Drawing to a Close: The Best Comics that I've read in 2018

This isn't the 'best comics released 2018,' just the best comics that I have stumbled upon this year, which very well might include comics that were released this year. They range from classics to weird little discoveries, slim indie prints to pulp serials. These are the best comics that I got stuck into this year.

Will Eisner- A Contract with God

Often cited as the first graphic novel, this collection of stories about early twentieth century life in tenement blocks in New York, centering especially on the lives of immigrants and their descendants, is a great eye into a historic underbelly of turn-of-the-century modernisation. Eisner depicts a New York landscape that we could recognise today in its infancy. Eisner himself is a giant among cartoonists, with his style predating the formalisation of style that came with artists such as Jack Kirby and others working at Marvel. The 'William Eisner Comics Industry Award' is named after him.

Brecht Evans- The Making Of

A comic about art that is itself intensely aesthetically pleasing. The vibrant watercolours and toying with colours and light made this work feel refreshing in an era slowly moving out of late-twentieth century comics draped in monochrome and shades of grey. Many page spreads felt frameable, and I could see myself enjoying them outside of the context of the story.

Craig Thompson- Habibi

Thompson made strong waves in the graphic novel game with Blankets, a coming-of-age memoir about first love between teenage Christians. I read Blankets well after Habibi, and am still won over by this later work. Almost every page shows a dazzling amount of work while also paying homage to the Arabic and Islamic writing and artistic traditions that he emulates and shares with the reader. The story takes a bold and unexpected step into the twenty-first century whereas Blankets was more concerned with a late 20th century adolescence. Pollution, globalisation, gender fluidity and equality is part of the rippling story while still umbilically linked to an ancient and largely unchangeable world.

Joyce Farmer- Special Exits

This book made me scared and I think that's okay. It made me scared to grow old. It made me scared to die and leave family behind. It made me scared to lose my parents. It made me scared to grow old with someone I love and lose them. It also made me see how these fearful moments are barely blips in the warm pool of love and family that embroils us over a lifetime like a careful and unaware nest. This book about dying is about living. I still can't help feeling a familiar fondness for the father figure of the book, as if he was a elderly man I was neighbours with or chatted to in a pub or shop.

Tillie Walden- On A Sunbeam

On a Sunbeam rests on some solid paving stones; sci-fi, romance, teen-drama. What exists among the paving stones is pure imagination; spaceships are fish and worlds sprawl like canyons in the galaxy instead of being neat spheres. Walden casts a powerful defiance of masculine sci-fi that laboured to explain everything, sciences, cultures; Walden shows what a lived-in story might be like in a spacey otherworld; who will love who, what trials might someone face growing up, what otherworldly sports will they take interest in, what work will be available to them, what groundbreaking tribulations will they overcome. Oh yeah, spoiler!- there are no men in this book. It doesn't matter and shouldn't; it's never explained or made a big deal of.

Read On a Sunbeam by clicking here 

Daniel Clowes- David Boring

Despite all that happens, the steady pacing of David's narration and Clowes' aversion to lines demonstrating speed or motion creates a vacuum of a comic that you slowly fall through... Ironically noir in essence, David Boring, a skinny, strange looking ass-man with an unexplainable attractiveness for women- not in a spitzy, hollywood way, but a drifting, lulling manner, where his desires are met easily yet he lives as if in fugue- tumbles through a series of romantic and dramatic events, trying to make sense of his father through his comic creation just as we follow David's own life in earnest through Clowes' creation.

Ben Katchor- Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay, with Julian Knipl, Real Estate Photographer

It doesn't matter that they're fictional, you are still being let in on secrets, you are being shown the details that hold up the very nature of the urban that have been hidden under your nose this whole time. In foggy greys and twentieth century American nostalgia, Julius Knipl narrates his flaneuring as if half in a dream, floating through the streets lit by the melting pot of American immigration of his city home.

Katchor's latest work is a free online strip titled 'Our Mental Age', which you can read here and you should because it's hilarious.

Maria Stoian- Take it as a Compliment

Each of the stories in this book are true, and that's what makes it the most terrifying. Abusive relationships, sexual assault, societally accepted harrassment; this book lays bare true tales from a wide range of voices, retelling in their own style and writ of what happened to them. I could slap the labels feminist and anti-sexist on the book, but socio-cultural-historical-politics aside these are just true stories and voices birthed in comic form that need to be listened to, showing events that need preventing and punishing and understanding.

Joe Sacco- The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo

I've previously read many of Sacco's comics such as his famous work Palestine, and Footnotes of Gaza both about current and historical events surrounding the plight of the Palestinian Arabs amid the Israeli occupation, and also Safe Area Goražde which, like The Fixer, is about the Bosnian War of the nineties. While I really enjoyed these works, The Fixer has a much less journalistic tone, and feels almost more like Sacco casting his memory back, or maybe sat next to you in a bar he says "Hey, back in the Balkans I met this guy..." I never expected a comic to make me think about the complexities of the 'war hero,' and how unheroic they actually are; each of the warlords and the titular fixer that Sacco mentions could be seen as bandits, war criminals- or war heroes.

Rutu Modan- Jamilti and Other Stories

I also read Modan's Exit Wounds and The Property this year, but have settled for this collection of comics by Israeli creator Rutu Modan because of the variation in styles; some styles have the tin-tinesque cartoon faces on realistic line drawings with block colour that Modan uses in her graphic novels, while others are sketchy, black and white and more abstract. These are heartfelt stories that peel away all the mish-mash, all the conflicts, fires, terror that happens everyday and lets the little loves, families and moments blossom.

Special Mentions in one line:

Jerome Ruiller- The Strange

The story of an immigrant through the eyes of those who meet him.

 Noah Van Sciver- Fante Bukowski Two

Fante Bukowski: the 'struggling writer' that all literature folks hate that they identify with.

Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima- Lone Wolf & Cub

Manga for people who don't like manga. Well-researched Japanese historical drama.

Jason Aaron & Jason Latour- Southern Bastards

Tales of a Southern U.S. county, stretching Southern stereotypes to their limits. Football.

Eric M Esquiel & Ramon Villalobos- Border Town

Preacher for woke kids. Mexican mythology finally gets some air time.

To make sure I remember, I've started a list of all the books I read. For whatever wierd reason this interests you, click here to check it out.

The Personal in Rutu Modan's 'The Property.'

“It’s going to be the Polish ‘Persepolis,” Tomasz claims of the graphic novel about the Warsaw uprising. You can’t help but smile a little, recognizing this as perhaps not Tomasz on his work in progress, but Rutu Modan on The Property. The comparison feels natural, but on closer inspection becomes more and more blurred; Marjane Satrapi’s biographical Persepolis presents us with a monochrome story of an adolescent girl from 1970s Iran, very different to Rutu Modan’s 21^st century Israeli protagonist Mica Segal, draped in Modan’s colourful style, reminiscient of a mixture of Georges Remi (or ‘Hergés’)’s The Adventures of Tin Tin mixed with the pop art style of Julian Opie on the Blue: the Best of cover. Bodies, clothes and surroundings are kept realistic, while faces are playful and sometimes exaggerated, especially noses. One strong similarity between the two texts is the unflinching and all-telling demonstration of a story of the Personal.

            The story follows Mica Segal and her grandmother, Regina, leave Ben-Gurion airport in Israel (the date is kept ambiguous as “200X.)” The internal conflicts of the region are not mentioned in the story; I have not read it, but Modan’s other work, Exit Wounds seems to deal with this more directly. The only real hint is when Mr. Popowski instigates a Krav Maga block from Mica upon learning that she is from Israel. They are heading to Regina’s native Poland, a country she left before WWII for Israel, to reclaim ‘the property’; a building that Regina’s parents owned before the war. Avram Yogdavik, an overbearing ‘friend’ of Mica’s auntie Tzilla, tags along. Mica meets Tomasz, a young Polish man giving tours of Jewish Warsaw while hiding away from Yogdavik, while Regina reconnects with a secretive past in the city.

            Right from the start we are given personal and emotive hooks; the inside covers display not an archetypal picture of Poland one might expect of the ‘Polish Persepolis,’ but an illustration of forests, houses, lakes and mountains in Sweden, complete with a little Swedish flag. Before reading the book this makes no sense, but comes to make sense as this luscious image of Sweden represents a deeply emotive point in Regina’s personal history. Even the epigraph has a personal nature, being from a family member of Modan’s.

            In the face of texts dealing with post-war Polish-Jewish identity such as Art Spiegelman’s MAUS (the only other similarity being Regina and Vladek’s shared stinginess of food,) we can see how difficult it is to pen a story of the Personal, of love, loss, and family. While embarking to locate the property, Mica suddenly witnesses a re-enactment of the Nazi’s forcing Jews onto a truck, shocking Mica and Avram into disbelief, with Avram almost forgetting that WWII is over and attacking one of the re-enacting Nazi soldiers. The history of WWII, the holocaust and uprisings against the Nazis is far from forgotten in the area, as Mica encounters tours, memorials, tourists and those in the business time and time again. Even Mica, when dealing with a melancholic Regina, brings up history as a cause before the Personal; “Is it because of Warsaw?... Is it because of dad?”

            The reader is shown both of Regina’s and Mica’s stories, in both written and pictoral form. It would be easy to make this redundant in the text, but Modan uses the scenario to bend language to exemplify the multitude of layers to the single story the reader gets. Three languages are used by the characters in the novel; Hebrew, Polish and English, each given their own font format. Mica can’t understand Polish, but speaks English and Hebrew; she speaks English with Tomasz, who also speaks Polish. Regina can talk Polish and Hebrew. Tomasz occasionally translates for Mica. When all characters are together and Polish is spoken, the reader is confronted with speech bubbles filled with squiggles, representing the incomprehensible Polish that Mica hears.

            Modan’s focus on the personal identity, history and times of the two main characters in the face of a messy multitude of factors that could easily creep in and weigh down the story creates not a ‘Polish Persepolis,’ but a unique story of emotion and self-reflection, that, yes, happens to be set in Poland, but is simply about the tragedies, victories, joys and frustrations that attach themselves to relationships with those we love and care about.