My Favorite Comics of 2023

The end of the year is always a time for me to make lists of my favorite stuff, and one of the lists I enjoy as much as dread making every year is my "Favorite Comics" list. Why? Well, not sure you noticed, but I read a lot of comics. 

Same thing as last year. Some REALLY great books in 2023, so as usual, this was not an easy list to assemble.

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2023: Caveat

Maybe this is just my way to get an extra entry onto this list - it has been a wonderous year for comics - but due to my difficulties procuring copies of Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips' That Texas Blood spin-off/prequel series The Enfield Gang Massacre, I still have not read the entire series and thus, cannot in good faith add it to this list. There's nary a doubt that it belongs here with the best of the best, though. 

The climactic Issue Five came out two weeks ago, and with me now spending most of January in L.A., I probably won't have it in my hands until February or March, whenever I return to Chicago. This means I won't be able to actually read this series in its entirety until then. Condon and Phillips show no signs of relenting in their ability to turn out one of the most interesting mixtures of Weird Fiction/Crime/Noir around, now adding Westerns to the list of genres they can effortlessly tackle.

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Favorite Comics of 2023:

10) The Ribbon Queen

It is so good to have Garth Ennis working in Horror again, especially when teamed with Jacen Burrows. The Ribbon Queen does what Ennis does so well - takes topical stress points from the headlines and juxtaposes them with ancient, otherworldly forces that ultimately just want to do horrible things to human flesh. In the case of this book, that methodology feels especially fresh and, dare I say satisfying. Nothing like seeing terrible humans suffer a brutal punishment. What makes this a cut above, though, is the added moral quandary of whether or not revenge is the answer, even if it feels like it is.

9) The Bone Orchard Mythos: Tenement

 

You might recall that I added a caveat to last year's list that stated I would hold off adding Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino's Bone Orchard Mythos until this year. Some might say that required a lot of faith, however, I did this primarily because, although we had received several entries into this mythos by the end of 2022 (The Passageway, Ten Thousand Black Feathers and the NCBD single) word was Tenement would really kick the doors open on what Lemire and Sorrentino are building. Happily, this book has more than lived up to any expectations set by those previous entries. What's more, as a standalone Horror story, Tenement excels. As with the duo's previous book, Gideon Falls, the frayed realism and vibrant humanity they bring to Horror, and the veil they reveal beneath the modern cityscape create such an otherworldly yet still relatable feeling that you're never quite certain what you're looking at, of, more importantly, if it will hurt someone you've grown to care for. 

8) Popscars 

Thanks to a chance meeting in the spring of 2022, I watched Pat O'Malley's Hollywood Revenge series Popscars go from a successful Kickstarter campaign to worldwide distribution via Behemoth (now Sumerian) Comics in 2023. This book is gritty and pretty at the same time - which is exactly how Pat and artist Santi Guillen planned it. A macro view of the illusory facade of Hollywood undercut by the stark, cold reality that lies in wait beneath it. Also, just about the coolest, most iconic character I've seen in a long time.

7) The Seasons Have Teeth

Gentle, brutal, horrific, serene, but overall sublime, The Seasons Have Teeth's high concept and eye-catching art grabbed me from the first issue and pulled me into a story that moved me to tears by the end. Dan Watters, Sebasián Cabrol and Dan Jackson's harrowing tale of Earth's mightiest retort to humanity's apathy is unlike anything else I've read and probably an annual read from here out. Now, what season should I associate with it?

6) Phantom Road

Leff Lemire and Gabriel H. Walta's Phantom Road is a book that brings me nothing short of pure joy. The story of two regular folks traversing a "between place," slipping in and out of the world they know and braving an unknown liminal space is so right up my alley that it kind of feels like it was commissioned by an alternate timeline version of myself. These are ideas I hold near and dear to my heart, and while I've certainly seen the themes of "Thin Spaces" and what lies in wait within them explored before, no one except Stephen King has ever come so close to capturing it the way I 'see' the idea. 

5) X-Men: Red

X-Men: Red is a BEAST. I've made the statement multiple times now that this book feels so much like Rick Remender and Jerome Opena's fantasy epic Seven to Eternity that I have to keep reminding myself it's an X-Book. This is where the Krakoa era - if it is truly on its way out - took some of its biggest swings and made the most impact. The ideas and concepts, characters and evolution have been nothing short of staggering, and I for one will be devastated to see this go. 

4) Void Rivals

The only thing that could have made this book better is if I'd followed a fleeting impulse and picked it up before I knew it would tie into Robert Kirkman's Energon Universe. This book sets an EPIC stage, and I have no doubt that Kirkman will deliver. After all, this is the man who kept The Walking Dead series my "MUST READ RIGHT F*&KING NOW" book every month for nearly sixteen years. I have no doubt he can do it again while mixing new characters and concepts with ones I've loved almost as long as I've been alive. 

3) Haunthology

Jeremy Haun put all of his hopes, fears and nightmares during the COVID lockdown into this collection of stories, so it resonates on its own level. There is an elegant simplicity to the storytelling here that absolutely blows me away, and I don't believe a single story herein ever pull their punches or take the easy way out. There's so much relatable pain in here, it's still a touch difficult to read, however, if you love Horror to pull your strings the way I do, there's no better tome in recent memory to go to than this one.

2) Something is Killing the Children

This is really the first year I've been a SIKTC fan, and I went all in. This book is so worth every bit of hype it receives, and the rabidity of the fanbase is earned. Hard Earned. The arcs fly by, no one is safe, and all manner of hell breaks loose over and over again. The fact that the first three trades or fifteen issues are all one location, one event essentially, is amazing when you stop to think about how much suspense and horror just explode from every single issue. And it's never slowed down since. 

1) Night Fever 

I have thought about Brubaker & Phillips' Night Fever every day since I read it back in May. 

Every. Day.

I love this book more than I can even begin to explain. Part Noir, definite 70s influence from the likes of Friedkin and Costa-Gavras, not to mention the cinematic flourishes and predilections of Kubrick and Mann, this one is, to me, the pinnacle of what Brubaker and Phillips have done to date.

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New Music From Nabihah Iqbal!!!

Somewhere back in 2017, my good friend and Horror Vision cohost Ray turned me on to Nabihah Iqbal's album Weighing of the Heart. This one blew me away, and I've been following her ever since, waiting for a new album. A few years ago Nabihah spoke on social media about how the studio space she had been using to record that follow-up was broken into and, if memory serves, all her music and equipment was either stolen or trashed. 

My heart broke, but nearly as much as it must have for her.

Now, in spite of the adversity, Dreamer is poised to drop on April 28th courtesy of Ninja Tune, and you can pre-order it HERE. Also, it appears she is touring the U.S., and I am going to try like hell to make it to the Empty Bottle show in Chicago on June 7th, so check those dates by you!

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NCBD:

A super light NCBD this week, which is great, as it makes up for all the damn action figures I ordered last week! Hahaha. Here's my single, solitary pick:

I find it interesting to note that, according to the five-issue paradigm SIKTC has demonstrated on all previous trade collections, this new issue would be the fifth and final issue in Volume 5. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean the end of the current storyline; in fact, I'm all but positive that won't be the case. Remember - the Archer's Peak storyline lasted for three trades, and now that the action has shifted to Tribulation, New Mexico, things feel way too involved for everything to pan out this early. That said, it's also interesting to note that, over on League of Geeks, where there should be a button to see the next issue in the series, there is not one. I am by no means suggesting this is the end of the series, but Tynion and crew are definitely playing close to their chest, which, considering how visceral this series is, and how absolutely none of the characters feel safe, may be interpreted in a number of alarming ways.
            

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Playlist:

Spotlights - Seance EP

The Darts - Snake Oil

Le Butcherettes - A Raw Youth

Savages - Silence Yourself

The Cure - Wish

dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip - Angles

Nabihah Iqbal - Dreamer (pre-release singles)

Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R

Blank Mass - Animated Violence Mild

Ministry - Animositisomina

 

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Card:

Thoth is calling me back again:

This card 100% describes the feelings I've been having the last few days. I managed to force myself out to sit at my writing spot yesterday. Very little actual writing was accomplished, but as a wise man once told me, even if you don't write anything, you sit there for the duration and stare at the screen - it's more than a lot of people manage. Hopefully, today will be better. 

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Department of Neon Truth

 

I rewatched Nicolas Winding Refn's 2016 The Neon Demon yesterday and was once again completely blown away by it. The visual textures are sleek and beautiful while remaining as soulless as the industry they house in the story. This is perfect for Julian Winding's throbbing, minimalist techno (not calling it EDM, sorry).

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Watch:

Interestingly enough, not a day after I read an article about Huesera: The Bone Woman in the latest issue of Fangoria, the trailer dropped: 

 

The first feature from writer/director Michelle Garza Cervera and distributed by the delightful XYZ Films; I'm kind of chomping at the bit to see this one. Something about the mythology at play here really fascinates me.

 

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Read:

Last week I doubled down on my James Tynion reading and picked up the first four trades of Department of Truth. This is research for an upcoming deep-dive Butcher and I are doing for The Horror Vision; the project began as a lay-everything-out for Tynion's Something is Killing the Children mythology; only before we could get going, The Book of Slaughter dropped and kind of answered everything we were going to attempt to draw conclusions on. However, knowing the overall premise of Dept. of Truth, I began to realize the real deep-dive is seeing how these two connect because I am almost certain that they do. 

We'll obviously get more into it on the show, which will hopefully drop in about two weeks, but for now let me just point out that in SIKTC, the thing that manifests the monsters is belief, and the titular Department in DOT's entire job is managing belief in conspiracies because the big secret of the world is that if enough people believe in something, it becomes reality.

There's a layer to my enjoyment of DOT I hadn't anticipated, and that's that it looks and reads almost exactly like a late 80s/early 90s Vertigo title. I'm still picking away at the first couple trades of Peter Milligan and Chris Bacchalo's Shade The Changing Man from 1990-1991, and there are so many similarities, it's unreal. Add to that the Bill Sienkiewicz-like art from Martin Simmonds, and I've realized this is a book I should have been reading from the beginning. Better late than never, though.

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Playlist:

David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time

Metallica - Hardwired... To Self-Destruct

Various Artists - Twin Peaks (Limited Event Series Soundtrack)

Metallica - 72 Seasons (pre-release singles)

The Police - Synchronicity

David Bowie - Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks)

Off! - Free LSD

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

Katatonia - Sky Void of Stars

Cliff Martinez - The Neon Demon OST

Final Light - Eponymous

Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch - An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil

Special Interest - Endure

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction

Godflesh - A World Lit Only By Fire

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

A strenuous emotional sacrifice to achieve a goal. (that's a crappy reading, but I'm short on time)

Xiu Xiu Cover Blue Frank

 I'm really falling hard into my first rewatch of the original Twin Peaks since before The Return aired, and as usual, it feels good to have everything Peaks seep out of the screen and into every aspect of my life. First and foremost is always the music, which tends to never stray far from my mind. This time, Angelo Badalamenti's passing really hit home, and I'm getting even deeper into the sonic space of the show than usual. This, of course, sent me digging. 

I vaguely remember Xiu Xiu touring and then releasing their music of Twin Peaks project, but I'm not sure I'd heard any of it before. Full disclosure: I've never really gotten into this band. That said, I came across this recently and thought it was pretty cool.

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Watch:

I finally sat down and watched Noah Baumbach's adaptation of Don Delillo's White Noise the other night. Turns out? It's my favorite non-genre film of 2022!

All the performances are fantastic, especially Adam Driver. Man, when I first saw this guy as Emo-Vadar, I never would have suspected what a great actor he has become. But between this and Jarmusch's Patterson from a few years ago, Driver just blows me away.

As far as adapting, it's been about a decade since I read White Noise, but a lot of it has stayed in my mind through the intervening years. Overall I loved it, especially how the cast delivers such obvious literary dialogue, which in lesser hands could have been obsequious and irritating. Robert Pattinson does a similar but not-quite-as-affective job with his Delillo dialogue in David Cronenberg's adaptation of Cosmopolis, and while that performance was instrumental in my accepting Patterson - at the time widely known as the 'sparkling vampire' -  as a serious actor, it left the cinematic version of that book something I have yet to revisit. 

I will revisit Baumbach's film often, and soon.

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Read:

After succumbing to the Something is Killing the Children wave - worth it! - I've now caught up on the sister title, House of Slaughter.

Ostensibly an anthology series, the first five issues cover Erica Slaughter-adjacent Black Mask Aaron's past, while the subsequent six issues delve into one of the Scarlet masks, the young and precocious Edwin and his trials while afloat on a lake that he comes to suspect may house a Dragon.

This book is weird. I enjoyed the arc laid out in 1-5, but I'm going to have to reread 6-10. This story didn't come together for me. Whatever I was supposed to glean out of Edwin's insights and memories just didn't unravel into a satisfying conclusion, and I was left wondering if I'd missed something. Still, I enjoyed all ten so far, as well as last week's Book of Slaughter, which is kind of a clever way to get a lot of info text to us, cementing into factual lore a lot of what we've already pieced together about the politics of The Order of St. George. The new arc starts this month, and I'm looking forward to it despite any hangups I had on this most recent story.

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Playlist:

Lustmord - Dark Matter

LCD Soundsystem - New Body Rhumba (single)

LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver

Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food

Black Sabbath - Vol. 4

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Emotional stability disrupted by a seemingly unending conflict will work itself out if I extend a hand. Hmm.