25 comics you should read
Something in here is for you personally
Every now and again I think I should really get back into reading comics. Reading anything besides posts come to think of it. Not too long ago I went back and re-read all the shit like Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, Sandman, Animal Man, Doom Patrol etc. and then I came up against a familiar problem: there's too much other stuff to choose from. I was paralyzed by an abundance of choice as it were. Kind of the opposite of trying to find something to stream on TV lately. As luck would have it I remembered that my buddy (and Flaming Hydra partner) Sam Thielman is something of an expert on all things comics so I asked him to put together a list of must-reads for me and for you. Hopefully we'll all find something we love in here.
You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read the whole thing. Thanks as always for humoring me.
On Saturday we went back to Harvard Square for the first time in a while to have dinner with friends and go see The Sheila Divine at The Sinclair – still after all these years my favorite Boston band and favorite venue. For a good while the four of us walked around the Square remembering out loud to one another what different businesses used to be. That bank branch was a beloved dive bar. That shitty restaurant was a good restaurant. The long since abandoned movie theater was a movie theater.
I ducked into the Harvard COOP real quick to see if they had A Creature Wanting Form for sale and was happily surprised.
I also went into Charlie's for a drink and as I was walking upstairs I heard the sound of children squealing and thought hm that's odd. When I turned the corner by the jukebox I realized the entire room was filled with children. Like they were having a really big 10th birthday party in the shitty old punk space. I was emotionally prepared to be surrounded by people younger than me but this seemed a little on the nose.
I thought of this old piece from the first year of Covid:
Luke O’Neil
It’s September and the list of beloved longstanding bars and restaurants closing down for good in Boston and Cambridge keeps growing.
But by the time I’d arrived twenty years ago I thought it was already over. That was the sense I had anyway. That the Boston I now inhabited was some imperfect and diminished version of what had come before. Shuttered clubs and bars and diners where matters of significant local folklore had transpired and defined life for the previous generation were lost to time they said.
This likely happened in whatever city you came of age in as well it’s the same story anywhere. Everything was always some degree better before in a time you no longer have access to. This is a lie in many ways and a story people tell themselves to mythologize their own youth but it can also be true. Things can and do very often get worse.
They can also get better though and so you nonetheless find your own places and make of them what you can and conspire in the erection of new monuments to joy and then twenty years on as the marriage of progress and entropy has its sour way with your life this time you pass on this sense of disappointment to your younger friends who listen but only so much. You know things but you don’t know everything. You know what happened but you don’t necessarily know what is happening.
A neighborhood’s soul is lost then rebuilt then lost again and it goes on and on but there is I think a potential end point where the predictions of a neighborhood’s demise can finally be fulfilled and maybe that’s here for Boston and for similar cities. Places with an abundance of soul can drag out the process for a long time but there are only so many blows they can take. My beloved Harvard Square has continued to be a cultural destination for all these years of loss simply because there was so much to lose in the first place. Now every other storefront is a bank branch.
And this new one that will probably go in the next book:
Boston, Massachusetts
We were back in the city for the first time in a good while and not recognizing many of the new businesses or even the skyline itself a melancholy overrode the initial excitement of it. The criteria for my melancholy is not especially rigorous to state the obvious but I mentioned it to some friends later and we talked a bit about nostalgia for our youth and the pain of that but it wasn’t quite getting it right. I'm not pining for something that is unattainable like the past I'm frustrated by not having access to something that still exists which is the city. It's all still right there just without me inside of it.
I thought of the old Bobcat Goldthwait joke:
"I lost my job. Well I didn't lose it. I know where it is. There's just some other guy doing it now."
The next day we walked around our perfectly nice suburban town and it was perfectly nice. I stopped to take a picture of a fire hydrant that’s in the process of being swallowed up by the overgrowth of brush on a quiet street by the river and thought of the end of the world. The criteria for me thinking about the end of the world is also not especially rigorous.
It's not the same of course. Out here. Nowhere. It does not nourish me in the way the city does. Did.
I need to be around people. Strangers.
I long for the camaraderie of our shared indifference to one another.
I wish for no one to care that I even exist.
The community in that.
25 comics you should read
by Sam Thielman
Luke asked me to do this and I’m not sure he knew what he was getting into. I have a list of over 100 of my favorite comics, just sort of hanging out on my phone. I add to it and prune it back regularly, because like every nerd I love making lists. I had a few rules for this version, since it’s for public consumption: No books no normal person will ever buy because they’re out of print, (so tearful farewells to MAD and Cages and Corto Maltese, among too many others.) No artist or writer more than once. Nothing that only exists digitally. Nothing currently ongoing. And nothing that requires prior knowledge of the artist or a particular genre, which is why there’s not much superhero stuff here. Beyond that, the sky is the limit, so here’s what I came up with. I have horribly neglected my responsibility to pick only a select few books, but that means there’s more for you to choose from. Everything is good. Something in here is for you, personally.
Ducks by Kate Beaton
If you like Luke’s newsletter and want to read something smart and funny and drawn from the deepest insides of a person who has had to compromise every part of herself to get by in a world that requires you to be of use to capital, you should probably read Ducks today. Tomorrow at the latest. That’s assuming you haven’t already read it. Kate Beaton is part of the original mid-aughts webcomic renaissance with Chris Onstad who did Achewood and David Malki (Wondermark) and Randall Munroe (xkcd). Beaton’s sister died and she said she couldn’t do funny comics about Jane Austen anymore, so she stopped drawing her wonderful gag strip Hark! A Vagrant, and then, after several years went by, she suddenly had this gigantic graphic novel about being a kid from the sticks in Nova Scotia whose only hope for the future she wants is to go take an incredibly dangerous job in the oil sands. It’s all true.
The Hard Tomorrow by Eleanor Davis
Just an extremely good book about The Way We Live Now. It gets right to the heart of why it feels futile to try to eke out a living when our entire society seems to want you to die, and what makes it worth doing anyway. Also the cartooning is awesome.
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris
Emil is a genius. I remember when I asked her publisher what was new and good from them and he tossed a gigantic proof of this book at me. At first I thought it was a new Robert Crumb book—it’s that technically accomplished. The renderings of classical paintings in multicolored ballpoint are just brain-destroying. It’s a murder mystery set in 1960’s Chicago, and both volumes are huge shaggy dog stories that can consume you for days when you’re reading them.
Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco
Between this book, Palestine, and his new one, War on Gaza, Joe Sacco has probably produced the most accomplished body of general-interest journalism about Palestine in English. This is his masterpiece, a delicate book about the unreliability of memory and the necessity of record-keeping in the face of an especially cruel form of oppressive lying, where the IDF and the broader Israeli government conspire to pretend that they haven’t destroyed your home and family.