What’s that? You thought that you could make it to Santa’s visit without a helping of Wait, What? Oh, faithful Whatnauts, we’re not a Charles Dickens miser. Do you seriously think we’d leave you without our favorite books of the year and a potential distraction from family and friends when you need it the most? We recorded this minicast thirty-five minutes ago. (Okay, two days, but I was on a roll.)
Topics discussed in today’s minicast:
- My personal news.
- Graeme’s Top Not Actually 10:
You and A Bike And A Road by Eleanor Davis
The Interview by Manuele Fior
Spinning by Tillie Walden
Mister Miracle by Tom King and Mitch Gerads
Batman by Tom King, Lee Weeks, Clay Mann, et al
The Wicked + The Divine by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie
Extremity by Daniel Warren Johnson
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North and Erica Henderson
Giant Days by John Allison, Max Sarin et al
Hawkeye by Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero
The Flintstones by Mark Russell and Steve Pugh
(I totally didn’t mention My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris, and I should have, because it definitely belongs on there. ) - Jeff’s AAA Top 10:
Batman Annual #2/Batman/Elmer Fudd by Tom King, Lee Weeks and Michael Lark
Legends of The Dark Knight: Jim Aparo Vols. 1 & 2 by Bob Haney and Jim Aparo
Battle Angel Alita: Last Order by Yukito Kishiro
The Complete Crepax Vol. 2: The Time Eater and Other Stories by Guido Crepax
West Coast Avengers: Lost in Space-Time by Steve Englehart, Al Milgrom and Joe Sinnott
Interview with Monster Girls by Petos
Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-Kun by Izumi Tsubaki
Delicious in Dungeon by Ryoko Kui
Golden Kamuy by Satoru Noda
Steaming Sniper by Marley Caribu and Tadashi Matsumori
Rock Candy Mountain by Kyle Starks - Jeff’s runners-up, because of course he has runners-up:
Dark Days: The Forge and Dark Days: The Casting by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Jim Lee, John Romita Jr, Andy Kubert et al (Ignore Jeff getting the creative team wrong.)
The Flintstones by Mark Russell and Steve Pugh
The Unbelievable Gwenpool by Christopher Hastings and Guruhiru
Rocket by Al Ewing and Adam Gotham
Deathstroke by Christopher Priest, Diogenes Neves et al
I’m Not Okay With This by Charles Forsman
The Hookjaw Archive by Pat Mills, Ken Armstrong and Ramona Sola
Shownotes for the new Baxter Building — which can already be found here! — will be up on Tuesday, because it’s the holiday season and I don’t want to spend the day writing show notes. Happy merry, everyone. May all your Christmases be a thing.
For those who prefer to download for themselves: http://theworkingdraft.com/media/podcasts2/WaitWhatBestof2017Minicast.mp3
If you liked You And A Bike And A Road you should check out Davis’s first book, How to Be Happy.” I’m pretty convinced that she is the best cartoonist of her generation, and frankly I’m not sure sure comics is good enough to keep her. Her illustrations are popping up all over the place in big, national periodicals, and she’s done a few of those animated Google “doodle” things. Hopefully that allows her to keep producing comics rather than pulling her away, but who knows.
Some knowledge for Jeff:
湯けむりスナイパー translates literally as steam sniper.
According to Wikipedia in Japanese, Marley Carib is a pen name for Garon Tsuchiya, the author of Old Boy. However, for the Japanese release he was credited as Yuho Hijikata. He also wrote Astral Project under the pen name marginal and all four volumes were released by DC of all publishers. Don’t know how easy they would be to find but I think Jeff would enjoy them.
Also, if Jeff wants to read more monster girl stuff I would highly recommend A Centaur’s Life, which is bizarrely fascinating. This is also the point were I am going to snarkyly point out that vampires, succubi and dullahans are of European origins, not Japanese.
Anyway, Happy New Years and I look forward to another year of great and enjoyably podcasts.
Thank you for the schooling, Eric! (And sorry this got held up in the moderation zone for so long.) And thanks for the info about Astral Project: just read the description on Amazon and WOW.
I really don’t want to be mean but when Jeff reads out Japanese titles it’s like a game where you have to guess what he really means.
That said I wonder if there is any chance I could recommend Hunter X Hunter if it hasn’t been already.
True! Painfully, painfully true.
And I’ve heard good things about Hunter X Hunter before and been tempted, so maybe? (At least I can’t mangle the name?)
Glad you’re digging Battle Angel. The first series is one of my favorites, and even though I think Last Order gets bogged down, I’m still excited for the new series that coming out shortly.
Some of my favorites from last year were My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Head Lopper, X-Men Grand Design (just under the wire), Delicious in Dungeon (which really takes an interesting shift in tone), Wicked and Divine, I’m Not Okay With This, Moore’s Providence, and Curse Words,
Trade-waiting Mr. Miracle.
There was also a fantastic Dredd one-off, possibly by Michael Carroll?, in which Dredd teams up with a mutant who can narrate peoples’ thoughts as noir voiceover that riffs on The Third Man. Loved it, but damned if I can remember what prog it was in or what the title was. Wagner/Ezquerra’s Harvey (the revisit of Mechanismo) was pretty great too.
I’ve generally been on a big 2000 AD kick, got some of the recent mega-collections on a recent London trip and have been reading and thoroughly enjoying a lot of old Nemesis and Strontium Dog.
Sword of Ages by Gabriel Rodriguez right at the end of the year is an absurdly fun comic. It’s basically the Arthur story, except Arthur’s a young woman called Avalon who a motorbike riding Merlin fostered with telepathic sabretooth tigers. There are also gorilla tribes, dinosaur type creatures, dragons, telepathic cormorants and Morgan has a Destroyer. It’s a Mantlo-esque mash-up of the pop cultural toy box drawn gorgeously in a style which Rodriguez acknowledges owes debts to Moebius, Boucq and Foster.
Princess Jellyfish remains my current favourite manga, especially recently as the arrival of the Vegeta of fashion in vol 6 means we’re now in Princess Jellyfish Z, in my head at least.
The arrival of Sarah Grote in Giant Days #34 thrilled my fannish heart. The possibility of a Grote/de Groot connection is something I asked John Allison about a couple of years ago at Thoughtbubble. It probably won’t happen but I would love Charlotte’s thoughts on her upwardly mobile rellies.