1. Pascal Blanchet, White Rapids (D&Q)
It's rare to find a book as formally innovative
and profoundly lovely as Blanchet's second graphic novel, which lays out the
brief history of a northern Quebec company town in a series of full-page
spreads that resemble Art Deco posters. Blanchet uses the clean designs of
commercial art and the nostalgic pull of retro advertising to create an effect
not unlike an extra-long children's picture book, pitched at adults. White
Rapids is
historical and wistful, and blazes a path that other fine-art-minded young
cartoonists would be wise to follow.
2. The Luna Brothers, Girls: The Complete
Collection
(Image)
The increasing prevalence of large-format,
slipcovered, super-glossy, super-pricey omnibus editions of existing comics can
be a little depressing to comics fans, who may have already shelled out the
bucks for the same content in issue form and then again in trade paperback. But
there's no better way to experience the Luna Brothers' ambitious, beautifully
illustrated 24-issue series Girls, a self-contained horror story in which a
mysterious woman spawns a plague that takes over a small rural town. The gloriously
muted art looks terrific in the glossy format, but better yet is the way the
characters develop over time, as the crisis sharpens (and gets increasingly
weirder and less predictable) and the increasingly strung-out characters are
pushed to uglier and uglier extremes. The brothers explore a lot of aspects of
gender, and they aren't kind to either side. But they're smart and knowing
about the ugly prejudices and secrets that people hide, and the ways
emergencies bring inner feelings into sharp relief. The story is as taut and
intense as anything else in comics this year, but it's as personal and closely
observed as it is savage.
3. Gilbert Hernandez, Chance In Hell (Fantagraphics)
If alternative comics can be equated to
independent film, then Hernandez has become the medium's David Lynch or Guy
Maddin, rolling his personal obsessions and freewheeling abstractions into
stories that present as pulp, then take some very weird turns. In Chance In
Hell,
Hernandez channels his own paternal anxieties into a book that covers three
stages in the life of "Empress," an orphan who starts out as a pre-teen rape
victim, then becomes the ward of a frustrated middle-class poet, then ends up
as the wife of a rich industrialist. Hernandez may be intending to explore the
symbiotic nature of human exploitation, but mostly, he's just tripping through
his fevered psyche, and drawing images and situations with the unwanted clarity
of nightmares.
4. Jack Kirby, Jack Kirby's Fourth World
Omnibus
(DC)
After serving as one of the architects of the
Marvel universe throughout the '60s, Jack Kirby left the House Of Ideas in
frustration in the early '70s, lured to DC with the promise of artistic control
and greater recognition. Never one to think small, Kirby created the Fourth
World titles, an intergalactic mythology pitting good against evil across the
universe. The project collapsed before it could be finished, but left behind
some timeless characters, huge ideas, alternately clunky and poetic writing, and
Kirby's priceless art at its most daring. The still-in-progress Fourth World
Omnibus
series collects it all, from the ambitious launch of titles like New Gods, Mr. Miracle, and the charmingly
counterculture-positive Forever People through the inglorious plug-pulling that
ended The King's most ambitious undertaking.
5. Rick Geary, The Saga Of The Bloody
Benders
(NBM)
The ninth volume of Geary's Treasury Of
Victorian Murder
series dredges up the story of a serial-killing family that operated on the
Kansas plains in the 1870s. (They dispatched their victims by inviting them in
for dinner, then seating them in front of a canvas sheet, behind which lurked a
hammer-wielding Bender.) Geary deploys his usual blend of portrait-style
illustrations, detailed graphs, and deadpan narration, which only serves to
make the grisly details of the case even creepier. Some writers and artists who
specialize in history strive to make the past look more accessible to modern
eyes, but Geary's books do the opposite, showing the world of a century ago as
an alien place, stalked by monsters. In sensibility and style, Geary is working
on a higher plane than just about every other comics creator in the business.
6.
The Fillbach Brothers, Maxwell Strangewell (Dark Horse)
Another set of brothers dealt with crisis and
quest in a very different way in the black-and-white trade Maxwell
Strangewell,
a bizarre cosmic adventure in which a McGuffin-man comes to earth, closely
followed by crowds of aliens who want to control, destroy, or worship him.
Dark, funny, dreamy, and deeply weird, the whole story starts out in left field
and just keeps going.
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7. Matt Groening, Will
And Abe's Guide To The Universe (Harper)
Groening's Life In Hell comic has become pretty
pro forma over the last decade, as, um, a couple of other projects have
bogarted his attention. But one aspect of the strip never got tired: Groening's
illustrations of conversations with and between his two small sons, who brought
all the warped logic of childhood to bear on topics from God to foreign
countries to geeky fare like monster movies and Star Wars. Many of the old Life
In Hell books
are indispensable, and this one joins the best of the bunch: The collection of
strips about interactions with Will and Abe lacks the acerbic despair of
Groening's early work, but nonetheless, it contains some of the most adorable
and enjoyable work he's ever done.
8.
Mike Carey/Jim Fern, Crossing Midnight Vol. 1 (DC)
Mike Carey's ambition sprawled all over 2007, from
excellent books like Re-Gifters to so-so efforts like Faker, but the best of the lot
was his new ongoing series Crossing Midnight, which fuses traditional
Japanese fairy tales with original mythmaking, gives it all a mystery twist,
and sets it in the modern day. The latest issues have been a little unfocused,
and it remains unclear where Carey is going, but the first five
issues—already collected in a trade volume—are stellar, exciting
work, with all the resonance of old stories and all the vivid intensity of new
ones.
9. Frank King, Sundays With Walt And Skeezix (Sunday Press)
As if the yearly blessing of Drawn &
Quarterly's vintage Gasoline Alley reprints weren't enough, now the comics
archivists at Sunday Press have employed the same D&Q design team of Chris
Ware and Jeet Heer to package 200 full-page Gasoline Alley Sunday strips into a
handsome 16" by 21" hardcover. By the mid-'20s, King had begun to experiment
with his art, working with silhouettes, shadows, close-ups, and even some light
surrealism. In the Sunday strips—and especially in the weeks when Walt
and his young ward would take a long walk or a drive in the country—King
used the limited color palette of the comics page to render the outside world
as though it existed in a perpetual state of autumnal twilight. He drew
pictures worthy of getting lost in, and Sundays With Walt And Skeezix is huge enough to make
that prospect seem plausible.
10. Stan Lee/Steve Ditko, The Spider-Man
Omnibus, Volume 1 (Marvel)
You could choke an elephant with this book, the
binding could be a little friendlier, and the price tag will make some fans
think twice, but it's still terrific to have all of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's
pioneering Spider-Man comics in one book. Ditko's dramatic, inimitable art is the
perfect complement to Lee's prose, which transposes all the worries of
adolescence to the shoulders of a skinny, gifted, guilt-ridden nerd named Peter
Parker. The partnership ended badly, but for a while, Lee and Ditko were
reinventing comics with each frame.
11.
Various artists, Flight Vol. 4 (Villard)
The
all-original Flight anthologies invite animators and graphic artists to explore
the narrative comic form, with invariably lush and luscious results. Any page
from any of the Flight books could blow up into a fantastic poster: The colors are
amazing, glossy, and vivid, and the design is wildly varying and creative. But
most amazing, the stories are invariably creative, expansive explorations of
strange little worlds, surprisingly child-friendly but involved and challenging
enough for adults.