Best Comics of the Year: Supplement

In this week's issue of New York, I get a nifty little sidebar to list what I think are the best five comics of 2007. Originally, this was going to be longer, with an introduction and everything, so I'm reprinting the intro that was eventually cut for space, along with 25 additional excellent comics published this year.

In the comics world, 2007 was a year in which each of the two dominant houses put all its eggs in one basket -- and smart readers went off in search of other baskets. The mainstream comics landscape was dominated by Civil War and 52, long mega-event series of limited interest to readers who haven't spent the past twenty years memorizing DC and Marvel continuity arcana. Luckily, there were a lot of other places to find pop thrills in 2007.

Manga continued its takeover of the American graphic novel market; bestseller lists and bookstore shelf space are both now dominated by Japanese comics in translation. With varying artistic success, major creators transplanted characters from other media into the comics world: Stephen King's Dark Tower comics haven't added much excitement to an already played-out book septology, but Joss Whedon's comics-only season eight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has invigorated the beloved TV series while bringing hordes of new fans to comics shops – even if there's no proof yet they're buying anything else. And in 2007, two beloved stories approached their ends: Brian Vaughan's standout series Y: The Last Man began its final story arc (its final issue publishes in January), while Tsugumi Ohba's hugely popular (and entertaining) manga Death Note reached its baroque conclusion in July.

In addition to the five best comics of the year, here are 25 more comics of note published in 2007.

Alive: Volume 1, by Tadashi Kawashima and Adachitoka (Del Rey)
All-Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (DC)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home, by Joss Whedon and Georges Jeanty (Dark Horse)
Criminal: Coward, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Icon/Marvel)
Crossing Midnight: Cut Here, by Mike Carey, Jim Fern, and Jose Villarrubia (Vertigo)
DMZ: Body of a Journalist, by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli (Vertigo)
Elk's Run, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Noel Tuazon (Villard)
Flight 4, edited by Kazu Kibuishi (Villard)
Ghost Stories, by Jeff Lemire (Top Shelf)
Good as Lily, by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm (Minx)
The Goon: Chinatown and the Mystery of Mr. Wicker, by Eric Powell (Dark Horse)
I Killed Adolf Hitler, by Jason (Fantagraphics)
James Sturm's America, by James Sturm (Drawn + Quarterly)
King City: Volume 1, by Brandon Graham (Tokyopop)
Laika, by Nick Adadzis (First Second)
Mu Shi Shi, Volume 1 by Yuki Urushibara (Del Rey)
Notes For a War Story, by Gipi (First Second)
Parade (With Fireworks), by Mike Cavallero (ACT-I-VATE/Image)
Robot Dreams, by Sara Varon (First Second)
Runoff: Chapter 3, by Tom Manning (Oddgod)
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, by Bryan Lee O'Malley (Oni)
Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil, by Jeff Smith (DC Comics)
Shooting War, by Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman (Grand Central Publishing)
Shortcomings, by Adrian Tomine (Drawn + Quarterly)
Yukiko's Spinach, by Frédéric Boilet (Fanfare/Ponent Mon)

Feisty Librarians

The big news takeaway from Thursday's ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference in New York -- a trade-only offshoot of the weekend's New York Comic-Con -- was ICv2 President Milton Griepp's announcement that in 2005, graphic novels outsold traditional comics for the first time ever, and that the margin widened in 2006. I missed the big news takeaway, though, because I didn't arrive in the overheated conference room in the bowels of the Javits Center until well into the second panel of the day, on nonfiction graphic storytelling. A peek over at the notebook of the earnest-looking young man sitting next me revealed no notes about revolutionary sales data but did reveal, in tiny handwriting:

swedes love manga??

The day's third panel addressed manga ratings, and featured some advanced self-congratulation on the part of most of the panelists for their industry's forward thinking. Mike Kiley, publisher of Tokyopop, started by joking about his company's initial poor response to the issue -- "I publish flesh-eating lesbian zombie manga; I'm the worst possible person to address this" -- but then explained that a librarian, Michele Gorman, had come in and helped the company establish new standards. Gorman, a feisty and outspoken presence on the panel, was pleased that the company followed her lead, and stressed that the new Tokyopop ratings system revolves around laundry lists of description rather than actual ratings -- this despite the fact that the handout we'd all been given specifically broke down the system into Under 13, Teen, etc., a point made pretty quickly by an audience member.

Another audience member -- in fact, another feisty librarian -- asked why, if all the publishers on the panel (Tokyopop, VIZ, Del Rey, and Yen Press) were so committed to being proactive on the issue, they didn't share a ratings system? Everyone sort of hemmed and hawed for a while, and failed to answer the question, when of course the answer is they're not so proactive as they make themselves out to be. Having just watched Kirby Dick's documentary THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED -- which asks some potent questions but sadly abandons most of them in favor of Michael Moore-style windmill-tilting -- I'm particularly skeptical of the efficacy of ratings systems, especially the more standardized and industry-run they become.

I spoke with Gorman after the panel and asked her how Tokyopop's new system dealt with gay themes, surely the biggest upcoming stumbling block in manga's relationship with middle America. She proudly noted that the ratings system didn't differentiate between gay and straight sex: "That was important for me; I told them I couldn't be involved in this if they didn't handle it that way."

But sometime in the next year, some PTA on Long Island is going to get in the New York Post because they find a volume of teen yaoi in the school library -- yaoi without explicit sex, but still exploring a gay relationship, placed there by a hip and feisty librarian, no doubt. And they'll be on every talk show demanding, like, Congressional hearings on the manga menace. What then, I asked?

She didn't really know: "I like to think that publishers like Tokyopop will stick to their guns. I hope they will." Gorman, who recently moved to Charlotte from Austin, is familiar with the ways that anti-gay uproar can derail worthy local arts institutions -- after all, I don't imagine you can live in Charlotte long without hearing about the 1996 Charlotte Rep Angels in America brouhaha. We'll see, I guess, how manga publishers will handle a similar situation. I look forward to the hysterical news coverage such an event will occasion.

Control-X: Dirkjan

According to Wikipedia, the title character of the impenetrable Dutch comic strip "Dirkjan" is "a loser who stumbles through life." Like "Doonesbury," "Dirkjan" started life as a college strip featuring collegiate sidekicks and a familiar university setting, and only upon syndication did creator Mark Retera attempt to broaden the strip's appeal by moving its main character into the world at large.





"Dirkjan" brings to mind the golden age of American comic strips -- not the 1930s, when the broadsheets ran "Little Nemo" every week, but the late 1980s, when "Bloom County," "Calvin and Hobbes," "The Far Side," and "Doonesbury" all appeared in the Milwaukee Journal's Green Sheet every afternoon. I learned everything I know about the 1960s and 1970s from "Doonesbury"; I still remember most major events of the 1980s as refracted through the lens of "Bloom County." I even filled scrapbooks with clipped-out copies of particularly crucial "Bloom County" cartoons, believing sincerely that future generations would treasure the opportunity to see first-hand the pale green "originals" of such epochal comic events as Opus's death by balloon-wheelchair, or his wedding to Lola Granola.





Endless inches have been written about the decline of the comic strip in American newspapers, most snappily by Scocca and MacLeod in Baltimore City Paper's treasured (and defunct) Funny Paper column. But between the Prophet Mohammed cartoon furor and "Dirkjan," it seems that things aren't much better in the Netherlands.




Reading a foreign strip like "Dirkjan" feels off-kilter, with the familiar rhythms of comic beats only barely breaking through my lack of Dutch language comprehension. In the strip pictured here, the entire first panel of the strip is wasted as a character -- seemingly Dirkjan's landlord, although it's unclear why he's wearing oversized clown pants -- asks Dirkjan and a roommate to come with him. In the second panel, the clown-pantsed landlord mentions that he's found a hair in the shower, and declares that the hair is not his own.

The third panel's punchline is an utter mystery to me. Altavista's Babelfish translates it: "With that red capsule nose he had still something comically." Perhaps this is a reference to the clown-pantsed landlord, who may at one time have worn a large red nose? Perhaps the "comically" should be translated "funny," and this is some Dutch-specific play on the well-worn cannibals-cooking-a-clown gag, "Does this taste funny to you?" It's unclear.

Wikipedia links to this site, which offers two Flash-animated Dirkjan bits, both of which are a tiny bit funny, and benefit from their relative lack of Dutch dialogue. Both seem to imply that Dirkjan, the character, is not your garden-variety comic loser -- in fact he seems so moronic as to nearly qualify as being in a persistent vegetative state. Dirkjan is visited by a clown at his (very European-looking, depressing block) flat, and sits mutely through the clown's performance? The gag is that next door, a harried mother waits impatiently at her child's birthday party as the promised entertainment never arrives. But I found myself wondering not at the joke, but at the depth of Dirkjan's idiocy, that he would never question the idea that a clown would visit his flat and put on a private performance just for him -- and that he would watch the performance silently, never smiling, never responding in any way. (Though I suppose his clown-pantsed landlord may have deadened Dirkjan to the appeal of clownly antics.)

Or are we to take away from the gag not Dirkjan's idiocy but his loneliness? That the long barren stretch of his endless days has been interrupted by a surprise visit from a floppy-shoed stranger with a unicycle and juggling balls? That despite the joy such a show should bring, Dirkjan realizes that even this pleasure is temporary -- that soon the clown will depart, unicycle packed carefully away, and Dirkjan will be left alone with his Continental despair, his tiny head sinking lower and lower into his chest, as a future of three-paneled misery stretches out before him?

According to Wikipedia, Dirkjan is also a "notorious leprechaun abuser." But I don't think he abuses leprechauns out of bigotry, or hatred. I think he does it to feel something. To feel anything.