(I originally posted this yesterday but somehow the actual list part got deleted. Sorry! Here’s the real list.)
Here, simply in alphabetical order, are some of my favorite comics from this year. Sometimes, when I read a comic that is mediocre, or even kind of good, and I feel frustrated. I want to love every book that I read as much as I love the medium, which is silly, but I guess I just really want comics to live up to their potential.
These comics didn’t frustrate me. They made me excited about the tremendous strength and diversity of cartoonists doing work right now and they motivated me to work harder myself.
Cross Game by Mitsuru Adachi: I didn’t read as much manga as I would have liked this year, but Adachi still beats pretty much everyone else for me. He does things that really shouldn’t work in shonen manga. I also was excited to discovered Erica Sakurazawa and her unique paneling this year, but I was disappointed to find that her stories are fairly boilerplate – though admittedly Adachi’s can be too.
The online comics of Derik Badman: Derik is going in very unique and exciting directions with his work. I mean, he isn’t even drawing his comics anymore! His use of appropriation has been an inspiration as well. Comics like this make me want to push myself more with my own work.
Keeping Two by Jordan Crane: This was not a comic that was published in whole or even in large part this year, but I wanted to highlight it for two reasons. First, some of the recent sequences have, for me, been some of the strongest of the comic. Second, I think Crane has build up enough of a critical mass at this point that some of the unique things he’s doing with this work are becoming increasingly clear. I really enjoy the way he uses visual cues to suggest connections between his groups of protagonists, and the slow, subtle build of the narrative and its themes.
The online comics of Jocelyn Gravot: My favorite “Internet find” this year, Gravot is a French illustrator who posts beautiful and enigmatic short comics on Tumblr. She writes in French and English, and in both languages her writing toes a line that I didn’t know existed between completely nonsensical and powerfully poetic. She is very good at composing on a grid in terms of both line and color; I really wish I could draw a page like this.
The online comics of Simon Hanselmann: Everyonelikes this stuff, but that’s because it’s really good! I enjoy Hanselmann’s strong rhythm and pacing, which I think is a big part of what makes his comics so hilarious. Of course, he also happens to be very funny.
Everything Together by Sammy Harkham: Sammy is one of my favorite cartoonists. I love the simplicity of his line and how much information he is able to pack into a page while keeping it readable. I have read everything in this collection before, but it’s nice to have everything in one place. I still wished I owned a copy of Crickets 2, though.
The Blonde Woman by Aidan Koch: Koch is a great mark maker, and her more recent color work is really exciting. I found this comic to be somewhere between her more oblique or abstract work and the more straightforward narrative of something like The Whale, which is interesting to me.
Smoo 5 by Simon Moreton: I’m sure the fact that I related quite a bit to the subject matter (the pain/pleasure of feeling isolated in a new place) is a big part of why I enjoyed this comic so much, but it was also very good. I enjoyed the way Simon was able to get at the same ideas from different angles with the various stories in the book. He is also, along with Warren Craghead and Aidan Koch, one of my favorite cartoonists who draws in pencil.
Pope Hats 3 by Ethan Rilly: I don’t know what it is with Pope Hats, but I have found both this issue and last year’s Pope Hats 2 almost infinitely rereadable. Maybe it’s the fact that Rilly is such a strong bread and butter cartoonist, with simple layouts, straightforward narratives, and that amazing brush line. I just love this one. Maybe my favorite comic this year.
SF2 and SFSF2 by Ryan Cecil Smith: I think (part of?) SFSF2 was released last year, but I didn’t read it until this January. Ryan draws with a looseness and energy that I enjoy, and the way he pushes his drawing towards almost abstraction in places is also compelling (this is especially prominent in SFSF2). Also, I wasn’t expecting this since I hadn’t seen it mentioned in any reviews, but the main SF series is really funny. I laughed out loud more than once at SF2, which is a rare thing for me.
Building Stories by Chris Ware: I got like two pages into the bee stuff before I decided to skip it. The one page in the far future was weird too. The rest was great, though. Acme 18 has long been my favorite of the post-Jimmy issues (I liked it better than Lint! Really!), and the “Oh God…” broadsheet almost made me cry.