasing more
Cold Heat action than they did when the series started. And while that brings the eventual conclusion of the limited series ever closer, this wasn't the year where anybody started taking down the set. Sarcastic music critics thrown into space jail, evil corporate monsters wearing gogo hooker boots, fights, complete with katana swords--
Cold Heat might still be one of those comics that seems preternaturally difficult to track down, but it's rewarding nonetheless.
13. Grandville, Dark Horse
By Brian Talbot
Thankfully arriving before Guy Ritchie's big budget Sherlock Holmes turned the Watson/deerstalker combo into a two hour joke about bromances, Talbot's ridiculous and ridiculously violent take on funny animals gave the classic duo their just rewards: this, right here, is what you want to see. A roguish badger detective, gun in each hand, tearing his way through the prigs of Europe, all for revenge. And while part of it is due to the violent death of the random flapper he picked up on the way, any honest reader can see the primary fuel in the bloodsoaked inferno he leaves behind--nobody, but nobody, messes with his best friend Ratsi.
Damn it, that's a bromance too.
12. Drifting Life, Drawn & Quarterly
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi
If you're looking for a complaint about 2009's non-fiction comics, the most obvious one would have been the failure of their two constituent parts--art and words--to merge. Whether it was
The Photographer or
Logicomix, content came to town, and the art failed to deliver in a fashion that made their existence as comics seem necessary. But in the case of Tatsumi's
Drifting Life--a massive chunk of manga that delivered one man's experience of the entire industry--the problem was skirted entirely. While the exciting moments were few and far between, with the edgiest being an argument between two brothers, Tatsumi's wide-eyed take on his wide-eyed boyhood served as Gekiga 101 without ever feeling like the entry level history course that it really was. Wry, optimistic, and surprisingly prudish, Drifting Life may not have been the textbook anybody carried around on their person, but it was one of the few that deserved a home nonetheless.
11. Gogo Monster, Viz
By Taiymo Matsumoto
Unavailable in English--legally, that is--until this year,
Gogo Monster arrived in '09, ready to tell the story of a trio of Japanese schoolkids: one who wanted to help, one who wanted to escape, and one who wore a cardboard box over his head. As the story plugged forward, with the random-cruelties-of-children aspect muted far more than that setting usually allows, the world collapsed in on itself, taken over by Matsumoto's kaleidoscopic focus on the corners of youthful imagination. What
Gogo Monster leaves behind isn't an exact plot recall, but a collection of moments, a wire shopping cart full of liquid memory. You're watching kids start to grow up, and you're being forced to forget the facts while they happen. And while it's nice to read a manga series and know that there aren't another forty volumes still to come, it's hard to say goodbye. Better to imagine another floor, another box, another confused hallucination.
10. "3 Jacks", Daredevil # 500, Marvel
Art by David Aja, Written by Ann Nocenti
Out of all of Marvel's super-hero titles,
Daredevil is one of the most consistently surprising. Frank Miller, David Mazzuchelli, Brian Michael Bendis, David Aja, Ann Nocenti, Alex Maleev, Michael Lark, John Romita Jr., hell, even Scott McDaniel--it's been the home of some of the best work of people's careers. And yet--Daredevil? It's not the character, god knows that Matt Murdock has gone to the well of dead girlfriends and crying on gargoyles way too many times for him to carry that much reverence. Whatever it is, there's something about the simplicity of ninjas, noir, Catholicism and sexy blind guys that brings out the best. When taken alongside Aja and Brubaker's Kingpin: Still Angry story, "Three Jacks" continued to make the case that a long-running serial--one that doesn't really do anything new, that can be consistently predictable and repetitious for years at a time--will still produce comics that surprise, entertain, and ultimately make the case for their hoary old history of waste. You just have to hire the right people. (And wait. You have to wait for a long time.)
9. Parker: The Hunter, IDW
By Darwyn Cooke
Few of my feelings about
The Hunter have changed since the initial review
here, but my admiration for Darwyn Cooke has increased since then due to the publication of
Jonah Hex 50. While the story doesn't punch in the same weight class as Donald Westlake, Cooke's use of a thin, consistent line throughout the adventures of the Cowboys: SVU story is an impressive experiment, and one that makes the challenge he gave himself with Parker that much more ambitious. See, he drew this comic with a brush. That's hard to do!
8. The Winter Men, Wildstorm
Art by John Paul Leon, Written by Brett Lewis
Planetary wasn't the only Wildstorm comic to find delayed closure in 2009, it was just the one that got the most attention. But buried back in January, after delays that stretched back to an incomprehensible level of scheduling and publishing decisions, there it was,
The Winter Men Special. Forced to embrace a hurry-up, pack-it-in page limitation, Brett Lewis and John Paul Leon's end result could've been yet another candle for the failings of corporate-mandate comics--but it was something else entirely. The limits of scale encroaching, the two creators packed every conceivable emotional and physical beat they could into panels, with relationships and wars delivered in such density that the story bled right off the page. Like some kind of censored government document, the script demanded the reader decipher the margins, and when the last page arrived, the simplest of acts--the removal of a hat--revealed what we had only seen a glance at before. They knew we were there all along. They just had more important things to do.
7. Ganges # 3, Fantagraphics
By Kevin Huizenga
Starting in a bedroom, ending with a policeman recommending masturbation as sleeping aid,
Ganges # 3 turned an already introspective story even further inside, with its protagonist literally diving into his own mind. It wasn't to find out the secret to love, it wasn't to defuse a nuclear weapon, it wasn't because zombies were coming--and yet it resonated with excitement all the same. Some of that exhilaration came from the opportunity to keep up with Kevin Huizenga's experiments with page layout and some of it was born merely because we were worried that Glenn's wife would wake up and tell him to turn the music down. But mostly, it was because
Ganges captured the thing that all of us spend a lifetime doing--thinking--and turned it into something deserving of examination.
6. Pluto, Viz
By Naoki Urasawa (after Osama Tezuka)
Pluto isn't finished yet--there are still two volumes to come--and if form follows function, it'll have some level of a happy ending. (It is an Astro-Boy story, after all.) But even if the final chapters turn into a trip through a Japanese Candyland, complete with hugs and greeting cards, it won't detract from the emotional highs and lows that
Pluto--2009's best science fiction adventure genre mainstream robots-fight-robots thing--delivered. Whether it was a greasy creep telling a father that his son had a few minutes left to live, whether it was the explosion that tore through the flesh and skin of the erstwhile replicant lead, or whether it was just Atom, who had the best comic book hair of the decade, Pluto was one of those serials that managed to navigate an ever-increasing level of tension, a story that consistently delivered the predictable beats in an unpredictable fashion, and it did it all without ever betraying the heart on its shoulder: creation, born out of one artist's love and reverence for Osama Tezuka, the man who made Naoki Urasawa want to try drawing for himself.
5. "Cockbone", Sleazy Slice # 3
By Josh Simmons
It starts off obscene, it starts off funny, it gets more obscene, and then that last page shows up, and that last page has those last two panels, and you're covered in blood--your mother's and your own--and you're hiding underneath the stairs in a brightly lit room and that's not a hiding place at all. There's scary, and then there's horrifying. After reading
Cockbone, I'm starting to wonder if there's a third thing that's even worse.
4. Driven By Lemons, Adhouse
By Josh Cotter
If Pixar ever wanted to make a film about exorcising one's personal demons, Josh Cotter could sue the hell out of them for theft. Not because
Driven By Lemons is like a Pixar movie, but because Pixar movies use the same technique: everything looks pristine, pleasant, wonderful--and then you get hit with a hammer, and you're crying on the floor. The funny thing about Lemons is how difficult it looks in snapshot, how the initial pages looked like the high school notebook of a bored genius, with sketches and colors filling up the boxes and pages, crowded walls of text that wouldn't have looked out of place when Somerset & Mills found John Doe's diaries in
Se7en. And while
Driven by Lemons doesn't lend itself to an easy plot-recap, the finished work
is a story. Forcibly ripping out one's own insides, the depressing recovery of a public hospital stay, the sight of industry, falling--the ugly temptation was to turn it around on the artist, to use the work to make a statement about Cotter's own mental processes. Don't make that mistake, it's the easy way out. Instead, dive in alongside, follow the rabbit, see where he takes you. It's worth a shot.
3. The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror #15, Bongo
Tim Hensley, Matthew Thurber, Kevin Huizenga, Jordan Crane, Ted May, Sammy Harkham, Will Sweeney, Jon Vermilyea, Ben Jones, John Kerschbaum, Jeffrey Brown & C.F.
You know how there's a general rule that comedy doesn't get enough respect, how it automatically gets labeled as being inherently weaker and lesser than things that are serious or political? Here's an idea: that's a general rule because being funny is a whole lot harder than being serious, and since the majority of people's opinions are what ends up constituting general rules, the majority of people are going to come up with a general rule that allows them to dismiss something that they can't do very well.
Shorter version: most people would fail to come up with something as funny as Ben Jones' "Boo-tleg" story, and they aren't going to come up with Ted May's line "If I wanted to hear a drunk singing Prince songs, I'd buy a Tom Waits CD".
2. Asterios Polyp, Pantheon
By David Mazzuchelli
I'll be the first to admit being a bit thrown by what I read in
Asterios Polyp versus what I'd heard about
Asterios Polyp. I didn't much like it, at first. The same dire snob-goes-all-native that's been better served by Updike--who isn't really somebody I aspire to read more of anyway--tacked on to page after page of formal experiments with cartooning. But the book stuck with me, and while I'll gladly admit to reading
Prison Pit more frequently, I read
Asterios Polyp more deeply. I craved this book, I wanted to know what anybody thought of it, especially those who didn't like it, and I found myself turning to it with a growing affection, again and again. By the time my copy started to fall apart--a tendency that the unsealed binding and blank cardboard cover seemed to demand--I had to admit it: this is a great, great comic. Chalk a stroke against me: I'm a little bitch at heart.
1. Prison Pit, Fantagraphics
By Johnny Ryan
Aggro, obscene, hilarious, compulsive:
Prison Pit. It wasn't just the greatest comic of the year, it was one of those comics that operated like the end result of a math equation, a definitive answer to the question of what comics are, and what they should be: not because of the content, although it wouldn't be a disappointment to see a million Slorge imitations flood the market.
Prison Pit read like a nightmare, it read like a fast drive through the desert--but it didn't ever read like a book, and it didn't ever feel like a song. It's a comic, pure, one of the few that was able to conceal a strong authorial hand underneath a heaping mass of gore and obscenity. Although there wasn't a single thing--not one!--wrong with the comics that Ryan has released over the last few years,
Prison Pit was the first time that the evidence was made inarguably clear: this guy. He's kind of a big deal.
Tucker Stone's writing can be found in print from time to time. He currently blogs about comics at The Factual Opinion and Savage Critics.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2010
