More than the previous few years, 2016 reached deeper into what the comic industry is and, more importantly, what it could be. On the Big Two front, Marvel further diversified its core titles with heroes who weren’t relegated to straight, white dudes crafted in the ‘50s. DC took major strides forward with its Rebirth initiative, embracing the soul of its heritage characters and a new majority of the market share for a few months.
But the indies seemed to shout the loudest this year. For all of comic journalism’s attention to Diamond Distributor’s lists, Raina Telgemeier is a one-woman industry who routinely dominates the majority of The New York Times' Graphic Books List. That success should come as no surprise on the heels of work like Ghosts, Telgemeier’s searingly emotional and joyous look at mortality. But she has new company that won’t be leaving any time soon; Congressman John Lewis’ graphic novel autobiography, March, concluded with its third entry, co-written by Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell. It’s the first graphic novel to win a National Book Award and it’s rightfully being adopted as required reading in public schools.
In addition, stalwarts Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics delivered a front-loaded bulk of innovative, mind-expanding tomes, writer Tom King infiltrated Marvel and DC with two of the most melancholy, heart-breaking comics of the year and Image continued to carry the torch of progressive genre fiction, with all-time greats like Saga, Southern Bastards and Lazarus losing ground on this list not due to a dip in quality, but an expansion of the playing field. This year may have been a garbage fire of bad vibes, but at least comics continued to foster dreams of a brighter 2017.
13. Moon Cop
Writer/Artist: Tom Gauld
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Tom Gauld is the book-lover’s cartoonist. His comics appear regularly in populist high-minded publications like The Guardian and New Scientist, where they focus on literary genres, both fiction and nonfiction. They’re silly, but in a serious manner, where a sandpaper-dry delivery renders the absurd amusing. Gauld demonstrates a very British way of executing humor—the appearance of noisy attention-grabbing is strenuously avoided for more casual methods of engagement. At the same time, the comics swim in melancholy, even when they aim to make you giggle. Gauld’s simplified forms, which often appear in silhouette, have skinny arms and legs. If they have faces at all, he often defines those faces only with eyes and an occasional nose. This visual technique, along with the figures’ restrained body language, can make the characters seem down, and an atmosphere of failure pervades the strips (because failure is much funnier than success).
His latest work, Mooncop, is a great exercise in restraint: a brief page count, panels with an Ernie Bushmiller level of minimalism, emotions expressed with body language and a few words. Yet, despite its location, it’s not airless. Gauld mixes sweetness and melancholy in a story that’s slim but not slight. Hillary Brown
8. Big Kids
Writer/Artist: Michael DeForge
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
The experience of reading Big Kids is almost synesthetic; it puts inarticulable emotional states into unrelated visuals that evoke those feelings with pinpoint precision. How can a six-panel page of two squiggly lines intertwining suggest a late-adolescent sexual encounter? Do guilt and shame translate as a body slowly absorbing raindrops that feel like tiny, heavy metal balls? How does one draw the concept of becoming aware of a new dimension of thought and feeling? Big Kidsposits crazy and ambitious goals, and cartoonist Michael DeForge doesn’t always achieve them, but his work here is reliably intellectual and emotionally intelligent, as well as garishly beautiful. Hillary Brown
6. Hot Dog Taste Test
Writer/Artist: Lisa Hanawalt
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Lisa Hanawalt’s second collection of work isn’t only about food, but it does have blurbs from Momofuku’s David Chang and Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold on the back, so food is certainly a large part of it. Most food writing can fall into insufferable extremes: too full of adjectives, too gross, too focused on morality at the expense of deliciousness, too boring, too self-important and/or too much about the writer. Hanawalt manages to avoid any of these traps. She is appreciative of weird foods without coming off like a dilettante, and expresses a love of junk without seeming like a glutton. She can even be directly autobiographical without being annoying, exemplified in her comic about how she prefers her egg yolks thoroughly cooked. One explanation is that she keeps things brief instead of rhapsodizing for 6,000 words on breakfast. A better reason is that her comics on food are no different from her comics on anything: the product of a mind with a marvelously weird perspective. Hillary Brown
3. Panther
Writer/Artist: Brecht Evens
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Let’s cut to the chase: Panther is fucking terrifying. Belgian cartoonist Brecht Evens covers similar terrain as previous graphic novel, Night Animals, showing the perils of little girls cavorting with storybook monsters. In this lush, watercolored fever dream, adolescent Christine bonds with the talking, titular cat who emerges from the lowest drawer of her dresser. Panther regales Christine with fanciful tales of Pantherland before parading a medley of red flags, including emotional co-dependency, inappropriate touching and sketchy, sketchy, sketchyfriends. As their time together grows, Panther stretches comic-book tension to its most affecting extremes, and attempting to reveal a metaphor or resolution is equally unnerving. Like some unholy love child between Winnie the Pooh and Harmony Korine, Panther is the harrowing comic event for 2016. Sean Edgar
