Good Comics News of 2003: - The big story, which was really 2002’s big story as well, is that yes, Virginia, comics can sell to the masses--if they’re manga. The most startling evidence of this is that Viz’ anthology mag SHONEN JUMP just reached the 500,000 mark in sales. This was a special issue, and shouldn’t be taken as the norm, but their norm is around 300,000, which is already three times the sales of most monthly comics in the Top Ten, and those comics are cheaper. I see the book not in my comics shop but at the grocery store, and while management only seems to order a handful, they seem to sell every week, which is more than I can say for the ULTIMATE MARVEL MAGAZINE experiment a couple years ago.

Another important development is that the phrase, “graphic novel,” seems to have finally taken root in the public consciousness. The roots aren’t extensive or deep, but it’s a start, and the fact that widely circulated magazines like ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY can regularly review graphic novels without defining them, and without the usual geek jokes, is encouraging, as is the fact that comics coverage in the magazine appears to have surpassed coverage of video games and theatre, and comics reviews are even mentioned on the cover blurbs. This is all good.

I was going to switch into snarky mode and cite Bill Jemas’ being kicked upstairs and out of creative impact on Marvel Comics as a bit of good news, but on reflection, Marvel Comics, despite his offensive personality and numerous bad decisions, is still stronger now, both creatively and financially, than it was before he got there. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not sorry he’s gone, but there were some good results for Marvel under his watch. Also, new Publisher Dan Buckley’s first decisions, which smack of 90s nostalgia, have been less than inspiring, though we’ll just have to see what happens when he settles in.

And the news that really made me feel good was that financially troubled artcomix publisher Fantagraphics would begin publishing Charles Schulz’ PEANUTS in its entirety, in handsome keepsake volumes. That’s good for fans and current fans of the one of the best strips of all time, and it’s good news for Fantagraphics, as I can’t see how they can fail to profit from publishing such an enduring classic.

Good Comics Anthology:
METAL HURLANT – I’m not sure what it is—maybe the confusing “hurlant” part of the name?—but this high quality science fiction/fantasy anthology gets almost no attention. It’s a shame, because it has the best production values of any comics magazine, with rich computer coloring on paper stock heavy enough to be dangerous if you swung the magazine around. There aren’t many $4 comics you can say that about. This year, the weird and wonderful Jodorowsky was restricted to just the ongoing “Megalex,” while other European authors and creators better known to U.S. audiences have broadened the scope of the magazine, among them Guy Davis in his familiar style on a zombie story and in a different style for the two-color Jacques Tardi homage “The Photo Taker.” Stefan (HAWKEYE) Raffaele continues the excellent zombie epic “Fragile,” (it’s not always so zombieriffic in this mag, really), and even Tommy Lee Edwards makes a return to comics. And the addition of relative unknowns like Dan Wickline of Comics World News shows Humanoids is willing to take some chances and hire on the basis of liking the work, not just the name. But my favorite feature is actually Jean-Pierre Dionnet’s column, which is an enlightening exploration of interesting comics, books and films from around the world, some often quite bizarre. I think it’s a really good magazine, with a lot of wit and style. A strong black-and-white anthology book I read recently is FAILURE, which features a handful of interesting cartoonists tackling the titular theme in interesting ways. One of the strongest trade paperback anthologies of the year was TOP SHELF ASKS THE BIG QUESTIONS, which had some marquee names like Alan Moore but really shined due to a loving tribute to Charles Schulz from a variety of good cartoonists, and a brace of actual stories as opposed to the vignettes and formal experiments and I’ll-throw-you-a-piece-of-junk-and-save-my-good-ideas-for-my-own-books efforts that pad out so many of these types of anthologies. LOVE AND ROCKETS falters with the interminable “Me for the Unknown” but is always good for a solid Maggie & Hopey story and Beto’s strong and increasingly perverted Fritz tale, “The High Soft Lisp.” Also, while its creator and publisher pulled the plug with the second issue, released right around the beginning of 2003, EDDIE CAMPBELL’S EGOMANIA was a great magazine, Campbell proving himself not merely an excellent cartoonist but a good editor, interviewer (of Alan Moore) and historian. It will be missed.

Good Ongoing Comic Series:
SLEEPER not only hasn’t hit a wrong note yet, it keeps getting better, deeper and darker. In this superpowered double agent drama, Ed Brubaker is writing the most twisted, suspenseful and brilliant work of his career. The first six issues have just been collected in OUT OF THE COLD. ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN shows Brian Michael Bendis still hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager, and this year some added some ethical questions and conflicts for Peter Parker as he tries to figure out the kind of man he’s going to be, and the kind of world he’s living in. Aunt May in therapy was another logical update to the character. Only knock against the book is that some scenes run too long, most notably the silent Black Cat sequence. NEW X-MEN was a book I dropped pretty early in the year in order to buy the collections, and I’m a little bit behind. Nonetheless, the Zorn revelation was a masterstroke that surprised without feeling cheap; it only enhances the stories upon re-reading. WILCATS 3.0 is the best writing Joe Casey’s done, and that means it’s about a “B.” It’s cool, has good dialogue, and has ideas and direction, though almost every issue has something pointless and over-the-top, usually misogynistic. Again, it’s a good book, almost in spite of itself. JACK STAFF, on the other hand, is pure pleasure, an affectionate ode to Silver Age American and British superhero comics that feels fresh due to the timeless art style and layouts of Paul Grist and his tight pacing and light touch with dialogue. WILDCATS 3.0 had something a bit off, at times misogynistic, in each issue, but it’s a good book with good ideas. Joe Casey is a flawed writer but at least is willing to pursue this superpowered look at corporate theory without resorting to spandex bullshit every four pages. It would be nice to have a character to care about, though. CATWOMAN is nearly as good as Brubaker’s SLEEPER, and though set in the DC Universe, it’s often just as dark and morally ambiguous. This year the book played musical chairs with the art, Cameron Steward replacing Brad Rader (whom he’d inked already on the book) and providing more of a bridge between the Darwyn Cooke style and more traditional superhero art, before being upstaged by the sublime Javier Pulido for a heartbreaking story bringing the Slam Bradley/Selina Kyle romance to an end. Stewart returned for one more arc, which saw Selina connecting with several other DCU heroes, and it was clear that though the story was good, it was likely dictated by DC to try to jumpstart sales. Since that apparently didn’t work, Brubaker is going for a sexier and more Batman-like direction for the book, with the inappropriate Paul Gulacy on art. This was such a late development it doesn’t affect the book still being one of the best series of the year, but things aren’t looking so good for ’04, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if Brubaker exits within eight issues or so. DAREDEVIL would have continued to be good even if nothing really changed, like most superhero comics, but damn if Bendis didn’t break the status quo in a way that might even be lasting. That’s corporate comics; things could always return to the way they were, but it would be difficult, and at least for now, the new direction has a lot of possibilities. If you haven’t been reading PROMETHEA, don’t complain that superhero comics are all the same and aren’t mentally challenging, rich and experimental. It’s going out on an even higher note than when it began. X-STATIX hasn’t been blowing me away lately, but it’s still a sharp satire on celebrity, and despite the badly handled rejiggering of the Princess Di story, it did end up all right. I do hope Mike Allred gets back to inking himself, as J. Bone just isn’t the same. URBAN HIPSTER by David Lasky and Greg Stump is only up to issue #2 in about five years, but that’s okay. I’ll be here when the next pamphlet full of small but well-observed stories comes. HUMAN TARGET is Peter Milligan’s and Javier Pulido’s icy veined examination of a man’s struggle to retain identity and humanity while wearing a succession of masks. GOTHAM CENTRAL is good, not great, police drama with superhero bits. I know they need the superhero stuff to sell it, but that’s actually the least interesting part, as the recent, draggy Joker story shows. On the other hand, if it was straight police drama, you could get in on TV for free. So there are some things working against it, but both Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker have done some very good character work, and artist Michael Lark is producing some wonderfully moody art. RUBBER NECKER is Nick (THE MASOCHISTS) Bertozzi’s sporadically ongoing series, which has one ongoing story, “Drop Ceiling,” about a ne’er-do-well trying to find some purpose in life and perhaps honor his father, plus lots of interesting formal experiments in storytelling. Bertozzi is always interesting, often funny and insightful, and this series is a fascinating account of a creator’s steps towards possible greatness. THE GOON by Eric Powell is a refreshingly unpretentious horror comedy book right in line that blends EVIL DEAD with THE BOWERY BOYS and Frazetta. VAGABOND is a lushly illustrated, hip samurai saga with elements of romantic soap opera, while BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL by Hiroaki Samura, peppers its own samurai saga with modern slang, shocking bloodletting and supernatural aspects. LOVE FIGHTS is Andi Watson’s cuddly superhero romance book. I bailed after the first two issues, but only because I really liked it and wanted to wait for the trade. I suppose it’s a commercial compromise, as Watson certainly doesn’t need superheroes in his stories, but this book still retains the same flavor as his books BREAKFAST AFTER NOON and SLOW NEWS DAY, much moreso than his collaboration on NAMOR with Bill Jemas.

21 DOWN is a cool, X-FILES-y post-human series light on superheroics and heavy on simmering tension and self-doubt. BLANCHE THE BABY KILLER by Songgu Kim is the most startling debut of the year, a wicked SF story with ideas and images as dark and disturbing as the title, but it’s a really compelling, confident work I hope to see continue.

USAGI YOJIMBO continues to be all-ages samurai manga with a wealth of humor and subtle moral lessons in its concise stories. LUMAKICK by Richard Hahn was a very good debut, mixing engaging low humor with wistful art comix ambition skillfully. RAISIN PIE by Rick (DOOFUS) Altergott and Ariel Bordeaux is a funny, earthy anthology in the footsteps of LOVE AND ROCKETS. It’s not a successor yet, but it’s on its way. PLANETARY returned and showed Warren Ellis and John Cassaday still make a perfect team. This is the height of current superhero comics.

Good Reprints:
STEVE CANYON 1947, 1948 begins collecting Milt Caniff’s wonderful post-war adventure series, which is not just entertaining but a true education in how much story can be told, and with great detail, within the confines of a four panel strip. From Checker. ASTRO BOY is Osamu Tezuka’s sweet but nuclear paranoia-infused masterwork of humanized robots and inhuman people, from Dark Horse. CHALAND ANTHOLOGY #1 & #2 collects the adventure stories of the late creator, which began as a kind of jaded adult Tintin and get increasingly more complex and assured. From Humanoids. WINDSOR MCCAY: EARLY WORKS is just that, the uneven (sometimes sublime, sometimes terribly dated and racist) early strips from the inestimable creator of LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND. From Checker. XENOZOIC TALES by Mark Schultz were some of the most gorgeous black-and-white adventure comics of the ‘80s, Schultz’ post-apocalyptic stories going for a ‘50s EC Comics visual appeal with modern romantic sensibilities. In two volumes from Dark Horse. ASTRONAUTS IN TROUBLE: MASTER FLIGHT PLAN is the definitive, all-in-one collection of Larry Young’s and Charlie Adlard’s grown-up-boy’s-adventure SF stories. From AiT/PlanetLar.

Not Good Comics I Dropped:
THE VISION - Insipid and uninspired property maintenance. REX MUNDI - Good idea, not badly written, but the dreary art kicked me out. PARADIGM - I was on board for a while but it wasn’t sticking in my head and the effort to keep up and figure it out wasn’t worth it. DETECTIVE COMICS - Brubaker left; still bad artists—isn’t this one of DC’s oldest books? At least try to compete with the heat for BATMAN. WOLVERINE - Fatally flawed first arc—no threat for Wolvie. Leandro Fernandez is not an interesting enough artist to keep me on for the next arc--bye-bye. OUTSIDERS - Started fine, looked good, and then by issue #2 I realized I didn’t give a shit. JSA ALL STARS - Shameless money grab with one plot: solo JSAer conquers inner demon, over and over. Awful. Some of the backups were okay. LEGION - When the stylish Olivier Coipel left, it became more apparent just how ordinary this book is. AVENGERS - Couple reasons: Geoff and Johns. Seriously, his first issue had fucking Jack of Hearts recast as the loose cannon of the team, which is such a creatively bankrupt and silly idea I didn’t need to stay on and waste any more money. HUMAN TORCH - Pretty good characterization for Johnny from Karl Kesel, but the story got old halfway through the first arc. I’ve seen BACKDRAFT already. SWEATSHOP - I know it’s Pete Bagge, but it wasn’t funny. VERTIGO POP: THAILAND - Ugly art. THE AUTHORITY - So bad there are theories DC intentionally sank the property. Michael Turner?! GRRL SCOUTS: WORK SUCKS - I may have actually bought the last issue but didn’t read it. Just didn’t care. Nice art, but Mahfood’s a lazy, obvious and desperately hip writer.

Good Grief—Big Comic Disappointments:
SUPERMAN/BATMAN/WONDER WOMAN: TRINITY - Matt Wagner is great, but not this Matt Wagner; an uninspired superhero project intended to raise the profile for his good, creator-owned work. 1602 - Neil Gaiman works with Marvel characters for the first time, in order to shore up his legal fund to fight Todd Macfarlane for the rights to MIRACLEMAN, and the results are a period misadventure that takes the surface-level characterization of classic Marvel heroes and plants them in a rudderless story that refuses to begin, with Andy Kubert’s boring art hastening its irrelevance. PISTOLWHIP: THE YELLOW MENACE by Jason Hall and Matt Kindt was another diminishing returns sequel to an overrated graphic novel from a couple years ago. I do like the art but this was padded, poorly-plotted and pretentious. JLA/AVENGERS - Kurt Busiek and George Perez reunite to finally get the two greatest superhero teams together, and the story is too small and rote, and Perez has lost his mojo, as even the eye-glazing covers will attest. CHANNEL ZERO: JENNIE ONE - As I once told AiT publisher Larry Young, Brian Wood’s at least memorably bad, so that’s one leg up on a lot of creators’ forgettable work. Still, it’s bad. THE COURIERS was marginally better, as it didn’t have the childish politicizing, but still didn’t have an actual three act story. PROJECT: TELSTAR - Really attractive design on this anthology trade, and a fun idea: all stories about robots, but aside from a few like Paul Hornschemeier’s, this was definitely style over substance. JOHNNY JIHAD - The title alone should have told me it was a clumsy and opportunistic book, loosely based on “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh. Ryan Inzana’s heart is in the right place, but his writing isn’t mature enough for such a project, and he can’t draw. by James Kochalka was a boring retread of the first MvR book. Get the first and be done with it. TROUBLE by Mark Millar and the Dodsons looked fine, but Millar, either in over his head or pulled in too many directions by Marvel, is incapable of making this stab at the teenaged girl demographic anything but a dull and tame adaptation of an 80s teen sex movie like PRIVATE SCHOOL. TOKYO STORM WARNING was the last of the bad “pop comics” miniseries from Warren Ellis, since RED was pretty good. The artist, James Raiz, has an ugly style, unlike and inferior to any of the good mecha comics that supposedly inspired this book. Ellis needed to get looser here as well, but the tone is instead pretty sour for what’s intended to be a fun pisstake on mad Japanese pop culture. WHISKEY DICKEL, INTERNATIONAL COWGIRL by Mark Ricketts and Mike Hawthorne deservedly sank under its sheer weight of disposable material, burying one decent story under a fake screenplay and way too many “international cowgirl” pin-ups from comics pals of Ricketts. DAYS LIKE THIS saw J. Torres trying to charge readers graphic novel prices for the same music biz cliché story they can find better, and for free, on network TV movies. MISTER NEGATIVITY - It’s hard to work up much hate for this thing, as it’s fairly innocuous, Archiesque humor. If you like that, cool, but ARCHIE is a lot cheaper, and has better art.

Good Miniseries:
WANTED - Oh, I wouldn’t call it the supervillain’s WATCHMEN, and it should be noted only one issue has been published, so it could go down the toilet by the end, but it was a damn strong first issue, with great JG Jones art and a funny, energetic script by Mark Millar. ASTRO CITY: LOCAL HEROES by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson is a return to form for Busiek, continuing to find clever ways to explore real-life problems in a superhero setting, emphasizing emotion over action. BLOOD + WATER by Judd Winick and Tomm Coke was a good-looking, pretty fresh take on vampires. THE FILTH was at times inscrutable, Grant Morrison spewing out wacky ideas to order, but underneath there was a human core of one man’s need for free will and unconditional love. I know, I know—it’s hard to see that under all the S.H.I.E.L.D.+L.S.D.+porno stuff. FRANK MILLER’S ROBOCOP is a novel and so far totally entertaining way to cash-in on Miller’s popularity in comics, with his friend Steven Grant and artist Juan Jose Ryp adapting Miller’s original script for ROBOCOP 2, which turned into a far different film. THE THING: NIGHT FALLS ON YANCY STREET looked at first blush like two bright creators slumming with a MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE homage until one actually read it, where its bleakness was more in line with UNSTABLE MOLECULES. RED was the best of a handful of Warren Ellis miniseries this year, about a retired assassin who goes on a killing spree when his former employers won’t leave him alone. With very few exceptions, the ambiguous, freeze-frame style of ending is disappointing and suggests the writer didn’t know how to finish the work, but otherwise this is a tight, brutal action comic. SMAX is Alan Moore’s and Zander Cannon’s spin-off from TOP TEN, and just as good as much of that series. Instead of spoofing comics, it spoofs Tolkienesque fantasy, but the basic story of Detective Smax returning to his homeworld and trying to deny his destiny is very strong, and, in issue #2, surprisingly dark. One just gets the feeling that what may have started for Moore as a lark became more important and deeper due to his immense talent and commitment to surprising and delighting the reader. THE TRUTH by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker stumbled a bit in spots, but was mostly a gripping story of U.S. Army racism and Black resilience DARK DAYS by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, packs nearly as much thrills, blood, and laughs as 30 DAYS OF NIGHT, and with a similar bummer ending. CAPER is a series of three miniseries, essentially, all written by Judd Winick with art by Farel Dalrymple on the first, a period gangster story with San Francisco Jews subbing for New York Italians. Too heavy on the Yiddish dialogue flavah, but by #2 it really finds a good groove, with a suspenseful plot. TUPELO melds superheroes with a jaded post-punk NYC in a riveting tale of damage, need and friendship. I love it. It’s from Slave Labor. Go get it. And LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN VOL. TWO was just as witty, quotable, suspenseful, provocative and well-constructed as the first series, with the additional of a bittersweet romance for Alan Quatermain and Mina Murray. The appendix, which saw Moore mapping out every myth and legend ever told as a kind of travelogue, is awe-inspiring.

Good & Funny:
ANGRY YOUTH COMIX - This one will divide many, as it’s really sophomoric, gross humor, but I think Johnny Ryan is hilarious. Curious readers should probably avoid PORTAJOHNNY and SHOULDN’T YOU BE WORKING? and just pick up a recent issue of AYC, where he’s shown significant growth in both writing and art. MAGIC WHISTLE - Sam Henderson is a slightly more mature, more avant-garde cartoonist than Ryan, and MW less a collection of stories than extremely silly gags. Some brilliantly absurd work here. GABAGOOL by Mike Dawson and Chris Radtke is the best slacker humor comic around, with increasingly sharp artwork and genuinely funny, occasionally surprising, scripts from Dawson. [Ed Note: Click hereor a fun online GABAGOOL strip.] DUNGEON by Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim is a medieval funny animal book bursting with good gags and even some philosophical ponderings—two really bright people doing silly. DORK: CIRCLING THE DRAIN is the latest collection from Evan Dorkin, including lots of quick gags—some guileless steals from the likes of MAD cartoonists like Al Jaffee and Sergio Aragones, as well as some more brutal originals like Hitler as a master sleuth, but he elevated his work to another level with the painfully funny self-loathing of the Eisner-nominated DORK #7, reprinted here.

Good Weblogs
Biased I may be, but of the few weblogs I keep up with, Sean T. Collins and Alan David Doane are my favorites. Smart and often good for a laugh or two. Also, while I think of it as more of a company arm, THE COMICS JOURNAL’S JOURNALISTA! is really Dirk Deppey’s baby, and while it’s the best source for comics news around the Net and around the world, it’s all filtered through his sparkling but jaundiced eye. If you look at his blogroll, most of the entries under “Comics Weblogs” and “Semi Comics Weblogs” are worth a look.

Good Comics Columns
I like Steven Grant, I like Tony Isabella, and Rich Johnston is usually good, breaking quite a few stories before the other online news outlets. I already a good deal of superhero comics continuity and history, MPS’s own Scott Tipton puts it all together in an excellent weekly primer that shows there are such things as rational, intelligent fanboys. And though I really don’t care for the silly wordplay and innuendo, I do try to keep up with what Chris Allen is doing, unless the column is just too long that week.

Good Example of How Divorced Webcomics Are from the Rest of the Comics Industry:
And I’m not saying that’s all a bad thing, but check this discussion about the Best Webcomics of 20003 and see if you can figure out half of what they’re talking about. It’s actually a useful piece for suggesting some interesting webcomics like Digger, but there are some awfully silly comments as well, like cartoonist David Wright’s comment on the topic of “Webcomic History Made in 2003” being “Spincter Man,” a strip that lasted just two weeks. Others found the advent of micropayment system BitPass to be significant, but to put it kindly, the jury is out on that one until someone can show they can make a living from micropayments. Wright also had this head-scratching entry for “Worst Comics of 2003”:

“'Hitler Kitten on the Moon’: What started as the tender story of a kitten with the unfortunate name of Hitler, quickly devolved into your average cliché 'Kitten on the Moon With Space Lawyer Babes' space romp/musical, that we've seen webcomics do hundreds, if not thousands of times before.

I guess he must be kidding about the hundreds and thousands of times thing. I mean, I get irony, but the irony would be that what he cites as cliché is actually, obviously fresh, original and fun, but you can’t tell if he feels that way about the last part here.

What I found interesting, and sort of disappointing, in 2003 is the absolute lack of effort any of these webcartoonists took to get their stuff reviewed. Just my personal perspective as a reviewer, but no one aside from Chris Mills of the now-defunct AdventureStrips site (part of the Modern Tales empire) ever got in touch with me. Come to think of it, with as many comics as Modern Tales has on it and its sister sites, shouldn’t publisher Joey Manley be sending links for reviews, and a weekly or semiweekly hypemail about what’s new, what’s coming to a close, etc.? Thousands of readers checking the column every week, obviously into both comics and the web—seems like a no-brainer. By the way, Mills and Joe Staton produce the weekly serial FEMME NOIR on this very site.

Maybe other webcartoonists are asking other reviewers to look at their stuff, but I know for a fact this site, and this column, is a good place to expose comics readers to one’s work--MONKEY MAN gets thousands of unique visitors every week! It just seems like the webcomics world is content to be their own, separate little subculture. Or as Jeffrey Rowland writes under the category “Freakiest Webcomic Shit that went down in 2003”:

“The fact that this entire subculture hasn't collapsed under the weight of its own self-importance.”

Good Webcomics:
Not something I really know or care that much about, I admit. This is not to diminish the good work some webcartoonists do, but when I want to read, I sit on the couch and read. A short, funny online strip like James Kochalka’s or Drew Weing’s JOURNAL COMIC, which unfortunately just ended, are just my speed. I never like to run down an idea that may be evolutionary, even if I don’t get the appeal, but I’ll just say that the storytelling potential guys like Scott McCloud espouse for webcomics seem to me to make an uncomfortable format even less comfortable. Basically, I’m willing to wait for a really great webcomic to come along and blow me away, and to do this, someone will have to tell me about it. [Ed. Note: How about the five that run at this site, you schmuck?]

Oh, okay, so someone did tell me about one, ACHEWOOD, which has that Dilberty crappy drawing to it but is actually amusing. Also, I shouldn’t forget James Kochalka’s AMERICAN ELF, either.

Best Comics-Related Book:
THE SLINGS & ARROWS COMIC GUIDE is about the only big book of comics reviews you’ll find, but the only one you’ll need. It covers thousands of comics series from the Golden Age to just last year, with wit and authority.

PEANUTS: THE ART OF CHARLES SCHULZ (SOFTCOVER) is now out in softcover, with additional pages, so there’s really no excuse not to add it to one’s bookshelf. It’s an idiosyncratic look at Schulz and the growth of his strip, to be sure, with the use of some photos of yellowing newspaper strips and many pages devoted to old collectibles that have little to do with Schulz’ work. Some might be put off by that, but I like Chip Kidd’s style anyway, and he does do a good job of illuminating Schulz’ personality and process. EXCELSIOR! STAN LEE AND THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN COMIC BOOK is Tom Spurgeon’s and Jordan Raphael’s definitive biography of the comic book legend, the tone punishing at times, in COMICS JOURNAL style, but it’s overall a solid history that acknowledges Lee’s accomplishments even while it points out failures and debunks myths. The title’s claim to the bio being some sort of parallel history of the comics industry is misleading, though there are a few attempts to tie this into Lee’s story. TILTING AT WINDMILLS collects a big bunch of columns comics retailer Brian Hibbs wrote several years ago, mainly for other retailers, but it’s enjoyable if you’re only a fan. Hibbs details the many pitfalls of being a retailer, and offers sound advice in a sardonic, appealing voice. It’s fascinating how columns written almost a decade ago are, unfortunately, still relevant today regarding stupid retailer and publisher practices. ALAN MOORE: PORTRAIT OF AN EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMAN has some dry or unenlightening pieces here and there, but for the most part it’s jammed with insightful essays, interesting tributes and appreciations, and even a great comics bio of Moore by Gary (STRANGEHAVEN) Spencer Millidge, who also co-edits. MYTHOLOGY: THE DC COMICS ART OF ALEX ROSS is a lavish collection of just what it says it is, delving deep into Ross’ singular vision and presenting the best examples of the realization of that vision. THE ART OF HELLBOY is a different animal, a less insightful but no less beautifully presented art book, with the best Hellboy art from the comics, promotional materials and creator Mike Mignola’s sketchbooks, photographed so that one can see every marker or ink line rather than just solid black. CHIP KIDD is a small, affordable look at the career of book jacket designer Kidd, whose influential work graces hundreds of novels as well as MYTHOLOGY (see above) and BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN. THE COMICS JOURNAL LIBRARY VOL. 1: JACK KIRBY; VOL. 2: FRANK MILLER are the first two in an ongoing series of looks at the careers of notable comics creators through a chronological collection of interviews in TCJ and other sources. The Kirby volume provides some previously unseen wartime sketches Kirby drew in letters to wife Roz, as well as his rancor for Marvel and Stan Lee, and a generous sampling of his eye-popping artwork. The Miller volume is an excellent source of Miller history, philosophy and evolving creative processes, much of it told with great humor or passion in interviews, though some significant creator-owned work is given short shrift for more detail on Miller’s many successes with Daredevil and Batman. OVERBITE is ostensibly the sixth issue of Dave Cooper’s WEASEL but it breaks format, becoming instead a hardcover catalog/artbook focusing on Cooper’s drawings and paintings of “pillowy women.” It’s more than that, though, because it puts Cooper’s obsessions on display without the context of a story to tell. THE ACME NOVELTY DATEBOOK is without doubt the most significant of the art book/biography hybrids this year, with the reclusive cartoonist Chris Ware opening up his sketchbooks to reveal fascinating obsessions and a surprisingly raw style as opposed to the brilliantly controlled dazzle of books like JIMMY CORRIGAN and QUIMBY THE MOUSE.

Well, that should wrap up 2003 in a big, sloppily tied bow, I think. Oh, you were expecting maybe what the good graphic novels of the year were? Fine. Be here next week, back in the usual Thursday slot, for a rundown of about twenty of them, as well as an interview with columnist and comics pro-vocateur Tony Isabella. I may even review some stuff, too, and possibly give a Publisher Report Card regarding promotional efforts (stay after class, Highwater). Happy Holidays, and thanks to all of you for reading, and for all the generous publishers and creators who have supplied me with books to review.

I’ll leave you with this nicely goofy DC holiday card image from Jeff Smith:

Chris Allen

If you would like a comic or graphic novel reviewed, send to:

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Chris Allen has written for Comic Book Galaxy, NinthArt and PopImage.

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