The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

For today’s Best of the Year spot I’m pleased to introduce fellow blogger-about-town and also gentleman librarian (quite possibly the only librarian who keeps a fully stocked utility belt under his chunky knit cardigan), Mark Kardwell, with his faves from 2009:

FPI: Can you pick three comics/webcomics/graphic novels which you especially enjoyed over the last twelve months and tell us why you singled them out?

Mark: I’ve recently been moving house, and I’m right beside a stack of unsorted stuff from the last 12 months, and thumbing through it, this has been a great year for the original graphic novel – I could have filled this list just from that side of things, and I’m sure most people will be including Darwyn Cooke’s Parker and David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, so I won’t. Kind of. I loved how Cooke adapted Westlake’s staccato, brutal sentences into staccato, brutal images. And Mazzucchelli’s work is a new high for the form, a work that is very literary yet accessible, and operates so purely through such original graphic storytelling techniques.

The ongoing comic I’ve enjoyed most this year has been Hellboy: the Wild Hunt by Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo. I’m cheating a little here because its first issue came out in 2008, but those last three issues that have came out this year just blew me away. It never ceases to amaze me how, with each series and after all this time, Mignola keeps adding more twists and revelations, and continues the sense of forward momentum, that everything is building to some insanely huge pay-off in the future. And because of Mignola’s huge reputation, people think I’m joking when I keep saying that the book has never looked better, but Fegredo is doing an amazing job. He’s the most under-rated artist in the comics mainstream.

One comic I didn’t expect much from but loved a lot was the Marvel mini-series Zodiac by Joe Casey and Nathan Fox. Casey’s work for hire stuff is usually nowhere near as pleasing as his creator-owned work for Image, but I think this work was maybe flying under editorial’s radar somewhat, and he had a ball with its amoral-yet-principled protagonist.  And Nathan Fox’s work is always a gaudy, messy, treat.

I hate to kiss arse, but Blank Slate’s Spleenal was bloody fantastic. I thought I was being very insightful as I read it, thinking, flippin’ hell, Nigel Auchterlounie is like a modern British Crumb or Shelton! Must write that down. And then he made the influence explicit on the next page as he name-checked them in a strip, and then drew them into the piece a few pages later. So yeah, he’s our Bob Crumb, and he rocks, and everyone should read it.

FPI: Can you pick three books which you especially enjoyed over the last twelve months and tell us why you singled them out?

Mark: This has been something of a good year for enjoying great new books by old favourite authors – Iain Banks’ Transition, Patrick McCabe’s The Holy City and James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover.

FPI: Can you pick three TV shows and/or movies which you especially enjoyed over the last twelve months and tell us why you singled them out?

Mark: Oooh, haven’t been to the cinema much this year, mainly because my local one is so unrelentingly dumb in its choices of what it shows on its many screens.  I did go to see Watchmen, pretty much secure in my opinion that adapting it would be a thoroughly redundant exercise. Und es war!  I didn’t want to be seen crying in public, so I viewed Up! alone on a crappy quality bootleg. More proof that Pixar make the best first acts in the business, but usually stuff up with obvious formulaic choices towards the end. I still haven’t even gotten ‘round to seeing District 9 or Inlgorious Basterds yet.

I’m currently hooked on HBO’s In Treatment, showing in the UK on Sky Arts. I love storytelling that reveals its secrets slowly, tantalisingly, and it was great for that. Plus, it revealed the secret, long suppressed by the medical community, that hugs are probably more effective than years of psychotherapy. And it was funny how Gabriel Byrne’s accent got progressively more Irish the angrier he got.

Oh, and Crank 2 is the greatest movie made since Citizen Kane.

FPI: How did 2009 go for you as a blogger?

Mark: This year was the fifth birthday of Bad Librarianship, and I was really touched by the amount of love generated by this event. And by love, I really mean “exclusive content”: lots of sketches and finished art by the great and the good; and my personal favourite – a photo of Chris Weston with his new best mate, geek legend Gary Oldman. It all reminded me of how I’ve lucked into becoming something of a comic art Zelig. I don’t really do anything, but I know a lot of wonderful people, and they treat me very well.

FPI: Anyone you think is a name we should be watching out for next year?

Mark: Someday soon the world will wake up to the genius of Warwick J Cadwell. I’ll put that another way: I shall not rest until the world wakes up to the genius of Warwick J Cadwell.

I’m hoping Paul Pope finally gets the finger out and finishes some of those long-form projects he’s been promising us, Battling Boy and a completed THB (or even LA Chica Bionica).

I’d really like Rebellion to put out a collected edition of the best strip that ran in 2000AD last year, Cradlegrave so that more people will cop on to the greatness of Edmund Bagwell (it doesn’t hurt that it’s the best thing John Smith has ever written, as well).

And hot damn, Brendan McCarthy’s Marvel debut Fever is going to blow people away. Seeing the most far-out artist in comics working on Spider-Man should give him the opportunity to explode as many minds as possible.

FPI: And one final, special question – since its not only the end of the year approaching but also the end of the decade, is there any comics work you’d especially pick out as one of the best you’ve read this decade?

Mark: I know the last volume won’t be out until 2010, but I’m pretty sure that the Naughties will be remembered as the decade of Scott Pilgrim.  It’ll be seen as the signature book of this decade as, say, Watchmen is for the Eighties.