This was the best year for new comics I can remember, and so I throw myself on the mercy of the court: This Top 10 list has 11 entries. There were so many good books that I forgot how to count, your honor.
A quality I love about comics is that they are as individual as painting or sculpture, but their mass production makes them available to anybody. Imagine being able to pull a Rembrandt off the shelf; that’s how it feels to have these books available to thumb through. Maybe even better: If the cat knocks a cup of coffee onto my Mimi Pond book, I don’t have to call the insurance company.
Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me
by Mimi Pond
If Pond’s family biography dazzles with its narrative ambition and brio — and it does — it is also a delight to look at, each page a feast of eccentric typography, clever visual puns and historical trivia. Pond juggles a huge cast of down-at-heel aristocrats and scheming literary types as they attend debutante balls, join the Communist Party and try to date Hitler.
Goes Like This
by Jordan Crane
Maybe the most beautiful piece of art I held in my hands this year, Crane’s candy-colored story collection stretches the comics form into a dozen delightful shapes. It’s a consistently surprising book; you might suddenly find yourself looking at a two-page spread of a giant sea monster, rooting for a greedy cowboy or watching a kid crash a motorcycle he’s not supposed to be riding.
Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown
by Mike Mignola
Mignola’s glorious collection of folklore from an imaginary world is written with a jeweler’s precision and drawn in long, insinuating shadows from which any number of weird creatures might emerge. It’s the start of a new project for the “Hellboy” artist, whose imagination is as gloomy, funny and exciting as it has ever been.
Existential Comics: Selected Stories 1979-2004
by R. Crumb
Edited by Dan Nadel (and a valuable companion to Nadel’s recent biography of the artist), this collection spans 35 years of comics and demonstrates Crumb’s apparently infinite narrative range: There are biographical sketches of beloved blues musicians, punchy adaptations of texts by elevated thinkers like James Boswell and Jean-Paul Sartre, cheap sex jokes and, of course, self-examination and recrimination at its most bitterly funny.
Tongues Vol. 1
by Anders Nilsen
Nilsen’s enormous web of Greek myths and tragedies absolutely shouldn’t work, and yet it is not merely functional but transcendent. The book follows the rebellious titan Prometheus through his imprisonment and into the present day, where he watches the gods consider how to deal with a human race that has, in their estimation, worn out its welcome.
Death of Copra
by Michel Fiffe
Fiffe’s astounding superhero comic is drawn with such intensity that the book practically glows with its own radioactive life. In this series’ final volume, Fiffe sends his characters into battle once more, and treats the reader to splash pages and double-page spreads that feel as if they’ve wandered into the comic-book store from an especially forward-thinking art museum. All good things must come to an end, but what a way to go.
Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance
by Ben Passmore
Passmore’s impassioned history of armed Black resistance feels more timely by the hour. The narrative examines a century of upheaval as real-life historical figures try to defend themselves against the soldiers of an undeclared war, told by Passmore’s cartoon self and his father, who end the story on a note of unexpected heartbreak. It’s a repudiation of nihilism that also understands why nihilism can seem attractive, even inevitable.
Spent
by Alison Bechdel
Bechdel returns to the cast of her beloved alt-weekly strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” in a new book that complicates the term “comic novel.” Her renderings are cheerful, her observations are acute and her self-deprecation is never not funny.
Cannon
by Lee Lai
For Cannon, a young cook at an upscale Montreal restaurant, the pressures of kitchen work and family obligation allow her a comfortable remove from herself, until she inevitably explodes. Her love of detail is emphasized by the perfection of Lai’s drawings, which burst into color at all the best times.
Life Drawing
by Jaime Hernandez
It makes a certain cockeyed sense that, after 40 years of impulsive decisions and the attendant heartbreak, Hernandez’s unsinkable Maggie Chascarillo would finally settle down. So she does, almost as an afterthought, as the wedding of a frenemy implodes in predictably spectacular fashion.
The Once and Future Riot
by Joe Sacco
Sacco’s careful autopsy of a lethal 2013 riot in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh is one of the most compelling works of narrative journalism — in any form — I’ve read this year. The cartoonist assembles a record of an event in which only the liars agree on what happened. In the process, he asks a terrifying question: What is the difference between democracy and mob rule? And where does that difference begin?
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