ATOMIC BOOKS BEST COMICS OF 2011 LISTS
This year, Atomic Books asked a bunch of cartoonist friends to pick their favorite comics of 2011. These are their lists.
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TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2011
by Benn Ray
1. THE INDIE CRED TEST by Henry H. Owings/The Chunklet Staff
Billed as "Everything you need to know about everything you need to know." And it's true. This book from the Chunklet folks (full disclosure - I'm a proud contributing editor), is like the Indie Cred SAT. Page after page of tests for you to take. Each quiz question is, in Chunklet fashion, a joke. This may be the perfect bathroom reading. I've already been through the book 4 times, and I still find new jokes, stuff I missed before, etc.
The Indie Cred Test takes the piss out of all facets of Indie Culture - music, movies, literature, fashion... hell just writing this makes me want to pick my well-worn copy back up and start thumbing through it again.
2. OUT OF THE VINYL DEEPS by Ellen Willis
Originally, I thought this book was going to be just another collection of self-important, Boomer-era rock criticism, with a slightly more pretentious edge since Willis was a writer for the New Yorker. I love being wrong. It's a collection of insightful essays by someone who is genuinely excited about music and the role it used to play in culture. And it's especially interesting to look back and see how certain godlike bands were seen at the time of their peak. Willis gave me the vocabulary to address a problem I see in modern music (clearly it's not a new problem) - Songs of Me versus Songs of We. And I don't recall ever reading, for example, a more perfect take on one of my favorite bands, The Velvet Undergound:
"In the midst of all this euphoria the Velvet Underground began performing in New York's East Village with Andy Warhol's mixed media show, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Their publicity, which ran to phrases like "a total bombardment of the sense," suggested that the Velvets were yet another psychedelic band - and in a way they were. But their brand of sensory bombardment could not have been more at odds with the era of good feeling. Their terrain was the city at its hardest and sleaziest. Their music was as painful as it was compelling, assaulting the ear with excruciating distortion and chaotic noise barely contained by the repetitive rhythms of rock and roll. Their themes were perversity, desperation and death. Instead of celebrating psychedelic trips, they showed us the devastating power, horror, and false transcendence of heroin addiction; they dared to intimate that sadomasochism might have more to do with their - and our - reality than universal love. Musically, as well as verbally, they insisted that the possibility, far from being limitless, was continually being stifled and foreclosed. At a time when hippie rock musicians were infatuated with the spontaneous jam, the Velvets' music was cerebral, stylized. They maintained a poignant ironic tension between the tight, formal structure of the songs and their bursts of raw noise, between their high artfulness and their street-level content, between fatalism and rebellion."
See? Doesn't it make you fall in love with the Velvet Underground all over again? And that's one thing that good rock criticism (like Greil Marcus) does, it makes you excited for music. But the other thing it does is it puts the music of a time into a cultural context, and we need critics who do more than say something is good or bad - we need critics to help us understand the significance of what we're listening to, and few did it as well as Willis.
As she explained, "I was interested in writing about rock and roll as an expression of a radical cultural and political force. To be honest, it became divorced from all those things for me in the eighties. I moved on to feminism and politics."
In the end, rock music broke Willis' heart. And it can, and will, only do that to those who love it.
3. WHY DO WE KILL? by Kelvin Sewell/Stephen Janis
This book doesn't succeed so much in answering the title's question (and works better when it doesn't try to), but what it does do is present a lot of fascinating cop stories from Sewell's time with the Baltimore Police. In the first half of the book, each chapter is criminal case study that speaks to the issues Baltimore city residents face. For the longest time I've felt relatively safe in Baltimore. I'm not involved with the drug game, so I figured I was less likely to be in danger. Sewell's book reveals the delusion I've been under - much of the crime shown here was conducted by pyschopaths - and no matter where we go, suburbs, cities, farms, there are always psychopaths - and at this point, there's very little that can be done about them.
4. THE PSYCHOPATH TEST by JON RONSON
This book kept me up a night. 1 percent of the population is a psychopath. So that means 1 out every 100 of my friends is a psychopath. But which ones? I have some ideas about a few, but what about the others? Am I a psychopath? Well, the good news is, if you're worried you might be a psychopath, you're not one. Psychopaths have different brains than most of us, and they can't feel empathy - so they learn how to mimick it in order to manipulate. Ronson goes on a fascinating adventure, meeting psychopaths and trained psychopath detectors, dealing with Scientologists, etc. 80% of most of the violence and chaos in prisons are created by a small percentage of psychopaths. Psychopaths see the world as a game they must win. As a result, they are attracted to positions of power. In fact, it's believed that the concentration of psychopaths in Wall Street, governemnet, big corporate business and church heirarchy is 5 times greater than the general population. If such a small percentage can create so much chaos in prisons - imagine what they're doing to the economy, politics, ect. See? It'll keep you up at night too.
5. SELECTED UNPUBLISHED BLOG POSTS OF A MEXIAN PANDA EXPRESS EMPLOYEE by MEGAN BOYLE
More than one of my favorite books of poetry in years, this is one of my favorite books. Funny. Dark. Personal. Boyle's book is about what it means to be alive. Right now. Boyle displays a voice that is as fresh and relevant as any I recall hearing.
6. THE PDT COCKTAIL BOOK by JIM MEEHAN / CHRIS GALL
This is more than a cocktail book. This book is a revolution. Exquisitely designed. Beautifully packaged. Impeccably researched. Now you too can make cocktails as perfect as those served in the famed PDT bar. Easy to follow recipes, loads of great advice - and this book is still super-difficult to find. And for good reason. PDT is the cocktail recipe book that all others should aspire to be.
7. THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME by DONALD RAY POLLOCK
Brutal, bleak, startling, loaded with oddball characters. Imagine Katherine Dunn writing an Elmore Leonard novel set in Appalachia, toss in a smidge of Harry Crews, and you sort of get the idea here. A solid read, and Pollock's fictional Knockemstiff brings to mind a modern, gritty version of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. This is Pollock's second book and his first novel. He's definitely a talent to watch.
8. STUCK UP! by RICH E. DREBEN M.D. / MURDOC KNIGHT M.D. / MARTY A. SINDHIAN M.D.
Really, it's a simple concept for a book - a collection of xrays of people who have managed to shove all sorts of objects up inside their bodies. But it really is meserizing. Each xray is accompanied by an explanation of how this could happen (no, not instructions), the commonality of this type of incident, etc. It'll haunt you.
9. LUCKY PEACH by MCSWEEENEY'S
Okay, not a book - a series of periodicals (two so far) - but so, so good. Who say magazines are dead? McSweeney's teams up with David Chang (Momofuku) to create the best food publication. Insights into cooking, fun with chef's, recipes, theory, you name it. All uniquely designed.
10. I WANT MY HAT BACK by Jon Klassen
Yes, yes, it's a kid's book. But damn it's a good kid's book. I don't know a single adult who has read this book and not loved it. It's the story of a bear, looking for his hat. And the moral to the story? Being an asshole is contagious.
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TOP 10 GRAPHIC NOVELS OF 2011
by Benn Ray
1. LOVE & ROCKETS: NEW STORIES #4 by LOS BROS HERNANDEZ
Jaime's return to his Maggie character is masterful. His story carries the emotional weight of catching up with old friends. His artwork has never been more perfect. In fact, "perfect" is the only word I can think of to use to describe Jaime's work here. I've long had respect for Jaime, and I feel like his Maggie and Hopey characters came of age with me in the '90s every bit as much as Peter Bagge's Buddy Bradley. But this issue has made me a convert. I've never seen such perfect cartooning. There it is again, that word. "Perfect".
2. THE DEATH-RAY by DANIEL CLOWES
A pretty reworking of the last issue of Clowes landmark comic series Eightball, into an over-sized graphic novel. This is a superhero comic by someone who doesn't care for superheroes, and it's better than any superhero comic has been in years. Cynical, dark, it's total Clowes!
3. MISTER WONDERFUL by DANIEL CLOWES
On the flipside of Clowes' Death-Ray is Mister Wonderful. Not only can Clowes be sharp, biting and cynical - here he shows he can be sweet, funny and play with our expectations as well as anyone. Mister Wonderful, the story of a trying blind date is shockingly, yes I say "shockingly" optimisitic, utterly charming and completely Clowes.
4. PAYING FOR IT by CHESTER BROWN
Brown's Paying For It has two things going on. One is a borderline-journalistic, biographical comic on the life of Johns and prostitutes. The other is a sort of a manifesto for the decriminalization of prostitution. The autobiographical side is masterful and engaging. The manifesto side allows rational thought to be clouded by impractical libertarian ideology. Regardless, Brown's nugget of a book stokes an intersting conversation worth having.
5. SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE by ADRIAN TOMINE
Originally produced as a gift for wedding attendees, what superficially seems like a novelty is actualy one of Tomine's most accomplished books. Here his art is more Peanuts-eqsue cartoony, and his story is more personal. I want to see more of this Tomine.
6. LIFE WITH MR. DANGEROUS by PAUL HORNSCHEMEIER
Paul tells the story of Amy - an aimless twentysomething with a pointless retail job, a mother who doesn't seem to realize she's grown-up, a boyfriend who doesn't seem to care that she breaks up with him and a fixation for a cartoon called Mr. Dangerous. Paul's art is as confident and stylized as ever, and his story speaks to an age many of us have shared.
7. DAYBREAK by BRIAN RALPH
This collection of Brian's Daybreak series is a gorgeous package. The story reads like a indie art-house zombie film, told from the first person perspective. It's a one-of-a-kind zombie book.
8. BLACK EYE #1 by RYAN STANDFEST (ed.)
My rule about anthologies is that they are only ever as good as the weakest story in the collection. Well, there isn't a stinker in the lot here. I've long fantasized about constructing my perfect anthology book, in the spirit of Raw, Zap, etc. And goddamn it Standfest's Black Eye doesn't look a helluva a lot like something I wish I had done. This book fills me with envy. And I love it.
9. POGO VOL. 1 by WALT KELLY
When Fantagraphics began their series of Peanuts archival releases, I was surprised at how many of my favorite cartoonists took the opportunity to wax nostalgic for the formulaic genius that was Charles M. Schulz. This year I was also shocked at how quiet many of those very same cartoonists were about Fantagraphics finally getting around to releasing the first volume of Kelly's Pogo. What the hell? This is epic, profoundly influential masterpiece material here. I guess there's just no substitute for the predictability of Charlie Brown not being able to kick that football. Good grief!
10. BIG QUESTIONS by ANDERS NILSEN
This huge tome collects the meditative, cerebral and wonderfully illustrated Big Questions series by Nilsen. Just beautiful.
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BEST COMICS OF 2011
by Eric Allen Hatch
Blammo # 7 by Noah Van Sciver
Blammo channels the great “indie” (ugh) “comix” (argh) of the 1990s. If you miss the wit and variety of Eightball, the unrelenting miserablism of Schizo, and the nakedly frank letters columns of both, Blammo is here for you. With each issue, Van Sciver has also refined his own style and voice, and this issue is both his most generous and his most creatively realized yet.
Hate Annual# 9 by Peter Bagge
What did we do to deserve new full issues of both Hate and Optic Nerve this year? Those of you who gave up checking the “H” shelf at Atomic years ago, take this as a head’s up that the longest new Buddy story in a decade is also quite good.
Ishi’s Brain by Eamon Espey
Much like our music scene, Baltimore has seen an explosion of first-rate comic artists over the last decade. Espey may well be my favorite, with work that manages to exude classical and lysergic vibes at once. Ishi’s Brain blends mystical and sci-fi elements into a tour-de-force narrative that also happens to be almost completely non-verbal.
I Want You # 2 by Lisa Hanawalt
Lisa Hanawalt’s work puts a new spin on the human-body-as-inscrutable-festering-organism visuals of early Lynch or Cronenberg. I caught up with this late-2010 release early in 2011 and went back to it several times throughout the year; like Espey’s work, Hanawalt’s can feel as much like an art object as it does a comic book.
Lose # 3 by Michael Deforge
I can’t help but notice that a lot of the best young comics are coming from Koyama Press. Lose has been a particular revelation, with a visual style not unlike Chris Ware and narratives flirting with the anthropomorphized dada of 1-800-MICE, but a feverish imagination all its own.
Optic Nerve # 12 by Adrian Tomine
I’m obviously a big fan of classic '90s titles like this one, but I also wouldn’t want Tomine to revive this series after a long absence if the results felt dated or redundant. Well, he emphatically hasn’t. This struck me as a drastically different Optic Nerve, with very fresh characters and a new, very welcome dark tone to its humor.
Reich #8 by Elijah Brubaker
An ever-fascinating, well-researched biography of Wilhelm Reich in a visual style very befitting its subject; new issues of Reich remain one of the first things I look for when I enter Atomic. Eager for this one to come together as a complete graphic novel so I can gift it to unsuspecting friends each December.
Snake Oil # 6, aka The Ground Is Soft by Chuck Forsman
This one snuck under the radar as a mini with a new title--very appropriate for such an expectation-confounding comic. With its silkscreened covers and challenging storylines that sometimes threaten to atomize into infinity, Snake Oil has always been one to treasure; this issue presents one of its tightest narratives yet, set in a deranged fantasy culture/kingdom. Imagine Dan Clowes in collision with Brian Chippendale, and you’re not far off.
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TOP 5 COMICS - SINGLE ISSUES/SERIES OF 2011
by Benn Ray
Optic Nerve #12 by Adrian Tomine
A lot of productivity from Tomine this year. His new issue of Optic Nerve is his most accomplished one yet. While his fiction and style experiments are still Clowesian, the final story is his best and it's also his most autobiographical and cartoony. In the digital age and an era of graphic novel collections, Optic Nerve #12 is a love letter to an endangered format - and it stands as an example of what will be missed if we lose the magazine-format comic. On the bright side, it was a best seller at Atomic - suggesting there are still plenty of people who love comic books.
Blammo #7 by Noah Van Sciver
Blammo is one of my favorite comic series. And for the longest time, I couldn't tell if Van Sciver was a welcome throwback to now-lost era of '90s alterna-comix, or if he was the vanguard of a new comics movement, and I'm happy to report that Noah these days seems more like the latter. Blammo is an anthology-style comic - a collection of stories, some ongoing, some not, with an array of characters and themes and even tones. Noah's style is has a Crumbian neurotic line, a Baggesian rounded angle, and a lot of halftones, zipatone, and crosshatching. (I prefer the last two moreso than the halftones). If this was 1995, Blammo would reside in the same pantheon as Hate, Eightball, Optic Nerve, Peep Show, Dirty Plotte, etc. But it's not, it's now. And as a result, it exists at a level other cartoonists should aspire to achieve.
Hate Annual #9 by Peter Bagge
For years, it seemed like Bagge didn't really know where to go or what to do with his best known, iconic character, Buddy Bradley. As a result, Hate Annual became bogged down with a lot of other cartoony ephemera which wasn't bad, but it just wasn't Hate. Bagge is now back on story with Buddy and he has once again turned in a great issue of Hate. If you were a fan of Hate but haven't picked up an issue in years, or you were always curious what the big deal was about, I strongly suggest you pick up this issue.
Animal Man by Jeff Lemire/various
DC Comics rebooted and revamped all its titles this year to varying degrees of success. This is one of the two best reworkings of the reboot. Animal Man has always been an oddball character. And years ago, Grant Morrison did some strange things with him in the Vertigo universe. But here Animal Man is back in the normal DC Universe. When DC did their reboot, and brought over Animal Man, Swamp Thing and even brought John Constantine (Justice League Dark) into the regular superhero continuity, I thought it might have exposed these characers as corny. Instead, with talents like Lemire, who builds upon the quirkiness of Morrison's Animal Man, it's added some grit to the regular superhero-verse.
Swamp Thing by Scott Snyder / Yanick Paquette
I've loved the swamp god ever since Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing (for my money, it is hands down Moore's best work). But maybe because those were hard shoes to fill, or maybe because the character had certain limitations, DC has never really been able to do much with the character since. Until now. Like Lemire's revamp of Animal Man, Snyder's take on Swamp Thing builds upon Moore's and gives a fascinating character a much-welcomed revival. These two titles sort of work together, with some crossovers happening (there seems to be a lot of that in the new DC reboot, and by and large, I like it), but Swamp Thing and Animal Man both also read like horror titles.
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BEST BOOKS OF 2011
by Sarah Pinsker
I read a ton of books this year, but not many published in 2011. Several of those that I did read wouldn't make my top ten so it's only a top eight. The best:
Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton
Very funny, very Canadian strip comics about historical and literary figures and events. My favorite parts were the section in which the plots of Nancy Drew novels were deduced based on the cover illustrations, and the section in which she extrapolates the plots of classic books based on the Edward Gorey covers. She also has a particularly deft hand when gently skewering the nature of Canadian patriotism and heroism.
Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (edited by Kelly Link & Gavin Grant)
I invariably like steampunk more when it is taken out of its expected context. Kelly Link and Gavin Grant went out of their way to do that with this delightful YA anthology. I love that the stories are set in Appalachia and Canada and Australia and ancient Rome, and that they intersect with the tropes of time travel and alternate world fiction, among other subgenres. The YA protagonists also provide a refreshing perspective on the genre. My favorite pieces in the book were Cory Doctorow's "Clockwork Fagin," Cassandra Clare's "Some Fortunate Future Day," Shawn Cheng's "Seven Days Beset by Demons," Kelly Link's "The Summer People," Christopher Rowe's "Nowhere Fast," and Dylan Horrocks' "Steam Girl." I think I've just named half the book. I should also add that this is an absolutely gorgeous hardcover.
Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away by Christie Watson
I'm going to quote Nnedi Okafor's review of Say You're One of Them, in which she wrote "I can stand the dark but I need light so that I can see where I need to go."
Christie Watson realizes that need for light. This book, set in a small community in the Nigerian Delta, does not shy away from the hot topics: oil, religion, poverty, female genital mutilation, violence. Despite all of that, Watson manages to paint a larger picture that is very much a tribute to the beauty of the land and its people. Her book is poignant, funny, and deeply moving. She shows real people, real problems and real solutions within a compelling fictional narrative.
This is a wonderful debut novel.
Among Others by Joe Walton
I enjoyed everything about this book, though it felt a little slight. I'm not sure that's a fair demand of a book about a damaged teenager trying to make her way in the world, but I was surprised when I realized I was only a few pages from the end. That said, I appreciated Morwenna's love of books and SF, and her logic and her heart. I loved the sense of discovery that came with every book that was recommended to her or that she found on a thrift store shelf. This is truly a reader's book.
Embassytown by China Mieville
China Mieville is a hard guy to pin down. Each of his novels probes a different cranny of genre writing. The only commonality is his use of the word "chitinous" as early and often as possible. Each of his novels that I've read layers idea upon idea, novelty upon novelty. A couple have defeated me, the ugliness of his descriptive passages outweighing the brilliance. I can't remember him depicting any place or creature that wasn't in some way grotesque. Some of those hallmarks are still in place here, but they are muted. The descriptions in Embassytown are of creatures and landscape that is utterly, brilliantly foreign. There are dozens of terms that need to be internalized and twisted until they give up their intent. The aliens are truly alien. It's a scorcher of an answer to anyone who has ever complained about Star Trek aliens that look like humans with headbumps.
America's Best Nonrequired Reading 2011
The best in this series in quite some time. First time ever that I liked the longer pieces better than the fun rapid-fire shorts that make up the first section, which have become a bit predictable. Best new band names was funny once, but if you repeat it every year it becomes a shtick. In any case, the longer essays and stories were well curated by this year's batch of students.
The Most Dangerous Thing by Laura Lippman
A fascinating novel that draws on details of Lippman's childhood in Dickeyville. The characters are all likable to a point, but also distressingly human. They fail, they make human choices, they acknowledge their mistakes and frailties. And sure, they succeed too, in their own way. Every relationship feels real and possible, and all the more heartbreaking for it.
I also enjoyed the unusual structure: present tense, two different time periods, and multiple narrators, including one that I think is not a human at all, but merely the center of a five pointed star, "we" come to life as a separate entity from any of the individuals that make up the group. Solid stuff.
Fables 15: Rose Red by Bill Willingham
At this point, 100 issues and fifteen collections in, I only measure Fables against itself. I think this was a solid addition to the series, if a little scattered. The current plot has not been my favorite, but I'm willing to follow it and see where it goes. I'm still interested in the characters and the world that Willingham has created.
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THE 5 BEST GRAPHIC NOVELS OF 2011
by Max Robinson
Daytripper by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon
Ba and Moon's meditation on death as seen through the life of an obituary writer is not only beautifully drawn (with powerful splashes of color from Dave Stewart), but narratively complex; the end result is surreal and moving.
Infinite Kung Fu by Kagan McLeod
The Shaw Brothers-esque tale of betrayal, black magic and cool fight scenes (Seriously, a guy punches people and they cough up centipedes) was basically the best Kung Fu movie of the year.
Criminal: The Last Of The Innocent by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Brubaker and Phillip's Criminal has been a consistently good read, but this year's mini-series (Wherein thinly-veiled, grown up versions of characters like the Archie Comics gang and Encyclopedia Brown get mixed up in blackmail and murder) was an outstanding, darkly humorous thriller.
Parker: The Martini Edition by Richard Stark and Darwyn Cooke
Forget that the two Parker adaptations included in this (2008's The Hunter and 2010's The Outfit) aren't exactly new. This oversized hardcover is a must-have for the supplemental material that includes a previously unseen Parker adaptation from Cooke and enlightening insight into Parker creator and novelist Donald Westlake (alias "Richard Stark").
Batman: The Black Mirror by Scott Snyder III, Jock, Franco Francavilla
What is essentially a spiritual sequel to Batman: Year One saw Dick Grayson (still struggling with the newly acquired Batman mantle) and Commissioner Jim Gordon facing off against a group of frightening new villains, including Gordon's own estranged son. Jock and Francavilla's art perfectly complements each other as Snyder tells two interconnected stories of good vs. evil in Gotham City.
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BOOKS
by John Nagle, Rant 'N' Rave
Note: Most of the books I read this year came out a long time ago, which is why I didn’t rank them.
• I Want My MTV: An Oral History of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum
• Underworld USA Trilogy by James Ellroy
• Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain
• Choke Hold by Christa Faust
• Drinking With Strangers by Butch Walker
• Hard Times by Studs Terkel
• The Good War by Studs Terkel
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READS OF 2011
by Michael Tully, Hammer to Nail
Five months of my year was swallowed up by finally conquering INFINITE JEST, so my reading tally was dramatically smaller than usual. I will say that my revelation of the year was Gary Shteyngart, whose ABSURDISTAN wowed me with its relentless hilarity, and whose SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY is currently wowing me with its hilariously astute vision of our near-future (let's hope he's wrong, but I kinda doubt it).
