My Comics Gone By

This year, with less time than I've ever had before, I read fewer books and more comics. Which means this is quite a long list. Its mainly mainstream - I don't read as many indie comics as I used to or as I would like. Lots of good mainstream comics these days, you see...

RESET
(Peter Bagge)
Bagge does sci-fi, only he does it Bagge style, meaning it's about a bitter man confronting his regrets and failures, and it's full of black humour and dark truth. A project uses technology to allow a subject to relive his past experiences. But they choose a stand-up comedian turned actor whose life hasn't turned out how he planned it, and his attempts to set right his own past begin to effect the people in charge of the project too. Bagge's art and writing is as perfect here as it ever is, and he finds a way of making such high-concept material feel personal and intimate.

PARKER: THE SCORE
(Darwyn Cooke)
Cooke's sublime series of adaptations of Richard Stark's brilliant Parker novels reaches a third chapter, varies its tone somewhat with the introduction of Parker's friend Grofield, but stays just as high-quality as the other books. The Score is more of a caper, with a huge cast and a nifty plot, and Stark does justice to all of it.

SAGA
(Brian K Vaughan & Fiona Staples)
Vaughan gives us a great big rollicking sci-fi tale full of alien races, big concepts and nicely turned genre beats, yes. But he also gives us a moving romance across the barriers. And as always, his characters are strong and instantly likeable - everybody has their reasons - and his dialogue is frequently brilliant. Staples has the versatility to handle all of the moods thrown up by the material, and the whole things looks great.

MANHATTAN PROJECTS
(Jonathan Hickman & Nick Pitarra)
Hickman does high-concept better than anybody this side of Grant Morrison, and this might just be his best attempt at combining that ability with a sort-of-superhero book. The heroes here are fictionalised versions of real-life historical scientists like Oppenheimer and Einstein, working for the US Government. Here, they don't just stop at the atomic bomb, no. Here they encounter alien races, create new energy sources, open inter-dimensional portals, and generally act like genius bad-asses. Oppenheimer is a psychopath who likes to eat people and absorb their essences, Einstein may be his own doppelganger from an alternate reality, and then theres Harry Daghlian, a floating irradiated skull encased inside a radiation suit. Hickman always has a long term plan, and his long game is only just becoming visible, but each issue is so stuffed with great ideas and neat character moments that it doesn't matter. Then theres Pitarra's detailed, dynamic, clean-lined art and fine design sense, which brilliantly suits the material.

PROPHET
(Brandon Graham & various)
Perhaps the very worst of Rob Liefeld's many terrible Image creations reimagined as a Heavy Metal/Mobius 70s -style sci-fi Epic with a massive Conan influence by Graham and a series of different artists, each of whom brings a different style and sensibility to bear on the material. Big concepts, great action, fine - if at times slightly challenging - storytelling and some fascinating tones and textures make this comic feel like just about nothing else, ever. Don't believe me? Heroes have love affairs with bug-aliens. Races make living creatures into cities. Melancholy robots fulfil endless missions. Our hero is one of an endless army of clones. And that is just the tip of the iceberg...

EVERYTHING TOGETHER
(Sammy Harkham)
Harkham is perhaps best known as the editor of the Kramers Ergot anthologies, but he is a gifted cartoonist in his own right, and this collects most of his work into one essential volume. That includes the seminal Poor Sailor, his fable-like story, plus some autobiographical cartoons, sketches and gags. Its a great package from a cartoonist whose only weakness is that he doesn't work more.

HAWKEYE
(Matt Fraction & David Aja & Matt Hollingsworth)
Hawkeye is the most acclaimed title from either of the Big Two (Marvel and DC) this year, and theres a good reason for that; its absolutely brilliant. It takes the slightly second-rate archer who is uncommonly visible after his appearance in The Avengers movie and does something unusual and even - imagine! - original with him. It depicts his days off, the moments we never see in the pages of the Avengers comics, him having barbecues with his neighbours, getting involved in street level crime and utterly fudging relationships. Fraction is a great writer at his best - his run on Iron Man is easily the best in the history of that character and two of his other titles, Casanova and the sadly-cancelled Defenders also belong firmly on this list - and here he takes a quirkier approach to his storytelling, cutting up chronology and messing with perspective throughout. But his characters are great and he never stints on the action, either, even indulging in the pure geek fodder of showcasing every trick arrow in Hawkeye's quiver in one story. Then there is the art. Series regular Aja has matured at an amazing rate on this title, with work that recalls David Mazzuchelli's genius on Daredevil (and that is high praise) and a line of beautiful covers too. When the schedule has overwhelmed him, Hollingsworth has stepped in ably.
Brilliant stuff, and the single comic I most look forward to every month.

JEREMIAH
(Hermann Huppen)
This post-apocalyptic buddy adventure - which may be familiar to some as the source material for the late Luke Perry tv show of the same name - is massive in Europe and Dark Horse's handsome hardback reprint series looks to be doing it justice in English. Huppen's art is stunning: brilliant storytelling, insane detail and energy, and if the meandering storyline is more to European taste than we are used to, well it has an Epic quality combined with vivid characterisation which goes a long way to explaining that success.

MINUTEMEN
(Darwyn Cooke)
I was dreading the Before Watchmen books DC brought out this year. They seemed a needless cash-in on what is a near-perfect original series. But some of the creative teams excited me. As it turned out, none of them produced work of any real value. Except for Darwyn Cooke, that is, who ambitiously took on a Minutemen series and made it a stylish, fun, brilliantly crafted superhero series. It may not be in the same league as Watchmen, but on its own terms, this is a fantastic mainstream comicbook; gripping, funny and beautiful. It even gets in a few digs at Alan Moore and his reading of the genre, while remaining faithful to the story he wrote.

CAPTAIN AMERICA
(Rick Remender & John Romita JR)
Remender follows Ed Brubaker's near-definitive run on Captain America with a completely different approach inspired by Jack Kirby's solo run on the title in the 1970s, meaning he plunges the character headfirst into a deliriously pulpy sci-fi adventure and runs the whole thing at 500 miles an hour with a very Frank Miller narration over the top. What really sells it though is JRJRs art, as energetic and muscular as ever, depicting Cap in combat with mutants and villains and making all of it look just beautiful. Theres a slight suspicion that this could be any character, but who cares when its this entertaining?

MULTIPLE WARHEADS: ALPHABET TO INFINITY
(Brandon Graham)
Graham's more personal work - as opposed to the work-for-hire of Prophet - is determinedly quirky and individual, richly detailed and ecletic, with traces of manga, erotica and mainstream US comic art obvious in a wonderful blend throughout. Like the amazing King City - also rereleased this year - Multiple Warheads is uncategorisable and indescribable; a sic-fi road comedy thriller distinguished by Graham's loopily inventive imagination and his beautifully stylish artwork.

ROCKETEER: CARGO OF DOOM
(Mark Waid & Chris Samnee)
Waid and Samnee capture the appeal of Dave Stevens' character and world as well as anyone has since the man's death, and more than that, they tell a fun little adventure story while doing it, with comedy, action, romance and intrigue all balanced nicely. Waid is a very consistent writer - his Daredevil remains one of Marvel's best titles, even if it has slipped slightly in quality since last year - and he and Samnee are a tremendous team. For me, Samnee is currently second only to David Aja in terms of artists on regular mainstream comics; a great storyteller with a lovely line and sense of design (look at the cover above!) whose work on Daredevil is just as strong as his work here.

FURY MAX
(Garth Ennis & Goran Parlov)
Ennis basically is the MAX line, and here he is allowed to indulge himself with a book showcasing lots of his interests. He looks at Nick Fury in the years after his WW2 adventures when he served in Vietnam, beginning when it was still controlled by the French, and in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Its a hyper-masculine fantasia; part spy comic, part noir, part War, with an awful lot of James Ellroy in the mix, loads of tough-talking macho dialogue, hot women in tight 1950s dresses, and some incredibly brutal violence. Parlov collaborated with Ennis on Punisher MAX and his work is evocative and rich with fine storytelling and strong characterisation. They make a great team. Not only that: Dave Johnson is the cover artist on this series, which should be enough reason for anybody to buy it...

BLACK LUNG
(Chris Wright)
A vivid, often frightening pirate story published by Fantagraphics, Black Lung somehow feels just as literary as it does visual. Wright, obviously just as influenced by the likes of Sam Peckinpah, Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy as he is by anyone working in his own medium, here crafts a sweeping story, fills it with some horrific violence and illustrates it in his uniquely scratchy, detailed style. The result is often breathtaking and even haunting.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN
(Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan)
Wood's Conan is the best treatment the character has had in a long, long time. It helps that he's adapting a great chapter of Robert E Howard's original Conan writing - these stories all concern Conan's time at the side of Bêlit, the Pirate Queen of the Black Coast, and that gives them a slightly diferent dimension to the hundreds of tales of Conan wandering Hyboria alone. That doesn't give the writer enough credit. Wood's work here elevates the material, respecting its mythic qualities but emphasising the strength of the characterisation, too, making Conan a living, breathing person in a way few writers can manage. Cloonan is perfectly suited to the character too. Her art is elegant, beautifully attuned to mood and tone, and she does action with a clean dynamism that is enviable.

BATMAN INC.
(Grant Morrison & Chris Burnham)
It feels like Morrison is nearing the end of his long, brilliant run on the Batman titles, and as such its worth comparing the work he's doing with that currently appearing in the other books in the Bat-family. Scott Snyder's run has been greatly acclaimed, and much as I love Greg Capullo's art, Snyder seems to rewrite the same story time and again, retro-engineering continuity to introduce a villain from Gotham's past, then stretching out his plotting to a ridiculous extent. Meanwhile Peter Tomasi's Batman & Robin is never better than average. The current Joker story stretching across different titles seems a pale shadow of better Joker stories of yore. Thankfully Morrison is basically left alone to do his own thing, mostly ignoring continuity to finish his epic yarn of Bruce Wayne's establishing Batman as a sort of international franchise. Burnham might have initally seemed like a sort of Quitely-lite, but his work is lovely; energetic, with a beautiful line and some great storytelling choices. When Morrison is done with Batman, the character will miss him. So will comics in general, if his middling Happy with Darrick Robinson is any indication...

FRAZETTA

He may have been something of a One-Trick Pony, but what a trick it was.

Frank Frazetta
1928 – 2010

Some Kick Ass Reflections

This is Not a review:

- The best thing about Kick Ass the comic was always the art of John Romita JR, one of the greatest working artists in comics nowadays. When I read there was a movie coming, while I could see the obvious commercial potential in such blackly funny and outrageously violent material, without the visuals of JRJR, it seemed a little pointless. The comic is never quite as shocking or as funny as it seems to think it is, a common complaint with Writer Mark Millar's putatively "edgier" work. He is instead at his best when he sticks to straight Super Hero material (his very best work may be his run on DC's tie-in comic with the Superman the Animated Series cartoon from the late 90s) or inflects such material with just the slightest trace of his more sensationalist authorial personality (as in the brilliant The Ultimates). Unsurprisingly, the comic remains grittier and far more violent than the often slick excesses of the film. And it provides JRJR with a chance to depict lots of his putty-faced people being beaten to a pulp with his always beautiful and dynamic storytelling giving everything a fantastic, hyperbolic, almost sickening impact.

- Aaron Johnson, who does just fine, is wrong for the role. A valid comparison would be the casting of Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man. Maguire is geeky-looking, slightly bug-eyed, not too tall or pretty or athletic. He could have been the nerd Peter Parker is meant to be. Johnson, on the other hand, is obviously a handsome boy, and a geeky afro and pair of specs don't really change that. He's also too jocky - tall, broad-shouldered, fit. A young leading man, in other words. Anybody who is cast as a young John Lennon , which is a role requiring a brooding, charismatic, smouldering kind of teen, is wrong for Kick Ass.



- Nicolas Cage, on the other hand, finds just the right film for that chihuahua-on-acid energy of his. Here he doesn't feel like he's wandered in out of his bubble of celebrity where its ok to marry Elvis' daughter because hey, you're a big fan and where you should say yes to every film that goes over a certain figure for your salary. Here he feels like he's caught the tone of the film just right, like he even exemplifies it. His Adam West impression is funny for a few seconds, he has plenty of action scene experience, and he doesn't jolt us out of the film with any bizarre line-readings or twitches for once. Do this and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans constitute a comeback?

- There have been films before parodying the Super-Hero genre. It is eminently parody-worthy, and comics have been doing the job for decades. Special (2007) is probably the most obvious recent example of this sub-genre, and Mystery Men is probably the most famous. There are numerous problems with this approach: a Super-Hero film really has to deliver Super-Hero action to achieve any commercial success. But fulfilling that particular cliche doesn't really square with mocking the genre and all of its cliches. Hancock, for example, begins as a semi-parodic, or at least certainly extremely revisionist, Super-Hero film, before abandoning any attempt at wit or satire for its actioncentric, exposition-filled finale. Revisionism complicates the issue, having usurped parody in the comics medium in the 1980s. The key mainstream works of that decade, the influences of which can very definitely be felt in Kick Ass, are definitively revisionist texts. Last year's Watchmen, based on one such text, perhaps failed commercially due to its extreme revisionaism- general audiences didn't recognise the archetypes these characters played off, and more to the point, they didn't really care.
Kick Ass proves that audiences are ready, though. Years of watching Big Summer Blockbusters about Super-Heroes and absorbing formulas, identifying types and recognising narrative beats has made us all geek-literate. Everybody gets the joke. As long as its well told.



- Set in New York City, Kick Ass was mostly shot in London, and there are times when the difference between the two cites is all too apparent. London and New York look different, basically. The architecture is different, the street furniture, the shopfronts, the alleyways...Vaughn and his people do well dressing up locations, for the most part, but this New York just feels wrong. It never coalesces into something that feels like a real city, with all its vague locations - lumber warehouse, drug dealers pad in council estate, suburban high school - and for all is references to NYC, the attitude and spirit of the place are utterly absent. It feels plastic. It feels like the generic "Metropolis" which is home to Superman, and is an obvious analogue of New York without being tied to the actual New York in any way. It feels more comic book-influenced then the same city does in Raimi's Spider-Man films. But this is the film that purports to be a realistic view of Super-heroes. Here New York is full of knife-wielding muggers, and there are plenty of darkened alleyways, just like in my 70s Marvels. In some films, geographical uncertainty can work well. David Fincher's Seven, for instance, is set in an unnamed city which we assume is New York for the first two acts of the film. But at the end, as three characters drive out of the city and into the countryside, they drive through the sun-blasted scrub of what can only be California, and the city seems suddenly more likely to be Los Angeles. This small detail shakes an audience a little, rocks its preconceptions and expectations about what it is watching.
I generally hate when films are shot in one place and set in another, though the strange atmospherics of an everycity can be effective in the right hands. Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was famously shot in a London standing in for New York, while Vancouver finds itself repeatedly impersonating American cities, often badly. Lost is a treasure trove of city masquerades, as Honolulu impersonates everywhere from London to Seoul to LA. But Lost does it either very well or horrendously badly. Either way is somehow better than the just-slightly off attempt made by Kick Ass.

- The most interesting material in both comic and film is in the early scenes, before the arrival of Hit Girl and Big Daddy into the narrative. Here Millar and Vaughn take on the concept of the Super-Hero and its application in a cynical, frightened world, but also a scattershot approach to modern culture, from viral video to cash-in merchandising. Then Hit Girl and Big Daddy show up, and it all turns into a big ridiculous stupidly entertaining action scene. Betraying the influence of both Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Jason Pierson's Body Bags, their characters are hilarious and fun and yet they are a big part of some of the film's problems. In the first act, they are somewhat uncomfortably crowbarred in to a story which is not theirs. And then later Hit Girl's central role is undermined by the fact that she is entirely without an interior life - we see her kill and maim and flip and stab, we see her beaten and shot, but we never have the slightest idea what she is thinking or feeling. This reduces her to a pretty black sight-gag, a flash of Japanese anime in the film's DNA, or perhaps a slightly offensive reduction, a character created purely for fanboys, which is never a good thing. Kick Ass himself, by comparison, is all interior life, as his voiceover fills us in on his every thought and aspiration, rendering him without mystery or much nuance. A better actor than Johnson might have given him more shades of despair or horror, but he remains a two dimensional creation throughout.

- The film is the very epitome of the modern genre spectacle. In a post-Tarantino world, that means that it is broadly post-modern, casually fascist and directed with an efficiently anonymous "stylish" sheen. It is also more concerned with being fliply funny than with being an effective action film, sacrificing emotional impact on several occasions for a gag. It has a scene with a heavy video game (read: First Person Shooter) reference in Hit Girl's night vision POV massacre, lots of martial arts and insane gunplay, and a soundtrack littered with pop culture ephemera and rescued trash - Sparks, Joan Jett, the Dickies' version of the Banana Splits theme, the Prodigy's sampling of Manfred Mann and a very Tarantino usage of Morricone's "For A Few Dollars More". In other words, it feels like a DVD movie, the sort of film made for Chapter Selection where you can rewatch favourite scenes and moments.

- The worst material in the climactic scenes is not from the comic. The comic stays gritty and horrifying whereas the movie finally aims for purest fantasy in a sort of betrayal of its own earliest impulses. Its a shame.



- What Kick Ass is, unexpectedly, is a great portrayal of adolescent male friendship. The protagonist says of himself that he "just exists, like most teenagers". He and his two best friends seem like the film's most authentic element, to me. Their warm camaraderie, based on mutual geekiness and constant ribbing, reminded me of my relationship with my friends at that age. Comic shops, sexual frustration, continual teasing of one another, not belonging to any of the teen tribes - all evoked lightly and wittily. Even if the film has little use for this side of its character, its brilliantly done while it lasts, before the costumes and the fight scenes come out.

Cassaday

A little bit Frank Quitely, a little bit Kevin Maguire, a little P. Craig Russell, John Cassaday is possibly the most versatile artist working in the mainstream these days. He can do massive superhero spectacle as well as anybody, but hes just as at home doing character scenes - that Maguire influence is there in his work with every aspect of his characterisation, facial expressions and "acting" - and his command of tone and mood is fantastic, his storytelling frequently inspired and almost casually cinematic.
But its his line and design sense I love most. His line is precise and even exquisite, and yet it also has the fluidity of the best sketchwork. His blacks are often heavy and yet his line can still appear feathery and illustrative, which is a beautiful effect. His sense of design is best evaluated by studying some of the covers he has worked on over the last few years.
Unlike many, he has enjoyed the success his talent deserves. His early work, for Caliber and Dark Horse, was distinctive and eye-catching enough to win him work at Marvel and DC. And he got lucky - becoming artist on Warren Ellis' magnum opus Planetary in 1998 in a job that gave him plenty of opportunities to strut his considerable stuff (both on the interiors and in his splendid series of covers) on a title which featured a brilliant variety of subject matter and territory over the next decade. Eventually he would land one of the Industry's biggest and most prized pencilling jobs when he began drawing Joss Whedon's run as writer on Astonishing X-Men. This he even parlayed into a gig directing a TV show - a couple of episodes of Wheedon's baby Dollhouse.
Hes still working, if not as regularly as he once did, and his art is still extraordinary:

My Booky Wooks 2009 (Part 2)

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzuccheli
Mazzucchelli returns, at last, and he's working on a different plane from 99% of the cartoonists in the comics medium. His book is a character study but it is full of digressions and tangents, and Mazzuccheli is good enough to be able to address two themes simultaneously. While his narrative may be concerned with fate or one of its titular protagonists opinions on life or art, his art is generally interrogating one aspect of the medium or another in his use of colour (his main characters are colour-coded), in the design of his characters, in the flow of his panel-to-panel storytelling. This is a cartoonist who obviously thinks as much about his chosen medium as, say, Scott McCloud does. His story follows Asterios Polyp, an Architect without any buildings to his credit, and flashes back and forth between his present - working in a garage in a small town following a fire that has destroyed his life and possessions, and finding himself once again, to some extent - and his past , in which he met a girl, fell in love and ultimately lost that girl. Asterios is not exactly a sympathetic character, but he is always interesting, and his slow thaw in his newfound smalltown life, while being the corniest, most predictable element of the entire book, is also tremendously effective and satisfying. Mazzuccheli draws him as an unchanging razor-edge design squiggle, almost an abstraction, throughout the book, in what may be a comment on the stubborn, immobile nature of his personality. It works as an epic of sorts, a detailed, artful character study, and a brilliant, frequently inspired piece of high comic art.

An Expensive Education by Nick McDonnell
Forget his youth and the suggestions of nepotism his well-connected family have made unavoidable, across the three novels published since he was 17 - which was only in 2002 - Nick McDonnell has proved himself a writer of great style, vision and ability. His third book is his best yet and shows the exciting maturation of his talent. It traces parallel stories with many links between the two - somewhere in Africa, a satellite-guided missile has just wiped out a village of potential anti-government rebels, leaving a young CIA operative the only witness. Back in America, a Professor working at an Ivy League University finds her work - on the rebel leader - and its sources questioned. McDonnell draws the connections between these two worlds with the lightest touch in scenes depicting the CIA agent and his growing paranoia and awareness of the mysterious forces behind his orders. These scenes are reminiscent of Graham Greene and John LeCarre in their great sense of place and moral confusion. In one brilliantly depicted interlude, the agent is dispatched to a luxury, tiny resort on a tropical island for some R&R and debriefing. This is where he figures out what he has seen and what it means and we can see that his growth of a conscience may come to mean his death. The College scenes - a mix of student romance and academic politicking - read like they are based in a solid reality, like McDonnell has based them on his own experiences, and they positively hum with the complex set of social and hierarchical systems universities run upon. I can't wait for whatever he does next, and for the chance to watch a fascinating career unfold.

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann
Not quite a short story collection but not quite a novel, either, Vann's book turns upon the event which changed his life - his father's suicide when he was a boy. And so he revisits this event, and the events leading up to it, and its consequences, over and over, in a set of tales about family and boyhood, divorce and adult unhappiness, and what forms character. The central piece follows a boy and his father as they go to live on a remote Island in a Cabin together for a year. The father has a slow, agonising breakdown and the boy witnesses it all before one horrible event turns the narrative upside down. In the final story an adult narrator returns to the town where he grew up, searching for memories and explanations of his father's actions.
Vann has a lovely, effortlessly elegant prose style - evident to anybody who has ever read any of his magazine feature work - in which no sentence is too long and each word seems to possess just the right weight in the grander scheme. His characters are well-observed, flawed and painfully aware of it, and his portrayal of Alaska - perhaps the third character in this book - is evocative and exciting, a true wild frontier with it's own tough side which wears down the father and his efforts to make a living in the great outdoors.

Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke
I read this in about 20 minutes, flying through it, then when it was finished I went back and appreciated Cooke's command of the comics medium, his storytelling skill, the sheer beauty of some of his panels, by reading it again, slowly this time, drinking it in. A faithful adaptation of one of Richard Stark's great pulp anti-hero's adventures, Cooke works in a lovely monochrome noir style, and his art is messier and more fluid than it has been on his big DC projects in the past. His script plays perfectly with that art, forming a near flawless reading experience for this type of material - stylish, exciting, witty and self-aware. The majority of the opening chapter is utterly wordless, placing much weight on Cooke's purely visual storytelling. His craft and flow carries that like it was nothing. Stark's books have the nastiness of the best pulp, as does his protagonist, and Cooke captures that quality both in his characterisation and his violent, slashy art. It made me want to read some of the original novels. More than that, it made me want to see Cooke adapt them.

Black Postcards by Dean Wareham
Wareham was the singer and chief songwriter in the influential, semi-legendary and awesome band Galaxie 500, and when he left, he went on to form the just-slightly less awesome but massively underrated Luna. These days he spends his time playing Lee Hazlewood to wife Britta Phillips' Nancy in Dean & Britta, and writing this fascinating, often hilarious memoir of the reality of life in a second tier alternative band in the 1990s. Alongside the vivid descriptions of gigs in seedy clubs in cities you've never heard of and the accounts of writing and recording various songs and the bleak little vignettes of isolation and boredom in sundry anonymous hotel rooms all over the world, Wareham pulls no punches in articulating his own flaws: his infidelities on the road, his pettiness and irritation with bandmates, the affair with Phillips that led to his divorce. But he is always likeable. Witty, self-deprecating and appealingly honest, his voice here makes the book an easy read and encouraged me to listen to nothing but his music for the few days it took to read the book.

The Way Home by George Pelecanos
If any book will ever finally send Pelecanos over into mainstream success, than this is it. He's been angling for that for a few years - ever since Drama City (2005), his first novel since Shoedog (1994) that wasn't part of a series. The Night Gardener (2006) and The Turnaround (2008) are both standalone stories without the Western, music and movie references of his earlier, more violent work. I loved those early books, back when Pelecanos felt like my writer, when nobody liked him and his books weren't reviewed in the broadsheets. But he deserves to be read by a huge audience, because he writes novels with indelible characters and great stories, full of atmosphere and exciting incident, and with funny, authentic-sounding dialogue, and thematic consistency and a righteous social anger. If his colleagues on the writing staff of The Wire; Richard Price and Denis Lehane, write bestsellers and have their books turned into big Hollywood movies, then Pelecanos should too. The Way Home is perhaps his most accessible novel yet, but he has not compromised on the quality of his writing. Washington D.C. is as strong a presence in this book as it has been in all his work, and his characters are just as angry and complex. The story follows a young juvenile delinquent through early incarceration and a subsequent attempt to go straight, which is tested by his discovery of a large bag of cash in a house he is working on. His relationship with his father is precisely dissected, as is the American juvenile detention system, and Pelecanos astutely probes at the forces driving young men toward crime. Also last year Pelecanos wrote the introduction to the NYRB reissue of Don Carpenter's brilliant and hitherto neglected (though not by me) Hard Rain Falling (1966), and I can see the influence of that novel in Pelecanos' book. The cool, dispassionate account of a young man's trials in prison echo Carpenter's lack of judgement, as does the understanding the author extends to his character's shaky efforts to remain clean on the outside. Pelecanos' clean, plain prose is not too far from Carpenter's style, either. The Way Home probably isn't Pelecanos' greatest novel - I would recommend Right As Rain (2001) or King Suckerman (1997) as better starting-points - but its still a great read, something Pelecanos unfailingly provides.

And just a few of the many older books I read last year:

We Don't Live Here Anymore: the Novellas by Andre Dubus
I'd read some Dubus before, in the form of his Selected Stories, which I'd dipped into but no more. But I had seen John Curran's terrific We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004), (which narrowly missed out on my Best of the Decade list), adapted by Larry Gross from a couple of Dubus' works (Adultery and We Don't Live Here Aymore). This book was utterly revelatory. Not that Dubus could write - I knew that from the stories I've read, where his prose had that very America ease and elegance. But that his vision was so acute, his ability to nail his characters to the page so faultless. Each of these novellas studies relationships between men and women in absolutely pitiless, unblinking detail. Dubus captures the way people think, the way they lie to themselves and others, and brilliantly; the way they talk. In the title novella, two couples dance around one another, two of them engaged in an affair that will ultimately damage all of them. In another, a young man disguises his obsessive stalking of his ex-wife even from himself, eventually forcing her into desperate action. Dubus charts it all so precisely - love scenes, arguments, internal monolgues...These stories are, variously, moving, painful, and funny. Dubus was a great writer, and he is absolutely ripe for a proper rediscovery of his talent and achievement.

Escape from Five Shadows by Elmore Leonard
I love Leonard's Westerns far more than I do his crime writing. Back when he wrote Westerns, he hadn't yet fallen quite so much in love with dialogue and those books are full of sparse descriptive passages that evoke his classical settings concisely but artfully. One thing that has never changed is his way with characters. He writes great villains - human, complex, with believable motivations and reasons, yet completely and utterly unsympathetic people who a reader wants desperately to see fail. His heroes are of a type - tough, honest, fearless and resourceful men. In other words, his westerns are formulaic in so many respects. And yet, Leonard somehow transcends his formula. His storytelling is great, his plotting like clockwork, and so books like this - to be honest, second rate as Leonard Westerns go - are still gripping, compulsive reading. The plot involves a man sent to a famously hard, impossible-to-escape Desert Prison and his attempts to, you guessed it, escape. And Leonard's account of his attempt is cool and laconic, with a cracking impact to each action scene and a seamlessly integrated love story.
If you want a really top-class Leonard Western, read Hombre or Valdez Is Coming. But I've read those books and I'm running out of other Westerns by Leonard, so I'm trying to ration myself to one a year. Its hard. If only he'd agree to write a few more...

Butchers Crossing by John Williams
My biggest discovery this year came courtesy of the incredible NYRB press. I'd never even heard of John WIlliams before I saw one of his books in a lovely NYRB cover in a bookshop. Reading the back, I discovered he was an American writer with some bold claims made for him. That book was called Stoner, and I bought it. Its a 1965 account of the uneventful life of an English Professor at a Midwestern University - his marriage, rivalries and disappointments. It is masterfully written, almost perfect in the cold poetry of Williams sentences, full of melancholy, and finally of a quite profound sense of the sum of a normal, unexciting, slightly drab life. That book inevitably led me to Butchers Crossing (1960), which is a Western. It follows a young Harvard Student near the turn of the last Century but one as he gives up his studies and travels to the Frontier in order to experience it before it disappears. He funds an expedition to hunt buffalo and he and his comrades spend a Winter in the mountains. When they return to the town of the title, they find that their world has changed utterly. Something of a boys own adventure, Williams' book is also a subtle deconstruction of the myth of the West and the Westerner, has almost an almost ecological agenda, and is a beautiful account of the natural world. I love literary Westerns, and this is one of the best I've ever read. I should thank the NYRB, I suppose, and hope that they get around to publishing Williams' last novel, the National Book Award-winning Augustus (1973), soon.

Say, Just...

- As the decade's end approaches and lists begin to spring up all over, literary site The Millions posts its list, voted for by a collection of bloggers, critics and writers, of The Best fiction of the Millennium So Far. And a fine list it is, too. at the time of writing they've only done 20 - 6, but I'm betting Roberto Bolano makes an appearance in that last five alongside Michael Chabon, though of course i could be very wrong...Anyway, it serves, as most lists of books or films or records do, as a syllabus of sorts. Each of these I've read has been great. Which is what really matters.


- Alan Moore interviews Brian Eno! On Radio 4. Odd, but interesting if you like Eno, or Moore.

- The Masters of Cinema catalogue becomes more and more beautiful with each release. Great films in good quality prints in lovely packaging with awesome extras. If you live in the UK, buy DVDs with any regularity, love film and you have none, shame on you. Pick one at random and chances are its incredible. This catalogue is just further loveliness, and reveals a few future releases I was unaware of (Pedro Costa!)

- British airways always gave good advert, but for the last two years they have shunned TV advertising. The massive new campaign they've just launched is some return, focusing as it does on a series of exotic events in far-flung destinations, each given their own spot, from a wildebeest migration to, well, the Buenos aires Superclassico, in this extended version. Great stuff:



- Who buys Simpsons comics? I don't know. I've never bought one or even read one. But Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror 15, out this week, changes all that. edited by Sammy Harkham, cartoonist behind the brilliant Poor Sailor and editor of Kramers Ergot, it features work from a slew of Kramers Ergot regulars including Kevin Huizenga and Jeffrey Brown. Basically an indie Simpsons comic, then, which sounds like a good thing to me, especially since Huizenga is one of my favourite working cartoonists...




- I love Big Star. Probably my second favourite band of all time (after the Beatles, obviously), the exhaustive new boxset has made me a happy boy. Amongst the many alternate mixes, demos and live readings there is a single mp4, setting some vintage footage shot by band members Chris Bell and Andy Hummel against the classic "Thirteen". That same footage has been on YouTube for an age, only here its set to the far jauntier "Thank You Friends". Either way, its fantastic

Olivia De Havilland.