2008's Best Comics (so far)

One of my editors at Time Out New York asked me for my favorite books this year. I put together this list, with contextual descriptions that it turned out he didn't need. It's kind of an impulsive list, but I'd back most of this stuff up if pressed.

All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
the whole run, but especially # 10 where Superman struggles against his own mortality to leave a lasting legacy of good.

Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean McKeever
a perfectly dirty and intertwined noir series, full of sex, guilt and violence.

Captain America by Ed Brubaker and various
A solid re-invention of a seemingly jingoistic icon by passing the mantle to a supposedly dead sidekick filled with regret over past sins and the weight of expectations.

Scalped by Jason Aaron and various
The story of Dashiell Bad Horse, a bad seed who returns to his old reservation as an undercover FBI agent. It's ornery yet deeply affecting and every issue feels like a punch in the stomach.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Eight
by Joss Whedon and various
Moving the series to comics form lets Whedon and his collaborators do things that would have been budget-prohibitive on the screen and he chooses to let the characters grow rather than freeze them in time.

Invincible Iron Man by Matt Fraction and various
Fraction's post-movie series looks shiny on the outside but examines what happens when old mistakes come back to haunt a man who can't afford to be fallible.

Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw
A dysfunctional family portrait that manages to avoid being prosaic by the specificity of its internal logic and sharply delineated loneliness.

Path of the Assassin, Vol. 13: Hateful Burden by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima
This installment of the fictionalized historical manga about the rise of iconic shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu had me gasping multiple at the tightrope walk of suspense and sexual intrigue. I was nearly late for a meeting with my book editor because of it.

Now The Hell Will Start by Brendan Koerner
This WWII micro-history–focusing on the trials of a black GI who shot a white lieutenant–features drug use, brutal racism and cross-cultural lust in a story that seems like it could never be true.

The Jazz Ear by Ben Ratliff
The NY Times writer listens to music with some of jazz's greatest and most misunderstood players. It opened up new understandings about the things driving musicians I already know and introduced me to tunes and people I'd never heard of before. Ratliff does a hard thing: making jazz seem accessible to to those who don't listen to it and deepening the understanding of those already trained to hear it.

Ex Machina #35 by Brian K. Vaughn and Tony Harris
Superhero-tuned-mayor is the high concept that drives Ex Machina but it's really about the collision of the personal and political. This issue deals with the legacy of slavery in downtown Manhattan, centering on City Hall, and Vaughn avoids easy platiitudes to wind up in an uncomfortable but honest place.

The Greatest Fictional Politician of Our Times?

Grand Text Auto

From pre-release hands-on to writing and talking about the game, it’s been damn near a month of GTA-mania for me. Here’s a few quick links to the things I’ve been working on:

Blazing Prattles
I got a bunch of folks together to talk GTA for Crispy Gamer’s podcast and everybody seems to have had a great time doing it. Let history show that my Crispy colleague Gus Mastrapa made a bold, early prophecy about possible cross-country travel in Niko Bellic’s future. (Gus was answering my question about what might be next in terms of GTA’s forthcoming episodic content.) A few days after the podcast was recorded, the internets went crazy over this shot that appeared on the Rockstar Social Club site. When talking about the Little Jacob character fro GTA IV, Gus (who also writes for Paste, the Onion’s AV Club and Media Coverage at GameDaily) also had my favorite line from the podcast: “I never knew I wanted to be friends with a Jamaican drug dealer…”


Thought/Process 004: Building Better Wor(l)ds
The idea here was to try and work out some of the thoughts I’ve been having about the intersection of story and experience in video games.

With our copter in freefall, I hit the Y button, foolishly thinking I could jump into the pilot's seat. Instead, I followed after our fellow gunsel, as if we had some bizarre suicide love pact.

I don’t know how successful I was in breaking any kind of new theoretical ground, but I’m glad to have gotten that stuff out of my brain.


Time Out Chicago review
Here we have the pitfalls of multiple-outlet deadline crunch, in that you’ll see some of the same thoughts and language I’ve used elsewhere about GTA IV crop again.

Writers I Like

Paul Beatty on Obama:

Yes, I know that after his resounding victory in the Iowa caucus, pundits decided that Barack's win proved that race was of political inconsequence, but I bet that they thought the same thing the day after O.J. Simpson was arrested.

Colson Whitehead on the Brooklyn Writer Mystique:

What do they expect me to say? “Instead of ink, I write in mustard from Nathan’s Famous, a Brooklyn institution since 1916.” “I built my desk out of wooden planks taken from the authentic rubble of Ebbets Field. Have I mentioned how I still haven’t forgiven the Dodgers for moving to Los Angeles?”

Ta-Nehisi Coates on writing his memoir (his blog is a must-read, btw):

Ah well, I can remember cats coming to school the next day bragging about how Humpty ripped it on that "the underground's down for peace among brothers" (how is it that him and Shock G are on stage together). But all I remember watching this clip was that the dark-skin chick in Oaktown 357 was a stunner. We'll get Juicy Got You Crazy in here at some point. No pubescent boy should have seen that video.

Haitian Cogitation

The latest edition of my Thought/Process column went live at Crispy Gamer. In this edition, I talk abut why it's hard to get a sense of auteurship out of video game development and some games that I think verge on the artistic. It's a brain-twisting premise, but I'm pretty proud of at least attempting to tweak the lens through which we look at video games.

A quick excerpt:

The thing about game development is that it's still a market-driven mode of creativity, and it's creativity by committee. As such, it's hard to build a body of work that evinces a particular aesthetic, a sense of where the creators' head/heart might be at in a moment of time. There's a reason that games like Rez get trotted out when the ongoing "Are Games Art?" argument boils over periodically. Rez and, to a degree, its EEE cousins try to alter the user's perceptions of sight and hearing. By intertwining the two senses closely, it attempts to blur the lines between the two in an effort to simulate synesthesia.

For more, follow the link: Thought/Process 002

Haitian Moderation

Last Saturday, I moderated a panel at Splat!, a graphic novel symposium. It was a last-minute set-up, with the e-mail asking me to participate coming on the preceding Wednesday. I had little prep time and the 9:00 am start time was hella early for me–especially considering it was on the weekend–but I think it went pretty well. (It's the first one on the linked page; things happened so quickly they didn't have time to update the info with my name and bio.) Of special note was that there were three black men on the panel of nerd experts, the first time any such thing has ever happened to me.

Here's a snippet from a blog post on Fleen:

In terms of presentation, the Who Reads Graphic Novels? and Webcomics: A Primer seemed to run most smoothly; this was probably a function of the panelists present and the moderators — wrangling smart, opinionated people is an art form, and Evan Narcisse and Colleen Venable just seemed to do the best job of it (it doesn’t hurt that Narcisse has both a conversational style and voice very similar to that of Elvis Mitchell).

NPR, here I come!

Haitian Representation

Here's what I've been up to, in terms of non-book stuff:

• The usual weekly Washington Post and bi-weekly Time Out Chicago game reviews keep on rolling along.


• A guest post on Level Up, N'Gai Croal's video game blog at Newsweek, just went up today. Aside from being a friend, N'Gai's one of the most well-regarded journalists working in the video game space right now and Level Up may be THE place to go for high-level critique (at least in the mainstream media) so it's very cool of him to let me play in his "house", as it were. My admittedly heady entry talks about how a solo game experience changes when it's shared, using my examples of playing Portal (below) and Assassins' Creed with a friend as a launching pad.



• Crispy Gamer, a new video game website powered by a murderer's row of freelancers including yours truly, launched about a month ago. I'm producing and moderating their podcast, Blazing Prattles, and writing Thought/Process, a monthly column of critique for the site, too. You should be able to click on my name and get a page with all my contributions so far. I'm pretty proud of the stuff I'm doing for CG so please check it out. While I was at GDC, my Crispy Gamer colleagues and I did an interview with iconic game developer Warren Spector. I kinda took the bull by the horns here and commandeered the time we had with Warren, but I feel like the resulting podcast came out great.

• Because no one demanded it, Scott Jones and I did another video game segment on the local CW affiliate (Channel 11). We talk about recent releases that are fun to play during Spring Break. You can see it here, once you scroll down a bit.

• My piece on Mat Johnson ran a few weeks ago in Time Out New York. This one was a weird tightrope to walk, since it had to talk about both Mat and his new graphic novel Incognegro. I liked Mat's writing way before I ever met him, but I didn't want the article to come off like one friend writing about another. Nevertheless, it was a fun piece to write.