1. ONE BEAUTIFUL SPRING DAY by Jim Woodring (published by Fantagraphics):
One of the most imaginative graphic novels ever created, ONE BEAUTIFUL SPRING DAY includes three previously published volumes (POOCHYTOWN, FRAN, and CONGRESS OF THE ANIMALS) chronicling the misadventures of a Candide-like, anthropomorphic Everyman named Frank plus one hundred brand new pages that combine to form a wordless, four-hundred-page, phantasmagoric epic of Homeric proportions.
In Woodring's surreal, dream-like landscape, known only as "the Unifactor," surprising moments of extreme body horror casually brush up against vaudevillian hijinx straight out of George Herriman's KRAZY KAT, almost as if Frank perceives very little differences between these disparate experiences; revelatory, violent, numinous events merge with the silly and the cartoonish and the absurd so often that the reader soon loses the ability to distinguish between the vulgar and the profound. ONE BEAUTIFUL SPRING DAY distorts one's mindscape in ways that are both magical and disturbing at the same time. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
To the casual reader, Ed Piskor's RED ROOM might at first appear to be little more than an exercise in splatterpunk excess; for the more discerning reader, however, it turns out to be a clever, insightful, McLuhanesque satire about the effects of technology on the human condition and vice versa. Here’s the plot synopsis that appears at the beginning of each issue:
The DARK WEB provides means to use the internet ANONYMOUSLY, free from consequence. CRYPTOCURRENCY transactions lack a detectable paper trail, providing further obfuscation. These tools are being abused to create a NEFARIOUS subculture of MURDER for ENTERTAINMENT in real time via WEBCAM. WHO would participate in such a sick enterprise? WHO are the VICTIMS? WHO are the CUSTOMERS? WHO are the MURDERERS?
Throughout each issue, the reader is not
only shown the extreme violence being streamed in the Red Room but also the
ongoing thread of comments from the viewers paying to watch (and critique) the
violence. From the way the comments are written, the reader begins to form a
mental picture of the type of person who would shell out an excessive amount of
money to witness something as bloody as this unfold before their eyes. The
perverse chatroom comments, particularly the ones that appear in RED ROOM: TRIGGER WARNINGS #3, are eerily
similar to what I’ve read in QAnon chatrooms while researching my latest book, OPERATION MINDFUCK: QANON & THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP.
If you think comparing a story about a cult of snuff film enthusiasts to the followers of QAnon is way off the mark, consider the fact that soon after Joe Biden’s certification as president, QAnon followers began enthusiastically sharing doctored photographs and videos on social media that appeared to show scaffolding near the White House on which human beings were being hanged. The QAnon cultists couldn’t have been more elated. They thought this was proof that Trump was still President, had declared martial law, and was now following through on “the Plan” to execute Satanic Democrats—in public view. When it became obvious to even the most gullible QAnon follower that these photos and videos were fake, the sigh of disappointment was heard around the world. These Christian Patriots were inconsolably upset that they had not been watching genuine snuff films.
Though not explicitly about QAnon, the hypocrisy of MAGA Trumpism, and the radicalization of the evangelical right, RED ROOM nonetheless holds up a distorted mirror to its audience that successfully unveils the ugliest Jungian shadows of early twenty-first century America. If "splatterpunk satire" isn't already a recognized category of fiction, perhaps RED ROOM will put it on the literary map.
3. RECKLESS: FOLLOW ME DOWN by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (published by Image):
Not long after the airing of the series finale of BETTER CALL SAUL earlier this year, I happened to stumble across a NEW YORKER interview with writer/director Vince Gilligan (creator of BREAKING BAD and BETTER CALL SAUL) who commented that he was looking forward to creating a brand new television show centered around a traditional "good guy" rather than an ethically challenged anti-hero. He added that the only television shows he found himself watching these days were those produced back in the 1960s and '70s:
"Yeah, there’s a real pleasure to watching shows like that [...]. I love the old stuff. I love old episodes of EMERGENCY! and THE ROCKFORD FILES and COLUMBO and THE TWILIGHT ZONE and HOGAN’S HEROES. It’s comfort food for my brain. I hope that kind of storytelling never goes away. For my next show, I’d like the lead character to be an old-fashioned hero, an old-fashioned good guy. Jim Rockford is kind of rough around the edges, but he always does the right thing. Fifteen years ago, when I was conceiving of Walter White, I looked around and thought, Well, what is current TV? It’s mostly good guys. But now I’m looking around, thinking, Gee, there’s an awful lot of bad guys on TV, and not just on shows but on the news. It feels like a world of shitheels now, both in fiction and in real life. I think it’s probably time again for a character who doesn’t go for the easy money. I’d be very happy if I could write a more old-fashioned hero, someone who is not out for themselves at every turn."
Trends in entertainment tend to swing from one extreme to the other and back again, so it was inevitable that one of the most innovative writers working in television would realize that a course correction away from the morally bankrupt "villain-as-hero" archetype would be necessary sooner or later. I find it fascinating that Ed Brubaker, one of the most innovative writers working in comic books, came to that same conclusion even earlier than Gilligan. As far back as the 1970s, when George Lucas lifted the premise for STAR WARS from the pages of Jack Kirby's FOURTH WORLD series, comic books have been pointing the way forward, at least when it comes to the mediums of television and film.
Brubaker and his longtime collaborator, Sean Phillips, released RECKLESS (the first in an open-ended series of self-contained graphic novels) at the tail end of 2020. The main character is Ethan Reckless, an FBI agent turned private detective living in 1980s Los Angeles. He shares some similarities with classic crime noir anti-heroes such as Richard Stark's professional thief, Parker; however, despite the fact that Reckless is willing to employ some questionable methods in order to get the job done, including committing serious crimes, one never gets the sense that he does so purely for self-gain. Even if Reckless' judgement is off-kilter, the reader always knows that he's at least trying his best to do the right thing. In this sense, he shares more in common with such serial detective characters as Stephen Cannell and Roy Huggins' Jim Rockford than with more recent television anti-heroes as Jeff Lindsay's Dexter Morgan or Vince Gilligan's Walter White and Saul Goodman.
As in all memorable detective fiction, the setting of RECKLESS serves as another character in the narrative. Though the Los Angeles of RECKLESS is appropriately realistic, Sean Phillips succeeds in re-imagining the entire landscape through his own distinctive vision; an oddly romantic, twilit glow always seems to be hovering over the sprawling metropolis, even in the midst of a smog-filled afternoon. Phillips' version of the city immerses us in a sense of nostalgia for a Los Angeles that no longer exists, and perhaps never existed in the first place, and yet for some reason we feel that, if we were granted the ability to travel back in time to 1980s L.A., we would find Reckless holed up in his little rundown art house movie theater, anxious to jump into yet another cold case that needs resolving in order to escape a past that's often far too painful to confront.
Of the five RECKLESS graphic novels that have been published so far, the latest (FOLLOW ME DOWN) is quite possibly the most complex, at least in terms of the moral ambiguities that surround Ethan's character arc, which in this particular adventure spans fifteen years (1989 to 2004) over the course of only 144 pages. Since you can read these graphic novels out of order, why not start here and work your back to the beginning? Reportedly, Brubaker and Phillips have promised many more Reckless stories to come.
4. FLUNG OUT OF SPACE by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer (published by Abrams ComicArts):
FLUNG OUT OF SPACE is a fictional biography of the crime noir novelist Patricia Highsmith, author of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY. This graphic novel focuses on the late 1940s and early 1950s, before Highsmith became a bestselling novelist, when she was still in her twenties and writing comic book stories for ACG editor Richard E. Hughes, who's most well known today for having created HERBIE, a wonderfully bizarre comic book that Alan Moore cites as the inspiration for Rorschach's distinctive speech patterns in WATCHMEN.
Another comic book editor she worked with at the time was Stanley Leiber, who would later be known as Stan Lee. Surprisingly, Lee plays a significant supporting role in this story when Highsmith agrees to go on a blind date with him. Not surprisingly, she ends up hating the experience.
It's interesting to note that, according to Highsmith's biographer, Joan Schenkar (author of THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH), this encounter actually occurred in real life. In the words of Golden Age comic book editor Vince Gato, who had set up the date, the match didn't quite take because "Stan Lee was only interested in Stan Lee." Schenkar adds, "...and Pat wasn’t exactly admitting where her real sexual interests lay." Of course, this would have been over ten years before Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby ushered in the Marvel Age of Comics.
According to comic book historian Paul Gravett, during these productive years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Highsmith wrote numerous stories for such four-color heroes as Black Terror, Pyroman, Fighting Yank, The Destroyer, Sergeant Bill King, Jap Buster Johnson (yes, that was the character's actual name), The Human Torch, Spy Smasher, Captain Midnight, and Golden Arrow. Comic books would not remain Highsmith's primary source of income as the 1950s rolled on. After making her impressive literary debut with STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into a successful film in 1951, Highsmith applied her talents to writing a highly regarded cult novel entitled THE PRICE OF SALT. Republished in 1990 under the title CAROL, this controversial book was the first American novel to feature lesbian protagonists who did not meet tragic ends. Due to the censorious strictures of the day, Highsmith was forced to publish the book under a pseudonym ("Claire Morgan").
Much of FLUNG OUT OF SPACE deals with Highsmith's conflicted attitudes towards her own homosexuality and how this ambivalence impacted her literary output.
One of the reasons she wrote so many comic book stories for low level
publishers like ACG and Timely was to pay for conversion therapy, a
measure she felt pressured into attempting. In one particularly amusing
scene, Highsmith's first go-round at "corrective" therapy is cut short
when she attempts to seduce her female psychiatrist.
5. MANIAC OF NEW YORK VOL. 2: THE BRONX IS BURNING by Elliott Kaplan and Andrea Mutti (published by AfterShock Comics):
In MANIAC OF NEW YORK, Elliot Kalan and Andrea Mutti manage to hijack a moribund subgenre (the slasher story), turn it inside out, and transform it into a clever satire with political overtones that bear great relevance to our current American zeitgeist, which overbrims with hypocrisy, shameless self-aggrandizement, religious zealotry, and performative politicking of a type not seen since the McCarthy Era of the 1940s and 1950s.
Despite having to deal with insurmountable bureaucratic obstacles on a daily basis, our two heroines (Detectives Gina Greene and Zelda Pettibone) manage to join forces in a valiant attempt to defeat what appears to be a metaphor given physical form, a Jungian archetype brought to life: Maniac Harry, an invincible supernatural killer who has brought all of New York to its knees. The true horror of the story is revealed in the way human beings decide to deal with this seemingly unstoppable threat. If Donald Westlake had turned his hand to writing a slasher flick, it might have played out like this.
6. IT'S LONELY AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH by Zoe Thorogood (published by Image):
This raw, painfully honest, darkly humorous memoir succeeds in deconstructing the emotional landscape of anxiety and clinical depression while also deconstructing the graphic novel structure itself. Zoe Thorogood's experimentation with format shares more in common with prescient avant-garde classics such as Laurence Sterne's TRISTAM SHANDY than it does with previous confessional graphic novels (Chester Brown's I NEVER LIKED YOU or Harvey Pekar's AMERICAN SPLENDOR, for example, which are far more quotidian in nature). Similar to Sterne, Thorogood's experimentation manages to be playful and utilitarian at the same time; her experimentation is always in service of the narrative, not the other way around. As mainstream comic book scribe Chip Zdarsky recently wrote (in an attempt to describe the artistic success of IT'S LONELY AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH), "[Thorogood] wildly manipulates the form while holding onto you tightly, as if this impossible task is the easiest thing in the world for the cartoonist to do."
7. HYPERTHICK by Steve Aylett (published by Floating World Comics):
During the past few decades, the graphic novel medium has been best represented by its most postmodern narratives (Art Spiegelman's MAUS, Chris Ware's JIMMY CORRIGAN, THE SMARTEST KID ON EARTH, Daniel Clowes' ICE HAVEN, and Alan Moore and J.H. Williams' PROMETHEA being just a few examples). In a field notable for such bold experimentation, Steve Aylett's HYPERTHICK might very well be the most postmodern (or post-postmodern) graphic novel ever published. Aylett, known for such trangressive science fiction novels as SLAUGHTERMATIC and NOVAHEAD, has now turned his satiric talents to the comic book medium with carnivalesque results, lifting public domain comic book art from a panoply of uncredited sources and--like the alchemists of old--transforming these base materials into something far stranger and more magical than their intended purpose. Aylett edits and remasters the artwork while replacing the original dialogue with Andre-Breton-like automatic writing, resulting in such immortal lines as, "My dreams are full of others' impulses, so waking life is my only real chance," "If you drink a glass of water while falling off a cliff it has the same effect as poison," and "We'll organize a pitchfork crisis, then a false thicket to kill time, add regulations as we go along, declare ourselves 'cautiously thrilled,' move the margins irrespective of the exchequer's annual outburst and Bob's your screaming uncle."
Pulp fiction heroes (created to function as nothing more than empty ciphers) are reinterpreted as brand new, bizarre characters like Benny the Hen, Fox Grave, Kryton Sweeny, Su Pesto, Biloxi Blake, and Luka Bazooka. Writing about HYPERTHICK, Alan Moore said, "Steve Aylett has blundered like a confused and angry bear into a new dimension of poetic genius,” and Grant Morrison called the book "...astonishing--like being riot-hosed with language, ideas and imagery! Makes everything else feel like vague drifting aerosol….”
I think it's notable that HYPERTHICK boasts one of the strangest production descriptions on Amazon: "Follow Benny the Hen, Su Pesto, Biloxi Blake and Fox Grave as they lurch from one fulfilling fiasco to another. Wall-to-wall trickster figures face off in a lateral drench of comedic honesty. What is the Memphis Conjecture? Are owls to blame? Where do characters go when they run out of bends to go around? Lucid dream or psychedelic stoicism? Ignite your chemistry and discover the heart of the spiral narrative. In Clownsurround!"
If you're at all interested in surrealism, postmodernism, comic books, or jabberwocky in general, then do yourself a favor and order a copy of the collected edition of HYPERTHICK which includes three issues of this truly idiosyncratic and unforgettable series... all in Clownsurround.
8. SHAOLIN COWBOY: CRUEL TO BE KIN by Geoff Darrow (published by Dark Horse):
Imagine a sprawling, industrial metropolis located on the back of a gargantuan lizard. Imagine this lizard is skittering through a desolate American desert strewn with beer cans and other man-made detritus. Imagine a chainsaw-wielding cowboy monk trapped in the stomach of the lizard while locked in mortal combat with an angry shark who has a human head lodged in its ravenous mouth. Oh, and imagine that the monk is holding not just one chainsaw, but two chainsaws... and both chainsaws are tied to either end of an extremely long wooden stick. Imagine this same monk being forced to hold his own against giant farting pigs, talking komodo dragons, floating jellyfishes, massive plucked chickens, murderous mutant crustaceans, and hordes of white supremacist gun nuts who look a hell of a lot like Adolf Hitler. Imagine the highest body count of neo-Nazis you've ever seen in a single comic book. And if you try to imagine any of this without ever having seen the unbelievably detailed artwork of Geoff Darrow, whatever you're imagining will pale in comparison to the madness that's actually been committed to the page.
SHAOLIN COWBOY is one of the most unique comic books ever published in America. I would also hazard to add it's the most violent anti-violence narrative I've ever encountered in any medium. The dadaist satire that lies at the core of SHAOLIN COWBOY acknowledges that violence and America are inextricably entwined... and yet the narrative never romanticizes this unholy marriage. Instead, the tone of the narrative seems to look at all this ultra-violence somewhat askance, as if trying to figure out how and why the machinery of Western civilization is primarily oiled with blood. If an extraterrestrial anthropologist-cum-artist landed on Earth just long enough to see how Americans behaved toward one another on an average day in 2022, then returned to his home planet in order to exhibit the blood-drenched absurdities he had just witnessed, he might come up with something that looked like the artwork in SHAOLIN COWBOY--and it wouldn't be an exaggeration, far from it. Perhaps this is what violence looks like when you're not viewing it through human eyes imprisoned in three dimensions. SHAOLIN COWBOY is what America appears to be when filtered through the eyes of an ultraterrestrial dimension... but this dimension exists only inside the brain of Geoff Darrow. Fortunately for us, Darrow has documented his strange visions in the form of SHAOLIN COWBOY, a clever refutation and celebration of the absurd desert wasteland known at the moment as the United States of America.
(Note: SHAOLIN COWBOY: CRUEL TO BE KIN is the fourth volume in the series. Previous volumes include SHAOLIN COWBOY: START TREK, SHAOLIN COWBOY: SHEMP BUFFET, and SHAOLIN COWBOY: WHO'LL STOP THE REIGN?, all of which are available in collected editions published by Dark Horse Comics)
9. RED SCARE by Liam Francis Walsh (published by Graphix):
It just occurred to me that four of the ten comic books on this list deal with the authoritarian past of early twentieth century America. Both FLUNG OUT OF SPACE and RED SCARE take place during the McCarthy Era of the 1940s and 1950s. THE GOOD ASIAN [see entry #10] takes place in 1936, after the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act. HYPERTHICK is entirely composed of repurposed artwork created during the 1940s and '50s. All of the artists involved in these books seem to be attempting to make sense of the horrors of the past by transforming them into twenty-first century Art. By doing so, of course, the creators are also attempting to make sense of the present. As William Faulkner once wrote (in his 1951 novel, REQUIEM FOR A NUN), "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."
Intended for children of all ages, Liam Francis Walsh's RED SCARE is a highly entertaining recontextualizing of the McCarthy Era that examines the extreme paranoia of Cold War America in the form of a high-spirited science fiction adventure involving atomic weapons, communist spies, relentless FBI agents, flying saucers, and a polio-stricken young girl named Peggy who accidentally comes into possession of an extraterrestrial device that grants her the ability to fly.
Walsh seems to take his cue from previous pulp-inspired comic books such as Dave Stevens' THE ROCKETEER (Peggy's discovery of the "mysterious artifact" parallels Cliff Secord's reckless appropriation of an experimental rocket pack in the Rocketeer's first adventure), Michael Cherkas and Larry Hancock's 1980s black-and-white masterpiece, THE SILENT INVASION, and a slew of noir-tinged science fiction movies of the 1950s such as IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, INVADERS FROM MARS, and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Imagine the paranoia-fueled cinematic parables of such B-film auteurs as Jack Arnold, William Cameron Menzies, and Don Siegel transformed into a McCarthy Era cautionary tale about the dangers of xenophobia and mob mentality as reinterpreted by Hergé (the famed writer/artist of THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN), and you might get a pretty good sense of what awaits you in the pages of Liam Francis Walsh's RED SCARE.
10. THE GOOD ASIAN by Pornsak Pichetshote and Alexandre Tefenkgi (published by Image):
Last year, I described the first half of THE
GOOD ASIAN as "a meticulously researched murder mystery that illuminates
the racial and class divides of the twenty-first century just as much
as it examines the violently dramatic social problems of Depression-era
San Francisco." The main character of THE GOOD ASIAN is Edison Hark, a Chinese-American detective who's investigating the disappearance of Ivy Chen (the young lover of Hark's adopted millionaire father, Mason Carroway) in the deadly streets of San Francisco's Chinatown. The second half of the THE GOOD ASIAN follows through on the promise of the first half, sticking the landing on an expertly crafted detective story that pays homage to the classics of the past created by the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich while also delivering an emotionally resonant character study of a man divided between two very different--and very violent--worlds.
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