So there have been “Best of 2009″ lists and “Best of the Decade” lists flying around the internet, pretty much since Halloween or so, maybe even earlier. I don’t have time to do a longer list, or a more comprehensive one, but I thought it would be interesting to talk about my five favorite books of 2009. This list is less a “best of,” and more a “my faves;” or rather, the five books that were most important in my comics reading, whether for sheer quality or brain-busting thought-provokitude, or other content or format choices that were impressive or influential on me.

NUMBER THREE: MOURNING STAR VOLUME 2, by Kazimir Strzepek

I’ve made no secret of my love for Kaz Strzepek’s MOURNING STAR series. It’s not hard to explain why–it’s harder to STOP explaining why; there are so many things I love about it. But chief among them is probably that Mourning Star “is what it is,” so to speak. It’s unselfconsciously genre, a sci-fi comic set in some world’s dystopian future, laced pretty liberally with humor, childishness, violence, gore, and a surprising level of subtlety.

It’s got a cast of characters that numbers in the several dozens, none of whom can be depended on to stay living for very long–which by itself creates much of the drama of the book. These are dangerous times, anything can happen, look out for yourself and not much else besides.

When I read Mourning Star Vol 1, I was immediately sort of blown away by the cartooning, by the sheer elan of it–I think when he did the first one, Kaz was like 25 or something, building this giant world with its disaster, a billion characters.. I was like, where did this guy COME from?? But Volume 2 is even better, it’s more mature; if volume 1 was by a guy who had a bunch of ideas and just WENT for it, then volume 2 is obviously by a guy who has a few hundred pages of this story already under his belt. Drawing a couple hundred pages of a comic means an extraordinary amount of time thinking about that comic, you know what I mean?

And it shows–the pacing has been firmed up over the previous book. It’s both faster where it needs to be–especially during the many scenes of violence in the book–and slower in others. On rereading it for this review I was struck at how contemplative some of the sequences are; Kaz somehow makes you care for some of the most apparently amoral characters in the book, choosing to show them in their private moments, their vulnerable moments.

The scene where “bad” guy Dent tells Bachelle the healer–or organ harvester or something, it’s hard to tell–about his worries that his newly damaged eye will keep him out of battle, is one of my favorite parts of the book. Kaz seems to take uncommon pains to keep his characters three-dimensional. It makes the overwhelming DANGER of the story–which takes place on a world half-destroyed, lawless, where anything can happen at any time and no one is going to worry much about you. Despite the cartoonish character designs, by rounding out his characters and keeping them REAL, Kaz infuses the story with real drama.

But despite all this, I’m not really sure that Mourning Star is one of the GREATEST books of 2009–not to slight the book; more that 2009 was an insane year for comics. 2009 for comics was like 1968 for music, there was a ridiculous profusion of comics wealth last year. But Mourning Star was one of the books I found myself coming back to again and again in my thoughts. The way Kaz composes his pages, the simple way his characters interact, the spare dialogue (rarely does a single speech bubble have more than ten words in it), the strange mix of violence and childish humor…

But most of all, and the thing that I think sets Kaz apart not only as a cartoonist but as a storyteller, is the way he approaches worldbuilding in The Mourning Star. As a reader you’re forced to sort of infer much of the shape of things: the only concrete information you’re given is the stark intro at the beginning of each book: “LESS THAN A YEAR AGO OUR WORLD WAS DESTROYED..” etc. Everything past that is supposition: the characters will occasionally reveal parts of the past, what happened, what the world was like before the catastrophe; but they are constantly being shown to be unreliable narrators of their own stories, as each character has their own view of events, and regularly contradicts what he have previously assumed to be the state of affairs.

And Kaz explains very little himself. When he does, it’s something mundane, a background datum, something about some animal or a remembrance of a favorite treat from someone’s childhood. The shape of the world itself is revealed slowly through the action and the often-conflicting accounts of the characters, and it’s fascinating. It’s a sophisticated way to tell a story, especially a COMIC story, where you “see” things as they’re happening (as opposed to prose, where everything is occurring in your imagination to an extent). Kaz manages to tell a story without “showing” us much–by the end of the second volume I’m only slightly more sure of what’s happening than after the first.

This macro storytelling is born out on a micro level in the character of the “Scissors Sniper,” who’s introduced in volume 1 with amnesia, and who bumbles his way through volume 2 without remembering much. In fact, most of what we learn about him is through other characters, who either bear a resemblance to him–see the hooded automaton in the fight scene in the first few images in this post–or know him from the past and are willfully deceiving him for their own gain. He’s like an empty shell of a character, all the best parts of him are on the outside, leaving the inside for the reader to inhabit, and view the rest of the story through his eyes.

The resulting experience is alternately exhilarating and confusing, perfect things for a science-fiction story to be. I wish all genre fiction were so unselfconsciously GENRE; it’s a pure pleasure to read it, and I think of it every time I sit down to draw or think about how to tell my own humble stories. If Mourning Star #2 wasn’t the BEST book of 2009, it certainly was one I thought about constantly, and for my money this is the best possible effect for a piece of art to have.

Sometimes, you’ve gotta wonder about the decision-making process of the bigwigs over at DC Comics.

For instance, why would they publish a comic book starring Magog — a character that most readers have never heard of … and others just hate.

Oh here’s another one: Why kill a ton of the members of the Justice League International only to bring some of them back in a bi-weekly series? Or why cancel Birds of Prey? Or why turn the Teen Titans into a cemetery? So many questions … so little time.

My latest “WTF DC?” moment came after reading the newest issue of Secret Six, which is the final part of the comic’s Blackest Night tie-in story arc. First thing I thought after reading the book — which co-starred the Suicide Squad and was co-written by former Squad scribe John Ostrander — is: Why doesn’t the Suicide Squad have its own book?Why doesn’t the Suicide Squad have its own book?

Back in the day, the comic — starring a bunch of villains and anti-heroes who are forced to be heroes — was one of DC’s best monthly reads. Seeing the Squad again in the Secret Six — DC’s current comic starring a bunch of villains and anti-heroes turned heroes — shows how interesting and viable this team actually is. Watching the sometimes-noble Bronze Tiger battle it out with Cat-Man, the morally complex Amanda Waller face off against Scandal Savage and the haunted Nightshade throwdown with Black Alice (among other cool moments), I was sold on the idea that these bad/good guys have story potential that could be mined for years.

And, yes, I know DC published a limited series starring the group a short while ago, but that doesn’t count because it was designed more as a way to clean up continuity. C’mon Mr. Didio — even Matt Murdock can see it’s time for an Ostrander-penned Suicide Squad ongoing.

Carlton Hargro is Editor-in-Chief of Charlotte’s Creative Loafing free weekly newspaper. You can read more of Carlton’s reviews at the magazines Comic Proportions blog.

So there have been “Best of 2009″ lists and “Best of the Decade” lists flying around the internet, pretty much since Halloween or so, maybe even earlier. I don’t have time to do a longer list, or a more comprehensive one, but I thought it would be interesting to talk about my five favorite books of 2009. This list is less a “best of,” and more a “my faves;” or rather, the five books that were most important in my comics reading, whether for sheer quality or brain-busting thought-provokitude, or other content or format choices that were impressive or influential on me.

NUMBER FOUR: PLUTO by Naoki Urasawa

One thing that visual media excel at, especially comics, is playing with genre boundaries. I think it might have something to do with what Scott McCloud calls “closure”: the mind’s interpretation of what is happening between (and often, inside) comics panels, thus creating active engagement between the reader and the comic itself.

It’s almost like a built-in suspension of disbelief: once you are choosing to, again and again on each page, engage with the comic, you are much more likely to accept what’s going on in the story, maybe much more so than in a more “realistic” medium; film, for instance. I have half a theory that this is why superhero comics have endured so long and are accepted so widely by comics readers–after all many of them are about men and women dressing up in bodysuits and flying or shooting beams out of their eyes or dying and being reborn every few years. Being actively engaged in “interpreting” what’s happening in a story maybe gives you an expanded ability to “believe” that story.

Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto is a reimagining of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy story, “The Greatest Robot On Earth.” On the surface it’s a sci-fi story, set in a future where robots exist not only as servants, but as citizens with their own inalienable rights (and occasionally as weapons). Within that sci-fi outer shell, the actual story itself is more a whodunit, as super-robot detective Gesicht tries to solve a string of murders of other super-robots and their creators.

But it’s within that whodunit framework that what really drives Pluto lives. The story is animated by its repeated examination of the various robot characters’ humanity. As Gesicht follows the trail of murders, he is also examining his own “programmed” humanity, which seems painted over a deeper, more fundamental psyche buried beneath. Each of the robots in Pluto seem to share a similar struggle: in the spread above, the super-robot North No. 2 is playing the piano as he recalls the slaughter of the previous war. The story’s superrobots were each–with one exception–involved in that war as weapons, and most of them have lived with horrifying memories of wartime atrocities ever since.

But the most interesting example of this “to be or not to be” theme is Astro Boy himself, called “Atom” in the story, as he was in the original Mighty Atom manga, called “Astro Boy” in Western countries. Urasawa underlines Atom’s “Pinocchio” nature by drawing him as a real boy, rather than Tezuka’s more cartoonish robot version. Not only does Atom look like a real little boy, he takes pains to act like one.

But as opposed to this being a part of his programming, it seems more like Atom is trying to approximate a little boy’s life in order to make some sort of sense out of his own, or more properly make sense out of feelings. The scene where Atom cries in the bathroom for Gesicht was really affecting the first time I read it–and throughout the subsequent story I kept coming back to it in my thoughts, as similar themes popped up for each of the robot characters; not to mention the titular Pluto itself.

I want to pause for a second in my aimless theoretical wandering to look at that page in detail, because the cartoonist in me is fascinated by it. I’ve been thinking ab0ut timing in comics a lot lately, due in large part to a passage in Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s amazing memoir A Drifting Life, where he says:

“A panel with a large image and lots of details is read from corner to corner. The image thus stands still for the duration of the time it takes to be read.

“The time it takes to read a panel can be calculated according to the relative size of the image and the amount of dialogue in it.

“This is the ’synchronization of panel and time.”

The above spread, where Atom excuses himself from his conversation with Gesicht to go cry in the bathroom, is a masterful example of this idea in action. Remembering that manga are read from right to left, start in the upper right hand corner and see how Urasawa paces this important scene. You have two small (quick) panels with just faces in them, then larger ones as we are meant to slow down and examine the expressions of the characters. Then a larger panel with a lot of detail as Atom gets up–it’s almost a new establishing shot, leading toward the next larger panel where Atom walks away. In a way the two panels, located diagonally on top of each other, are almost the only thing you need to see, with the smaller dialogue panels existing as little more than seasoning.

Then the left-hand page, completely silent, is broken up into six panels, with the largest for last, and maximum time/impact. While the panels leading up to it all seem to exist in the same moment–the “camera” is just moving around the scene–the successive panel breaks slow down the pace of reading leading up to the last panel. If we saw the scene as one single panel with Atom crying, we’d just say “huh” and flip the page. But with this layout we are forced to consider what is happening, and more than that, are shown by the amount of effort put into these moments that they are important.

And, at least to me, this two-page spread is one of the more important of the book, so it feels as if Urasawa has doubly underlined it for us, to ensure that there’s an impact in our minds, even if we do not perceive it until later.

Sorry, I’m digressing. But whoa.

I’m new to Urasawa’s work; Pluto was the first of his books I read, although since I’ve read the fun (but less nuanced) 20th Century Boys, and dipped my toe into his longer work Monster. But Pluto was a book that really opened my eyes up in 2009–not only in terms of story and art, but in a larger sense in terms of manga itself. While I’ve read plenty of manga, I usually stick to the more “grown-up” stuff like Lone Wolf & Cub or Buddha. It’s always been easy for me to sort of eschew a broad swath of manga, lumping it subconsciously into a “for kids” drawer in my head.

But as “sci-fi” or “murder mystery” are just starting points for Pluto, “manga” is just a kind of comics after all–it’s not a different genre, it’s a different form. It’s easy for American comics readers (like me), especially of a pre-manga explosion generation (also me) to discount a lot of manga as being simple or childish or “for kids.” Super dumb, and maybe even vaguely xenophobic in a lot of cases. Pluto is a book that opened my eyes a lot wider in 2009: what starts out on the surface as a retelling of a 50 year-old Astro Boy story is a nuanced work with multiple and successive layers of genre, artifice, and theme that reward deep reading. It’s changed the way I look at manga, not to mention softened me up for more stylized and challenging manga like Tatsumi’s.

And what’s best about Pluto is that (as of this writing), there are still two volumes left (of 8), which I am anticipating like two little Christmases. Delicious manga Christmases.

Other Top 5 of 2009 entries by me:
#5: Popeye Volume 4

So there have been “Best of 2009″ lists and “Best of the Decade” lists flying around the internet, pretty much since Halloween or so, maybe even earlier. I don’t have time to do a longer list, or a more comprehensive one, but I thought it would be interesting to talk about my five favorite books of 2009. I admit I swiped the idea from Christopher Butcher’s excellent series on the top 10 game-changing moments in North American manga publication. Although Chris goes into way WAY more depth than I have the time or erudition to attempt; and fortunately he’s Canadian, so he probably can’t even read American and will never know of my theft.

This list is less a “best of,” and more a “my faves;” or rather, the five books that were most important in my comics reading, whether for sheer quality or brain-busting thought-provokitude, or other content or format choices that were impressive or influential on me.

NUMBER FIVE :: POPEYE VOLUME FOUR: Plunder Island

I have made no secret of my intense love of the Popeye reprints from Fantagraphics. Pretty much from the first volume–can it really have been over three years since it was published?–to this one, the once-a-year books are almost always the most pleasant reading experiences of that year for me.

I am a lover of old newspaper strips, although I worry that I’m more a lover of the idea of loving old newspaper strips–with so many reprint volumes coming out lately, I keep buying them but not actually reading them. But they’re such fancy-looking books I can’t help thinking I just MUST have them for my comics library. Sometimes it’s hard to get in the mood to read old newspaper reprints; it’s a little like reading Charles Dickens. Everything is happening at a different speed, all the jokes are nearly a century old; or if it’s an adventure strip the danger is always vipers or poison or something, as opposed to the many and much more dramatic real-world dangers we face today.

Not to mention that, in a newspaper strip, you never know when some repugnant ethnic stereotype will traipse across the page, reminding you instantly that what you’re reading comes, after all, from an often uglier time.

But the Popeye volumes are different, there’s something about them that seems larger than the sum of their parts. Part of it is probably the strip itself, which is completely and unapologetically silly. It’s slapstick and violent and goofy, and it’s far easier to enjoy it on a surface level than one of the more dramatic strips like Little Orphan Annie or Dick Tracy. You don’t need to know much about the setting or the times to enjoy Popeye, it’s all pretty much there in any individual page: Popeye is a one-eyed sailor of almost supernatural toughness and strength, who loves to fight and always looks out for widows and children.

But I would suggest that one of the things that make this particular series of Popeye reprints from Fantagraphics so great is the design of the books themselves. The books’ designer, Jacob Covey, made the books into objects, and not only objects but obviously well-loved objects. The books are large, they’re corporeal, they have real mass and weight and take both hands to hold comfortably. When you lay in bed at night with the book open in front of you, it effectively takes up your entire field of vision–I mean, it’s like 2 feet wide and something like 15 inches tall when it’s open. It’s a case where the actual shape of the book acts as an immersive into the book’s content.

Which helps–Popeye is set in pretty much the prime time of the Great Depression, although it’s never directly referenced. If anything, money is treated with an almost dismissive attitude: Popeye comes into millions of dollars all the time, usually spending it all with a few panels, sometimes on buying houses for “widders,” one time in this volume buying 10,000 sets of pajamas for his adopted son Sweetpea.

I want to say this means something: that one of the most popular strips of the day NEVER referenced what was at the time utter disaster for most people in the United States, certainly many of Popeye’s readers. Escapism? I don’t know, I don’t have a lot of education. Seems like “escapism” is an easy answer though. It’s not so much that money is never mentioned; it’s that it’s often little more than an inconvenience. Moreover, money’s often paired in Popeye with buffoonery. Those hunting money nearly always come to a bad end, while Popeye seems the least interested of any character in money, though he’s forever blundering into great piles of it.

And, even though volume four of Popeye was originally published in papers between 1933 and 1935, the book is littered with tycoons and multimillionaires. Although interestingly, they all spend their money with cavalier disregard for its importance. When Popeye rescues June Van Ripple from drowning, her father is outraged that Popeye won’t accept a reward, and goes out of his way to foist money on him whenever possible, just because that’s the way he likes things: paid for. It’s like in Elzie Segar’s mind, rich people viewed the world and everything in it in a way completely alien to the average Joe. And, of course, alien to Popeye as well. If Popeye is the kind of salt-of-the-earth Everyman of the Thimble Theatre strips, then it says a lot about Segar’s thoughts on the American everyman in the 1930’s. But again, these are just the buds of thoughts, I think a smarter person would be able to talk about this stuff a little better.

Anyway. I’m more qualified to talk about the look of the book than the subtext. The physical layout of the book is such that you get an entire week of Popeye daily strips per page, which besides being very satisfying to someone like me who loves to sort and organize things, creates a kind of Rorschach-blot pattern of blacks on the page. If you look at the example above, E.C. Segar uses very clear, almost stupidly-clear storytelling, with each character having a little blotch of black in their design somewhere (Wimpy’s jacket, Popeye’s shirt, Olive’s skirt), so that your eye tracks from character to character in a panel. And, as discussed in Rick Marschall’s introduction, Segar rarely moved his “camera” around, or zoomed in or out for closeups or wide shots. For Segar the panel itself was the prime organizing unit in his comics; characters were moving into or out of panels, or the panel itself might “follow” them, but rarely did the panel or composition change, with the exception of occasional double-sized panels for the punch-line at the end.

If you look at the page above, in the third strip from the top, the “camera” follows Wimpy as he goes out to smite a Bruiser brother. In the fourth panel, though Wimpy has jumped nearly out of the panel itself to wield his club, the camera has not moved at all. Segar’s panels operate like little peepholes on the action, with the reader only ever able to see what is happening across his small field of vision. The feeling is multiplied when reproduced like this, with six tiers of strips–in another cartoonist’s hands it would be too cramped and claustrophobic, but somehow it operates in opposition to the innate wide-openness of Popeye himself, to the sprawling violence of the strip. It’s almost like the panel is controlling things a little bit, somehow dampening what would otherwise turn into a non-stop free-for-all, no-doubt spilling into Gil Thorp and Bringing Up Father on the funny pages.

I will say that I was a little let-down by the “Plunder Island” story, which I’d heard from pretty much everybody was the (in the words of J. Wellington Wimpy) “acme” of Popeye stories. As Andy Mansell patiently explained to me, Plunder Island was serialized only in the Sunday pages of the strip, and it took over six months, which I’m sure at the time must have been pretty dramatic. For my money, I still prefer the original Sea Hag story, reprinted in the first of the newer Popeye volumes, which was RIFE with drama. I am way WAY in the minority on this one, believe me; but I also prefer the black and white dailies to the Sundays, although they are reprinted here with what is almost outlandishly high production values.

And to me, the real star of these later volumes is Wimpy anyway. Just as Popeye intially upstaged the characters when he showed up as a bit-player in Thimble Theatre, so Wimpy has turned into the real star of these later strips, certainly the color Sundays. Don’t get me wrong, Popeye is amazing, just the ridiculous lexicon of speech-ticks Segar has given him are enough crack me up any time. But Wimpy has not so much developed into a character as he has simply accrued more and more little running jokes, despicable character flaws, and best of all his unflappable greed. His weird plans don’t make any sense at first, but here at the end of Volume Four, having read these stories for the first time, I will reliably laugh at any mention of “ducks,” the “acme” of anything, or the “Jones boys.”

Volume Four of Popeye was maybe my least favorite of the series so far, but I think less from a failing of the book, and more that my shocking love of these strips (I have never been a fan of the silly cartoon version) has become less new by the fourth volume. They still are the BEST-designed comics being made today, and easily my favorite strip reprints ever, including Peanuts, Gasoline Alley, even my beloved Dick Tracy. I feel myself thinking about their design constantly, especially when looking at some of the many MANY strip reprints being published these days. These Popeye books are made with the kind of love and care and attention to detail that’s rare in comics–it’s clear that their publishers treat this material with reverence, and it makes it even more pleasurable to crack a new volume open each year. I cannot wait for Volume 5!

Brian Michael Bendis today is the main man over at Marvel these days.  The figurehead, along with Joe Quesada, of the direction the company has gone with for the last decadec is this book that was the beginning of the Marvel as we know it today.

The premise of the book was simple: take the core elements of Spider-Man and distill it into the modern day. The idea worked.  Ultimate Spider-Man launched to high sales and critical reviews.  But it was a different animal than the books coming out at the time.  The pacing was different, slower, cinematic in a not widescreen way, but in how it was paced, the story breathed and the original 11 page Spider-Man origin story was now about 192. The first Ultimate Spider-Man trade paperback even more so was a game changer (for good or ill) creating a template of the way stories were paced, writing 4 to 8 part stories “for the trade” as they say.

Ultimate Spider-Man is at the end of the day not just the coming of age story that Spider-Man is known as, but the  story of a kid messing around in a morally gray adult world–and more often that not being in over his head.  More than once Spider-Man dives into or is caught in the middle of a situation he only knows half the story about, and tries to do the right thing. Meanwhile, others berate him for seeing things in terms of right and wrong or for failing to see the moral complexity of a situation.  Often adults try to manipulate him or claim him for there own purposes.

In one story Norman Osborn claims since he created the spider that gave Peter his powers that Peter is now his property. Later in the story when Osborn is defeated with Nick Fury’s help Fury says something to the effect that once Peter comes of adult age that he becomes property of the government like all other super-powered persons.  Ultimate Spider-Man is a story of keeping a good moral compass in a modern world of the military industrial complex that pushes apathy and control as inevitabilities of adulthood.

Ultimate Spider-Man is also notable for its consistency.  Every issue has been written by Bendis and he has almost exclusivity with the character that Stan Lee had with the Silver Surfer for years.  The first 110 issues were drawn by workhorse artist Mark Bagley who was turning out issues so fast that the book was often bi-weekly.  Stuart Immonen drew the next 20 issues in a similar timely fashion before the book’s first volume drew to a close recently. Annuals were drawn by the fabulous Mark Brooks and David LaFuente who is the current artist on the book’s recently launched second volume.

Really this book might really fit more in a “Most Important of the Decade” thing for the standards that it set.  Best of the Decade is things like Asterios Polyp and All Star Superman and DC The New Frontier and Bottomless Belly Button.  Those are finite works as most everything in these write-ups will be, but there’s room for at least one continuing series here and for the fact that the series remains so consistent in quality, because it has so much personality, because it’s such an obviously personal piece of work to its writer, I think “Best” will work too.

Where Shawn looks at the New Releases and lets you know which books she is most excited about!

1) Buffy the Vampire Slayer #30

Buffy and the gang are fighting Twilight and his army in Tibet. I really liked the last page of #29 and I am excited to see where this story is going. Plus there is a sweet Adam Hughes cover for this issue. Awesome!

2) Cinderella From Fabletown With Love #1

I love that they made Cinderella a superspy in the Fable-verse. And I love that they are exploring her character more. This book has a ton of potential and I hope they don’t disappoint. I love the covers too, which are done by local artist Chrissie Zullo.

#3) Donald Duck & Friends #347

The cover really quacks me up! I could go on but I won’t. Donald Duck as James Bond. Need I say more?

4) Marvelous Land Of Oz #1

I was really blown away by Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The story was fresh and entertaining (even though I knew what was going to happen) and the art was amazing. I am super excited that they are doing another mini-series especially since I am not as familiar with the other Oz books.

5) Strange Tales #3

I am so glad Marvel is doing this series. It is a lot of fun seeing some of my favorite Indie artists interpreting Marvel characters. This issue has Paul Hornschemeier, Stan Sakai, Becky Cloonan and Nicholas Gurewitch, just to name a few!