The Best Comics of The Decade

Robert Boyd

In 1990, I worked on one of my favorite publishing projects, a two-volume anthology called The Best Comics of the Decade, published by Fantagraphics Books and co-edited with Gary Groth and Kim Thompson. The thesis behind these volumes was that the 80s had seen an explosion of great comics in anthologies (like RAW and Weirdo), in newspapers (specifically in alternative newsweeklies), and in what at the time was called alternative comics (which included publishers like us, Fantagraphics Books). Another part of our thesis was that most of the greatest works had been in short stories. The age of the graphic novel hadn't yet arrived, although Maus volume 1 had been published in 1986.



Our volumes excluded superheroes from Marvel and DC, partly because we were snobs about mainstream comics, but partly because we didn't have access to that material. If we had, would we have included something? Maybe an excerpt from Watchmen? We did include an Alan Moore story which we loved, called "Pictopia," which is a weird story about how the innocent fun of old-time heroes in comics had been replaced by a grim and cynical type of superhero--one that Alan Moore himself is partly responsible for (along with Frank Miller).

The thing about assembling this volume was that we editors felt that knowing what comics actually were published in the 80s was a doable task. We had each read thousands of pages of comics and felt like we had a grasp of what had been published. (Because we thought that book buyers back then would never shell out for a 240-page book of comics, we published it in two volumes. That's another thing that has changes a lot in the past 30 years.)



Things have changed. Back then, "alternative comics" (i.e., anything that wasn't super-hero comics) were eking out an existence on the fringes. While superheroes now dominate our pop culture, in the world of comics, they are no longer utterly dominate comics mind-space as they once did. They still do to a certain extent--I know when I tell someone I am interested in comics, they usually ask about superheroes. As I have pointed out many times before, I am interested in comics as a category of art, like literature, theater, music, film, visual art. (To limit it to one genre or format is something I am not willing to do, especially a genre controlled by two large entertainment megacorporations, Warner Brothers--which owns DC Comics and all its properties--and Disney--which owns Marvel and all its properties.)

But in the 2010s, so many comics have been published that there is almost no way one person could have read them all. (I would fear for the sanity of anyone who tried.) Nonetheless, some brave souls have attempted to construct their own "best of the decade" lists. This decade has been dominated by book-sized publications, which is reflected in their lists. The lists I looked at were:

• Comic Books Are Burning in Hell
• Entertainment Weekly
• The A.V. Club
• Polygon
• The Comics Beat
• The Guardian

The best list in my opinion is Comic Books Are Burning in Hell's, and it is also the shortest. The Beat's is the longest. The total of all five lists is 130 titles (or 129, because there is some overlap on a Batman title). The lists are mostly unranked. (I'll put the whole list at the bottom of this post.)

It occurred to me that one way to rank the comics would be to look at which ones appeared on multiple lists. So with a long morning of Excel-ery, I have made a list of the most highly regarded comics of the decade by that criterion (appearing on multiple best-of lists).

Here are all the titles that appeared on at least two lists:

• Hawkeye, Matt Fraction and David Aja, 4
• Mister Miracle, Tom King, Mitch Gerads, and Clayton Cowles, 3
• The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm, 3
• Prince Of Cats, Ron Wimberly, 3
• Hark! A Vagrant!, Kate Beaton, 3
• Lumberjanes, Grace Ellis, Noelle Stevenson, Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, Brooklyn A. Allen, Carolyn Nowak, Carey Pietsch, Ayme Sotuyo, Maarta Laiho, Aubrey Aiese, with Brittney Williams, Faith Erin Hicks, Aimee Fleck, Rebecca Tobin, Felicia Choo, and T. Zysk, 3
• Daytripper, Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon, 3
• My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Emil Ferris, 3
• Saga, Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples, 3
• Batman, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, 2
• Copra, Michel Fiffe, 2
• The Nib, Matt Bors and a cast of thousands, 2
• Monstress, Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda, and Rus Wooton, 2
• This One Summer, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, 2
• The Wicked + The Divine, Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, 2
• The River At Night , Kevin Huizenga, 2
• House Of X/Powers Of X, Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, R.B. Silva, Marte Gracia, Clayton Cowles, and Tom Muller, 2
• Giant Days, John Allison, Max Sarin, Lissa Treiman, Whitney Cogar, and Jim Campbell, 2
• Black Hammer, Jeff Lemire, Dean Ormston, 2
• Thor, Jason Aaron, Russell Dauterman, 2
• The Love Bunglers, Jaime Hernandez, 2
• Goodnight Punpun, Inio Asano, 2
• You & A Bike & A Road, Eleanor Davis, 2
• Last Look, Charles Burns, 2
• O Human Star, Blue Delliquanti, 2 

I have only read six of these in their entirety. The Nib would be difficult to read all of--it's a political comics site that one dives in in bits and pieces. But I've read a LOT of the comics there; I highly recommend it. I've read a bit of Lumberjanes and Copra, but didn't really connect with them. I haven't read any of the superhero titles because that's a genre I've outgrown in comics. And as for the rest, I've heard of most of them...

Perhaps a better way to look at it would be to see which authors and artists were referenced most frequently by appearing on multiple lists with multiple titles. Of course, I made a similar list.

• Matt Fraction 6
• Eleanor Davis 5
• Scott Snyder 4
• Brian K. Vaughan 4
• Tom King 4
• Jamie McKelvie 3
• Jason Aaron 3
• Blue Delliquanti 3 
• Emily Carroll 3 
• Greg Capullo 3 
• Jaime Hernandez 3
• Jillian Tamaki 3
• Kieron Gillen 3
• Mariko Tamaki 3
• Emil Ferris 3
• Gabriel Bá 3
• Fábio Moon 3
• Kate Beaton  3
• Ron Wimberly 3
• Ryan North 3
• Alan Moore 2
• Jason Latour 2
• Olivier Schrauwen 2
• Raina Telgemeier 2
• Sam Alden 2
• Charles Burns 2
• Inio Asano 2
• Jeff Lemire 2
• John Allison 2
• Jonathan Hickman 2
• Kevin Huizenga 2
• Marjorie Lu 2
• Matt Bors 2
• Michel Fiffe 2

The number refers to the number of times a person appeared anywhere on any of the lists. Several appeared in anthologies that made the list (Mould Map 3 and Smut Peddler 2012 Edition, specifically).

I'm willing to agree with the consensus in one small way: Eleanor Davis is the comics artist of the decade. What a privilege is has been to see her blossom as a cartoonist.

It is interesting to look at this list and see who among them were also in The Best Comics of the Decade in 1990. The only three who made both were Charles Burns, Jaime Hernandez and Alan Moore (three giants, to be sure).

OK, given that I have read only a small fraction of the comics that were published between 2010 and 2019 (and given that I have only read some on the master list that I will reproduce below), here are my favorites, selected by perusing my bookshelves 10 minutes ago:

• Sir Alfred No. 3 by Tim Hensley (Pigeon Press, 2015)

• Tenements, Towers & Trash by Julia Wertz (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2017)

• Motel Art Improvement Service by Jason Little (Dark Horse Comics, 2010)

• Over Easy by Mimi Pond (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014)

• The Property by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly, 2013)

• Berlin by Jason Lutes (Drawn & Quarterly, 2018)

• The River at Night by Kevin Huizenga (Drawn & Quarterly, 2019)

• Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen by Dylan Horrocks (Fantagraphics Books, 2014)

• Incidents in the Night by David B (Uncivilized Books, 2013)

• You & a Bike & a Road by Eleanor Davis (Koyama Press, 2017)

• The Love Bunglers by Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books, 2014)

• Your Black Friend and Other Strangers by Ben Passmore (Silver Sprocket, 2018)

I have personal connections with many of the artists here, and I've met all of them except for Julia Wertz and David B.

This is the most I've thought about comics in one sustained burst in a long time.  I wish I had insights about the past decade to share. I don't except to note how that book has become the dominant form and that female artists and artists of color are now the dominant figures in art of comics. They make up more than 50% of my personal list, at least. That's a big shift.

I want to dedicate this post to the memory of my friend Tom Spurgeon, who died in November.

Addendum: Some additional best-of lists made me want to revise these compiled lists, which I have done here.

Here is the combined best-of list mentioned above:

• “Time” by Randall Munroe
• 20th Century Boys by Naoki Urasawa
• A Silent Voice by Yoshitoki Olma and Steven LeCroy
• Afterlife With Archie by Robert Aguirre-Sacasa, Francesco Francavilla, and Jack Morelli
• All-New Wolverine by Tom Taylor, David Lopez, David Navarrot, Marcio Takara, IG Guara, Bob Wiacek, Victor Olazaba, Walden Wong, Nik Virella, Scott Hanna, Djibril Morissette-Phan, Leonard Kirk, Cory Hamscher, Marc Deering, Terry Pallot, Juann Cabal, Marco Failla, Ramon Rosanas, Nathan Fairbairn, Jordan Boyd, Mat Lopes, John Rauch, Michael Garland, Jesus Aburtov, Erick Arciniega, Nolan Woodard, and Cory Petit
• Archival Quality by Ivy Noelle Weir and Christina “Steenz” Stewart
• Arsène Schrauwen by Olivier Schrauwen
• Basquiat by Julian Voloj and Søren Mosdal
• Batman by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo
• Batman: The Black Mirror by Scott Snyder, Jock, Francesco Francavilla, David Baron, Jared K. Fletcher, and Sal Cipriano
• Batman: The Court of Owls by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo
• Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët
• Becoming Unbecoming by Una
• Berlin by Jason Lutes
• Big Kids by Michael DeForge
• Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Valentine DeLandro, Cris Peters, Kelly Fitzpatrick, and Clayton Cowles
• Black Hammer by Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston
• Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze
• Boxers & Saints by Gene Luen Yang and Lark Pien
• Brazen by Pénélope Bagieu
• Building Stories by Chris Ware
• Check, Please! by Ngozi Ukazu
• Clyde Fans by Seth
• Copra by Michel Fiffe
• Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
• Daredevil by Mark Waid, Chris Samnee, Javier Rodriguez, Matt Wilson, and Joe Caramagna
• Daytripper by Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon
• Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot
• Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles by Mark Russell, Mike Feehan, Mark Morales, Sean Parsons, Howard Porter, Jose Marzan Jr., Paul Mounts, and Dave Sharpe
• Fatherland: A Family History by Nina Bunjevac
• FF by Matt Fraction and Mike Allred
• Frontier #7 by Jillian Tamaki
• Gawain’s Girlfriend and the Green Knight by Polly Guo
• Generous Bosom by Conor Stechshulte
• Giant Days by John Allison, Max Sarin, Lissa Treiman, Whitney Cogar, and Jim Campbell
• Girl Town by Carolyn Nowak
• Goodnight Punpun by Inio Asano
• Grip by Lale Westvind
• Guts by Raina Telgemeier
• Hark! A Vagrant! by Kate Beaton
• Hawkeye by Matt Fraction and David Aja
• Hellboy in Hell by Mike Mignola
• Helter Skelter by Kyoko Okazaki
• Here by Richard McGuire
• Hilda & The Black Hound by Luke Pearson
• Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor
• Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers
• House Of X/Powers Of X by Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, R.B. Silva, Marte Gracia, Clayton Cowles, and Tom Muller
• How To Be Happy by Eleanor Davis
• How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less by Sarah Glidden
• Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
• Is This How You See Me? by Jaime Hernandez
• It Never Happened Again by Sam Alden
• Julio's Day by Gilbert Hernandez
• Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine
• Last Look by Charles Burns
• Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valerio-O’Connell
• Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe
• Lumberjanes by Grace Ellis, Noelle Stevenson, Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, Brooklyn A. Allen, Carolyn Nowak, Carey Pietsch, Ayme Sotuyo, Maarta Laiho, Aubrey Aiese, with Brittney Williams, Faith Erin Hicks, Aimee Fleck, Rebecca Tobin, Felicia Choo, and T. Zysk
• March by Rep. John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell
• Margot’s Room by Emily Carroll
• Mister Miracle by Tom King, Mitch Gerads, and Clayton Cowles
• Monstress by Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda, and Rus Wooton
• Mould Map 3 by Aidan Koch, Amalia Ulman, Angie Wang, Ben Mendelewicz, Blaise Larmee, Brenna Murphy, CF, Cody Cobb, Daniel Swan, Dmitry Sergeev, Gabriel Corbera, GHXYK2, Hugh Frost, Jacob Ciocci, James Jarvis, Joseph Kelly, Jonas Delaborde, Jonathan Chandler, Jonny Negron, Julien Ceccaldi, Karn Piana, Kilian Eng, Lala Albert, Lando, Leon Sadler, Matthew Lock, Noel Freibert, Olivier Schrauwen, Robert Beatty, Sam Alden, Sammy Harkham, Simon Hanselmann, Stefan Sadler, Viktor Hachmang & Yuichi Yokoyama
• Ms Marvel by G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona, Jacob Wyatt, Elmo Bondoc, Takeshi Miyazawa, Nico Leon, Francesco Gaston, Marco Failla, Diego Olortegui, Ian Herring, Irma Knivila, and Joe Caramagna, with Saladin Ahmed, Rainbow Rowell, Hasan Minhaj, Devin Grayson, Eve L. Ewing, Jim Zub, Gustavo Duarte, Joey Vazquez, Kevin Libranda, Minkyu Jung, Juan Vlasco, and Bob Quinn
• My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris
• My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf
• My Hero Academia by Kohei Horikoshi, Caleb Cook, and John Hunt
• My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness by Kabi Nagata
• Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
• O Human Star by Blue Delliquanti
• Octopus Pie by Meredith Gran
• On A Sunbeam by Tillie Walden
• Patience by Daniel Clowes
• Peplum by Blutch
• Poochytown by Jim Woodring
• Prince Of Cats by Ron Wimberly
• Prison Pit by Johnny Ryan
• Providence by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows
• Rock Candy Mountain by Kyle Starks and Chris Schweizer
• Sabrina by Nick Drnaso
• Saga by Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples
• Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O’Malley
• Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky
• Sex Fantasy by Sophia Foster Dimino
• Silver Surfer by Dan Slott and Michael Allred
• Sir Alfred no. 3 by Tim Hensley
• Smile by Raina Telgemeier
• Smut Peddler 2012 Edition by Rebecca Ruby, Megan Furesz, Trisha L. Sebastian, Erin Basie, M. Magdalene, Mr. Darcy, Betty Jean Doe, Nora Riley, Kel McDonald, Rennie Kingsley, Erika Moen, Leia Weathington, Algesiras, Dwam, Argets, Ursula Wood, Jennifer Doyle, E.K. Weaver, Magnolia Porter, Shari Hes, Steve Horton, Erica Leigh Currey, Alice Fox, B. White, Ambrosia, Alice Hunt, Dechanique, Carla Speed McNeil, Karate McDanger, Jess Fink, Blue Delliquanti, Nechama Frier, Pupcake Jones, Lee Blauersouth, Abby Lark, Theo Lorenz, C. Spike Trotman, Diana Nock, Amanda Lafrenais
• Southern Bastards by Jason Aaron, Jason Latour
• Spider-Gwen by Jason Latour, Robbi Rodriguez
• Sunburning by Keiler Robert
• Sunny by Taiyo Matsumoto
• Super Late Bloomer by Julia Kaye
• The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew
• The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui
• The Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg
• The End of the F@(U$*#+g World by Charles Forsman
• The Fifth Beatle by Vivek Tiwary, Andrew Robinson
• The Hard Tomorrow by Eleanor Davis
• The Hospital Suite by John Porcellino
• The Immortal Hulk by Al Ewing, Joe Bennett
• The Love Bunglers by Jaime Hernandez
• The Multiversity by Grant Morrison, Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Chris Sprouse, Karl Story, Walden Wong, Ben Oliver, Frank Quitely
• The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon
• Nemo by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
• The Nib by Matt Bors and a cast of thousands
• The Oven by Sophie Goldstein
• The Passion Of Gengoroh Tagame by Bruno Gmuender
• The Private Eye by Brian K. Vaughan, Marcos Martin
• The Property by Rutu Modan
• The River At Night by Kevin Huizenga
• The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman, JH Williams III and Dave Stewart
• The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm
• The Vision by Tom King, Gabriel Walta, Jordie Bellaire
• The Walking Dead #193 by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard
• The Wicked + The Divine by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie
• This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
• Thor by Jason Aaron, Russell Dauterman

2013: A Highly Personal Top 10 List

Robert Boyd

Usually top 10 lists are about one type of thing. Top 10 movies, top 10 books, etc. In the past we've run best-of lists for visual art and performance art. This year, I decided to follow Griel Marcus's example and just list anything I wanted, regardless of genre. This blog is still an art blog, however, so art dominates the list. But it's not all art exhibits. These are exhibits, books, comics, etc., that appealed to me mightily this year.

The list is not in any particular order. There are many items on the "honorable mention" list that could easily have gone in the top 10 list if I thought about it long enough. And these items reflect both my own taste, idiosyncratic as it may be, and what I had access to. (I'm always impressed by critics who seem to have, for example, seen every movie released in a given year. But I'm an amateur part-time art critic, and I know I missed some great exhibits in the past year.) So the way to view this list is not as a top 10 list but rather as a list of things that I considered good in 2013.



Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible, curated by Claire Elliot and Robert Gober (The Menil) and Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle by Chuck Smith (powerHouse Books)

It was a Forrest Bess year for me this year. The Menil put together a fine exhibit, which included within it an exhibit originally curated by Robert Gober for the Whitney Biennial. I suspect that the exhibit was what prompted Chuck Smith to turn his 1999 documetary into a book. The documentary is good, but the book is so much better--including complete texts of many Forrest Bess letters and tons of photographs. For me, the exhibit and the book inspired three posts that I'm proud of--first a review of the show, then a recounting of legendary newspaperman Sig Byrd's visit with Bess, and finally an account of my attempt to find the location of Bess's long-gone shack on East Matagorda Bay.



12 Events by the Art Guys

The Art Guys have been a partnership for 30 years. This year, they decided to step away from the baroque style of their more recent projects and do 12 "simple" events. Some involved endurance (walking the length of Little York, the longest street in Houston; doing standup comedy for 8 hours straight), some involved repeating the same absurd action over and over (riding around the 610 Loop over and over for 24 hours; walking around the crosswalks at the intersection of Westheimer and Hillcroft for 8 hours); and some were sui generis (wearing portable fences as they walked around city hall; moving objects counterclockwise from the southernmost, westernmost, northernmost and easternmost points of the city). They concluded by restaging their first event, The Art Guys Agree on Painting, as The Art Guys Agree On Painting, Again, This Time From Thirty Feet Up. 12 Events wasn't just a celebration of their long partnership, it was a tribute to the site of that partnership, the city of Houston.



The Property by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly)

This graphic novel (which I reviewed here) by Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan took the form of a madcap romantic comedy (a delightful one) to deal with the fraught issue of the history of relations between Polish Jews and Gentiles. (See Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945by Tony Judt for a grimmer recitation of this distressing history.) The opening and closing scenes on the airplane (coming to Poland and returning to Israel demonstrate the duality between frivolity and seriousness that typifies the story. Of course, it helps that the art is beautiful and the visual storytelling lively. It's Modan's best comic from a career of excellent work, and it suggests where she can go in the future. My main worry now is that she may end up seduced away from comics to film--Modan would be a great screenwriter/director.



Sean Shim-Boyle's Salt House at Project Row Houses

To describe what Sean Shim-Boyle did with his Project Row Houses installation is to minimize its impact on the viewer. Nonetheless, here goes. Shim-Boyle took inherent elements of the row house and limited his installation to minimal use of existing elements. Specifically he put a second chimney in and added a new light source in the floor. But the magic was actually being in the space. The angled chimney was uncannily like the original chimney, and by its position made the familiar boxy room of the row house utterly strange. Devon Britt-Darby wrote in Art + Culture Texas, "The criss-crossing lines created by the chimneys, the beams, the windows and shadows give seemingly every vantage point an enchanting division of spaces that cries out for a viewfinder."


Hillerbrand+Magsamen, untitled, 2013, plastic toys, mostly from McDonalds Happy Meals, dimensions variable

Hillerbrand+Magsamen's Stuffed at Brand 10 Artspace

When I saw the above piece in Fort Worth, I instantly thought of Richard Long circles of slate. Long's work suggests to me the deep geologic time of the earth. Hillerbrand+Magsamen's Happy Meal toy version suggests another kind of time--call it "mess time"--the tiny period of time it takes for children to spread toys evenly over the floor space of one's home. It's work that makes you smile, but it also makes you think about the stuff that fills our lives. Mary Magsamen and Stephen Hillerbrand often use their two children in their work (they should get credit!), and much of the work is about being a suburban nuclear family. (I wonder how their work will change when their kids enter adolescence. So far, though, they seem like real good sports about working with mom and dad.) This exhibit was especially about the possessions that fill up a suburban home--the piles of stuff that fill a house, end up in garage sales, Good Will stores, and landfills. It was a playfully absurd exhibit.


Jeremy DePrez, left: Untitled (Milton), 2013, oil and wax on canvas, 82 x 36 inches; and right: Untitled (Harriet), 2013, acrylic on canvas, 82 x 36 inches

Jeff Elrod's and Jeremy Deprez's Fantasy Island at Texas Gallery 

I'm not going to pretend I really understand Jeremy DePrez's artwork. On the contrary, I feel like whenever I try to analyze it, I fall flat on my face. That was the case when I looked at his work in his MFA exhibit, and it was the case when I saw his paintings in the Boredom show at Lawndale. I wish I could say I had an "aha!" moment seeing his work displayed with Jeff Elrod's at Texas Gallery. But I did have a revelation: whatever it is that DePrez is doing, I like it. The slightly irregular look of his canvases in this show (the stretchers weren't straight, the parallel lines were broken up) gives the work a carefully constructed feeling of slackness. They get it right by not getting it right. Oh, and the Jeff Elrods were excellent, too.



Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize by Sean B. Carroll  (Crown)

Germany invaded France on May 10, 1940, and in just over a month defeated the French and British armies there. Albert Camus was the editor of a French Resistance newspaper called Combat. Jacques Monod, a biologist, was recruited into the Resistance group Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. When the various Resistance organizations were joined under an umbrella organization, the French Forces of the Interior, Monod was the chief of staff. The writer and biologist didn't meet each other until after the war, however, when they became close friends. Camus continued to write and remained an activist, turning against Communism in the face of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Monod fought a public battle against the ideologically-motivated Soviet pseudo-science of genetics known as Lysenkoism. Camus died in a car accident in 1960 shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in literature. Monod went on to win a Nobel Prize in medicine for his pioneering genetics work. Only a brief portion of the book that considers the personal friendship of the two men. Instead, Carroll weaves their life stories into the history of the French Resistance, the Hungarian rebellion, the study of genes, etc. In addition to showing the intersections between these two brilliant men, this book manages to show how the advances in biology in the period from just before World War II through the 60s are as much a part of history as anything else--that despite the split of the humanities and science into "two cultures," it is possible to consider them together fruitfully. I could not put Brave Genius down once I started--it was the most compelling book I read all year.



Brandon Araujo's exhibit at Domy Books and New Paintings by Brandon, Dylan, Guillaume and Isaiah at Spring Street Studios

Araujo's paintings have sneaked up on me over the course of the year. I know I have probably seen his work before, but the first time I noticed was at the exhibit at Domy (it was really a "Brandon" show, but Domy was still there). And I wasn't totally sure what to think about it. Then I saw more of his work in the Spring Street group show and finally visited his studio during Artcrawl. Araujo is an artist who is working out his own style, but he is also one whose work has a relationship to work by other artists around his age in Houston. So trying to understand his work is related to the task of trying to understand the work of some of his peers (among whom, the artists in the Spring Street show--Dylan Roberts, Guillaume Gelot and Isaiah López). But these artists aren't the germ of some regional school of painters--there are artists all over who are working in similar areas of abstract painting--Nathan Green, for example. They are sometimes called New Casualists or New Provisionalists. I'm a little loathe to put Araujo in that pigeonhole, particularly so early in his career. I can't put my finger on what I like about it, but the thing is, every time I see his work, I want to see more.


Ken Price, Pastel, 1995, fired and painted clay, 14.5 x 15 x 14 in.

Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center

If you read much about contemporary art, you will have seen over the past few decades a reduction of discussion of craftsmanship in the conversation. This goes doubly so for arts that are traditionally considered part of the craft tradition. But the considerable rise in the critical fortunes of Ken Price recently suggests that the the fortunes of craft may be changing. Price, who died in 2012 just a few months before his retrospective opened at LACMA, was one of the artists associated with the Ferus Gallery. His work has a jazzy West Coast vibe. It's playful and fun. As a ceramicist, Price would make overtures to the traditions of the crafts (his highly abstracted "cups," for example) but was also quite willing to toss tradition completely overboard when it suited him. Seeing a lifetime's work from Price was one of the best museum experiences I had all year.



Sam Zabel and The Magic Pen by Dylan Horrocks

This is an incomplete comics narrative. Every now and then, Horrocks will throw up a new page on his website. He just posted page 103. The first page was posted in 2009. So why call this a 2013 work? I've been following it for quite a while with great pleasure, but it was this year that it really electrified me. The very first page in 2013 plops the protagonist Sam in the middle of an orgy with 50 beautiful green Venusian women (the page reproduced above is the only "SFW" page from that sequence). Now if someone had described this too me, I'd say it sounded like a lame pile of adolescent fantasy wish-fulfillment, and I certainly wouldn't imagine that a cartoonist as sensitive and possessing of moral rectitude as Dylan Horrocks would draw such a thing. And yet, here it is. It isn't ironic--it's eroticism is meant to be erotic. But within the context of the narrative, it works--especially as you see how the rest of 2013's pages unfold. Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is about the ability of comics to be wish fulfillment. The first part is essentially realistic, a story of a blocked cartoonist. But there is an abrupt switch to the fantastic, specifically magic realism in the sense of Italo Calvino.This feels like it is shaping up to be a sequel of sorts to Hicksville, Horrock's graphic novel that posited that there was an secret art history of comics. That Horrocks continually creates major works about cartoonists and comics may seem solopsistic, and the character Sam does in many ways seem to be a stand-in for Horrocks himself. But the work is playful in the same way that If on a winter's night a traveler is playful, and that draws me in.

Honorable mention

• 9.5 Thesis on Art by Ben Davis (Haymarket Books)
• Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me directed by Drew DeNicola and Oliva Mori 
• Inside Llewyn Davis directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
• The Core Fellows exhibit at the Glassell School of Art featuring Andrea Behm, Anna Elise Johnson, Jang Soon Im, Madsen Minax, Miguel Amat, Ronny Quevedo, Senalka McDonald and Tatiana Istomina
• North of South, East of West directed by Meredith Danluck
• The uncontrollable nature of grief and forgiveness (or lack of) by Kathryn Kelley (Art League)
• Within Without the Space of a Corner by Nick Kersulis (Devin Borden Gallery)
• Tracing Our Pilgrimage by Kermit Oliver (Art League)
• Ad Reinhardt: How to Look: Art Comics with an essay by Robert Storr  (Hatje Cantz/David Zwirner)
• Not How It Happened by Joel Ross and Jason Creps (Tiny Park) 
• A chain of non-events by Katie Wynne (Lawndale) 
• World Map Room by Yuichi Yokoyama (PictureBox)
• Zinefest 

Report from the Golden Age of Art Comics: Geneviève Castrée, Peter Bagge, Rutu Modan and Brian Ralph

Robert Boyd

I've read a considerable number of comics recently. I'm going to try to discuss a few of them every week, and I've been thinking about a way to organize them. "In the order that I read them" was my default choice, and "randomly" was considered. But I decided to group them as much as possible by publisher.

Doing this gives a small claim of authorship to the publisher, which may rub some readers wrong. To claim any authorship for the publishers sounds a little like the corporate comics published by Marvel and DC and Archie--comics where the corporation owns the work and the artists who create the work are replaceable cogs. That arrangement, where a corporation has legal authorship, has come to really disgust me over the past few years. But that's not what I'm talking about in these reviews.

Instead, I'm thinking about the roles of gatekeepers or taste-makers that occur in any kind of art. I'm talking about the impresarios. In comics, they're the publishers and editors. In theater and movies they're the producers. In visual art, it's the gallerists and curators. And so forth. Publishers over time develop a particular voice based on the kinds of projects they choose to take on. They are in business to make money, sure, but to reduce the motivation of a publisher of art comics to money is simply ridiculous. No one gets rich publishing art comics. At best you can survive if you run a lean operation and have a good eye.

One of the great survivors is Drawn & Quarterly. Founded in Montreal in 1990, their first successful artists were Julie Doucet, Joe Matt, Chester Brown and Seth, followed soon by Adrian Tomine. Although all these artists were quite different (and became more different as they developed as artists), they all did fairly unflinching autobiographical comics--and popularized a genre that came to define art comics in the 90s. It would be unfair to characterize all of Drawn & Quarterly's output as low-key autobiographical comics, but enough of it was that they got a reputation for autobiography. (As you will see, only one of the four comics below is autobiographical.) Drawn & Quarterly has evolved quite a lot over time, but one big reason for the change in flavor is the addition of Tom Devlin as the company's second editor (after founder Chris Oliveros).

Devlin ran a small publisher called Highwater Books in Boston and New York from 1997 to 2004. He had a very firm and peculiar aesthetic philosophy--the comics he published were precious objects, they weren't realistic (and in that regard quite different from many of Drawn & Quarterly's main comics), they were often quite experimental. When he was brought into the Drawn & Quarterly fold, at first he was a bit shy about pushing his tastes. But books that to my eye seem very much like "Devlin" books started to pop up. Here's a story that will illustrate this. Back in the early days of Highwater (late 90s), I was visiting him and he gave me a set of photocopies of a comic strip I had never heard of. It was Moomin, drawn by the great Finnish children's author Tove Jannson. It was crisply photocopied and bound (Devlin worked part time at a copy shop). He had discovered this strip--a masterpiece of wry, humanist humor and whimsy--and was eager to share it with cartoonists and other editors like me. Then in 2006, Drawn & Quarterly came out with the first of many official Moomin comic strip book collections, Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip. Obviously this was Devlin's baby.

This goes back to the "authorship" of publishers. It's inevitable that Drawn & Quarterly would evolve as a publisher, but when a small publisher brings on a new acquiring editor like Tom Devlin, the flavor of its overall output will sharply change. It's what a publisher chooses to publish that defines its voice, and that voice changes as the personnel that make up a publisher changes. (I wonder, for example, how Fantagraphics will change now that Kim Thompson has died.) The four reviews below will give you an idea of the range of what Drawn & Quarterly is currently publishing. I would say that Susceptible is definitely an Oliveros acquisition, and Reggie-12 is a Devlin acquisition. The other two? Who knows and really, who cares--they're all Drawn & Quarterly books in the end.


Susceptible by Geneviève Castrée (Drawn & Quarterly, 2012). Susceptible is an exceptional example of autobiographical comics and therefore fits in with Drawn & Quarterly's historical profile. And according to an interview with Castrée, she was asked to do something by publisher Chris Oliveros in 2001--back when autobiographical comics were more prominent in Drawn & Quarterly's list. By 2012, Susceptible is an odd book out in terms of content, but in terms of quality, it fits right in.



Geneviève Castrée, Susceptible page 27

The book deals with Castrée's life from birth until she's 18. In the book Castrée is called Goglu, her mother's nickname for her. Above we see her when she was 6, after having a nightmare about Marc Lépine's anti-feminist massacre of 14 women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. This anchors her story in time, but generally the depiction of time in the story is more personal. It could be the story of a North American child from anytime in the past 30-odd years. Castrée is being raised by a single mother in Montreal. Her father is in British Columbia, "a mythical kingdom where dads go to disappear."

Her mother is quite young, an accountant who put off getting a college education because of Goglu. She drinks quite a lot and has a somewhat chaotic life that Castrée recoils from.


Geneviève Castrée, Susceptible page 36, top tier

The book is episodic and there are a lot of captions setting the scene. However, she mostly avoids analyzing the scene from the point of view of her 30-year-old self. While her means of expression are sophisticated and adult, she is writing about the perceptions of a child. So her reaction to her mom drinking and taking drugs is rationalized by the fact that drugs are illegal. This is a 10-year-old's world. A 30-year-old would have a different way of thinking about what it meant to have a passive-aggressive alcoholic mother.


Geneviève Castrée, Susceptible page 37

Her panels are spare--no more visible information in included than necessary. This means there are a lot of panels like the top two, where there are figures and nothing else. After establishing the reality of the piggyback ride in the first two panels, Castrée only needs a barrage of speech balloons in the middle. But in the bottom two panels, she shows the stairs to remind the reader of the distance she is trying to keep from the intoxicated adults upstairs.


Geneviève Castrée, Susceptible page 67

As Castrée becomes a teenager, she has a typically contentious relationship with her mother that is complicated by her mother's drinking. She is sent to therapy, where her councilors eventually tell her to tough it out a couple of more years and move out. Not exactly the most empathetic advice, but realistic. At 17, she moves to that mythical land of BC, to a rural part of Vancouver Island to live with her father. Despite having the fact that they've only seen each other once since she was 5, he takes her in and builds her a small cabin so she can have solitude.

 
Geneviève Castrée, Susceptible page75

When she turns 18, she moves back to Montreal for a summer, where the above scene takes place. Again, the spare panels (leaving out the borders this time). Castrée's story is both personal and typical of childhood in the late 20th century. Lots of readers will find plenty to identify with. Her drawing is very appealing, combining aspects of classic French language comics (which she read from an early age) and the comics that came out of the North American alternative and self-published comics scene--I see strong similarities with Julie Doucet's and John Porcelino's work. But her work feels a little more grounded than those two artists, who are respectively more surreal and more poetic than Castrée. While Susceptible is within the tradition of autobiographical comics, it is a strongly individualistic work. Its rhythms are unusual but appropriate. Curiously, her technique of presenting a string of episodes is precisely how Peter Bagge structures his otherwise very different book, Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story.


Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story by Peter Bagge (Drawn & Quarterly, 2013). Peter Bagge is best known for his two comic book series from the 80s and 90s, Neat Stuff and Hate. These were humorous fictional comics, but after the end of Hate, he started dabbling in non-fictional reportage in such venues as Suck and Reason. This practice evolved into a series of short comics about America's  founding fathers. Throughout, he maintained his rubbery cartoon drawing style and his humor. Woman Rebel is not strictly a biography in comics form of Margaret Sanger but instead a series of episodes from her life, mostly one and two pages long. Bagge follows the 72 pages of comics with a 20-page prose appendix, which provides a context for each of the episodes. The comic section and the appendix together form a pretty decent biography of Sanger.

 
Peter Bagge, Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story page 14

Bagge's drawing is pretty much the same as when he was drawing Hate--highly stylized humorous faces, figures with no joints in their arms and legs. But the writing is not always humorous--as in this scene where Sanger and the doctor she works for visit a woman who tried to give herself an abortion and nearly killed herself. But what's great about Woman Rebel is how frequently Bagge is able to turn episodes of her life into comedy, such as this bizarre scene where she meets pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis.


Peter Bagge, Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story page 31

As is spelled out in the forward by Thomas Spurgeon (which is practically a review of the book the reader is about to read), Bagge "portrays Sanger as a comedic protagonist, as someone with an inflated sense of self and a whole list of appetites and specific desires to fulfill on her way from cradle to grave." We're not used to seeing biographies like this. In books, modern biography tends toward encyclopedic documentation (particularly of every fault and stumble). In film, hagiography is the norm. The notion that the life of an important and accomplished person like Margaret Sanger could be told in a voice that resembles, say, Eastbound & Down doesn't enter our consciousness. But Bagge already has a great narrative voice, and Woman Rebel proves that he can apply it to the most unlikely subjects.

 
Peter Bagge, Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story page 51


Sanger, of course, was the leading proponent of contraception in the early 20th century. Her own mother had 18 pregnancies, and the lack of control that women had over their own bodies often lead to tragedy, as seen in the sequence on pages 14 and 15. Her crusade was opposed strongly by the Catholic Church (and other religious institutions) and the U.S. Postal service, which repeatedly seized Sanger's publications and pamphlets.

 
Peter Bagge, Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story page 55

Her reputation now is a bit frayed because of attacks on her from the right and the left. The right excoriates her for founding Planned Parenthood and in general for being in favor of contraception. The right has a problem with female agency in general, and certainly with sexually adventurous persons like Sanger. On the left, there is her support for eugenics (which was quite tepid, as depicted on page 55), her speech to the Ku Klux Klan women's auxiliary and her clinic in Harlem, for which she has been accused of wanting to wipe out the black race. (When I typed "Margaret Sanger" into Google, the third link was "Black Genocide," which accused Sanger of just that; the fifth link was a harangue against her radicalism by a neo-John Birch-ite website called "Discover the Network"; and the sixth link from a site called "LifeNews" basically accused her of being pro-infanticide.) I think her "shot by both sides" status  must have appealed to Bagge. He depicts Sanger's mission as helping women gain control of their own reproductive systems--whether those women were Catholocs, Ku Klux Klanners or African American.

 
Peter Bagge, Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story page 56

 
Peter Bagge, Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story page 63

Sanger lived long enough to see the contraceptive pill, which represents the fulfillment of her long struggle (not that reactionaries don't continue to fight against contraception, of course). But despite her success, I think she remains too controversial a figure to be taught in high school American History classes. (Hell, we're lucky that the Texas State Board of Education permits mentioning the abolitionists and suffragettes.) So a book like this is useful for schlubs like me who had only a vague notion of what she was all about.

Bagge humanizes Sanger and places her in the context of her times. But more important, he creates an utterly amusing and engrossing story. He's funny all the way through (even in the appendix), and that's what I look for is a Bagge comic.


The Property by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly, 2013). Rutu Modan was a member of an Israeli comics collective called Actus Tragicus that published beautiful comics in the 90s and 2000s. Her work then was very stylized, so for longtime readers it was quite a shock when she started working in the style she employs in The Property. The figures are simplified in the ligne clair style, but otherwise much more realistic than her earlier work. And apparently Modan used a lot of photographic sources--she credits "comic actors" for all the characters in the back of the book, including her Actus Tragicus colleagues Yirmi Pinkus and Batia Kolton.


Rutu Modan, The Property page 10

The story is built around a trip to Poland by Regina and Mica Segal, grandmother and granddaughter respectively. They share their plane with a school trip for Isreali teenagers to see the sites of the Holocaust. As you can see above, the teenagers aren't getting into the spirit of the thing. (At the end of the book, Regina and Mica are returning to Israel on the same plane as the high schoolers, who are now much more somber.) The story ostensibly involves the recovery of property by Regina that had been taken by the Nazis in the war. This sounds like a very depressing story, but what's amazing and delightful about it is that despite this background, it's actually comedy of errors, a romantic comedy spanning three generations.


Rutu Modan, The Property page 10 detail

Mica meets a tour guide named Tomasz, and over the course of seven days, their relationship swings wildly between attraction and misunderstood motives. But at first at least, they find each other fascinating. Modan uses Tomasz to wryly comment on comics as art and the sense of incomprehension that this notion evokes in the average person.


Rutu Modan, The Property page 88 detail

Tomasz's sketchbook becomes a plot point in the story. To give his comics a different look, Modan had another excellent Israeli cartoonist, Asaf Hanuka, do all of Tomasz's drawings.


Rutu Modan, The Property page 89 detail

The irony is that this conversation suggests a dichotomy between "serious" comics and "humorous" comics--but The Property straddles that division. It has a level of sophistication that you don't often see in comics. This is a comic for adults.


Rutu Modan, The Property page 100

The fly in the ointment in this story is Avram Yagodnik, a busybody who, for mysterious reasons, keeps interfering in Mica's search for the property. His part in the story slowly unfolds, as does Regina's. Like classic comedies from Shakespeare to the present, all the characters in The Property except the ingenue Mica have secrets that don't quite unfold until the end. It may be too much to say that the contentious romantic entanglements in The Property represent the contentious relationship between Polish Gentiles and Jews. Suffice it to say, it's not just Mica and Tomasz who have a complicated romance. I don't want to spoil the story, so I won't write more.


Rutu Modan, The Property page 184

For comics to mature as a medium, they have to include stories like this--stories that might remind one of the novels of David Lodge or Allison Lurie. Serious works about the absurdity of human relationships that happen to be humorous. The Property is a deeply enjoyable comic.


Reggie 12 by Brian Ralph (Drawn & Quarterly, 2013). Brian Ralph was a founding member of the artists collective Fort Thunder, which spawned such artists, collectives and bands as Forcefield (including Mat Brinkman and Jim Drain) and Lightning Bolt (which includes Brian Chippendale). Ralph was the first artist to get a solo publication from Highwater Books, and he has now had three books published by Drawn & Quarterly including his latest, Reggie 12.

 
Brian Ralph, Reggie-12 page 12, bottom half

Reggie 12 is a robot in the mode of Astro-Boy. The strips poke gentle all-ages fun at the conventions of classic manga (as well as American comics). Most of these strips originally ran in the magazine Giant Robot, which itself was full of ironic appreciation for Japanese pop culture.

 
Brian Ralph, Reggie-12 page 40

Ralph playfully inverts the cliches of the comics he bases Reggie 12 on. But love for the originals comes through. Parody can be a critique of the source or an homage (and often a combination of the two). Reggie 12 veers closer to the homage end of the spectrum.


Brian Ralph, Reggie-12 page 4, top half

Often he includes homages to other comics. The maple syrup monster Landark appears to be a kind of tribute to the comics of his Fort Thunder compatriot Mat Brinkman.


Brian Ralph, Reggie-12 page 16

And the "Space Gods" above are a deliberate reference to Jack Kirby's 70s comic, The Eternals. Reggie 12 must fight against Jemiah the Analyzer, which is the actual name of a Celestial (the giant space gods in The Eternals). It doesn't go well for Jemiah.

  
Brian Ralph, Reggie-12 page 18

These comics are dynamic, clever and funny. They are quite a long way from Drawn & Quarterly's realistic roots and are therefore a good example of how the company has grown and evolved over the years.