#260 The Annual Graphixia Year-End Spectacular

Phew, you guys. 2016. That sucked, huh?

Here at Graphixia, we have a tradition of trying to round up the year-that-was in comics with our annual year-end superlative post. So as we close in on the final hours of the year that was, and ready ourselves for what fresh hell 2017 will bring (maybe it’s Canada’s year for political catastrophe!), gather ’round the virtual fire and enjoy our meditations on 2016 in comics culture.

Best Comic Published in 2016

Peter: Wandering Island by Kenji Tsuruta. This series has been published in Japan since 2010, but Dark Horse brought out a translation of volume 1 in July of this year, so I hope that counts.

Dave: The Flintstones by Mark Russell and Steve Pugh.

Brenna: Bitch Planet #6 is, I think, the most important comic published this year for all sorts of reasons I itemized here.

Scott: A.D. After Death by Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire. Large blocks of text accompanied by some amazing watercolors and Lemire’s inimitable inks – visually stunning poetry this one. Well worth the read, and still coming out.

Hattie: The Wicked and The Divine Issue 23. Pitched as an issue of the magazine ‘Pantheon Monthly’ and featuring profiles of the Pantheon written by journalists such as Laurie Penny, Mary HK Choi and Dorian Lynskey. I loved the concept and I love that this series is just getting better and better with the creators willing to play with form and content.

Damon: Laid Waste by Julia Gfrörer. I’ve been looking forward to the follow up to 2014’s Black is the Colour for a while (and glad to see that that book was finally reprinted). Gfrörer’s work is poetic but not afraid to be grim and dark. Her stories are embellished by her meticulous line work. Her art created with only one uniform thickness of line that allows her images to be as detailed or sparse as suits the scenes in the book. Laid Waste is the story of Agnes, a young woman in a medieval village. She may have supernatural powers but these are downplayed against the day-to-day drudgery of plague and pestilence. People think the world is ending and dogs gnaw at human flesh. This sounds grim but it is a beautiful book.

Paddy: I’m going to go for Box Brown’s Tetris: The Games People Play because it showcases how to do narrative non-fiction comics perfectly, and its use of colour is so great: so much is done with just yellow.

Best Read of 2016

Peter: Sacred Heart by Liz Suburbia. I learned about this comic from Cloudscape Comics Trade Waiters podcast. It was originally a web comic, but has been published by Fantagraphics. Teenagers inhabit a town that their parents have left. Things are almost normal. But…

Dave: Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North, Jacob Chabot, Rico Renzi, Erica Henderson, and Travis Lanham and Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary, Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels edited by Tom Devlin.

Brenna: Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts was just a phenomenal read, not only because it’s beautiful and lengthy and immersive, but because of all the important ethical questions it poses about activist journalism. I loved it, and the watercolours are beyond.

Scott: Civil War II by Bendis caught me off guard with how thoughtful it was.

Hattie: Paul Up North by Michel Rabagliati. I loved this album (big surprise from the Rabagliati fangirl) but it was a slightly melancholy read for me as the creator has announced it is likely the last Paul album (at least for the foreseeable future). It was a beautiful and wistful snapshot of life in Quebec in 1976 as the province was in the midst of massive social and political change. Fascinating and charming.

Damon: I’m just about to start reading the final volume of March by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, having recently reread the first two books. A three volume memoir of John Lewis’ participation the the American Civil Rights Movement, interspersed with his attendance, as a US Congressman, at the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009. The book is full of hope, despite the violence perpetrated on the movement by its opponents. As Raina Telgemeier writes on the back cover, it is ‘proof that young people can change the world.’ As American politics takes a huge leap backwards, let books such as this inspire us to keep fighting for equal rights for everybody.

Paddy: Simon Moreton’s new zine series Minor Leagues has been the thing I’ve most enjoyed this year, I think. It’s a real step up from his previous work but still exhibits his gift for the economy and poetry of the form. On a separate note, I also enjoyed the crowdfunded comics criticism anthology Critical Chips that Zainab Akhtar put together. It’s a very well-packaged and thoughtful collection of timely essays.

Most Disappointing Read of 2016

Peter: I can’t recall a particularly disappointing read last year. Probably because I spent a lot of it reading all 20 volumes of Bakuman. I mostly read recommendations this year and didn’t take many reading risks.

Dave: I didn’t have a disappointing read this year. Mind, I didn’t read much… so…

Brenna: Civil War II — Trudeau cameo not withstanding, because obviously I loved that — once they decided to revise Alpha Flight. The deterritorialization of Alpha Flight and the stripping of their nationalist superhero status disappointed me on so many levels, I cannot even.

Scott: Dark Knight III by Frank Miller – total cash grab. The uninspired plot is a total snore, plus it’s subject to the predictable delays.

Hattie: Hattie declined to comment. The editor respectfully submits that Hattie’s most disappointing comics read of 2016 was “literally all of comics Twitter.”

Damon: Is it bad to admit that I no longer read Gilbert Hernandez’s work? Love & Rockets volume 4 launched with a return to regular (we hope) magazine size comics but I’ve only really been interested in Xaime’s stories for a while now.

Paddy: Nothing is springing to mind for me here. I tend to block out disappointments.

Most Important Comics Headline of 2016

Peter: “Gord Downie to release album, graphic novel about residential schools,” Globe and Mail, September 9.

Dave: “Why This Year’s Eisner Awards Are a Turning Point for Women in Comics: A record number of female nominees earned nods from the most prestigious comic book awards this year. But the industry still has a long way to go on the road to equality.” – Maybe… maybe not

Brenna: The comics industry remains basically the worst. The Marvel chief being one of Trump’s bros, the Frank Cho situation Hattie details below, all the male-centred Con panels that we’re still dealing with in 2016, the insane fame and readership most PoC creators must already have to be given a shot… Ugh. I’m just tired. I’m so tired. I’m so so tired.

Scott: Darwyn Cooke died, well before his time. Made me very sad.

Hattie: If important in a bad way is permissible then I would offer up any one of the many headlines related to ongoing sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia within comics, particularly behind the doors of the so-called Big Two. The industry’s willingness to ignore the fact that they employ serial harassers and allow bigoted images and words to be published on a weekly basis is just awful.

Damon: Through my work as Coordinator of Dundee Comics Creative Space (DCCS) I was part of the team that created ‘Tackling Disability Hate Crime’, a comic produced by artists at DCCS, young people from our comics clubs, and self-advocators from Advocating Together, a local organisation for people with learning disabilities and/or autistic spectrum disorder.

Paddy: Personally, I was really overjoyed by the news that Luke Pearson’s Hilda series is being made into an animated show for Netflix. It’s great to see comics that have all-ages appeal with beautiful art making their way into other media, particularly at a time when Netflix originals just seem to be unstoppable.

Biggest WTF Comics Moment of 2016

Peter: It seems like there’s a WTF moment every other day concerning racism and sexism in the comics world, particularly around the big two publishers, which I generally try to avoid.

Dave: When everyone was stunned that the Deadpool movie made a ton of money despite being R-Rated. Who the hell thought comic book movies were only for kids or that kids were even going to them? And that Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro didn’t win an Eisner; somehow Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang won for Paper Girls.

Brenna: I admire everyone’s ability to be surprised by racism and sexism in the comics industry, but it’s less WTF Moment and more Huh, Must Be A Day Ending in Y for me. I think my biggest WTF was the trailer for Riverdale on the CW. What is that going to be?

Scott: They killed the HULK? How is that going to last? Main character deaths are a total waste of time – they mean nothing anymore because we know that anyone in a movie franchise is going to come back almost immediately.

Hattie: Frank Cho and Milo Minara (men who have produced problematic representations of women in the past) being asked to give an Art and Women panel at the Lucca Comics and Games festival. In brief: Cho described those who objected to this panel as being “humourless neo-puritans”. Milo Minara responded by drawing a picture of Spider-Woman that was decidedly NSFW and presenting Cho with it at the end of their panel. This behaviour is a prime example of my point about Important Comics Headlines. Cho and Minara are so unwilling to listen to criticisms of their work or behaviour and so desperate to get the last word that when questioned Minara chose to draw a creepy picture of a woman and then Cho crowed about it on social media. It seems they just wanted to remind women out there that they have power over how we are seen in comics. The comics industry is a hostile place for so many and we need to make it better. It should be a safe space for Women, People of Colour and LGBTQ+ people who want to read, write, draw and write about comics and right now it really isn’t.

Damon: Probably too many to mention from the American superhero comics industry in 2016, which often strikes me as the biggest mess with the worst people involved. I don’t read many of them and I’m not readily inclined to change that stance. Other comics cultures are often not much better. In January, the Angouleme jury managed to not nominate any women for awards and then presided over a fake award ceremony, FFS.

Paddy: Both Genevieve Castrée and Alvin Buenaventura passed this year, far too young and with so much more to give to comics on many levels. Both their deaths made me think WTF, in an existential kind of way.

Most Significant Personal Comics Moment of 2016

Peter: Chatting with Richard McGuire at the Poetics of the Algorithm conference at the University of Liege in June. In fact the conference as a whole was a major highlight of the year for me. Well done Arrnoud and Benoit.

Dave: Reading The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story – I found it by chance, without direction and assistance and really enjoyed reading it. Nothing like an unanticipated gem.

Brenna: I finally had a paper about comics accepted to a mainstream peer-reviewed literary journal. I really, really needed this to happen this year, and it did, and I am embarrassed and annoyed by the sense of legitimacy it has bestowed upon my work.

Scott: For some reason, when Father Gabriel, the priest in Walking Dead, got eaten upside down by a crowd of zombies, the panel really hit me. He wasn’t my favorite character in the series, but Kirkman killed him in a very small way – a tiny little panel, an afterthought of a death instead of a big splash page like most other characters get. He’d been around for about 100 issues and he deserved more than the couple of inches and lack of fanfare that he ultimately got in his passing. I think that was kind of Kirkman’s “not with a bang but a whimper” point about the issue. It hurt to see him go like that, which is likely exactly what the author wanted.

Hattie: I had a blast in Toronto for TCAF in the spring and cannot wait to return one day!

Damon: I had a few. My work as Coordinator of DCCS meant I have had a hand in encouraging some amazing comics being produced by the young people of Dundee. The first print collection of their work Tales from Dundee and Beyond was launched at Dundee Literary Festival in October, and some of our 10-13 year old creators helped sell their work at the Ex Libris Book Fair. We hosted the Graphic Medicine Conference at Dundee University this year and I had the joy of hosting a truly international selection of DeeCAP comics performances at the opening event. We also hosted a Lynda Barry and Dan Chaon workshop at DCCS before Lynda’s inspiring keynote presentation. Most significant though, was the handing in, and passing of my PhD, finally. Truth Games: Fact Fiction, and Performance in British Autobiographical Comics is the snappy title of that particular beast.

Paddy: My micropublisher, Good Comics, properly took off this year and we published our first titles, the most significant of which was Robin William Scott’s Every Life I Ever Lived (Volume One). The response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive and so many people have connected with Robin’s work personally, which just makes it all worthwhile.

Most Anticipated New Comic of 2017

Peter: Another volume of Wandering Island or Sacred Heart wouldn’t go amiss. But mostly I look forward to something unanticipated. After a conservative 2016, I’m hoping to be surprised.

Dave: That Jason Lutes might finally finish Berlin (not gonna happen). Also, Lena Dunham Archie thread? Where is that? (Can’t wait for CW take on Riverdale either!!). Could be just a brutal year.

Brenna: I haven’t had a chance to poke around. But, as I will be on maternity leave for all of 2017, I’m actually thinking about re-starting my paper subs so I have a one-day-a-week mini-ritual all to myself. We’ll see. Best laid plans…

Scott: Honestly, I haven’t even had time to check the Previews beyond a month or two from now. I’m looking forward to looking forward once the holidays have settled.

Hattie: The new Guy Delisle book Hostage in the spring of 2017 is definitely something I am very excited about!

Damon: I received The Can Opener’s Daughter by Rob Davis as a Christmas present but I haven’t started it yet! It is the second book in Davis’ trilogy which began with The Motherless Oven (2014), which I wrote about for Graphixia. I’m looking forward to finding out more about characters such as Vera Pike (the title character in this book) and the world in which they live, where children construct their own parents and are aware of their deathday but not their birthday. I’ve just noticed that Peter Bagge has a new graphic biography coming out next year from Drawn & Quarterly. Fire!! The Zora Neale Hurston Story follows up his biography Margaret Sanger, and confirms an interesting new direction in Bagge’s work. Davis claimed Zora Neale Hurston as an influence on The Motherless Oven, so I’m looking forward to finding out more about her.

Paddy: I have to mention that Good Comics has a really strong roster for next year, with new books from Rozi Hathaway and Olivia Sullivan that I think will be their best work yet, among others including volume three of our flagship Dead Singers anthology.