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.

Denis Healey's George V. Higgins Book Collection

Every year, the East Sussex village of Alfriston – not far from the East Sussex town of Lewes, where I live and work – holds a Summer Festival. Often as not I'll pop over there on the summer bank holiday, usually on the Monday when there's also a boot sale in the playing field as well as, on the beautiful village green beside the River Cuckmere, a selection of stalls and games and rides. Best of all – and this is something I'd completely forgotten until I got there this year – there's a secondhand book stall; more of a marquee really, with tables arranged in a circle, laden with boxes stuffed with fiction and non-fiction (hardback and paperback).

Rifling through the wares this year I started to notice a number of George V. Higgins books among the selection of hardback fiction. Higgins is an author I've tried once (The Friends of Eddie Coyle, his 1972 debut) and keep meaning to return to – a noted stylist whose novels, many of them of a crime fiction bent, others of a political persuasion, are largely comprised of long stretches of dialogue, with little if any description. The more I looked in the boxes of books, the more Higgins I found. Evidently someone in Alfriston was a fan... but then I started looking inside the books, at the ownership signatures on the front endpapers of one or two of the books and, in some cases, inscriptions on title pages from Higgins himself, and realised who that fan was: former Secretary of State for Defence (1964–70), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1974–79) and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party (1980–83) Denis Healey.

Healey, who passed away in 2015, and his wife Edna, who died in 2010, amassed a huge book collection over 40 years at their Alfriston home, much of which was bought by local bookshop Much Ado Books (a shop I've written about more than once on Existential Ennui), and some of which wound up in an Alfriston book sale in September (which, annoyingly, I didn't find out about until well after the fact). The collection ranged across a variety of subjects – art, photography, history, poetry, literature and, it seems, George V. Higgins.

Only a couple of the Higgins books I found on the stall had Healey ownership signatures in them, and just three were signed and inscribed by Higgins, but I bought the whole lot anyway (twelve books at a quid each) as it was almost certain they all belonged to Healey and it seemed right to keep the collection together (or at least as much of it as possible; there may have been other Higgins book bought by other folks before I got to them). According to the dated ownership signature in the earliest book I came across, a 1973 Secker & Warburg first of The Digger's Game (Higgins' second novel), Healey bought that one in 1977, and then at some point his and Higgins' paths must have crossed, judging by the warm author inscriptions in Victories (Henry Holt, 1990), Bomber's Law (Henry Holt/Owl paperback, 1994) and Swan Boats at Four (Little, Brown, 1995).

A couple of the books are association copies: a 1979 Harper & Row edition of A Year or So with Edgar, which is inscribed to Healey by Kit McMahon, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England; and a 1987 Holt edition of Outlaws, which is inscribed by political scientist Graham Allison, with a compliment slip from Libor founder Milos Zombanakis.

And on a separate book stall in the boot fair field I found a 1974 Doubleday edition of Penelope Mortimer's Long Distance, inscribed by Mortimer to Edna Healey, thanking her for "a BBC birthday".

Quite the collection all told.

Mike Ripley's Not Single Spies, a Readers' History of Thrillers, Published 2017

Now this is rather exciting. Crime writer and thriller aficionado Mike Ripley has announced the publication next year of "a readers' history", as Mike himself puts it, of "the boom in British thrillers" from 1953–1975. Titled Not Single Spies, the book takes as its starting point Ian Fleming's debut Bond novel Casino Royale (1953) and its end point Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed (1975), featuring along the way the likes of Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley, John le Carre and Frederick Forsyth, and drawing on discussions Mike has had over the years with such luminaries as Len Deighton, Anthony Price, Alan Williams and Gavin Lyall.

Set to be published by Harper Collins on 18 May 2017, Not Single Spies also boasts a foreword by Lee Child, who, when approached to write the foreword, apparently noted that he knew: "It would be a book I would want to read – maybe even pay for!" I couldn't agree more.

London Paperback and Pulp Book Fair 2016

Absence, they say – and who am I to naysay 'they' – makes the heart grow fonder, which was why I was delighted to see the return on Sunday, after a three-year absence, of the London Paperback and Pulp Book Fair – as were a good many others judging by the crowds at the 2016 event. Now at a new venue – the Royal National Hotel in Russell Square, tacked onto the monthly Bloomsbury Ephemera Fair – this year's fair was a busy, bustling, er, affair, with the likes of Jamie Sturgeon, David Hyman and others purveying fine selections of vintage paperbacks and pulps (as one might expect, given the name of the thing). I came away with this little lot:

Top row, three Cornell Wooolrich paperbacks: The Black Curtain (Dell, 1948), The Black Path of Fear (Avon, 1946) and, ah, The Black Path of Fear again (Ace, 1968); middle row, three John D. MacDonald paperbacks: Death Trap (Dell, 1957); Deadly Welcome (Dell, 1959) and The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything (Frederick Muller/Gold Medal, 1964); bottom row: C. S. Forester's Payment Deferred (Guild Books paperback, 1950), Margaret Millar's Beast in View (Corgi paperback, 1960), Elmore Leonard's Hombre (Ballantine paperback, 1967 reprint) and John Fowles' The Collector (Pan paperback first printing, 1965) – that last one actually bought from a paperback dealer in the main Ephemera Fair. A pretty good haul, all told. Here's hoping the wait between fairs isn't quite so long next time.

Blimey I Wrote a Book

Actually I wrote two books... and co-wrote another book... and wrote a bit of another book... and wrote an essay for another book... so I guess in total that adds up to, what, two-and-a-half books or something? All in the space of less than a year. Which, when added to all the writing I've done for the Marvel Fact Files and The Walking Dead: The Official Magazine and the stack of books and graphic novels I've edited over the past however many months – more on those below – might go some way towards explaining why there's been bugger all happening on Existential Ennui of late.

But anyway: the books wot I wrote. The two books written entirely by me will be published spring next year: Guardians of the Galaxy: The Ultimate Guide to the Cosmic Outlaws, and Guardians of the Galaxy Ultimate Sticker Collection (the attentive might be able to spot a common theme there). Doubtless I'll be banging on about those nearer the time. The book I co-wrote (and did a fair amount of editing on), alongside fellow authors Billy Wrecks and Danny Graydon, is out now:

The Mysterious World of Doctor Strange, published by DK – an official guide to Marvel Comics' Sorcerer Supreme (soon to be seen, in the form of Benedict Cumberbatch, in cinemas in Marvel's Doctor Strange movie). I got my copy the other day and it's a handsome thing: a hardback with gilt-edged pages, beautifully designed by Amazing15 and DK's Chris Gould, lavishly illustrated with panels and splash pages from across Doctor Strange's fifty-plus year comics career – and the writing's not bad either. It's aimed at kids, but I'll wager the more mature comics fan will find it diverting too (being one myself). Review here.

Also out now is the all-new edition of the DC Comics Encyclopaedia, which I wrote a bit of and did a fair bit of editing on. I haven't seen a finished copy of that one yet, but according to reports it's a great big beast of a book. Review here.

And out later in the year is Murder in the Closet, an anthology of essays examining queer themes in crime fiction that I contributed a piece on Patricia Highsmith to. I haven't seen a copy of that one either, but editor Curtis Evans has chosen some intriguing and sterling contributors (present company excepted, of course), so it should be a fascinating book.

Besides that little lot, I've edited a whole heap of other books and graphic novels over the past year or so:

Top to bottom in that towering pile are Pen and Ink by James Hobbs; Electri_city: The Dusseldorf School of Electronic Music by Rudi Esch; Who Are You? The Life and Death of Keith Moon by Jim McCarthy and Marc Olivent; 5-Minute Sketching: People by Pete Scully; 5-Minute Sketching: Architecture by Liz Steel; Essential Type by Tony Seddon; Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor Archives Vols 1–3; Independence Day: The Original Movie Adaptation; Elric Volume 3: The Dreaming City; and Battle Classics Volume 2. There's others besides, I'm sure, plus books and graphic novels I've proofread rather than edited, but I've either filed them away and forgotten what they are or they've not been published yet.

So that's what I've been up to. And who knows? Maybe at some point I'll find time to blog about some of the books I've bought as well...

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.