The 2016 Big Long List of the Books and Graphic Novels and Comics I Read This Year

Here, for the sake of posterity, as if anyone's remotely interested, is pretty much everything I read in 2016, in roughly the order in which I read it. Not many novels... lots of comics and graphic novels... lots of Guardians of the Galaxy and Marvel space opera (see here for why)... lots of Hickman: this was my 2016 (in reading, anyway). Happy New Year.

Novels, Graphic Novels, Comics
The Ultimates by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch (Marvel, 2005) (reread)

The '44 Vintage by Anthony Price (Gollancz, 1978)

The Private Eye by Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin (Image, 2015)

Pilgrim on the Island by Desmond Cory (Frederick Muller, 1959)

Mills by Manning O'Brine (Herbert Jenkins, 1969)

The Little Prince by Joann Sfar (Walker, 2010)

Crambo by Manning O'Brine (Michael Joseph, 1970)

Copra Round Three by Michel Fiffe (Bergen Street, 2015)

Secret Warriors vols 1–6 by Jonathan Hickman, Stefano Caselli et al (Marvel, 2009–11)
S.H.I.E.L.D.: Architects of Forever by Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver (Marvel, 2011)

The 6 ​Voyages of Lone Sloane by Phillippe Druillet (Titan, 2015)

​Secret Avengers: Run the Mission, Don't Get Seen, Save the World by Warren Ellis et al (Marvel, 2012)

No Earth for Foxes by Manning O'Brine (Barrie & Jenkins, 1974)

Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Box by Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi (Marvel, 2009) (reread)

Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis by Warren Ellis and Kaare Andrews (Marvel, 2011)

​Fantastic Four: Dark Reign by Jonathan Hickman and Sean Chen (Marvel, 2009)

Avengers by Jonathan Hickman vols 1–3 (Marvel, 2015–16) (reread)
New Avengers by Jonathan Hickman vols 1–2 (Marvel, 2015–16) (reread)
Infinity by Jonathan Hickman, Jim Cheung and Jerome Opena (Marvel, 2014) (reread)
Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates by Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic (Marvel, 2011–12) (reread)
Avengers: Time Runs Out by Jonathan Hickman et al (Marvel, 2016) (reread)
Secret Wars by Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic (Marvel, 2016) (reread)

​Revenger: Children of the Damned by Charles Forsman (Bergen Street, 2016)

Ultimate Comics Thor by Jonathan Hickman and Carlos Pacheco (Marvel, 2011)

Ultimate Comics Hawkeye by Jonathan Hickman and Rafa Sandoval (Marvel, 2012)

Ultimate Spider-Man: Death of Spider-Man Fallout by Brian Michael Bendis, Jonathan Hickman et al (Marvel, 2011)

Patience by Daniel Clowes (Jonathan Cape, 2016)

Annihilation Conquest Omnibus by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning et al (Marvel, 2015)

Guardians of the Galaxy by Abnett and Lanning Omnibus (Marvel, 2016)

Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash by Dave McKean (Artist's Edition, 2016)

Megg and Mogg in Amsterdam by Simon Hanselmann (Fantagraphics, 2016)

The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin (Orion, 2016)

Ultimate Comics Spider-Man vol 1 by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli (Marvel, 2012)

Fantastic Four Omnibus vol 1 by Jonathan Hickman, Steve Epting et al (Marvel, 2013)
Fantastic Four Omnibus vol 2 by Jonathan Hickman, Steve Epting et al (Marvel, 2014) (reread)

​The Mighty Thor vol 1 by Matt Fraction and Olivier Coipel (Marvel, 2011)

Mister Wonderful by Daniel Clowes (Jonathan Cape, 2011)

Nicolas by Pascal Girard (Drawn & Quarterly, 2016)

​"Cash on Delivery"/"Soft Drink"/"Bed and Breakfast": three short stories by P. M. Hubbard (Argosy, 1969–70)

Mooncop by Tom Gauld (Drawn & Quarterly, 2016)

​Astonishing X-Men: Exogenetic by Warren Ellis and Phil Jiminez (Marvel, 2010)

Billy Hazlenuts and the Crazy Bird by Tony Millionaire (Fantagraphics, 2010)

Absolute Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross (DC, 2006) (reread)

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David and Colleen Doran (Simon & Schuster, 2015)
The Demon by Matt Wagner (DC, 1987)
"Give Till It Hurts: A Christmas Story" by Donald E. Westlake (Mysterious Bookshop, 1993)
Various Guardians of the Galaxy and Marvel cosmic comics​, including: Marvel Presents #3–12 by Steve Gerber and Al Milgrom (Marvel, 1975–77) (part reread); Guardians of the Galaxy by Jim Valentino (Marvel, 1990); Annihilation by Keith Giffen et al (Marvel, 2006) (part reread)
Various Marvel comics – research for Marvel Fact Files articles, including: Spider-Verse: Warzones! by Mike Costa and Andre Araujo (Marvel, 2015); Secret Wars 2099 by Peter David and Will Sliney (Marvel, 2015); Civil War: Warzones! by Charles Soule and Leinil Yu (Marvel, 2015), The Ultimates: Omniversal by Al Ewing and Kenneth Rocafort (Marvel, 2016); Moon Knight: Dead will Rise by Brian Wood and Greg Smallwood (Marvel, 2015)

Ongoing Periodical Comics
Kill or Be Killed by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Image)
Velvet by Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting (Image)
Criminal 10th Anniversary Special by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Image)
The Black Monday Murders by Jonathan Hickman and Tomm Coker (Image)
East of West by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta (Image)
Sex by Joe Casey and Piotr Kowalski (Image)
Hellboy in Hell by Mike Mignola (Dark Horse)
Captain America: Steve Rogers by Nick Spencer and Jesus Diaz (Marvel)
Captain America: Sam Wilson by Nick Spencer and Daniel Acuna (Marvel)
Guardians of the Galaxy by Brian Michael Bendis and Valerio Schiti (Marvel)
Civil War II by Brian Michael Bendis and David Marquez (Marvel)
DC Universe: Rebirth by Geoff Johns et al (DC)
Wonder Woman by Greg Rucka and Liam Sharp (DC)
Lazarus by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark (Image)
Jupiter's Legacy by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely (Image)
The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard)
Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang (Image)
Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Image)
Stray Bullets by David Lapham (Image)
James Bond by Warren Ellis and Jason Masters (Dynamite)
Injection by Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey (Image)
Vile by Tyler Landry (Study Group)

Started but Nowhere Near Finished
Found in the Street by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1986)
A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene (Heinemann, 1936)
War of Kings Omnibus by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning et al (Marvel, 2016)

Linked in this Friday's Forgotten Books round-up.

Manning O'Brine: Mills, Crambo, and No Earth for Foxes (1969–1974)

To read the author bios on the covers of the trilogy of spy novels Manning O'Brine (1919–1974) published from 1969–1974 is to get a glimpse of a quite remarkable life. The dust jacket flap of the first edition of Mills (Herbert Jenkins, 1969) states: "During the War he served in France with the Resistance, then in North Africa as a secret agent. In 1943 he was parachuted into Montenegro to join the partisans and finished the War with the Garibaldi partisans in Italy. After the War he fought for Israel in the Arab Wars, managed an opera company, and wrote several thrillers. Still a believer in authentic background, he recently smuggled himself in and out of Albania to get material for Crambo."

The author bio on the first edition of Crambo (Michael Joseph, 1970) notes that O'Brine was an opera director, a film producer and a writer for film and television "with more than a hundred scripts to his credit". The third book, No Earth for Foxes (Barrie & Jenkins, 1974), adds to his CV a stint as a scenic designer and reveals that he "turned to writing when he decided he could write better than the 'bloody scripts that appeared on his drawing board'". It also gives additional details of his wartime exploits – that "he was with Special Services and parachuted into France on a number of occasions", was "Caught and tortured by the Gestapo... escaped on the way to Belsen", and finally reached Gibraltar.

His was, by any measure – and if those jacket flap bios are to be believed – an extraordinary life, aspects of which he channelled into Mills, Crambo and No Earth for Foxes. O'Brine had published novels before these three – he wrote a string of spy thrillers in the 1950s starring ex-Secret Service agent Mike O'Kelly – but his later espionage novels were clearly closer to his heart. (In the bio on the jacket flap of Crambo he describes his earlier novels as "desperately bad".)

Mills is the best of the three, a cat-and-mouse thriller in which the eponymous British agent decides to retire but then becomes quarry for agents from the Russian and America secret services – as well as his own – all of whom believe he is carrying the formula for a new form of LSD. But Crambo and No Earth for Foxes are almost as good, the former an account of the titular agent's extraction of a Soviet State Security man and his family (although there's more to it than that), the latter a tale of a faked defection (although again...). Characters cross over from one novel to another – Mills and his fellow agents Crambo and Pavane appear to greater or lesser degrees in each story – and there are manhunts (the one in Crambo through the coastal swamps of Albania is particularly good; O'Brine's research paid off there) and double-crosses aplenty.

What's really extraordinary about the books, though – especially Mills and No Earth for Foxes – are the frequent flashbacks to World War II, and how those shape the narrative. These brief interludes sketch in the wartime backgrounds of some of the protagonists – Mills', but also the Nazis he fought in the war and hunted down and killed afterwards for their war crimes. There are gut-wrenching glimpses of the atrocities carried out by German SS troops. Clearly informed by O'Brine's own wartime experiences, these passage burn with a righteous fury and give the novels their character of unfinished business being dealt with. Take this passage from Mills:

The old and infirm had been locked indoors and flamethrowers put to their houses. Babies had been tossed, screaming, into cement-mixers. Women had been cut down by machine-guns as they fled to the chestnut groves.

Or this one from No Earth for Foxes:

He smashed her teeth with the barrel of the machine-pistol and thrust it into her mouth. He fired a burst of 9m bullets that exploded her skull. As she fell backwards, he blew down the barrel of the pistol, lay the weapon on the wall.

And those aren't even the worst of it. O'Brine's hatred of Nazis and, yes, Germans, is channelled through Mills, who in No Earth for Foxes refers to Germans "as dog-turds, fouling the footpath of mankind, filth to be swept away every so often". But it's also made explicit in the Author's Foreword at the start of that book. Noting that the wartime horrors he details in the novel – the horrendous SS 'rastrellamento' (which O'Brine translates as "a scoring, a raking over, a cleansing") in Italy in 1944 – are based in fact, he writes:

Today, all too few really care, one way or the other. It is so much blood under the bridge, forgive and forget, Germans and Austrians are a new generation now. Indeed they are, fathered and mothered by the Hitler Jugend and Bund-Deutsche-Madel of 1945, men and women whose memories are of defeat, of being uprooted from a domain they cherished, and still cherish, as a divine right... a viscid bile that seeks by way of reunification to rise again.

Fools and politicians (all too often one and the same) can believe that the seed of such malignancy withered and died in the flames of a Berlin bunker. Facts, alas, prove otherwise.

A bleak summation of the German character, for sure. But then, given that in an afterword to the novel, O'Brine writes of having seen in Italy in 1944 "a well choked with the bodies of babies and tiny children, most of them drowned or suffocated under the weight of those above", perhaps understandable.

The Secondhand Bookshops of Suffolk: Aldeburgh and Westleton, Guest-Starring Manning O'Brine and Elleston Trevor

As we reach the end of the first week of posts about my – and Rachel and little Edie's – recent holiday to Suffolk, and with a second and possibly even (heaven forfend) a third week of such posts in prospect, it occurs to me in passing that I may be trying the patience of even the most ardent and steadfast of Existential Ennui readers with this absurdly self-indulgent endeavour, which, if the missives thus far are anything to go by, and the odd book-focused interlude aside, will continue to consist largely of a succession of pictures of me and a supposedly cute baby in front of a variety of secondhand bookshops in whichever godforsaken Suffolk town or village I've dragged Rachel and Edie to on the pretence of it being picturesque.

Still: in for a penny, eh?

So then. Where were we? Halesworth, that's where, the base location for the week's holiday, from which locale we ranged far and wide over the eastern bit of Suffolk, in the first instance to the seaside town of Southwold, where, sadly, there are no secondhand bookshops (although my good friend and colleague Roly Allen, who's very familiar with the area, assures me there used to be about four), and then to the similarly coastal but not quite as quaint Aldeburgh, where there is a single secondhand bookshop:

Reed Books 2. Apparently there was at one point a Reed Books 1, but it didn't seem to exist by the time we got there – a shame, because while Edie nabbed herself a Noddy in Reed Books 2 (the first book in the series, Noddy Goes to Toyland), there wasn't anything for me, and I suspect most serious secondhand book collectors would struggle to find much of interest either. Unlike the next bookshop we ventured to:

Chapel Books, in the little village of Westleton, about six miles north of Aldeburgh. As the shop's name suggests, it's based in an old chapel, with shelves arranged in a pleasingly haphazard fashion around the hall, and the occasional charming offer of tea from the proprietor (although it was a bit too hot the day we were there to take him up on it). Even though there was only a small crime fiction section, tucked away in the far corner, there was still plenty for both me and Edie to look at:

Lots of children's books, evidently, but also a good range of non-fiction, vintage paperbacks, science fiction, and a decent holding of modern firsts. I eventually emerged with three books:

Er, and a baby (Edie, in case there's any confusion). One of those books will form the basis of the next post, but the other two were:

A first Corgi paperback printing of Manning O'Brine's The Hungry Killer, published in 1956 (the same year as the Hammond hardback edition), cover art by John Richards (who also did the cover art for my 1955 Corgi paperback of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man), and:

A 1955 Heinemann first edition of Elleston Trevor's The Big Pick-Up, dust jacket design by the great Val Biro.

O'Brine has been on my radar for a while now – indeed I have a first edition of his 1970 novel Crambo, the second in his three-book Mills espionage series, waiting to be blogged about. The Hungry Killer is part of an earlier, longer spy series starring Michael The O'Kelly – the fifth book in the series in fact, and notably scarce: there are only three copies in any edition on AbeBooks at present, none of them the Corgi paperback.

Trevor, on the other hand, is probably better known round these here parts under another of his aliases: Adam Hall, author of the nineteen Quiller spy novels (and one standalone thriller). However, The Big Pick-Up isn't an espionage work: like another Trevor novel I blogged about back in 2011 (The Killing Ground, 1956), it's a World War II tale, in this instance set during the Dunkirk evacuation; there's a review of it over at the Broken Trails blog.

Jacket designer Val Biro I've written about numerous times, and his wrapper for The Big Pick-Up is another cracker, that big, bold but elegant hand-lettering standing in marked contrast to the freely daubed gouache paint behind. Needless to say, it's now taken its place in my Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1960s and 1960s gallery, alongside eleven other fine examples of Val's work (and taking the number of covers on the page up to a remarkable 111).

As for the third book I bought, and why it's special enough to warrant its own post: all will be revealed soon.