A dozen favorite comics of my year

Irrevocable loss and other children’s stories

As with most of my non-music lists, titles are recent but not necessary published in 2023: I’m perennially a year behind on American comics, while with manga I vary from reading the simuls to being hopelessly behind. I’ll leave out titles that were on last year’s list (Chainsaw Man is still good, but it wouldn’t be number one, so I might as well talk about something else.)

MANGA

1. Kanehito Yamada & Tsukasa Abe: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (tr. Misa “Japanese Ammo”)

A catch-up pick: this has been one of the most acclaimed mainstream manga titles since its inception, but I only got around to it a little before the anime hordes did. A party of adventures saves the world; fifty years later, they reunite, with elf mage Frieren unchanged and the rest old. Yamada takes a subset of old school fantasy tropes (from Tolkien via RPGs) and sees how far it can stretch them. Paramount is the idea of heroes: not everyone gets to defeat the Demon King, but much more minor acts of heroism are of value too, even if they’re forgotten within a human lifetime. Abe’s art can be cutesy while getting across that a mage with a thousand years of accumulated magical wisdom is scary as shit.

2. Yuto Suzuki: Sakamoto Days (tr. Camellia Nieh)

Sakamoto used to be the world’s greatest hitman; now he’s fat and runs a convenience store. Action-comedy hijinks have ensued from the beginning, but starting with last year’s exam arc (there’s always an exam arc) the dramatic stakes have been raised, the fight scenes have become even more creative, and the whole shebang is just more awesome. The flashback to Sakamoto’s past with his colleagues Nagumo and Rion as the all-time top three assassin draft picks establishes that that trio could’ve been among the coolest manga protagonists ever, and yet Suzuki chose to tell a story about a shopkeeper, his family, and an ever-growing group of friends who tried to kill him at one point or another. The baffling lack of an anime is producing conspiracy theories.

3. Yukinobu Tatsu: Dandadan (tr. Kumar Sivasubramanian)

I almost wrote off this yokai-and-aliens title by a Chainsaw Man alumnus after a kind of gross first issue, but after steady improvement, it’s stepped up in its third year, with real emotional weight to go with the increasingly batshit double-page spreads, and a still-accumulating ensemble cast with the best reaction shots in comics. Note that the upswing has come as the theme has become the healing power of rock and roll, or at least the karaoke version of rock and roll. Dolly would approve.

4. Eiichiro Oda: One Piece: Wano Country (tr. Stephen Paul)

I’m neaaarly caught up. Agree with the consensus that this is the best One Piece has been in fifteen-odd years, with some of the most tragic backstory flashbacks in a title full of them. And just when things threatened to get bogged down in super-serious fighting, Luffy’s final form hearkens back to the goofiest moments of not just the series but of the entire history of cartoons. Joy? Boy.

5. Glaeolia 1 (tr. zhuchka, rkp)

Reprint of the first in a sequence of anthologies of mostly-indie manga published by Glacier Bay Pres; I do intend to catch up with the rest eventually. A showcase of how diverse the scene is, especially in art styles, from Takehito Moriizumi water-drawing to Jushichi Masumura avant hatch-work. My fave is Akiko Okuda’s “Watching the House”, an exercise in nostalgia that captures both sadness and a sense of progress. It’s also about drawing manga, of course.

6. Yuki Suenaga & Takamasa Moue: Akane-Banashi (tr. Stephen Paul)

A highly valuable series for Weekly Shonen Jump: a moderate hit that isn’t about fighting or sports, providing some much needed variety for the magazine. Akane wants to become a professional in rakugo, a traditional form of storytelling, to avenge her father (you know how these shonen set-ups go.) Very occasionally it dips into deeper issues, especially with the character Master Urara, who shows Akane what a woman had to go through and had to become to be accepted into a patriarchal society. Mostly though the fun is in competitiveness as a motivation for self-actualization, and in the tanuki suits.

WESTERN COMICS

1. Emma Grove: The Third Person

Most of the 900 pages are Emma—or is it Katina, or Ed—sitting in her exasperated therapist’s office extracting asterisked reactions from him, and it’s engrossing. (It’s hard for reasonably neurotypical me not to sympathize with the therapist, himself trans, despite his evident and painful mistakes.) Does she suffer from dissociative identity disorder, née multiple personalities? Is she faking it? What does “faking it” even mean? It’s a deep psychological case study, and then in the closing stretch it becomes extremely moving: we may have to abandon parts of ourselves to move on. Grove’s breezy style, inspired by classic strips with regular panel structures, nudges the material closer to objectivity than most memoirs get.

2. Lewis Trondheim: Ralph Azham (tr. Joe Johnson mostly)

One of the highlights of my comics in translation project, it epitomizes a strain of Franco-Belgian fantasy, and, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s short enough for both the author and me to finish it. In some ways it resembles Tacitus or Sima Qian in the way that Stuff Keeps Happening at such a breakneck pace that the reader has nary a moment to reflect on it. Yet the characters do, and they keep gradually evolving that it might take a couple of volumes to see how a hippie slacker (duck) has changed into a highly efficient killing machine and, worse, a bureaucrat.

3. Cliff Chiang: Catwoman: Lonely City

A rare successful attempt at a Dark Knight Returns-style “and then they got old” story, maybe even rivaling the original. Advantages over Miller: at least in the 2020s, a 50-ish Catwoman is a more interesting character than a Batman of whatever age; plus the material is clearly anti-fascist, instead of, uh, the opposite of that. Chiang’s character drawing is very humane: you might not have ever thought you needed to see Killer Croc’s filled out in middle age, but perhaps you do.

4. Jim Woodring: One Beautiful Spring Day

An expansion to 400 pages of the Congress of the Animals/Fran/Poochytown trilogy, and I’d rank this higher if I hadn’t already read those. The phantasmagoric spreads and cute/gross character drawings are now enmeshed in a much clearer narrative—you can even pick out, like, themes (pets: you can trust them.) In a fairer world he’d be as famous as David Lynch.

5. Kate Beaton: Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

2022’s most acclaimed hardcover comic, and understandably so. In 2005, 21-year-old Beaton goes to work in the Alberta fields to pay off her student loans, and quickly learns the place is a crucible for producing the most concentrated kind of misogyny. Only she comes to learn that the men of Syncrude aren’t necessarily inherently worse than men anywhere else, that women can encounter the same traumas in much more picturesque parts of Canada. Part of the power is the person that all of this is happening to is in the process of becoming a beloved gag webcomic artist. Ducks isn’t necessarily better or worse than Hark! A Vagrant!, but it's undeniably more “important”, and Beaton has the technique to maintain a feeling of life amidst the heaviness.

6. James Tynion IV & Werther Dell’Edera: Something Is Killing the Children #1-30

Spoiler: it’s monsters, but spoiler to the spoiler: WHO ARE THE REAL MONSTERS. The premise seemed a bit too derivative at first, and I can’t say I’m too interested in the lore, but the imagery is scary, the moment to moment plotting is extremely slick, and the one character anyone cares about is deepening well.