Here's something I nabbed on eBay over the festive period:
The 30 June 1951 edition of Picture Post. Not the sort of thing I normally buy on eBay, I must admit – after all, as the subtitle, not to mention the substance, of Existential Ennui attests, I tend to collect old books, not old photojournal magazines – but I had a particular reason for picking this issue up, to do with the article on pages 20–23:
"Bob-a-Dance Men Wait to Be Asked". The feature spotlights an intriguing innovation in Britain's dance halls at the time, the male hired dance partner. Hired dance partners – taxi dancers in American parlance – had been around since the early twentieth century, but by and large they tended to be female; the male variety was much more uncommon. So when the newly opened Lyceum Ballroom in London introduced them in the early 1950s, they exerted a certain fascination, as evidenced by this Picture Post piece. These "bob-a-dance men" – so named because they charged a shilling, or a bob, a turn round the dancefloor – were obliged to remain in "the Pen" at the Lyceum – a closed off area guarded by a lady with a cash box – until their services were required. They weren't allowed to leave the Pen, or ask anyone to dance themselves – they could only be asked – but they could read if they wished, or drink coffee, or just sit and wait.
Unfortunately, sitting and waiting was precisely what they did most of the time. The bob-a-dance men had been attracted to this new career by the prospect of a commission of half a shilling per dance on top of a £7-a-week wage. But as they quickly learned, the commission only kicked in once they'd "sold £7 worth of dances in a week" – and none of them managed to get anywhere near that. Instead, as the page above demonstrates (click on the image to enlarge), they spent the majority of their time cooped up in the Pen. The bottom left photo shows a packed Lyceum, but in the top left photo, there the bob-a-dance men sit, clearly bored out of their skulls, chatting amongst themselves or to their female counterparts, or sneakily fraternising through the railings with a prospective partner.
Indeed, it's the fellow doing the illicit fraternising who was my reason for purchasing this copy of the Picture Post. Here he is again on the next page:
On the far left of the top photo, gazing gloomily into the distance. He's named in the caption as Fred, a former "warehouseman", although his surname is never given. In point of fact it's the same as mine: Jones. And I know this because he's my dad.
You see, over Christmas, while Rachel and Edie and I were staying at my parents' house, Dad showed us his treasured copy of this edition of the Picture Post. It was in a dreadful state: worn, torn – literally falling apart in his hands. At one time he'd owned a second copy in much better condition, but it had been lent to someone and, to Dad's lasting regret, never returned. Accordingly he'd figured he'd just have to make do with his battered copy... Except of course in this day and age, for someone like me, tracking down old magazines (or, more ordinarily, books) is often as simple a matter as picking up a smartphone and hitting a few keys. Within minutes I'd found a nice-looking copy of the Picture Post in question on eBay, and snapped it up for a tenner. A couple of days later it arrived at my folks' house, and now my dad has a splendid new copy (kindly scanned for me by Mum... who, now I come to think of it, herself has a notable background in magazines...) of one of his most prized possessions.
Dad wasn't a bob-a-dance man for very long, but he did go on to become a ballroom dance instructor. Though my sister, Alison, made good use of these skills (for a while, anyway), I, in typically contrary and obstinate fashion – traits, ironically enough, I think I've inherited from Dad – elected not to. Which, given the renewed rise to prominence of ballroom dance in the wake of Strictly Come Dancing, was decidedly shortsighted of me. Later, Dad changed his career and became a driving instructor. Once again, while my sister took full advantage of this, learning to drive as soon as she possibly could, I declined any and all offers of assistance and only passed my driving test last year, at the age of forty-three, having paid a small fortune for the privilege.
Basically, I've always been an ungrateful bastard, and while buying my father an old magazine hardly makes up for decades of taking him for granted, I suppose it's something.
Or at least it would have been, if, unbeknownst to me until later, he hadn't slipped Rachel twenty quid to cover the cost.
I realise certain date-specific salutations are slightly ridiculous in the context of a blog post which might only be chanced upon weeks if not months or even years after after the event in question (if at all), and especially a blog post which itself arrives days after that event, but even so: happy new year.
I shan't be making any resolutions regarding Existential Ennui in 2014, nor any predictions, or forecasts, or – God forbid – formulating any kind of manifesto for the year ahead; any past such attempts have at best turned out to be only partially correct, and in any case, who (other than me... maybe) really cares what one insignificant books-related blog among so many thousands has planned for the next twelve months? (Not that there is much of a plan beyond the next week or so.) Instead I thought I'd ease myself into the new blogging year in (arguably untypically) unostentatious fashion by posting some thoughts on the two books I managed to polish off over the festive period (not bad going, considering the various demands of fatherhood and home life and travelling to see family over Christmas and whatnot), and drawing attention to a couple of comments which have appeared since I last posted, plus a few more from earlier in December and November.
Books first, beginning with this:
Richard Stark's Parker: Slayground by Darwyn Cooke. When The Violent World of Parker (where I'm co-blogger) supremo Trent and I interviewed Darwyn back in the summer of 2012 (Christ, was it really that long ago...?), Cooke's intention had been to adapt the eighth in Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's series of Parker novels, The Handle, as his next full-length Parker graphic novel, and after that do "a 48-page real boiled down version of Slayground", the fourteenth Parker outing. Evidently those plans changed, because instead of The Handle – of which there's been nary a sign – Slayground arrived as a 96-page graphic novel in December.
Of those 96 pages, Slayground itself takes up roughly 80, many of them, as the opening spread above demonstrates, as stylish and formally inventive as we've come to expect; there's even a foldout map of Fun Island, the closed-for-the-winter amusement park in which Parker becomes trapped. That the story lacks substance is less a fault of the adaptation than of the source novel – for me one of the slighter Parkers – but it's still an effective manhunt thriller, and in adapting it Cooke makes some intriguing storytelling choices, especially as regards the structure – swapping parts two and three and lopping off the ending where Parker tells Claire he'll go back for the stashed loot some day – and the character of Caliato, the local mob second-in-command, who in Cooke's hands becomes instead Benito, the son of mob boss Lozini. Presumably that change was made in order to give Lozini more of a personal beef with Parker for Cooke's final adaptation, Butcher's Moon, although if so, given that Lozini already regarded Caliato almost as a son, Iwonderwhether that was really necessary. I guess we'll find out in 2015.
Also included is Cooke's short adaptation of the seventh Parker novel, The Seventh (alias The Split). As I've mentioned before, The Seventh is one of my favourite Parkers, and consequently I'd been wanting to read Cooke's version ever since I learned that it was an extra in Parker: The Martini Edition, which I was reluctant to buy as I already owned Cooke's adaptations of The Hunter and The Outfit (which The Martini Edition collected). In the event I'm glad I held out, because Cooke summarily dispenses with the meat of The Seventh across a single spread and concentrates instead on Parker's climactic pursuit of his nameless nemesis, which, the payoff aside – which in any case is diluted by the abbreviating of the glorious madness which precedes it – is probably the least interesting part of the story. Still, it all looks lovely.
Incidentally, I expect there'll be a review of Slayground over at The Violent World of Parker before long, but if Trent doesn't have one lined up, I might end up posting a version of the above over there.
Anyway, the other book I finished was this:
Doctor Sleep, Stephen King's belated sequel to The Shining, published September 2013 and seen here in its British WHSmith limited edition. The phrase 'return to form' must have been applied to every Stephen King novel of the last twenty years, but in this case it's apt: Doctor Sleep is the best King book I've read since Cell – not quite up there with The Dark Half or Needful Things (and certainly not The Stand), but not far off. I think the reason for that is that Dan – formerly Danny in The Shining – Torrance is one of King'smore convincing leads, an alcoholic like his father – and indeed like King himself – whose efforts to carve out some kind of life after a drink-sodden decade or so are at least as, if not more, compelling than the paranormal plot in which he becomes embroiled.
As for those comments, a Tehanu left a comment on my interview with spy novelist Anthony Price drawing my attention to the third novel in Charles Stross's series of "Laundry" occult spy thrillers, The Fuller Memorandum,which I'd not come across before but which apparently is an homage to Price's work. And on a similarly supernatural tip, an anonymous commenter left a message on this post on Andrew MacKenzie, confirming that as well as novels, MacKenzie did indeed pen a good number of occult works. And while we're on the subject of comments and updates, earlier in December a Saz left an enlightening pair of comments on this post on James Mitchell's Callan spy series which are well worth reading; "Going on Ninety" expressed thanks for reminding him about John le Carré; and in November a former associate of Dr. Strangelove writer Peter George's, Madeline Weston, emailed me with her recollections of George's suicide, and granted me permission to update this post on George accordingly.
Thank you to all of those folks, and to everyone else who's commented and emailed; when – as is its occasional wont – the Black Dog pays a visit and I feel like abandoning Existential Ennui altogether, messages like these act as a useful reminder of why I persist in this foolish endeavour.
And so we reach the not-especially-grand finale not only of the Existential Ennui Review of the Year, but of Existential Ennui for the year. And on both counts, all I can say is, thank fuck for that. On reflection, five end-of-year posts (five! What on earth was I thinking?) was at least two posts too many (if not five posts too many), and as for the year in general, while it's been wonderfully life-changing in at least one respect, it's also been bloody long and in places bloody hard, and I'm kind of glad it's almost over.
But let that not deter us from finishing the year chez Louis XIV in traditional fashion with my ten best books of the year, as picked from the big long list of the books I read in 2013. As usual, and unlike with my newly-instituted-and-unlikely-to-be-repeated ten best comics (linked by The Comics Reporter, no less) and ten best albums posts, few of these books actually date from 2013 – just one, in fact, although another one was published into paperback in 2013 having been published in hardback in 2012, so it's still reasonably 'new'. The rest date from much earlier than 2013 – decades earlier, making the top ten as comically arbitrary – and thus of no use to anyone – as previous years' efforts. (Equally arbitrarily, I've once again discounted any novels I'd read before, of which there were four this year – see the aforementioned big long list.)
Since I've already reviewed all of these books – you can click through to each review via the titles – I'll be keeping additional commentary to a minimum. Let the countdown... commence!
I'm still not sure if the denouement of Atkinson's device of having a character live their life over and over again in order to avoid a succession of untimely deaths quite, um, lived up to the journey there, but in any case the journey there was well worth taking.
9. Deep Water Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1958)
Highsmith preferred to tell a story from the perspectives of two protagonists (usually opponents, usually men), butRipley's Game aside, arguably her most powerful novels adhere to a singular viewpoint, Deep Water being an early example.
Widely recognised as a classic not only of the spy fiction genre but of twentieth century fiction in general. And yet... while I admired it, and it is evidently a great novel, for me it's not up there with Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, or indeed that novel's twosequels. Perversely, perhaps, I also preferred the two less-acclaimed novels which preceded The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, namely:
Obviously I'm cheating here... or am I? After all, these are the ten best books I read in 2013, not the ten best novels, and I read le Carré's first and second novels, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, together in The le Carré Omnibus. Ergo I'm not so much cheating as... not being completely honest. Ahem.
6. Alys, Always by Harriet Lane (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012)
A The Talented Mr. Ripley for the 21st century? Not quite – for one thing, Frances Thorpe, the star of this novel, isn't as murderous as Tom Ripley – but Lane shares Highsmith's cool detachment, steady pace and sly psychological depth. Advance word on Lane's second novel, Her, is very good.
What's this? A novelisation? Ah, but what a novelisation. Mackintosh's take on his own espionage TV show packs more in, and in a more convincing manner, than many more celebrated spy novels manage.
Yes, yes, I'm sort of cheating again – see The le CarréOmnibus above – but I did genuinely read Swag and The Hunted in the Dutch Treat omnibus (later securing a scarce first hardback edition of The Hunted). And anyway, who'll begrudge me a minor con in the year that Elmore Leonard died? Incidentally, the third novel in this collection, Mr. Majestyk, is almost as good as the two I've highlighted, but I read it last year (as a paperback original).
In previous years I've limited myself to one appearance per author in my top tens, but under the circumstances, this year I think I'm justified (arf) in dispensing with that rule. Besides, Leonard's novels were some of the best things I read in 2013 – were this a top twenty rather than a top ten, he'd be filling most of the positions from 11 to 20 – and LaBrava was one of the best of that best.
Is this, like The Sandbaggers, a novelisation? After all, Mitchell adapted it from his own own screenplay – for an Armchair Theatre production which acted as the pilot to the subsequent Callan TV series – so I suppose in that sense it is. But then really, who cares? What matters is that it's a brilliantly grubby spy story, economically and unfussily told, and all the better for it.
It couldn't really be anyone else at number one, could it? But even if Leonard hadn't passed away in August, this novel would have still nabbed the top spot. Follow the link in the title to find out why.
And with that, my work here is done for the year. A very merry Christmas to you all, and see you in 2014.
Well, thus far the Existential Ennui Review of the Year has turned into a wander rather further down memory lane than I'd intended – witness the preambulatory contextual rambles at the start of my posts on the ten best comics I read and the ten best albums I heard in 2013, which ventured far beyond 2013 to detail in tiresome fashion my personal histories with both comics and music. Rest assured, however, that there'll be none of that nonsense in this post, because we're back on more recognisable terrain here in the shape of the traditional – as in, including this post, I've rolled something similar out four years running now (twice in 2010, ridiculously) – big long list of the books I read this year.
As in previous years, the list is ordered roughly in the, er, order in which I read the books, and the title of each book links to whatever I wrote about it. Analysis (oh dear God) follows underneath the list.
I make that forty books in total, which is twenty-four fewer than I managed in 2012 and twenty-nine fewer than I managed in 2010, although only eight fewer than 2011. There is, of course, a very good reason for this – one which I trust and fervently hope will
continue to have an impact on my reading for many years to come – and we should also bear in mind that I read quite a lot of comics too, so all things considered, it's really not a bad total. Obviously it's not quite the end of the year yet, and I do have a further four(!) books on the go, but I'd be surprised if I finish any of them before 2013 breathes its last. And even if I do, who's to know apart from me? It'll just give me a headstart on next year's total (which I suspect I'll need).
So, what can we determine from the 2013 list? Well, almost all of the books I read were novels, and even the two that weren't – Kingsley Amis's My Enemy's Enemy and Peter Rabe's From Here to Maternity – are still essentially fiction, the former a short story collection and the latter a fictionalised illustrated account of Rabe's wife's pregnancy. Just three were published this year – Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, Roger Hobbs's Ghostman and John le Carré's A Delicate Truth – and a further two – Harriet Lane's Alys, Always and C. J. Sansom's Dominion – were published into paperback this year (having been published in hardback last year) and so could still be considered 'new'. The rest were published across the preceding six decades – two in the 2000s; six in the 1990s; five in the 1980s; eight in the 1970s; eleven in the 1960s; and three in the 1950s. Almost all, however, were 'new' to me, with the exceptions of Patricia Highsmith's The Boy Who Followed Ripley and Ripley Under Water and Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty and Stick, which I'd read before.
If we were to divide the books into categories, twenty are what you could loosely term crime fiction; eleven are to a greater or lesser degree spy fiction; five are I suppose what you'd call literary and/or historical fiction; two are westerns; one is science fiction; and one would be categorised as humour. The author I read the most in 2013, appositely given that he passed away this year, is Elmore Leonard, by a wide margin: thirteen novels in total (including the two rereads). His nearest rival isn't, in terms of raw numbers, any kind of rival at all really – John le Carré, of whose novels I read four this year – while I read three books apiece by Richard Stark (alias Donald E. Westlake, who was my most-read author in 2012 and 2010), Patricia Highsmith (again including two rereads), James Mitchell (including one written under the pen name James Munro) and Ian Mackintosh, and two by Kingsley Amis.
Fascinating stuff, I'm sure you'll agree, but as the more attentive souls among you may have noticed, it tells us little to nothing about the books themselves. For that I'd suggest following the links to read whatever piffle I posted about each of them. And if you're curious as to which books I'd pick as my ten best of the year, all will be revealed in the final post not only in the Existential Ennui Review of the Year, but of the year.
Music may have been '70s crooner John Miles's first love, but I can't say for sure whether it was necessarily mine. Certainly music was an early love – I vividly recall as a child listening to the top forty chart show on a crackly transistor radio and taping songs on a separate cassette recorder held close to the radio's speaker – and by Christ doesn't that date me – but whether it came before other loves like comics and books, I couldn't tell you.
What is the case is that like both comics and books (but maybe not films and telly, which have been hardy perennials throughout my life), periodically I've fallen out of love with music. The first time this happened was in 2000, when my eight-year stint as a music journalist came to an end and consequently I couldn't listen to an album all the way through for three or four years. (I'd like to say I learned a valuable lesson about the dangers of turning one's passion into a career, but after leaving the music industry I did exactly the same thing again when I moved into comics, so that lesson probably took at least another three or four years to sink in through my thick fucking skull.) The second time was towards the end of the 2000s, when after a torrid fling with the Franz Ferdinand/Futureheads/Maximo Park-inspired UK artrock/math rock 7" single scene (bit of a mouthful there, and I fear I might have invented the whole thing in my head anyway, but you get my drift) I became consumed by secondhand book collecting and most of my available funds were diverted to the acquisition of the musty old tomes which have fuelled Existential Ennui ever since.
But even in those times when music and I were only at best nodding acquaintances, we never forsook each other completely. If I were to take a stroll along my shelves of CDs, I'm sure I could find a good many from those periods even when I was absorbed by other concerns, although less so, I suspect, my vinyl collection, which is largely confined to specific eras – but more on that in the next paragraph.
And what has all this to do with the Existential Review of the Year? Well, it's an inescapable fact that a top ten albums of 2013 post is an incongruous thing to appear on what's become (admittedly more by accident than design) a books and book-collecting blog; but as I've hopefully elucidated, my passion for music far
predates my passion for secondhand books, and as outlined in the Existential Ennui Review of the Year introductory post, more recently that passion has once again become noticeably engorged (I'm so, so sorry) via a renewed interest in vinyl albums. Therefore, my picks of the best albums I heard in 2013 – all of which were released in 2013, unlike my ten best books list, which will follow next week – are below. I can't claim to be any kind of expert in music anymore – if I ever could claim that, which is doubtful – but if nothing else this post will at least act as a personal record (no pun intended), for posterity's sake, of what I was listening to in 2013.
=10. Folly by Kitchens of Distinction (3Loop) / Bloodsportsby Suede (Warner) / MBV by My Bloody Valentine (MBV)
These weren't the only belated new albums by bands from my late-teens/early twenties (i.e. late-1980s/early-1990s) to be released in 2013, but these were the ones I liked and bought – I guess because all three sound like they could have been released not far off the peak of each band's career. Kitchens of Distinction were responsible for two of the best gigs I ever witnessed – at the Boardwalk in Manchester and the Venue in New Cross (how three men managed to concoct such a beautiful cacophony I'll never comprehend) – and by chance I was at one of Suede's earliest gigs (supporting forgotten baggy band Spin at the Camden Falcon, when Justine out of Elastica was still a member) and their final one (or what was believed to be their final one, at the Astoria in London in 2003). I am, self-evidently, a huge fan of both bands, and their latest albums are fine, fine things. My Bloody Valentine I've never seen live, and in truth I've only ever admired rather than loved them, but I still own You Made Me Realise on 12" and Isn't Anything on vinyl (with the bonus 7", natch), and to my ears MBV sounds just as good as their last album, 1991's Loveless.
One question remains, however: given that I've begun my top ten countdown with a three-way tie, why the bloody hell didn't I make it a top twelve* and have done with it?
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9. Field of Reeds by These New Puritans (Infectious)
I've been buying These New Puritans records since they emerged as part of the aforementioned mid-2000s artrock/math rock scene, but this album is rather a different kettle of fish to their prior post-punk-esque output: a collection of near-ambient quasi-classical compositions on, variously, piano, double bass, strings, wind and drums, with Jack Barnett's quavering vocals (and contributions from Elisa Rodrigues) weaving in and out. In a way it's closer to jazz than rock or pop – shifting time signatures, modulated repetition and a willingness and eagerness to challenge the structure of the song.
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8. Big TV by White Lies (Fiction)
Another escapee band from the artrock scene (there's a theme developing here), although back then they were called Fear of Flying and were somewhat jauntier than their current incarnation (I saw them live supporting The Maccabees, and still have their first two 7"s). But I'm not averse to a bit of melodramatically doomy bombast (within reason), and Big TV, the band's third album as White Lies, is arguably the strongest set of songs they've yet produced. Also, the deluxe double-CD edition comes in the form of a hardback book (the packaging designed by Big Active, from whose website I nicked the above image), which obviously appealed to me.
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7. Factory Floor by Factory Floor (DFA)
Would you Adam and Eve it, yet another band who have their origins in the artrock scene – the very arse end of it anyway. Factory Floor have travelled a long way since then, though. Their 2008 debut single, Bipolar – which, inevitably, I own on 7" – sounded like Joy Division locked in the back of a lorry, but their self-titled debut full-length album finds them almost completely transformed into a Detroit techno act. Kind of – there are still echoes of the neo-post-punk band that was, and the net result is not unlike one of those British techno bands from the 1990s – Bandulu or someone like that. Which is a good thing, in case you were wondering.
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6. Days Are Gone by Haim (Polydor)
An American band for a change, and an all-girl one (three sisters) at that. I tend not to pay much attention to online music journalism, but I did happen to see some sniping from some internet quarters along the lines of Haim – a band in their early- to mid-twenties, remember – being music for middle-aged dads. As a middle-aged dad, let me just state for the record that I've long had a penchant for the kinds of well-crafted, almost overproduced pop songs that Haim are so good at, along with other musical penchants, also dating back to my teens and twenties, for electro, hip hop, fey indie guitar bands, hardcore techno and stupidly fast acid trance. There's room in most sane people's lives for all sorts of music, even those of us on the wrong side of forty and with a seven-month-old daughter.
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5. Fanfare by Jonathan Wilson (Bella Union)
For some reason, every few years I fall for an American male singer songwriter (I mean fall in a musical sense... although they are usually quite good-looking). Previous recipients of my unwanted and unregistered affections have included Ryan Adams circa Heartbreaker (2000), Pete Yorn circa musicforthemorningafter (2001), Josh Rouse circa Nashville (2005) and John Grant circa Queen of Denmark (2010). To that list I think we can add Jonathan Wilson, whose second album, Fanfare, was recommended to me by Lewes-based designer and illustrator Neil Gower on Twitter. Not long before I bought Fanfare I watched a third of a BBC Four documentary (it was very long, and on late, and as I've mentioned I'm a middle-aged dad with a seven-month-old daughter) about the Eagles and found myself musing that I'd like to listen to some more '70s West Coast rock. No need now: Jonathan Wilson's 2013 variety fits the bill perfectly.
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4. Pale Green Ghosts by John Grant (Bella Union)
Speaking of John Grant, his second solo album landed this year, and while I haven't been quite as bowled over by Pale Green Ghosts as I was Queen of Denmark – on which his backing band was Midlake; more on them in a moment – it's still a sterling effort, introducing an electronic element to proceedings. And by and large the songs and lyrics are just as good, especially the title track – imagine Happy Mondays' WFL crooned by a depressed Bing Crosby – and It Doesn't Matter to Him, I Hate This Town ("You know I hate this fucking town, you cannot even leave your fucking house, without running into someone who no longer cares about you") and GMF ("I am the greatest motherfucker that you're ever
gonna meet, from the top of my head down to the tips of the toes on my
feet").
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3. Antiphon by Midlake (Bella Union)
John Grant's one-time backing band, now minus their original frontman (Tim Smith, who left towards the end of 2012)
and consequently forging a more adventurous, even psychedelic, direction, which I for one am thoroughly impressed by. Midlake's rural meditative folk rock – made in America but with a British feel – had become pretty intense by the time of 2010's The Courage of Others, which unlike The Trials of Van Occupanther (2006) was a difficult album to love (although achievable given time). By comparison Antiphon – especially the swirling title track – has a real spring in its step – or at least as spring-stepped as an album made by a bunch of beardy blokes bowed furrow-browed over their instruments gets. I saw Midlake Mk. I at the Concorde in Brighton five or six years ago, and it's fair to say that for the most part they struggled to connect with their audience. I'd be intrigued to see what they're like live now.
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2. Tell Where I Lie by Fossil Collective (Dirty Hit)
An English Midlake? Well, maybe not, but I wouldn't be surprised if Fossil Collective's Dave Fendick and Jonny Mulroy had been listening to Midlake since their former band Vib Gyor split in 2010. Certainly they've cast off the more Radiohead-like stylings of their previous incarnation in favour of the sort of deep-in-the-woods introspected folk rock that I'm a sucker for. There are six tracks on this album that I'd rate as the loveliest things I've heard all year – Let it Go, Under My Arrest, Wolves, Monument, On and On and The Magpie – and if the other four don't quite live up to those, they're still eminently listenable – so much so that I reckon I've played Tell Where I Lie more times this year than every other album bar one.
And that one is...
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1. Arc by Everything Everything (RCA)
I'm not sure why this album has been so comprehensively overlooked in the 'albums of the year' lists that I've seen. Maybe it's because it arrived right at the start of the year and everyone figured it was released last year... or maybe the critics and independent record shops who assembled those 'albums of the year' lists genuinely thought it wasn't up to much. If that is the case, for my money, they're mistaken. Opener Cough Cough is deceptive in that it's the type of jerky math rock (Everything Everything are another band who emerged at the tail end of the mid-2000s artrock movement) that characterised their debut LP, Man Alive (2010), but the songs thereafter, once you've allowed them to sink in, are of a different stripe, possessed of a depth and raw emotion that I find really affecting. The complexity of Everything Everything's compositions was always apparent, but in slowing down the tempo they've made the richness and traditional verse-bridge-chorus structure even more evident. In other words, this is a terrific set of pop songs (with even more on the deluxe double-CD version), not least closing single Don't Try, which is my song of the year.
*Or even a top fifteen. That way I could have got Savages' Silence Yourself, Pet Shop Boys' Electric and Franz Ferdinand's Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action in too.
I've three top ten posts planned for this, the Existential Ennui Review of the Year (which if all goes according to plan will ultimately span a ludicrous five posts in total). Over the course of the next week or two I'll be blogging about the ten best books I read in 2013 (very few of which, true to form, were actually published in 2013) and the ten best albums I heard in 2013 (all of which were actually released in 2013). But ahead of those, I'm counting down the ten best comics I read in 2013. First, however, an unnecessarily prolix history lesson.
I've been reading comics for as long as I can remember – initially British humour weeklies like The Beano and Whizzer and Chips, then when I was a bit older things like 2000 AD and Action and especially Spider-Man Weekly. That one, I think, was the comic above all others which shaped my future comics consumption – that and the chance discovery of an actual American Amazing Spider-Man comic book in a box of comics at my junior school (said box dragged out to entertain the kids during breaks when the weather was too rank to play outside). I realised that Spider-Man Weekly simply reprinted the American colour comics in black-and-white, and soon I was hunting down US comics – Marvel and DC – in newsagents in my local area – Beckenham and Penge in south London – then further afield in the Camberwell and Lewisham branches of back issue merchant Popular Books (which had dirty magazine sections at the back of each shop), and finally the comic shops up in central London (Forbidden Planet – then based on Denmark Street – Comic Showcase and the like). Here I encountered indie and small press comics for the first time, which in turn led me to the Fast Fiction scene based around the Westminster Comic Mart.
Shortly after that I fell out of comics altogether, forsaking them for rock 'n' roll and drugs (and very little sex); it wasn't until around 1997 or '98 that I rediscovered them when, whilst in Camden one day, on a whim I popped into Mega City Comics and emerged with a bunch of Marvel titles (some Heroes Reborn: The Return number ones, I believe they were). It wasn't long before I was hooked again, alternating between Marvel and DC depending on which seemed the more interesting (i.e, which writers were working where) and plunging back into the indie and alt. comix scene too (and filling in gaps in my collection from the non-comics years at comic marts). A few years after that I started working in comics myself, first at Titan Magazines on reprint titles like Tomb Raider Magazine and short-lived collectors' magazine Memorabilia, then at Titan Books, launching the Modesty Blaise, Dan Dare and James Bond strip collections and editing Wallace & Gromit graphic novels. (Even now, working at The Ilex Press, I'm still tangentially involved in comics, having edited the likes of Alan Moore: Storyteller and The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga.)
I offer all this partly by way of a long-winded explanation as to why I'm posting my top ten comics of 2013 on what is, to all intents and purposes, a musty old books blog – and one on which there's been nary a mention of comics all year (I'll deal with why I'm even more incongruously posting my top ten albums of 2013 separately) – but also to note that my interest in comics is rather more catholic than that top ten might suggest. I do read – or rather, have read – comics and graphic novels other than those more superhero- and adventure-oriented ones published by Marvel and DC and Image and Dark Horse; it's just this year, what with the arrival of Edie, and work, and passing my driving test, and of course the secondhand books I blog about as a matter of course on Existential Ennui, I haven't had time to read more than a scant few of them. I don't doubt that there were many fine alt. comix and small press titles published in 2013; unfortunately I missed most of them, so by and large they won't feature in this top ten.
That caveat in mind, then, the ten best comics I read in 2013 were:
10. Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Image, 2012–2013)
Image-published comics account for half the titles in my top ten for the
simple reason that, right now, Image is home to more intriguing,
entertaining and adventurous mainstream adventure comics than Marvel and DC
combined. Brian K. Vaughan published his two prior long-form creator-owned series, Y: The Last Man andEx Machina, through DC (Vertigo and WildStorm, to be precise), and while Saga isn't, to my mind, the equal of those, it's still fun to witness a writer free to do whatever he darn well pleases, even if the results do sometimes feel a bit stapled (groan...) together from too disparate a selection of sources.
9. Sex by Joe Casey and Piotr Kowalski (Image, 2013)
While we're on the subject of Image, here's another Image-published title which makes the output of the 'big two' seems positively pallid by comparison. Though Sex is, loosely speaking, a superhero comic, I can't imagine Marvel or DC publishing anything as weird as this, in which a repressed former superhero returns to the city he once protected – and the business which once funded his superhero activities – and engages in an extended bout of soul-searching and libido-servicing. Kowalski's elegant artwork lends the whole enterprise a winning bande dessinée feel: kind of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns as imagined by Moebius. Also worth a look is Casey and David Messina's similarly Image-published The Bounce – in essence, Lee/Ditko Amazing Spider-Man viewed red-eyed through a haze of dope smoke.
8. Fury MAX: My War Gone By by Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov (Marvel, 2012–2013)
Then again, in Marvel's defence, they did publish Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov's brutal, foul-mouthed, blackly comic reimagining of World War II hero/secret agent Nick Fury as a combat-addicted pawn of the CIA – until the series was cancelled with issue #13 midyear, anyway. In plucking Fury from comic book continuity and depositing him in more plausible stories, Ennis was performing the same trick he did with the brilliantly bleak Punisher: MAX – so it was entirely fitting that My War Gone By featured cameos both from Frank Castle and his occasional nemesis Barracuda. And though Fury: MAX is done and dusted, there's still the entirely welcome news that Ennis is returning to the Punisher in 2014.
7. Hellboy in Hell by Mike Mignola (Dark Horse, 2012–2013)
I lost track of Hellboy (and its spin-off B.P.R.D. series) five-and-a-half years ago when I left Titan (the company, not the moon orbiting Saturn), but at the tail end of 2012 creator Mike Mignola resumed art duties as well as writing ones and sent Hellboy to Hell, thus re-piquing my curiosity. Until Mike Carey and Peter Gross' Lucifer makes a return (I can dream, can't I...?), this metaphysical exploration of the stygian underworld, with the occasional bout of fisticuffs, will do nicely.
6. New Avengers by Jonathan Hickman, Steve Epting and Mike Deodato (Marvel, 2013)
Possibly the gloomiest comic I read in 2013 – which is saying something in this company – New Avengers saw the Illuminati – the superhero think tank composed of Iron Man, Mister Fantastic, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Namor, Black Bolt and the Beast – confronted with the stark choice of either destroying a succession of alternate Earths or seeing their own Earth destroyed. Kill or be killed, essentially. Who says superhero comics aren't fun any more? The only Marvel comics I'm still buying these days are those written by Jonathan Hickman, and this one is the best of that select bunch. Even so, it's still not as good as some of his Image titles – see below.
5. JLA by Grant Morrison and Howard Porter (DC, 1997)
I originally read Morrison and Porter's late-1990s run on JLA at the time, but on a recent trip up to the loft to have a sort out I came across the back issues in a comic box and decided to give them another go. What's remarkable is how fresh and thrilling they remain over fifteen years on (even Porter's art, which was always a slightly uncomfortable thing to behold), especially in comparison to DC's current overwrought output, with deft characterisation (Morrison's curmudgeonly, perennially preoccupied Batman is particularly fine) and a palpable sense of awe and wonder. And I haven't even got to Rock of Ages yet.
4. Optic Nerve #13 by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly, 2013)
Three sublime stories in one beautifully designed comic: the autobiographical one-page Winter 2012, in which Adrian Tomine manfully struggles with the modern world; Go Owls, a forensic examination of a doomed affair between two addicts (with a proper kick-in-the-teeth ending); and the drifting, meditative Translated, from the Japanese. Well worth the two year wait.
3. East of West by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta (Image, 2013)
It took me a few issues to work out what the hell was going on in this series, but I reckon I've got a handle on it now: the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse are trying to shepherd a shattered world to its timely end (with certain world leaders complicit in this), but Death has fallen in love and defected. Um, I think. It's the end of the world reworked as a revisionist western, basically, with lots of backstabbing, double-crossing and gunplay, all depicted in delightful Alex Toth-meets-Katsuhiro Otomo fashion by artist Nick Dragotta. Splendid.
2. The Manhattan Projects by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra (Image, 2012–2013)
Bugger me, it's that man Hickman again. For my money, among the post-Bendis/Brubaker/Rucka crop of mainstream comics writers Jonathan Hickman is the only one offering anything other than sub-Bendis/Brubaker/Rucka reheats. As evidence, may I present this barking comic book, in which an assortment of supergenius scientists – among them Wernher von Braun, Richard Feynman and Enrico Fermi (plus a couple of doppelgangers) – fend off an alien invasion and then fall to fighting amongst themselves, and where a current storyline details the psychological struggle for supremacy between Robert Oppenheimer and his cannibalistic brother Joseph who has, er, eaten him.
Lazarus by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark (Image, 2013)
When I read the prelude to Lazarus in The Walking Dead #109 back in April I suspected Rucka and Lark's new series might be right up my alley, but I wasn't prepared for quite how far up it it's, ah, ventured. Set in a dystopian future where capitalism has triumphed, the world is ruled
by the top one percent (headed by cartel families) and everyone else is considered
"waste" – not dissimilar to our own dystopian present, then – it's evident from the commentary and timeline in the back of each issue that Greg Rucka researched and planned the bejeezus out of his concept before committing it to the page – still is, if his Tumblr is anything to go by. On that solid bedrock he and his old Gotham Central chum Michael Lark have constructed a credible science fiction spy thriller that for me stands head and shoulders above every other mainstream adventure comic being published at the moment – and that's a judgement based on merely the first four issues. I for one am jolly excited to see where the series goes from here.
