And we’re back. That bit of Christmas downtime there, see? That bit just gone where nothing ‘appened? Where everything was broken and forbidded ‘n’ that? See that? Wasn’t meant to ‘appen. Not my fault, but now cash ‘as changed ‘ands, we seem to be back up ‘n’ runnin’ again. So, what wiv the date ‘n’ all, let’s ‘ave us a look back athe last twelve months and get my worthwhile opinions on what you should have all been perusing over that period. What? Oh, it was a character. I got bored with it quite quickly. Anyways, here’s a few things what I liked this year. I’m not going to one of a decade, as I’ll only end up misremembering and praising most of 1998 instead of anything that happened in the nothingies. Right. This year then.
Music
I didn’t acquire an awful lot of recorded music this year, due to my generally being out of touch with what was coming out and my being ethically unwilling to download stuff for free. Of what I did hear, I was generally disappointed by the new offerings from Tortoise (diminishing returns from TNT onwards in my opinion), Max Tundra (not listened to it much, but nothing compared to his previous two outings) and the Animal Collective (Merriweather Post Pavilion seems to be on a few best of the year lists, but seemed like a massive step back from Sung Tongs to me. Not heard Strawberry Jam so won’t comment upon it). Album of the year has to go to Sunn O)))’s magnificent Monoliths and Dimensions. Had anyone told me that a drone metal album would provide me with one of the most strangely moving tracks I would hear this or any other year, I would have called you a poltroon and beaten you around the head with a rolled up copy of the Daily Express. Yet that is what occurred, especially with the album’s traditional final song, Alice. I’m not sure if it’s just the addition of strings and brass to the ultra slow riffs that does it for me, but it’s a truly haunting, beautiful piece of music. The rest of the album’s pretty damned good too, but the closer really pushes it into exellence.
Track of the year must go to something I managed to discover nigh on four years after its initial release. A couple of friends of mine had been raving about Parts and Labor (damn their colonial spelling!) throughout the summer, which piqued my interest somewhat. One even played some on his podcast (more of that sycophancy later), which ws my first hearing of any. I liked it, but imagined I would never happen upon any within my meagre price range. Some months later I was rifling through the section marked ‘Cool Stuff For Hoxton Twats’ (not the exact name, but it honestly was labelled something like that) in one of the Notting Hill record exchanges, when, to my joy, I came upon three albums by Parts and Labor. I grabbed the cheapest two of the three – Mapmaker and Stay Afraid – (all three would have been overkill on a group I’d only heard one song of) for a fiver and went about my business. The next day I stuck Stay Afraid on and was instantaneously bl;own away by A Great Divide, the first track on said LP. I’ve subsequently played the thing to death, to the extent that I’m almost a bit sick of it, but not sick enough to still give it at least one listen a week. I think it’s the sheer energy that pummels you into submission, the absurdity of the drum work on display, the bagpipe noises, the vocal effect and the fact that it’s so low down in the mix that it’s just being treated like another instrument, the computer game zaps, God, I could go on. It’s just the most exciting piece of music I’ve heard in over twelve months and I really do love it to pieces. Do click on the link and have a listen – it’s not a download or anything.
Books
Inevitably I’ve not read a great deal of prose this year and of those that I have, the majority have been a bit gash. I received TOMAS by James Palumbo as a birthday present, so entirely apologise to my brother and his wife for the savaging I am now forced to give it. Palumbo was Eton educated, did some sort of high level banking before going on to found Ministry of Sound. This does not mean that anyone should have pub.lished his adolescent dribblings. The best part of the book is the fact that he’s managed to get cover quotes from Kathy Lette, Rory Bremner and Pete Tong, the incongruousness of which amused me to begin with. Having only got half way through this sputtering pile of old wank, I may be doing it a disservice, but I honestly can’t imagine the turgid prose improving any or the hackneyed ideas becoming any less laboured. A lot of it covers similar ground to The Crow Gets Comfy (for the benefit of new readers, it’s a novel I failed to finish between the ages of sixteen and nineteen and entirely available in the April 2008 section of this site’s archive), so perhaps I’m jealous. The writing is better than that of my teenaged self, but that’s hardly a challenge. Look at how well I can do the writings now though! Take that wealthy businessman!
That turned into a lengthier rant than I’d planned for it to be. Let’s try and concentrate on the good. Armando Ianucci’s Audacity of Hype was my companion for many a tea break at this end of the year and most pleasurable it was too. A collection of newspaper articles, it would make for very fine toilet reading, should you be in to that sort of thing. Most compelling prose for me was Most Outrageous by Bob Levin. This 2008 biography of Dwaine Tinsley, cartoonist for Larry Flint’s Hustler, for which his most famous creation was a recurring character named ‘Chester the Molester’. The creation of said chacter went on to have greater significance when Tinsley’s daughter accused him of abusing her when she was a child. The court case that followed these allegations is the hook upon which most of the book is hung and it is a genuinely fascinating, if disturbing, tale. Levin interviewed all participants in the trial that would allow him to do so and paints a very balanced portrait of everyone involved. By the end, I was still uncertain as to whether Tinsley had committed any of the crimes he was accused of, mainly down to the peculiar acts of smoke and mirrors the American judicial system seems capable of. It’s a compelling read and the introduction is available if you’re interested.
Comics
As the majority of you will have guessed, I have read an awful lot of comics over the past twelve months. As such, let’s try and bang through this sharpish like. Finally got round to reading Lost Girls, which I will try and finish writing about some time soon, though that might necessitate re-reading it, which’ll cost me a day and a pint of fluids. It was good, but flawed for reasons I will eventually go in to, so it doesn’t quite make this list.
Let’s start with some of the things I was sad to see the back of. The greatest disappointment was the cancellation of David Lapham’s Young Liars. If I’m perfectly honest, I had no idea as to what was going on towards the end of its run, which is more than likely what drove so many readers away from it. For me though, that was the fun. Plus it was the first new, properly creator owned material Lapham had had out there since the seemingly endless hiatus Stray Bullets endures. Why does he need to keep taking these well paid jobs when he could be working on one of the greatest independent comic series of all time? Let his family eat gruel! After the last issue came out, I sat down and read the whole of Young Liars in one sitting. The first dozen issues are astonishing, masterful work, as are the half dozen following it. These are rather let down by the whole thing having to be tied up in two issues, which unsurpisingly, feels rushed and is massively inconclusive. A great shame all round really.
Another series’ cessation I was sad to see was Doug Paskiewicz’ Arsenic Lullaby. His annual releases of dark/sick comical comics had always been a high point in the year for me and the tiny notice in this year’s saying it was to be the last was very saddening. Still, it is at least at his own behest and the plan seems to be to continue the ‘brand’ in some sort of animated form, so all is far from lost. I wish him limited success in the endevour, only so he might realise the folly of the plan and return to the sequential art he does so well.
A couple of other series of note came to their natural conclusions this year, both of which I have been sad to see the ends of, but happy that, having told their stories, they are complete, without having to be dragged on in endless soap opera fashion as is so often the way in the world of the comic. First mention goes to Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s 100 Bullets which reached it’s hundredth and final issue this year. I’d followed this title for ten years, knowing at an early date that it was due to only have 100 issues and had spent a highly enjoyable couple of days working my way through all of them. About half way through the run, reading it just the once on its (mostly) monthly schedule, I had entirely lost track of what was going on, such is the delicate plotting and subtle reveals that go on throughout the story. I reread the first fifty or so issues and began to see the much larger picture appearing beneath the tales of petty crime and occasionaly grisly slaughter. The climax was actually pretty satisfying as everyting fell into place and then fell apart again as rapidly. If you’re going to read it, start at the start.
T’other natuaral conclusion reached that excited me in some way was the completion of Warren Ellis and John Cassady’s Planetary. Again, close to ten years in the making, though this time due to both creators working on too many other projects to actually get their schedules in alignment through the latter half of the decade. Under a third of 100 Bullets‘ length, it only took me a day to get through the whole tale in one sitting, but again a very satisfying one. Once again, Ellis pulls off a magnificent switcheroo in the closing pages of this one. You may have thought the whole thing was about archaeologists of twentieth century genre fiction having spurious adventures, but actually it’s not. That’s almost a subplot to a tale that’s far more human and which is causing me to well up slghtly thinking about. Not as great as the climax to Transmetropolitan (which involves the greatest piece of reader interaction I have ever seen with a physical object – really can’t see it working on a Kindle), but frankly very little is. Again, I would recommend you begin at the beginning.
Ellis has been doing a fair amount of work for Avatar (the publishers, not the Smurf porn) recently. The mini series (No Hero, Wolfskin, Black Summer et al) he’s been working on have been interesting, but I’ve found them ultimately unsatisfying. His ongoing Doktor Sleepless series is more enjoyable, but is on such an erratic schedule at the moment that it’s hard to keep up without rereading what’s gone before. Garth Ennis has been working for the same company too and his current collaboration with Jacen Burrows is fascinating me at the moment. Crossed begins with a premise massively similair to every zombie film you’ve seen – if you are bitten or exchange any fluids with one of the Crossed, you too become infected. Rather than joining the living dead though, the infection instead robs you of all moral scruples and induces genocidal levels of psychosis in the infected. My suspicion when I first read about the series was that it was going to be Ennis’ attempt to offend the largest possible number of people he could in one foul swoop. This would go along with his track record (examples include him being the first person to slip the ‘c’ word into both Marvel and DC comics, DC’s refusal to carry on printing The Boys because of it’s possible damage to the superhero brand, the Dicks mini series’, really I could go on) and to some degree is true, the double page spread towards the end of the first issue is testament to that. But I shouldn’t have underestimated Ennis as a writer. Even though he’s not produced anything as impressive as Preacher this decade, it seems that he still has the ability to create characters you really do begin to care about. This could also be said of the excellent Dear Billy strand of his Battlefields series of series’, but it came as a bigger shock to me in Crossed as I had been expecting something closer to fecking Eden Lake (new readers might want to endure my lengthy essay about that piece of shit film that robbed me of ninety minutes of my life, or they might not. I’m not your mother). There are some genuinely chilling moments i the series so far, made all the more so by the ‘human’ characters being so well drawn (in both an artistic and storytelling sense). There’s only one more issue left to go and I really don’t know how it’s going to end.I only fear it won’t be well.
Other ongoing series I’ve been enjoying in a quick round up kind of a way; Scalped – Jason Aaron’s writing just keeps getting better and better. The ongoing story of a corrupt Indian reserve deserves better superlatives than the ones I can think of. Keeps defeating any expectations I have as to where its going to go next and after over three and a half years of serialization, not much more than a month seems to have elapsed in story time. That you don’t see very often. R. M. Guerra’s gravelly, organic art compliments the stories complexity magnificently; Seaguy has to get a mention as it’s the only Grant Morrison I’ve been able to read since I started swearing off superhero comics. Yeah, alright it sort of is one, but not really. Probably works on half a dozen meta-levels I’m yet to understand. Really wish Morrison would go back to working on his own creations more, but you can hardly blame him for playing with all DC’s toys now that they’ve apparently handed them to him on a plate. At least there’s Joe The Barbarian to look forward to and it at least stops him mucking about with Robbie Williams; The Walking Dead continues to impress me. Zoap opera? Zomb opera? Soap zomera? Dunno, none of them really work, do they? See what I was saying about Ennis with Crossed? Well that’s sort of what Kirkman and Adlard are doing here. Characters in a hopeless situation. The hopeless situation is exciting, but it’s the characters that make it compelling reading; Echo, Rasl and Glamourpuss need to get mentions as they’re proof that there’s life in self publishing yet. Echo’s probably my favourite at the moment, primarily because Terry Moore has produced the most material since all three launched in quick succession. All three are fascinating in how far they are away from the series that all three creators made their names on (Moore on Strangers in Paradise, Jeff Smith on Bone and Dave Sim with Cerebus). Long may all three continue; I’ve been buying 2000AD weekly for two years now, following five or six years away from the title. There’s been some cracking stuff in there this past year, hence my continuing to go back there, but the stand out strip has been John Smith and Edmund Bagwell’s Cradlegrave. Smith has had a patchy career as a writer of comics, to say the least. His Indigo Prime and Tyranny Rex tales for the ‘Galaxies Greatest Comic’ are thought of as classics and I was always rather fond of the twelve pager Danzig’s Inferno and Firekind. Devlin Waugh is still a classic creation (“the head of Noel Coward on the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger” as the character description allegedly read) and Smith looked set to be part of the second wave British invasion of the States in the early nineties. Sadly, the purple prose (something he was often guilty of using excessively) that filled his Scarab mini-series put the kibosh on that. Those purply tendencies have been entirely reined in on Cradlegrave, a Cronenbergesque horror set on the grimmest of council estates during a heatwave hotter than ‘76. The pages ooze out at you, characters seemingly rotting on the page. It’s a real return to form and I hope to see more from the man soon. He’s only got one arm you know.
Film
In The Loop. There were no other films this year. Anything else was a figment of your diseased brain feeding on itself.
That’s all we have time for now. Because of time constraints I’m now going to have to do a graphic novels list. Blech. Maybe I’ll call it something else. Bet this is all in italics because I’ve fucked the coding somewhere. Must learn to edit. Anywhich way, I shall try and finish this nonsense off in the morrow. Byeee.