I was warned, by no less an authority on all things small press-related than Daniel Elkin, that once I read the first issue of Tongues, the opening installment in a new, long-form, modern retelling of the Promethean myth by Anders Nilsen (take or leave the Brekhus as you see fit — although the artist himself seems to be including it more and more frequently), that I’d probably feel like going back and re-doing my “Top 10 Single Issues Of 2017” list — and damn if he wasn’t right. Still, going back over old ground has never been my style, we just plug ahead around these parts, but that doesn’t mean we can’t — and shouldn’t — give this extraordinary work the recognition it deserves, does it?

There’s lots to unpack when one discusses Tongues — visually, conceptually, thematically — but before getting lost in those tantalizing weeds, a word…

How’s everyone’s holiday season going? Is your schedule brimming over with last-minute shit to get done? Or do you actually have time to do some reading? If so, here’s some new stuff you can find at your local comic shop, or via mail order, all of which (for better, worse, or somewhere in between) drew my attention over the course of the past week —

Assassinistas #1 is the opening salvo of a new six-parter from Shelly Bond’s Black Crown imprint at IDW. Writer Tini Howard’s name is one I confess to being unfamiliar with previously, but a quick glance at her CV shows that  she’s most recently worked on a couple of re-launches for decidedly second-tier Image properties Hack/Slash and The Magdalena — and now she’s jumped right to the head of the class by landing a gig co-creating a series with Gilbert Hernandez. This old/new mix seems to be something…

I plead the Fifth on whether or not I’ve ever done this myself, but there was a time when dropping acid and reading (or, more likely, just looking at) Jack Kirby comics was a popular pastime — and so it was only a matter of time, I suppose, before some enterprising cartoonist came along, eliminated the drug-dealing middleman, and just served up Kirby-esque tales with the “LSD effect” baked right into the pages.

Enter Kansas City’s William Cardini — although I honestly wonder whether or not he hails from a dimension much like the ones he draws, because I don’t know how you come up with some of this stuff without having seen it, perhaps even lived it, firsthand. Or, ya know, maybe he’s just got a good connection for hallucinogenics, in which case I really need him to give me a call.

My only previous exposure to…

And so we’ve arrived at this, our final — and, I’m sure for some, most significant — “best of” list of the year, surveying 2017’s top 10 graphic novels. Quick reminder of our “house rules” : these have to be original works designed from the outset for the GN format, not collected works of any sort, which have already been covered on our contemporary and vintage collected editions lists — and, as always, no real “reviews” here (chances are I’ve reviewed most, if not all, of these somewhere or other online already), just quick summaries of why they’re all so fucking awesome. Okay, let’s do this!

10. Vague Tales by Eric Haven (Fantagraphics) – Long one of the most intriguing, if sporadic, cartoonists around, here Haven constructs a fascinating and surreal overarching story from mostly-silent vignettes featuring barbarians, super-heroes, sexy sorceresses, and monsters that borrow equally from Jack Kirby, Fletcher…

This was a pretty solid week of reading, with short graphic novels being something of a running theme —

I Am Not Okay With This is the latest release from Charles Forsman, and a much-hyped one at that, being something of a conceptual and thematic follow-up to The End Of The Fucking World, in that both works focus on the interior thought processes, and external actions, of alienated youth. Our protagonist this time out, an Olive Oyl doppleganger named Sydney, ups the ante in that she possesses obliquely-defined mental powers, but it’s her home and social lives (her father recently passed away from an apparent suicide, she has unrequited romantic feelings for her slightly older best friend, her sexuality seems either fluid or unresolved) that are of far more interest, and her “superhuman” abilities actually function as something of an unnecessary crutch in the scheme of things.

Which isn’t…

We’re getting there, I promise! Next up in our 2017 year in review we come to the top 10 vintage collections of the year, a list which comprises reprint collections released over the past 12 months of material originally published prior to the year 2000. Not much preamble apart from that necessary other than the standard reminder that these selections won’t be accompanied by anything like “reviews,” just quick summations of why you, dear reader, should buy them :

10. Belgian Lace From Hell : The Mythology Of S. Clay Wilson Vol. 3, edited by Patrick Rosenkranz (Fantagraphics) – The final volume of Fantagraphics’ exhaustive half-biography, half-comics retrospective of the career of underground trailblazer S. Clay Wilson presents a terrific selection of strips that don’t just transgress, but utterly annihilate, any and all notions of good taste with recklessly gleeful abandon — but a handful of very noticeable…

Let’s keep plugging away here, shall we? This time around on out year-end wrap we’re looking at the top 10 collected editions of 2017, with a slight change to my previously-announced methodology : rather than placing everything “Modern Age” (roughly the 1980s) and beyond in this category, I’ve narrowed it to collections of comics published post-2000, so that everything being referred to as “contemporary” at least comes from, ya know, this century. Apart from that, however, the category remains a fairly broad one : TPB or hardcover collections of single issues, webcomics collections, diary comics collections, and anthologies all fall into what I consider to be “collected editions” — in other words, a lot of this stuff is more or less brand new, and many critics who don’t share my OCD affliction might even call some of these “graphic novels.” I’m not gonna do it that way, though, because…

Great stuff to tell you about this week, friends, so let’s eschew the time-wasting in favor of getting right the fuck down to business —

Twilight Of The Bat is Josh Simmons’ second “unauthorized” take on DC’s most bankable property, following on from his 2007 mini-comic simply titled “Batman” (later re-christened, no doubt for legal reasons, “Mark Of The Bat”), and this time out he’s joined by artist Patrick Keck for a 20-page ‘zine boasting high-quality Risograph printing and an $8.00 price tag set in a post-apocalyptic G _____ City where “The Bat” and his mortal enemy “Joke-Man” are the only survivors. The true nature of the most psychologically complex hero/villain relationship in comics is laid bare in frank and stark terms here, Kek’s rich and no-doubt-time-consuming linework is exceptional, and damn if this story won’t even make you laugh a couple times in spite of yourself. Yeah, okay, the 

Okay, let’s keep our best-of-2017 theme going here with a look at the Top 10 ongoing series of the year. A quick refresher on the rules : both ongoing and limited series are eligible in this category, as long as they meet a three-issue minimum. The idea here is to rank comics that are chained to a regular(-ish) production schedule, as opposed to those that come out whenever a cartoonist or creative team has the time and/or finances (in the case of self-publishers) to release them. Those books were all eligible (and, frankly, dominated) the “Top 10 Single Issues” list that I cranked out a couple days ago — and, as with that, this one won’t feature full reviews of each series, nor even ones that graduate to the “capsule” review level, just short summations of why I like ’em.

Sound good? I’m happy if you agree, and frankly could…

And so it’s that time of year again : let the debating begin, I suppose, as the various “Top 10” lists begin to hit the internet in earnest, but one thing I think we can all agree on — it’s been quite a year in the world of comics. The underground lost luminaries Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson, the mainstream lost Swamp Thing co-creators Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson — there have been some tough moments.

But there have also been a number of “highs,” as well — in fact, one could make a fairly convincing argument that 2017 has seen more really fucking good comics published than any year in recent memory. To that end, then, we’re splitting this annual “best of” round-up into several columns, the basics of which will proceed as follows :

The top 10 graphic novels list will be pretty much exactly what it sounds…