Best of the Year 2011: Matthew Sheret

Tue, Dec 13, 2011

Best of the Year 2011, Comics and cartoons

Today’s Best of the Year guest post comes from Matthew Sheret, comics creator and also co-founder of the excellent Brit small press showcase We Are Words + Pictures as well as being behind the brilliant Paper Science anthology.

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?

Matthew: Journey Into Mystery: I’ve got an unhealthy cynicism about most of the Big Two’s output, fueled in part by trading in some two thousand comics earlier this year. I’d enjoyed Kieron’s run on Thor, but the big crossover and interruptions frustrated me a little, and I sort of expected The Adventures of Kid Loki to be similarly hobbled. But from the off it blew me away, happily riffing off of the likes of Sandman while slinging Actual Teen Dialogue the reader’s way every few pages, it’s been a proper treat to see it play out month after month

(Journey into Mystery #625 by Kieron Gillen and Doug Braithwaite, cover art by Stephanie Hans, (c) Marvel)

Drawing The Line: London During The Student Protests (posted on Cartoon Movement). It’s worth noting that despite being a bit of a lefty I was actually deeply skeptical about the student protests. But I thought this ten page strip for Cartoon Movement was a really elegant meander through a few perspectives by Humberstone and Holiday. I really want to see more by them.

(a scene from Drawing the Line: London During the Student Protests by and (c) Anne Holiday and Tom Humberstone)

Don Quixote, book one (SelfMadeHero). I saw some of Rob’s artwork for this at Thought Bubble 2010 and knew it’d be great. I picked it up a year later and started laughing out loud as I read it on the train home. He treats Quixote and Panza very tenderly, and exploits the best elements of the medium to ‘bring the laffs’.

(the famous windmills scene from Cervantes’ remarkable Don Quixote, adapted by the excellent Rob Davis, published SelfMadeHero)

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

Matthew: Rockall. Great book from 1956 about the history of “the most isolated small rock in the oceans of the world”.

Do It For Your Mum. Former British Sea Power manger Roy Wilkinson’s book about the trials of being part of a touring band and the inspirational impact rock music had on his seventy seven year old father.

On Nature. A collection of articles from contributors to the blog ‘Caught By The River‘. Part of the book’s magic was reading it while on holiday in Norway, under a sun that never set, surrounded by incredible scenery.

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?

Matthew: Doctor Who. I know it went off the boil a bit this year – the arc and the Neil Gaiman episode were a bit weak by my reckoning – but Night Terrors was tremendous and Matt Smith just got more and more compelling to watch. (Actually, you know, I’m gonna get some flak for the Gaiman comment, so let me explain it: the TARDIS has endured for almost 50 years because it’s a mystery. ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ was just a 45minute series of answers to questions best left unasked.)

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Grand romp. Just complex enough. Plus Toby Jones is in it, and I bloody love that guy.

Drive. Moody, brilliant, boasts a soundtrack I still haven’t quite shaken from the back of my brain. Superb violence and some of the most touching shots of two people falling in love I’ve seen on camera. Just fabulous.

FPI: How did 2011 go for you as a creator? Are you happy with the way you got your work out this year?

Matthew: Hard to answer; I certainly did a bunch of very different things. Comics wise we took Paper Science quarterly for a year, a terrific experiment that paid off spectacularly well. On the other hand I’ve only written two comics, and people know me more for We Are Words + Pictures and editing Paper Science than as a writer, which is something I want to address next year. At the other end of the spectrum, my day job included standing up in front of about 1’000 designers and developers and giving a talk which featured me repairing my laptop with a sonic screwdriver. That was pretty sweet.

FPI: What can we look forward to from you in 2012?

Matthew:2012′s going to be a ‘knuckling down’ sort of year. January sees Paper Science 7, with Paper Science 8 likely to come in time for Free Comic Book Day before it goes on hiatus. In between I’ll be writing and listening to Kate Bush records, the fruits of which won’t see the light of day until Thought Bubble at the earliest. I’ll also be learning how to program an Arduino.

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

Matthew:Adam Cadwell. He’s stepped up his game massively in the last twelve months, and his professionalism puts most of his contemporaries to shame. Also Andrew Tunney’s Girl & Boy looks great.