As in the past few years, I'm doing 2 lists, one for graphic novels and more indie stuff, another for comic shop serial books. Here's the graphic novel list first.
GRAPHIC NOVELS, ONESHOTS, MINICOMICS, ETC.Honorable Mentions:15. Vision parts 1-2 | Julia Gfrorer
14. Disorder #1 | Erika Price
13. Egg Cream #1 | Liz Suburbia
12. BTTM FDRS | Ezra Claytan Daniels & Ben Passmore
11. How I Tried To Be A Good Person | Ulli Lust
10. Gates of Plasma | Carlos GonzalezGonzalez is one of the most distinctive, underrated voices in modern comics, and this wild book is the best thing I've read from him and probably the best introduction to his utterly bizarre sensibility. Across 300+ pages, this book careens through a feverish B-movie narrative, packed with psychic bugs, hallucinatory drug experiences, mad genetic experiments, secretive cults performing plays to come into contact with an alien race, and so on. It's hard to describe what's so appealing about all this, especially the absurd humor of it - I often found myself laughing out loud, then wondering how exactly I'd explain to someone just *what* I was laughing at. But it's unmistakeably compelling, with a Cronenbergian approach to body horror and bodily transformation, that is to say a profound belief that a visceral, often gross process of transcending physical reality can be an ecstatic escape from the numbing boredom and violence of "ordinary" society.
9. Plaza | Yuichi YokoyamaYokoyama's oddest book yet, entirely dedicated to an outlandish parade or performance: a succession of mind-boggling routines are performed on a stage, with elaborate mechanical constructions, legions of odd-looking Yokoyama figures in garish costumes, and tons of weird little details crammed into every panel. It's wild stuff, in many ways seeming similar to some of Yokoyama's more catalogue-like moments from the past, an excuse to draw as many different things as possible. And yet, it's hard to shake the feeling that there's more there. There's something menacing about all this spectacle, a vague militaristic sensibility underlying a lot of it - there are guns, rockets, flamethrowers, barbed wire, vehicles on tank treads, and random inserts of English phrases like "black helicopter" that seem more pointedly directed at Western culture's sinister undertones. Potent, deeply weird stuff, with a looser, more raw aesthetic than usual - dense smears and scratches of ink and marker, seemingly drawn quickly. Another baffling, unforgettable work from one of comics' most unusual auteurs.
8. Pittsburgh | Frank SantoroA free-flowing tone poem on memory and family, bursting with brilliant colors on every multimedia page, as Santoro loosely traces the history of his own parents: their courtship, his own childhood, and their eventual acrimonious divorce. But rather than stitch together a full narrative Santoro builds a patchwork that reflects the reality of the piecemeal way he's found out information about his family over the years, in fragmentary conversations and unexpected, unguarded moments, in little bits of stories that gradually change his conception of the past and his family ties. It places less emphasis on dramatic incident than on the emotional reality of it all, and on the way he visually remembers his home and his neighborhood. The colors are vivid, fluorescent, sunny, but the lines are often sketchy and hazy, creating this sense of memories that are emotionally intense even as some of the details blur at the edges. The searching, meandering structure, darting around in history and weaving in conversations with his parents and grandparents, adds to the sense of excavating memories. The loose narrative is certainly affecting, but it's of course the art that really blows me away here - some of Santoro's best work ever, perfectly walking a line between process and finished art, continually shifting between modes, playfully taping in cutout figures and inserts, using a wide variety of implements to achieve constantly varying lines and textures.
7. Bad Gateway | Simon HanselmannHanselmann's latest Megg & Mogg novel continues a path he's been on for a while with these characters, increasing their isolation and their desperation, pushing the story to ever-darker territory without losing the discomfiting laughs that are at the core of his work. The result is the darkest Hanselmann book, but in many ways also the funniest. There's a real sense of dread running through this, a sense that things could go even more horribly wrong than usual at any moment. It's a very melancholy book too: Megg and Mogg sulk through a totally dysfunctional relationship that's limping along from sheer inertia, while Werewolf Jones sinks deeper and deeper into depravity, neglecting and abusing his feral children - and his one attempt to get clean, becoming "Warehouse Jones" and working respectably at Lowe's, is quickly sabotaged by a drug dealer friend. Despite the darkness, this is damn hilarious, every page is packed with gags and funny details. Hanselmann has these characters so thoroughly down by now that he can generate humor just from their subtle interactions and facial expressions, just throwing them into absurd scenarios to see how they react.
6. Kramer's Ergot #10 | various ed. Sammy HarkhamThis new KE has an especially broad, eclectic range, intentionally placing different modes and eras in dialogue with one another. There's a sense of old and new speaking to each other, drawing parallels and contrasts between different artists, creating this lively conversation that stretches from the golden age of newspaper comics to the undergounds to the 90s indie boom to the modern avant-garde. There's also just a shitload of amazing comics in this. C.F. does what's easily the most jaw-dropping comic I've ever seen from him, these swirls of paint and digital color that just overload the huge page. Similarly, Lale Westvind outdoes her horror story from KE#9 with an even more visually daring, terrifying/beautiful piece about a monstrous shark woman. Harkham's own "Blood of the Virgin" - in color, a standalone chapter separate from the story he's been serializing in
Crickets - shows off his rock-solid cartooning and storytelling, using a traditional cartoonist's mastery of visual language to tell a story that's by turns quietly funny and mysteriously melancholy. Steven Weissman does an eerie, inexplicable Old West tale in which the cutesy simplicity of the drawings belies the menace hidden between the lines. Connor Willumsen weaves an intricate, unsettling story about inept terrorists across page after stark white page, with no panels as in his other recent comics, just these funny, rubbery cartoons running and sweating and plotting against the backdrop of all that blank space. The best overall issue of this anthology sinces its heyday with KE #4-5.
