Today’s Best of the Year picks come courtesy of internationally best-selling author Ian Rankin, creator of the incredibly popular Inspector Rebus detective novels set in and around Edinburgh (incidentally he picked the name Rebus from the title of a word puzzle on the funny pages of D.C. Thomson’s Sunday Post, the same section that hosts Oor Wullie and the Broons). I know Ian is a keen comics fan and he is also now getting to pen a graphic novel, a special Hellblazer tale for DC which is due late in 2009, I believe, and which I’m looking forward to. Ian’s latest novel, Doors Open, which sees an attempt at the ‘perfect crime’, targetting the National Gallery of Scotland, was published recently.
FPI: Could you tell us what your favourite three comics/graphic novels and/or books have been this year and why they stood out for you?
Ian: I’m not sure it’s been a classic year, but I’ve been enjoying the non-PC capers of Garth Ennis’ ‘The Boys‘ (which even has a Scottish hero, albeit one based visually on Simon Pegg). I’ve got high (ahem) hopes for Alan Grant’s ‘Wasted‘. And Jonathan Cape has just sent me a volume of comic strips about lesbians (’The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For‘ by Alison Bechdel), which I’m looking forward to getting my teeth into.
(a page from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys, published Dynamite)
FPI: In other art forms was there anything in the world of radio, TV, film or other artistic endeavours that really drew your attention this year?
Ian: For movies, Dark Knight and In Bruges were the two films I enjoyed most. I found Wall-E slightly too cute/saccharine, but I doff my cap to the animators. On TV, I found Mad Men enjoyable. It had the same fun ‘Life on Mars’ did - allowing its actors to behave badly because it is set in a previous era.
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