1. Pascal Blanchet, White Rapids (D&Q)
It's rare to find a book as formally innovative and profoundly lovely as Blanchet's second graphic novel, which lays out the brief history of a northern Quebec company town in a series of full-page spreads that resemble Art Deco posters. Blanchet uses the clean designs of commercial art and the nostalgic pull of retro advertising to create an effect not unlike an extra-long children's picture book, pitched at adults. White Rapids is historical and wistful, and blazes a path that other fine-art-minded young cartoonists would be wise to follow.
2. The Luna Brothers, Girls: The Complete
Collection
(Image)
The increasing prevalence of large-format, slipcovered, super-glossy, super-pricey omnibus editions of existing comics can be a little depressing to comics fans, who may have already shelled out the bucks for the same content in issue form and then again in trade paperback. But there's no better way to experience the Luna Brothers' ambitious, beautifully illustrated 24-issue series Girls, a self-contained horror story in which a mysterious woman spawns a plague that takes over a small rural town. The gloriously muted art looks terrific in the glossy format, but better yet is the way the characters develop over time, as the crisis sharpens (and gets increasingly weirder and less predictable) and the increasingly strung-out characters are pushed to uglier and uglier extremes. The brothers explore a lot of aspects of gender, and they aren't kind to either side. But they're smart and knowing about the ugly prejudices and secrets that people hide, and the ways emergencies bring inner feelings into sharp relief. The story is as taut and intense as anything else in comics this year, but it's as personal and closely observed as it is savage.
3. Gilbert Hernandez, Chance In Hell (Fantagraphics)
If alternative comics can be equated to independent film, then Hernandez has become the medium's David Lynch or Guy Maddin, rolling his personal obsessions and freewheeling abstractions into stories that present as pulp, then take some very weird turns. In Chance In Hell, Hernandez channels his own paternal anxieties into a book that covers three stages in the life of "Empress," an orphan who starts out as a pre-teen rape victim, then becomes the ward of a frustrated middle-class poet, then ends up as the wife of a rich industrialist. Hernandez may be intending to explore the symbiotic nature of human exploitation, but mostly, he's just tripping through his fevered psyche, and drawing images and situations with the unwanted clarity of nightmares.
4. Jack Kirby, Jack Kirby's Fourth World
Omnibus
(DC)
After serving as one of the architects of the Marvel universe throughout the '60s, Jack Kirby left the House Of Ideas in frustration in the early '70s, lured to DC with the promise of artistic control and greater recognition. Never one to think small, Kirby created the Fourth World titles, an intergalactic mythology pitting good against evil across the universe. The project collapsed before it could be finished, but left behind some timeless characters, huge ideas, alternately clunky and poetic writing, and Kirby's priceless art at its most daring. The still-in-progress Fourth World Omnibus series collects it all, from the ambitious launch of titles like New Gods, Mr. Miracle, and the charmingly counterculture-positive Forever People through the inglorious plug-pulling that ended The King's most ambitious undertaking.
5. Rick Geary, The Saga Of The Bloody
Benders
(NBM)
The ninth volume of Geary's Treasury Of Victorian Murder series dredges up the story of a serial-killing family that operated on the Kansas plains in the 1870s. (They dispatched their victims by inviting them in for dinner, then seating them in front of a canvas sheet, behind which lurked a hammer-wielding Bender.) Geary deploys his usual blend of portrait-style illustrations, detailed graphs, and deadpan narration, which only serves to make the grisly details of the case even creepier. Some writers and artists who specialize in history strive to make the past look more accessible to modern eyes, but Geary's books do the opposite, showing the world of a century ago as an alien place, stalked by monsters. In sensibility and style, Geary is working on a higher plane than just about every other comics creator in the business.
6.
The Fillbach Brothers, Maxwell Strangewell (Dark Horse)
Another set of brothers dealt with crisis and quest in a very different way in the black-and-white trade Maxwell Strangewell, a bizarre cosmic adventure in which a McGuffin-man comes to earth, closely followed by crowds of aliens who want to control, destroy, or worship him. Dark, funny, dreamy, and deeply weird, the whole story starts out in left field and just keeps going.
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