Saturday, February 13, 2010

Best Comics of 2009 part 3

As I wrote in an earlier post, I am trying to catch up on some of the comics that were considered the best of 2009 that I never read. My main reference for this is the meta-list compiled by "I Love Rob Liefeld," which combines 130 "best of" lists into one.

My overriding goal here is to read certain comics that I managed to overlook last year. But I am also interested in seeing if these comics would have made it onto my own personal top 15 list, which I presented at the end of last year.

So anyway, here are a few that I read recently.

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The Bun Field by Amanda Vahamak (ranked 75 on Liefeld). (The letter "A" in Vahamak has umlauts, but I don't know how to insert them in Blogger.) A bit slight, but really good. A surreal story of young girl (I think--she's young enough that she could be a boy)--it reads like a dream or bits of various dreams strung together. The pencil art is really powerfully good.

http://www.adhousebooks.com/books/images/cvrs/BOOKS/AD.DRIVEN.jpg
Driven by Lemons by J.W. Cotter (ranked 21 on Liefeld). Another surreal comic, it reminds me a bit of Lewis Trondhiem and a bit of Joakim Pirinen. I don't know exactly what to think of this one. I think it requires rereading. But I was entertained reading it, and amazed by Cotter's technique and imagination.

http://www.fantagraphics.com/components/com_virtuemart/show_image_in_imgtag.php?filename=961c12225390ea621c03259a270025a0.jpg&newxsize=145&newysize=&fileout=
Prison Pit by Johnny Ryan (ranked 69 by Liefeld). Pretty dumb. Visually, it seems like watered-down Kaz, and story-wise it falls way short of the similar (but less gruesome) Muti-Force by Mat Brinkman. It has its funny moments--like the first two chapter names: "Fucked" followed by "Mega-Fucked."

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Monsters by Ken Dahl (ranked 6 by Liefeld). That ranking seems absurdly high, but that isn't to say that Monsters is not a very good book. This unexpected story of herpes and anxiety really worked. The sense of dread hanging over the author's head--for years, it seems--is quite powerful. Dahl is a hell of a cartoonist. I may have ranked him in the top 20, but probably not the top 10.

http://content-9.powells.com/cgi-bin/imageDB.cgi?isbn=9780307378149
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld (ranked 13 by Liefeld). I'm guessing this got ranked so high partly because of it's subject matter. It's a very handsomely presented book, and the coloring is quite attractive and innovative. But I don't think it's really all that great. It all seems a bit flat. Neufeld has never had a particular dramatic comics style--in a way, it's best suited for non-fiction, just-the-facts kind of stories. But these stories had an inherent drama to them that feels drained away when you read them here. It's a noble, well-crafted work, but not one that connects with me.

At this point, I've read 35 out of the top 100 on the Liefeld mega-list. That's it for me as far as deliberately seeking out these works. I feel certain that there are other good comics on this list, but it's 2010 so time to leave 2009 behind.

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