by Arpad Okay and Jarrod Jones. These are the ongoings, minis, and OGNs that saved us, made things better, and represented the best comics could be in 2023.
Mending a Rift. (Jean Wei; ShortBox) Portal travel is good for business but bad for reality. The day job is sewing shut tears in the air’s fabric, the ones that people report. The torn curtain of light that makes it snow indoors all the time, or the little bunched-up wormhole snag you noticed on your walk to the store. Wei criticizes structure by documenting life within it. I think her minimal, whimsical style is magnificent; her world has heart, and you can see it as well as read it. The somber moments of a seamstress who mends existence doing her job are eerie, powerful images. Plus, she’s got a dog named Mr. Bingley. — AOK (Buy it.)
Black Phoenix Volume 2. (Rich Tommaso; Floating World Comics) I’m uncomplicated in my wants: Give me crime comics. Rich Tommaso provides a king’s ransom with Black Phoenix, a bi-annual anthology that owes its DNA to the library of EC Comics, Argosy and other pulp fiction mags, romance strips, and other paper pleasure cruises. Tommaso’s work ethic keeps him putting pen to paper, and sometimes the sheer scale of work in Black Phoenix becomes more impressive/memorable than many of the stories it contains as a result. But I won’t deny that Tommaso wields the pulp comics format to his bidding like a master cartoonist; pin-ups, phony adverts, quickie strips, and serialized stories, Black Phoenix has the goods. Readers hungry for salacious weirdo comic stories ought to count their lucky stars. — JJ (Buy it.)
River’s Edge. (Kyoko Okazaki, translated by Alexa Frank, edited by Ajani Oloye; Vertical Comics/Kodansha) Just a messed-up comic about some kids and a town so bad that a dead body in the tall grass is the best thing to happen all year instead of the worst. It looks amazing, though. Okazaki’s lines flow and billow, figures long and languid as BDs. Dead-eyed and dead fashionable. No expressions save for when they break down and cry. The bare cruelty of both teenagers and the world in general are presented without holding anything back. And, like in a Gregg Araki movie or a Shirley Jackson novel, the deeply flawed, possibly cursed protagonists are disarmingly in touch with humanity. — AOK (Buy it.)
Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise Treasury Edition. (Tradd Moore, Heather Moore, Clayton Cowles; Marvel Comics) Like last year’s Fantastic Four: Full Circle, this is a proper excuse for a peak artist to flex. And like Alex Ross’ Marvel masterwork, Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise represents the many ways an artist has improved upon their strengths, the artist in this case being Tradd Moore, who goes full-squiggle alongside colorist/partner Heather Moore and letterer Clayton Cowles. Unlike Full Circle, however, the experimentation of Fall Sunrise transcends the material, boosts it with heady, lysergic plateaus of self-rediscovery and freak-out adventure. It does have its limits; I can’t think of a modern prestige superhero project that would benefit more from hand-lettering than this. But not since P. Craig Russell asked the Sorcerer Supreme what disturbed him so has Doctor Steven Strange had it so good. Or wiggly. — JJ (Buy it.)
The Council of Frogs. (Matt Emmons; Second At Best Press) It’s up to one little guy to get a message from the swamp lich to the warlock in the far tower. The fate of the frogs, defended by the tiniest sword you’ll see in comics. But like any fantasy quest, it’s all about the folks you meet along the road and how, by chance, fates become intertwined. I like Emmons’ explorations of parenthood in post-human sword ’n’ sorcery situations, and this comic is, I think, his strongest yet. The art has a nice retro vibe, strong contours, and delicate, developed details. Emmons is a printmaker, so the colors and overall finish have a folio feel to them that is the opposite of vintage. — AOK (Buy it.)
Mister Mammoth. (Matt Kindt, Jean-Denis Pendanx, Jim Campbell; Dark Horse Books/Flux House) Assembling the many pieces of Mister Mammoth to see its bigger picture is a rich experience. Studying the finished piece is a whole other banana: Thoughtful, sad, maybe kind of nuts, these traits are all evident on the face of Mammoth, Matt Kindt and Jean-Denis Pendanx’s hulking private investigator and they’re how I’d describe the comic, too. Picture Barry Windsor Smith’s Monsters as a lonely detective story, a brilliant hulk not bent on clobbering but understanding. Working out a conspiracy with his brain, working out his anger with rock and stone, building something with all these pieces. Something isolating. The mystery of Mister Mammoth is just a part of the story; figuring out how its quasi-gentle giant fits in the big picture is its hidden truth, one you won’t see coming or soon forget. — JJ (Buy it.)
The Hard Switch. (Owen D. Pomery; Avery Hill Publishing) A thoroughly remarkable science fiction adventure story, set before the collapse rather than after, but just before. I really love the look of this book. The planet has this widescreen badlands quality. The spaceship and its tech-scrapper crew are unlike anything I’ve seen before: one crew member is an alien octopus, and much of the engineering deck is underwater. And despite recalling the intense mise-en-scène of Ridley Scott or Sergio Leone, it has a distinctly comic book simplicity I think just rules. Come for the fantabulous view, stay for the reality of resource depletion. — AOK (Buy it.)
Copra. (Michel Fiffe; Copra Press) If the scattered, chaotic landscape of superhero comics even has an avant-garde these days, you can be damn sure Michel Fiffe is at the fore, smeared in ink, keeping his head low, hammering out his heady masterpiece in real-time. Copra is fanboy sketchbook pandemonium, where panels slide off the page to make room for action figures running amok across the page. Colorful, engrossing, violent, at once a heartfelt tribute to the greats who came before and a bonkers action comic in its own right, Copra is on a cannonball run to issue #50, with its latest arc culminating with an offbeat riff on Justice League Detroit, an ersatz “Copra-adjacent crew” that looks an awful lot like Orion, Hawkgirl, Green Arrow, Stalker (!!!), and Firestorm going apeshit in full-color. Glorious. I don’t read nearly as many cape comics as I used to, but so long as Michel Fiffe stays in the game, I’m never too far away. — JJ (Buy it.)
20th Century Men. (Deniz Camp, S. Morian, Aditya Bidikar; Image Comics) Undeniably sophisticated story about war, told from the perspective of the men who become the machines that wage them, and from the perspective of the people who live on the land nations fight over. Brutally true to the real world, its fantastic monsters haunt me still. The issue that juxtaposes the way atrocity is spoken about over it occurring in real time is incredible comics craft as well as heartbreaking storytelling. This, folks, is how you do it. — AOK (Buy it.)
Monica. (Daniel Clowes; Fantagraphics Press) What I love about Daniel Clowes’s work, have loved like a big stupid dummy for decades now, is how his formal draftsmanship is the least of it. Look at any page of Monica and see: Clowes’ craft is chaos. Rigid panel lines look uniform at a glance. Gawk, and they go crooked. Word balloons, crowded with his tidy letters, sometimes get crunched due to limited panel space or ranty dialogue. His faces are made up of lines that don’t cleanly meet, or brushstrokes obscuring some goof, making them fascinating and ugly. That we can see these flaws is everything; Clowes may appear to be an unyielding formalist in the macro, but in the micro, he’s manic, an artist getting the lines down only as cleanly as his patience allows because there are stories to tell. And the way Daniel Clowes tells them is always worth poring over. — JJ (Buy it.)
DoomRocket’s Best of 2023 continues this week.
