The Best Comics of 2012! A DEFINITIVE LIST.

Bunny VS Monkey (c) 2012 by Jamie Smart

I meant to write one of these ‘Best-of-the-year’ posts for the Forbidden Planet International blog but completely failed to get it together in time to do so. Anyway, it is still 2012 (just) so I thought I’d post mine here: sticking to the same format as the FPI posts (which you can read here): my 3 favourite comics from the last 12 months...

1: TIE! BUNNY VS MONKEY by Jamie Smart / GARY’S GARDEN by Gary Northfield

 

Gary's Garden (c) 2012 by Gary Northfield

Having spent many weeks attempting to decide which of these was my favourite, I eventually decided I couldn’t, so we have a tie. I love both of these strips for similar reasons – that they are very, very funny, and wildly imaginative, and that my son loves them and I love reading them to him. Each also has a special claim in its favour that kind of balance each other out: BvM has achieved the highly admirable feat of being amazing every single week in 2012. And in the other corner, Gary’s Garden produced amongst its many riches the single best  page of comics I saw all year.* So that is why it’s a tie!

*I don't have it to hand, sorry. It was the one with the pond and the tadpoles. If you saw it, you know which one I mean.

2: CORPSE TALK by Adam Murphy

Corpse Talk (c) 2012 by Adam Murphy

Yeah, yeah, another Phoenix strip, I know. But if you can show me another comic out there that is – week in, week out - as funny, clever, inventive, silly, gross, imaginative, fascinating, and beautiful as Adam’s work on Corpse Talk... well then I will be very grateful to you for introducing me to such a wonder.

3: THE NAO OF BROWN by Glyn Dillon

The Nao of Brown (c) 2012 by Glyn Dillon

I don’t feel like I need to say much about this one, as I assume it is on everyone else in the universe and their dog’s Best Of 2012 lists already. An absolutely glorious achievement, one of my favourite comics I’ve read in ages, by probably my favourite comics artist in the world. Yeah, it’s a bit good.

HONOURABLE MENTION: pretty much everything else in the Phoenix. I utterly love that comic. Not sure if I mentioned that.

I think if this was an FPI post I’d have to come up with lists of my favourite movies, and TV shows, and books and such, too. But really, who has time to watch movies or TV or read books? We went to see Looper, that was quite enjoyable. Ooh, Catfish, I liked that. Um... Doctor Who? Cheers? I watched quite a lot of Masterchef?

I would also then be called upon to give you a quick plug for what you can expect to see from me in 2013 but hey, this is my blog, I talk about that stuff all the time. More Pirates of Pangaea! Coming Soon! Coming, in fact, NEXT WEEK!

And that right there is why I have had so little time to write these sort of blog posts. But while I am here and in a ‘reflecting on the Best of 2012’ mood, let me just say how delighted I was to see Pirates of Pangaea and the Phoenix pop up on just such a list – and from no less august a journal than the mighty Comics Alliance! Given what an undertaking it is for a reader outside the UK to even get hold of the Phoenix, it really is appreciated. And hey! We are mere weeks - no, days - away from international access to the Phoenix getting a whole, whole lot easier. Brace yourselves, 2013 is going to be fun...