Year is Here?

ugh, that subject line! Sorry about that, y’all. Maybe I’ll think of a better one? (And then forget to change this paragraph and you’ll get to wonder just how high I was while writing this?)

Anyway, I think this’ll be a fast one. I think I mentioned last time around I wanted to do something like a Best Of list? Seems to me it’d be a huge waste of two of my best assets—a list of every comic I read this year, and a captive audience—to not put something like that together.

But, hmm, didn’t I already talk about a lot of whatever ended up on that list during the course of writing these dang newsletters? Well, I dug through my archives and as it turns out, the answer is: yes. Which means I can talk about a lot of this stuff even more quickly.

(Nothing says a writer confident in his own powers like a guy continually going: No, no, don’t worry, this won’t take long!)

so, yeah, let me try a different approach to pulling in this list and let’s see what we’ve got!

Oh, and but so I put this list together more-or-less chronologically and with some basic formatting to sort of pull apart “my favorite reads of the year” from “honorable mentions” but since that formatting didn’t make it in….um. I guess I’ll reapply it? So bolded is a fave, italicized is an honorable mention.

Here we go!

ORIGIN (by Boichi, published by Kodansha): Last time I talked up this “Machine Man but with hard science and a lot of panty shots” was with vol. 6 which was the finale of the multi-volume escalating super-robot showdown. I was coolish on it, but vol. 7 went right back to being my shit and then some. I mean, there’s probably a whole essay to be written about how Origin decides to raise much-needed funds for himself by churning out thousands of pages of porn comics every night to sell on the web?

Anyway, I hope it runs for a dozen more volumes, both for my sake and for Boichi’s who I now kind of worry about.

How To Grill Our Love (by Shiori Hanatsuka, published by Kodansha): A “let’s show you how to cook stuff” manga enrobed in the world’s gentlest romantic comedy about a married couple who barely knew each other before they got married and find themselves delightedly and delightfully happy.

The nice part about How To Grill Our Love is that since it’s an instructional manga with story elements, it really doesn’t need “drama” or “conflict” heavier than the sort of stuff you might encounter in, I dunno, a commercial?

I’m sure that sounds like i’m damning it with faint praise but….I do think a lot of us have needs beyond narrative. And fucking narrative! Narrative now is like when they invented the digital clock and put them everywhere—it’s on your microwave! Your stove! Your rice cooker! Your bathroom mirror!

But as every writer of fanfic knows, sometimes you just want people you think are cute doing cute things together, cutely. And as every reader of fanfic knows, that shit grows pretty tedious quickly as once they get what they want out of whatever page or illustration, they’re done.

Throw in some instructional food comics, however, and now you’ve got something for the story to build toward, readerly expectations to play with, and the reader, on top of seeing a husband and wife learn gentle little life lessons about one another, learns how to make coq au vin!

So yeah, thirty thousand more volumes of this, please.

The Thirteenth Floor (by John Wagner, Alan Grant, and José Ortiz, published by Rebellion): Graeme had recommended this title to me for what seems like forever and I finally got around to reading all three volumes. (Or four? There’s a volume that are more modern creators trying their hand and it’s not very good.)

But man, the Wagner/Grant/Ortiz volumes are fab—Max, the sentient computer that watches over the residents of its apartment block begins dabbling in punishing those who mess with its residents but putting them on the virtual 13th Floor where they’re subjected to torments beyond measure until such time as they clean up their act, go mad, or conveniently off themselves.

As is the case with Wagner and Grant in their prime, it’s a decent premise that then ramps up to brilliance with their ability to take that premise and push it as hard as they can to break it: what happens to the concept when Max actually deliberately kills someone? What happens when the government finds out? What happens when you make the character go fully mad?

More than any DC Silver Age comic (which always quarantined such stuff to the “imaginary stories” ward) or Marvel (which played out its string so long it just had repercussions either disappear with a handwave or acted like they’d been forgotten), Wagner and Grant are able to take a premise, break it, then set it back up so it works again, wrangle more fun out of the premise, then break it again…. it’s delightful and inspiring. Sure, the regular caveats apply—characters are at best skin-deep; the racism is casual and recurrent; more than once you find yourself reading a rewrite of an earlier story; you may or may not check out before or after Wagner & Grant do—but no really: delightful and inspiring. So glad I read it.

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (by Sumito Oowara, published by Dark Horse): Also, in the “behold, the power of imagination” genre is this little number about a group of schoolgirls starting a club for making anime. I don’t know if it’s a choice or an artistic limitation, but Sumito Oowara’s flat, uneven line is a stylistic gambit that may not pay off for everyone—all I can say is I’m glad I played a lot of Purappa The Rapper back in the day—but if it works for you, the whole series opens up as a simultaneous education in, and excellent presentation of, the appeals and challenges of world-building and, again, the power of the imagination.

There’ve been nine volumes of the manga collected in Japan; Dark Horse published volume six back in March 2024, and volume seven will be hitting in March 2025. Bring them on, I say!

Rom Spaceknight Omnibus, Vols. 1 and 2 (by Bill Mantlo, Sal Buscema, Ian Akin, Brian Garvey, and others, published by Marvel) and Micronauts Omnibus Vols. 1 and 2 (by Bill Mantlo, Michael Golden, Pat Broderick, Danny Bulandi, and others, published by Marvel): Between this and the publication of the Micronauts Omnibii, it’s been a very good year for (re)appraising Bill Mantlo, the very poor man’s Chris Claremont. You’re probably aware of the high concepts—Rom: Spaceknight was a comic based on a toy line that only launched one toy before crashing; Micronauts was a comic based on a toy line (and pitched by Mantlo to Marvel) that had nine kajillion toys on the market for about two years—but how well they work for you is really how well Marvel Comics in the last ‘70s and early ‘80s work for you.

Unlike Hama’s G.I. Joe, which was entirely self-contained, Rom and Micronauts are neatly wedged in to the Marvel Universe which, again, is part of the glory of Marvel Comics from that period. Everyone met everyone else; every concept had the potential to be connected to anything else; and the success of a comic was in no small part due to how much the creators could make their title mesh with everything else while still having a distinct identity. And part of the success was also due to how much you could make things change and grow while keeping the appeals of the concept intact.

(If you put money on 1400 words being where Jeff breaks out his “I really should write a longer essay” comment, please pick up your winnings at the window. Because I really should write an essay about how Stan Lee’s narrative voice—as its own and as copied by a generation of writers for Marvel afterward—is the lingua franca that allows for enough homgenity that the different titles to interact, regardless of differences in genre or tone or purpose (though that might be too strong a word since the purpose of any book was, basically, to sell enough copies to get a next issue).)

Aaaand I should probably write more about that reappraisal of Mantlo more…but please god, not here! Let’s just leave it at reading a hundred issues of Bill Mantlo on two toy comics was more delightful and interesting than I expected, though I don’t know if I can recommend it to many. (To be fair, I don’t know if this entry is a list of recommendations as much as an extended volley of excuses and justifications so that caveat probably applies to the entire thing.) I’d hands down sign up to do it again—which is good because I think both Rom and the Micronauts have one more omnibus each on the horizon—much more than I would something similar in scope from, say, other “bigger” names like Gerry Conway or Len Wein.

Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You (by Jinushi, published by Square Enix): It’s weird to me seeing how much mileage manga can get out of tropes superhero comics have left for dead. On the one hand, Smoking Behind The Supermarket With You is an unthreatening rom-com blatantly indulging the base need of middle-aged men to believe themselves desirable by younger women; but on the other, it’s 100% superhero secret identity hijinks: middle-aged salary man Sasaki shops at his local market to crush on the lovely, chipper, unobtainable register girl Yamada, and ends up smoking behind the market with brash, punkish storeworker Tayama, absolutely unaware that both women are one and the same, caught somewhere between teasing the oblivious, indulging a harmless crush, and catching actual feelings.

In the same sort of way How To Grill Our Love’s instructional cooking segments replace and fulfill the drive of dramatic narrative, Sasaki’s ongoing cluelessness provides a spark to keep the engine running, page in and page out, so one can flip the pages, admiring Jinushi’s boldly thick linework and ongoing masterly eye for body language (in one of the author notes, Jinushi claims to have created the strip so they could linger on the different way people smoke and I kinda believe it), while being sort of idly aware nothing can really happen without the strip ending. Like a cigarette smoked out back, it’s just a bit of a break from the world, and a relief.

Dragon Ball (by Akira Toriyama, published by Viz): Oh man, so embarrassing to admit I’d never read this until now!

But as much as I’ve always, always loved Toriyama’s design work—”always” being the first time I played a Dragon Quest on the PS2 around the turn of the century, I guess?—and I loved reading Dr. Slump (though never all the way through or anything). I’ve been….something…about digging in to Dragon Ball. If I had to guess, maybe it just seems like a lot, and a lot of something I’m not super into—it’s self-evident that Dragon Ball is shonen fight manga but I think many would argue that Dragon Ball is the shonen fight manga.

But Dragon Ball, I was relieved and delighted to find out, starts out closer to Dr. Slump, loosey-goosey cartooning and cheap laughs. And even when it moves beyond that, it doesn’t move that far—training arcs played for laughs become tournament arcs played for laughs become super-showdowns played for laughs. Dragon Ball is shockingly close to Segar’s Popeye for me, or some of the greatest newspaper strips of the 20th Century like Al Capp’s L’il Abner: goofily invulnerable heroes whose innate decency makes them beat all the odds (and half of the ingenuity in the strip is in cooking up impossible odds to stack against them) and all takers.’

I stopped before getting to Dragon Ball Z…but I’m going to get there, and I suspect I’m going to love it. One of the rare things that absolutely lives up to all the hype, and just a sanity-saving read for me this year.

Batman Dylan Dog #1 (by Roberto Recchioni, Gigi Cavenago, Werther Dell'edera (published by DC): Oh shit, I totally forgot about the bold/italic distinction! I can’t remember if any of the picks above was supposed to be a lesser/italicized pick (maybe The Thirteenth Floor?) but this one definitely is. It’s fun and pretty to look at and kind of interesting to pick at in a “well, North American comic book creators plot like this, but Italian comic book creators plot like this” kind of thing.

Batman meets Dylan Dog! The Joker meets Dr. Xabraxas! Alfred meets Groucho! Catwoman’s vagina meets Dylan Dog’s penis! John Constantine meets Picadilly Circus! North American trade paperback best seller meets European graphic album perennial!

Fun, gorgeous to look at, disposable. Comics!

The Cross and The Switchblade (by Al Hartley, published by New Barbour Comics): Speaking of Comics!, back when I was growing up, when you saw a comic, you didn’t hesitate; you picked up the damn thing and read it. Sure, we had comics on the spinner racks at supermarkets, but that was more or less it and there weren’t many titles. After that, you had comic strips in the newspapers, and then the free comics they’d give you once a year warning you not to fly kites into powerlines, then the Tintin comics in the magazine at the dentist’s office, then there were the underground comics you might see at the record store or university shop that would make you feel like you’d been kicked in the stomach, then there comics you’d come across at your friends’ houses.

Somewhere in and along all that, there was The Cross and the Switchblade, a comics adaptation of David Wilkerson’s best-selling memoir of his days as a hip young pastor able to rap with the kids on the streets. I read it and thought it was well-done. (I was ten.)

Now, forty-plus years later, the book’s cartoonist, Al Hartley, has digitally republished that book and a few others he did as a born again cartoonist putting his skill to work talking up his good friend, Jesus. (One of the other comics from the era Hartley has republished is in fact called Jesus.)

And at the tender age of 58, I re-read it…and thought it was well-done! Hartley’s talented in an incredibly generic way—he makes Frank Springer seem zesty by comparison—but his mixture of slightly cartoonish faces and solidly realistic body language and detailed backgrounds very much hit that early ‘70s commercial art right on the nose…which helps give the story its charm and (arguably) its punch: the dichotomy between kids looking like they fell out of an issue of Betty & Veronica threatening suicide if they’re not allowed to shoot up is the former, but the very deliberate product-ness of it—an advertisement for Christianity in a way that evokes a certain stripe of catalog and magazine ads, a way to put your product in a way designed to catch the innocent and impressionable—is the latter.

Anyway, it’s an italicized pick if you’re keeping track, but I’m really glad I got my hands on a copy all these many years later.

[BONUS: I wrote the line “you know what’s really hip? JESUS” and then couldn’t figure out how to fit it in to my talking points for The Cross and The Switchblade but I liked it too much to cut it.]

The Helltrekkers (by John Wagner, Alan Grant, José Ortiz, and Horatio Lalia, published by Rebellion): Another high-concept bit by Wagner, Grant, and others: a bunch of pilgrims leave Mega City One and travel across The Cursed Earth to a new colony where they can be free…provided they survive.

LIke The Thirteenth Floor, you could make a completely compelling TV series out of this with very few changes (bigger cast for a higher body count, some actual characterization to the characters). That said, this is only a single (pretty slender!) volume, so maybe its charms aren’t for everyone—it has some of the maniacal dark glee you get from issues of Action! and early 2000 AD, but not as much as you’d expect. Wagner and Grant are clearly dressing up the Western migration genre, and so it’s not quite as fun, for whatever reason. Things feel a bit more restrained than I expected, like two drunks showing up to heckle a funeral and somehow shaming themselves into behaving. Maybe somewhere around the third or fourth installment, their research or some bit of family history crept into their awareness and they realized having a bunch of families die just for daring to dream of a better life isn’t quite the piss-take that, say, a polar bear chewing off the head of a CIA agent is?

Still a good read, though.

Homunculus (by Hideo Yamamoto, published by Seven Seas): I know I ranted about this before in a previous newsletter so I’ll keep it short (plus, Papa is once again cresting almost three thousand words and there’s only so much weekend left). Absolutely one of the best reads of the year for me—a homeless man has holes drilled in his head by a dilettante scientist interested in seeing if trepanation can be linked to seeing psychic phenomena.

Glacially paced to give the proceedings a dreamlike feel, Homonculus is shockingly confident and assured as it goes about unpeeling the world of the main characters and finally the character himself. It’s a drama that feels like a horror story, a Jungian exploration into personalities and, ultimately, a specific personality.

As with Jungian stuff, there are times where some of the bits feel too on-the-nose and a bit precious, but there’s many, many more times where stuff is just happening, and you’re utterly absorbed in it and in determining how you feel about it. Several times in the narrative, I encountered moments where I wasn’t sure if what i was seeing was something incredibly positive or incredibly negative—if I was uplifted or appalled.

Our Aimless Nights (by Kou Mori, published by Azuki): Italicized for you; bolded for me. A popular, extroverted girl crushes on the introverted boy in her class who works nights at her local convenience store. It’s slight in just about every way—it’s only 25 chapters; it’s got all the psychological depth of a dixie cup—but the way Kou Mori draws teenagers mooning over one another worked for me, as did the setting. There’s something about teenagers out and about in the night that really fries my burger: a mix of personal nostalgia— for my high school years meeting up with friends at the corner of Dark and Nowhere—and artistic aptness—what is all that darkness but everything you might be but aren’t yet?

Dandadan (by Yukinobu Tatsu, published by Viz): It’s kind of dumb to say I like Dandadan, because Dandadan is designed by Yukinobu Tatsu with an almost weapon-like precision to be impossible to dislike. It’s a romantic screwball comedy; it’s a supernatural-alien super power comedy; it’s a teen superhero team; it’s a slap-happy gag manga and a sour indictment of how society destroys those it forsakes; and six or seven other things I can’t be bothered to properly describe. It looks like a million bucks; it publishes like clockwork; it seemingly does it all, the poster child for modern manga (after Chainsaw Man set its own poster on fire.)

There’s a very good case to be made it’s really not anything other than what it is, a little pop confection that’s only purpose is to be consumed. (As usual—as almost always!—Abhay talked about it first and better)

But on a long sleepless night in an intensely uncomfortable Amtrak cabin, I reread the first six volumes on my iPad and it was such a consolation, such a relief, that made a nearly untenable stretch of time pass pleasantly. So I’m tremendously grateful and in the tank for it.

Roxxon Presents: Thor #1 (by Al Ewing and Greg Land, published by Marvel): Italicized book, quick mention: I think Ewing stuck the landing on this title that is, essenitally, a clever ironic deconstruction of clever ironic deconstructions (and how corporations use them to sell the same pernicious products to you). It is meta within meta within meta and that’s not for everybody but it worked for me.

Plus, one of my ongoing theories is that Immortal Thor is a deeply coded text about being a comics creator—as All-Father, Thor is able to change reality and rewrite history, even as he finds himself forced to follow the larger narratives of the ur-gods before him and in danger of being rewritten by capitalist opportunists—and Roxxon Presents: Thor is a pretty succinct (and funny) summation of all that.

The Summer Hikaru Died (by Mokumokuren, published by Yen Press): Another one I blabbed about extensively elsewhere—the first two volumes are pure gold, in my opinion: a quiet and disquieting horror story about two high schoolers, one of whom has died and come back to the village, animated by the spirit of….something.

The next two volumes I liked a little less as they move a bit more into standard territory—there are secondary characters, most of whom are distressingly psychic (distressing in a statistically unlikely sense, if nothing else).

But I’m holding out hope for the next volume. When Hikaru works best, it’s just unstoppable to me—a gay(er) version of Let The Right One In where you find yourself unsure if you’re right to be rooting for what you’re rooting for. So much of The Summer Hikaru Died turns so nicely on themes of suspecting but not knowing, and maybe that’s why I think there’s probably at least two psychic characters too many?

Tokyo These Days (by Taiyo Matsumoto, published by Viz): A retired manga editor decides to put his savings into one last anthology of all his favorite creators in this utterly lovely work by manga legend Taiyo Matsumoto. Matsumoto isn’t usually my bag, but my god this is such a lovely and loving tribute to creators and those who support them…and also just an exceptionally well-cartooned piece of art in its own right. It’s great to be an old guy and read something about getting old that gets that feeling right, that feeling of being tender and fond toward so many and so much, even as it keeps churning away, turning away from you.

Issak (by Shinji Makari and DOUBLE–S, published by Kodansha): Two Japanese snipers hunt one another amidst the Catholic-Protestant turmoil that will ignite into the Thirty Years War in a series that only could have been more my shit if it’d been published under the “Truly Jeff’s Shit” imprint.

Characterization? Atmosphere? Nuance? Um, no. But Makari does the research, figures out ways to ratchet the tension point in the plot whenever possible, and crafts realistic and consistent motivations. Meanwhile Double-S draws a shit ton of battle scenes, horses, and hollering people with beards with a minimum of fuss and a ton of clarity. Sometimes I find myself thinking the art could really use more varied line weights—it’s like looking at an entire book drawn right off a light table—but that’s me being a quibbler. Super-fun book. Truly my shit.

Kunigei - Okuni University Art Department Film Program (by Yosuke Takano, published by Shueisha on MangaPlus): There’s a handful of manga about the arts currently running I’m really reading and enjoying—Akane-banashi by Yuki Suenaga and Takamasa Moue (about rakugo) and Show-Ha Shoten by Akinari Asakura and Takeshi Obata (about stand-up comedy and Japanese manzai)—but Yosuke Takano’s manga is the one that makes me nod my head the most with every new chapter.

Unlike the standard art manga where the protagonist is usually some kind of prodigy hobbled by the deck being unfairly stacked against them, Kunigei features a film student protagonist who in the very first chapter is forced to realize how easily self-satisfied and self-deluded he’s been after being excoriated by the actual prodigy.

In short, Takano has less interest in the standard tropes of either using the prodigy as a way to explore and display the topic at hand (as the prodigy has tremendous skill but no experience, requiring mentors to explain the nuances of the field to them/the reader) or as simple (and popular!) ego-fantasy.

Instead, it’s more about, “Oh hey, you realize you suck. What now?” And so is actually kind of instructive and I think helpful for people who want to make art (and especially film).

I don’t know, maybe this is or was an italicized pick for me, but it’s such a relief reading something where the protagonist decides to keep going even after being told—and realizing!—that their work isn’t very good. Good advice about how to get better at making art isn’t especially easy (despite lots of people being willing to give it, or perhaps because of that), especially in manga. Wouldn’t surprise me if it gets canceled a week or two after I post this, but I’m glad it’s around now.

Hima-Ten! (by Genki Ono, published by Shueisha and Viz on MangaPlus and ShonenJump): Absolutely indefensible pick by me: a romcom about a high school housekeeper who gets a job cleaning the house of his new classmate, a highly successful businesswoman and viral idol. Like any good “will they or won’t they,” it was set up as a love triangle by chapter two, and became a love quadrangle by chapter nine. All the characters are mostly quite nice to one another, and Ono draws the female characters really pretty. Ono had some comments in issue 43 of the 2024 issue of Shonen Jump that pretty much sums up the complexity of his approach to Hima-Ten!: “I like that Shonen Jump doesn’t have bikini-girl sections in it, but I also like bikini-girl sections.”

Utterly indefensible.

My Dearest Patrolman (by Niyama, published by Viz via SuBLime): OK this may be as shocking to you as it was to me, but Boy’s Love comics…are pretty damn gay?!

I mean, way, way back when, I dipped my toe into some of the better loved titles by Fumi Yoshinaga who I was told was the gold standard for this kind of thing…and they were totally tame!

So a few months back (July), while jonesing for some decent romance manga to read, this came up in the books for that week, and I went, “Huh. No way it could be as good as Fumi Yoshinaga but, you know, romance, right? Plus all the other translated adult romance I’ve read has been pretty tame, so it’s not like there’s gonna be, like, lots of dicks out….”

And ok, not lots, but—dicks are out! Ejaculating is happening! I swear to God, I’ve read five volumes of Ladies on Top and seen maybe six nipples, but this book totally has a guy grunting and tugging his junk fifteen pages in!

But you know, that aside (or maybe that included, if that works for you), the first volume of this is exceptionally cute and charming, one of the few books I’ve read where the manga-ka is 100% like the people you see online in love with their OC fanfic—it’s all lovingly inked panels of Seiji’s hair (the easy-going shopkeeper who used to be a cop) or the forearms of Shin (the stoic patrolman in love with Seiji who long ago had been a delinquent until Seiji the cop reformed him) while one cracks wise and the other silently pines. Niyama’s love for her characters is contagious, and I really enjoyed the first volume where the “will they or won’t they” is resolved with “well, wow, they most graphically did!”

The second volume? Ehhhh, I think it worked better as a one-shot but I think it’s unsurprising a cartoonist who loves their characters this much would be unwilling to put them away and move one.

The Brave and the Bold #75-150 or so? (Mostly by Bob Haney and Jim Aparo, but occasionally others, published by DC): I mean, it’s Bob Haney and Jim Aparo! what do you want, a road map?

(Plus, I’m over 4700 words and kind of want to punch myself for doing this to myself again!)

Let me just say that I get you cool kids love your print, but having a light, slender iPad on which I can keep three omnibus editions (Rom, Micronauts, The Brave & The Bold) and read an issue of each without having to search for a missing issue or throw out my back hefting a five pound book around (ok, yes, I’m old and out of shape, I know)? The bee’s knees, my friend. Everything my childhood self would’ve wanted.

Absolute Batman #1 (by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta, published by DC): I can run hot and cold on Snyder but his reinvention of Batman here is a lot of fun, always trying to zig when you think he’s going to zag. But the real star of the show to me is Dragotta, who not only carries it all off with aplomb, it’s easy to miss how much lifting the guy is doing: in the first three issues, most of the pages start at eight panels and go up from there; he’s got pages with fifteen panels, angles and points of view utterly dynamic while remaining utterly clear. I liked both Absolute Superman and Absolute Wonder Woman a lot as well (and didn’t think I would) but every issue of this leaves me excited and tickled.

Daredevil #1-24 (by Chip Zdarsky , Marco Checchetto, and others, published by Marvel): If we weren’t nearly at the 5K mark, I’d spend some time talking about the dangers of digital for me but if you want to know where I’d be going with that, let me say that I finally got around to reading this after buying the omnibus on sale (even though I already had the first dozen issues, and then two or three trades, also all on digital and almost all on sale).

That’s beside the point, though. The point is Zdarsky writes a really good Daredevil comic, and when he gets the right artists on it (Marco Checchetto does fab work and is mostly the artist on the run) it’s like, “holy shit, Daredevil. Still some fucking gas in the tank, huh? Who knew? Not me!”

I mean it’s very much a modern Daredevil comic—there’s Elektra and the Kingpin and the Punisher and Catholic guilt and a lot of internal struggling about the necessity of violence and Matt Murdock once again fails to keep it in his pants—but it’s done just differently enough, just enough of a new thing to say on all the old stuff that it works.

I consider myself lucky I read Zdarsky’s turn on Batman (and mostly liked it) before coming to this, because I think it’d be a lot more disappointing the other way around. And I still have about six to ten issues to go. But yeah, for the most part it works, it deserves the hype.

Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre #1 (by Tom Scioli, published by IDW): Tom Scioli has Godzilla meet the Great Gatsby, and I truly love him for that. I don’t think it’s prime Scioli, mind you, but we can get into that later, maybe. (Though there’s a thing where he has Gatsby pose in a panel that’s an homage to the movie Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze and that still just delights the shit out of me and has that mad scientist mash-up heft he brought to G.I. Joe/Transformers and Super-Friends.)

Gannibal, Vols. 1-3 (by Masaaki Ninomiya, published by Ablaze): Talked about relatively recently and with nothing new to say—but this tale of a city policeman assigned to a rural village where he comes up against a powerful local family and the even more powerful horrible secret they’re protecting is just paced like a motherfucker. I’m dubious whethere Ninomiya can sustain it (or if Ablaze can sustain their publication model long enough to get it all in print) but a solid read. (You can get it on Hoopla!)

whewwwww……

OK! Don’t be surprised if this is my last missive for the year. But I suspect I’ll be back before too long.

Let me extend to you the warmest wishes for your holiday and new year! Thank you for reading (or skimming! Or scrolling quickly with your mouse, shaking your head and mumbling “Jesus, Jeff” under your breath while you do!). Let’s do it again soon, yes?

Your pal,

-Jeff