A detail from Declan Shalvey and Warren Ellis’s beautiful sci-fi series Injection. Line art by Shalvey, colors by Jordie Bellaire.

Hello, patient readers! For the new year I wanted to write something of undeniable utility to you, and if you agree with me and like this sort of thing, please tell me so and I will do more of it (for a future edition, if folks want: the 99 best children’s picture books, as chosen by me with input from our three-year-old). This edition started as my annoyance at a number of lists of similar size that I won’t name and shame here. They felt both overly dutiful and still somehow undercooked, as though they’d been written by people who felt a responsibility to everything and everyone except the reader, and that they had been compiled by people who read widely but not deeply. And I wanted to read a similar something that was both passionate and well-informed. So I’ve written the former, at least.

My rules for the composition of this list, since ten years is a long time to survey, were as follows:

1. No artist or writer may appear more than once with the exception of anthology or jam books. This started to feel a little arbitrary by the end of the compilation, but it helped out with rule #2:
2. As many different kinds of comics as possible must be included.
3. No including things I didn’t like just because I read them. (this was harder than it sounds!)
4. Actually read the things on the list and don’t just add them because I’d heard they were good. (also hard!)
5. Work that began before the decade started but ended during its duration is eligible; so is work that is not yet complete as of this writing (I did not let myself list work that fits the latter category in my piece for The Guardian along similar lines).
6. The work here appears in alphabetical order. See the above Guardian piece for a shorter list of books I absolutely adored and some longer explanations of why

This involved a lot of reading of new work on my part, which is something I really enjoy, doubly so when it’s for a project that I will eventually publish. I hope you enjoy this list, too, and consult it when you want to read things that are good or buy Christmas or birthday presents or just for fun. I realized fairly early on in making this that I would run out of superlatives very quickly if I tried to tell you what I liked most about these books, so I have opted in most cases to simply tell you what they’re about; sometimes that sounds especially appetizing and sometimes it just doesn’t, but if it’s on this list, I think most people who like my writing here should read it.

My final caveat is that this is me shooting from the hip, extra reading and long gestation period aside. I’m just one guy. I know this list is very male, and very white. It is, in many ways, a picture of the inside of my head, for good and for ill, and as much as I would like to be someone to whom work by women and marginalized creators is marketed and promoted, I am not. I try to seek it out, but I also read a lot of comics, so the proportions are off. Compiling this helped me to change that a little bit! 

I’ve put an asterisk next to the books I think my kid, who is three, might enjoy some time between now and his tenth birthday, and a dagger next to those that I would not read while he was looking over my shoulder. So make of that what you will; I’m not here to tell you how to parent but if you want to know more about any single entry, please email me and we can chat about it.

All entries are single codexes unless otherwise noted. Where books are published in multiple editions, I have listed the easiest to find, i.e., Last Look is one paperback volume, not three big hardcovers. Where books are ongoing, I have noted that as well.

I hope you enjoy it, and that you find something new and cool to read by doing so.

1. Achewood by Chris Onstad (webcomic, also in hard copy)Every annoying Twitter comedian loves this longrunning webcomic. It really is brilliant. 
2. Age of Ultron by Brian Michael Bendis and Bryan HitchMarvel Comics’s event miniseries get a bad rap; this mammoth time-travel story, about evil robot Ultron taking over the world, has a punchy script by Bendis and perfect superhero art by Hitch, one of the all-time greats.
3. Amnesia: The Lost Films of Francis D. Longfellow by Al Columbia†Columbia’s appallingly perverse paintings are always hard to put a narrative frame around, but it’s impossible to look away from this collection of fake one-sheets for the work of an imaginary cartoons director whose work recalls the Fleischer Brothers’ most psychoactive ideas.
4. The Arab of the Future by Riad Sattouf (three volumes, two forthcoming)Sattouf’s memoir about growing up in Libya is drawn in an engaging, funny, ironic style that belies the complexity of its subject matter; one of the few really original and interesting entries in the graphic memoir genre in recent years.
5. The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny LiewA meticulous history of American comics that is also a history of Malaysia, told as an unlikely art book about a failing cartoonist who copies dozens of twentieth century omics artists’ styles in an effort to document the seismic changes to his country.
6. Athos in America by JasonDour Dutch cartoonist Jason’s funniest book may be this story of musketeer Athos, confident and out of place on US soil.
7. Bad Gateway by Simon Hanselmann†Hanselmann’s poisonous comedy is maturing into something more heartfelt in this lovely graphic novel, a kind of raw counterpoint to Matt Furie’s Boys’ Club.
8. Batman: Noel by Lee BermejoBermejo’s bibliography has far too many humorless Brian Azzarello scripts in it, so it’s a relief to read this lighthearted Christmas tale with Batman himself cast as Scrooge. He draws fantastically beautiful pages and his layouts are always inventive; this is easily his best work.
9. Batman: The Kings of Fear by Kelley Jones and Scott PetersonJones just gets better with age; this fantastically beautiful Batman story looks a little dim in synopsis—The Scarecrow messes with Batman—but in execution it’s largely a collection of wonderfully demented things for Jones to draw.
10. Battling Boy by Paul Pope*A YA graphic novel that cross-pollinates Jack Kirby, Dune, and John Carter of Mars, all to charming effect with Pope’s beautiful inks on full display. His Adam Strange strip in DC’s Wednesday Comics anthology is similarly beautiful.
11. Berlin by Jason LutesA massive opus twenty years in the making about the decline of Weimar Berlin and the ascent of the Nazi Party, its every background drawing a dozen pages’ worth of historical, artistic, and architectural research, its foreground Dickensian and thrilling.
12. Beverly by Nick DrnasoDrnaso’s Sabrina won the Booker; I prefer the more elliptical collection of linked Rick Moody-style short stories that preceded it. It’s as incisive a book about life in suburbia as has been written in twenty years.
13. Billie the Bee by Mary Fleener*Fleener’s cubistic, strange, and informative book about bees does nothing any other comic ever has.
14. The Black Beetle by Francesco FrancavillaFrancavilla’s high-contrast pulp comic is the artist’s best work and a treat for fans of vintage pulp writing.
15. The Black Monday Murders by Jonathan Hickman and Tomm Coker (two volumes, more forthcoming)An inventive mystery book with a stew of conspiracy theories and high finance as its lore.
16. Boxers & Saints by Gene Luen Yang (two volumes, sold together)*An inventive retelling of the Boxer Rebellion from both sides, one for each book.
17. Boys Club by Matt FurieFor all the consternation that Pepe the Frog caused, his origins as a harmless stoner icon are very much worth checking out.
18. Building Stories by Chris WareWare gets dinged–justifiably–for being gloomier than necessary in much of his other work; here, his absolute joy in the craft of comics and his love of his strange, sad characters shines through, in this collection of disparate little volumes, strips, and doodles in the margins of his margins.
19. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz ChastChast’s uproarious comedic memoir of her beloved parents’ decline and death is wittier and more poignant than any book on this subject has a right to be.
20. Captain America: White by Jeph Loeb and Tim SaleAnother long-delayed release—a hugely stylish Captain America tale by Loeb, whose collaborations with Sale (Spider-Man: Blue, Daredevil: Yellow, Hulk: Gray) have a solid, Norman Rockwell-esque vibe perfectly fitting the character.
21. Castle Waiting Linda Medley (two volumes)*Medley’s life’s work, about a castle where the fairy tale royalty are out on adventures and the staff are left to their own devices, remains essential.
22. Cosplayers by Dash ShawA kind of Ghost World for millennials, Shaw’s adolescent drama is more tightly focused than his larger work and, as a consequence, a bit more satisfying, too.
23. Coyote Doggirl by Lisa HanawaltHanawalt, of Bojack Horseman fame, draws a comedy Western about a half-dog, half-coyote protagonist. The jokes go off like whoopee cushions every few pages and the watercolors are unlike anything anyone else is doing.
24. Daredevil by Mark Waid, Chris Samnee, et al (11 volumes)Exactly what you’d like a superhero comic to be: Gripping but light, fun with high stakes, drawn so adroitly the panels seem to flow into each other. 
25. Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel BáMoon and Bá, brothers, write and draw this ten-part story of a man who dies at the end of every chapter, only to return when the narrative picks back up in the next installment as though nothing had happened.
26. Everything Together by Sammy HarkhamA lovely volume of deeply felt short stories by Harkham, whose spare drawings elicit rare and surprising emotional connections and seem drawn directly from memory.
27. The Fade Out by Ed Brubaker and Sean PhillipsThe strongest collaboration yet between the comics noir team, The Fade Out has no storytelling gimmicks, no supernatural twist, and resolves as confidently as a Billy Wilder movie.
28. The Flintstones by Mark Russell and Steve Pugh (two volumes)An absolute treasure of a comedy book with scabrous commentary on capitalism and its discontents, framed as the misadventures of the stars from the 1970s stone-age animated sitcom.
29. Fury: My War Gone By by Garth Ennis and Goran ParlovSome of Ennis’s strongest work in years, if not his best ever, the author reunites with Punisher artist Parlov to draw an operatic war story about Marvel Comics’s second-favorite soldier and his disturbing decline.
30. The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil by Stephen Collins*A willful, strange, charcoal-drawn graphic novel about a gigantic beard that may or may not be malicious.
31. Glenn Ganges in The River at Night by Kevin HuizengaA bizarre, beautiful, impossible book about the depths of memory and imagination.
32. Goliath by Tom GauldAnother Bible story, this one a lovely retelling of the story of David and Goliath, rendered sympathetically from Goliath’s perspective.
33. Grandville by Bryan TalbotI have no excuses for Grandville, Bryan Talbot’s five-volume series of self-contained mystery comics about a badger detective in a world filled with anthropomorphic animals, where humans who look like Herge drawings are a subaltern class and 9/11 was an inside job. But I do recommend it.
34. Groo: Friends and Foes by Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier*After a few heavy-handed miniseries in which Groo experiences contemporary problems like the financial crisis, Aragones and Evanier return to form in a big story revisiting all the old supporting characters from the delightful series’s salad days.
35. Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories by Ben KatchorKatchor’s gorgeous comics are in color in this terrific collection of short pieces; his eye for humor in the absurd and lapidary has never been sharper and the generous proportions of this collection make it, I would argue, his best.
36. The Hard Tomorrow by Eleanor DavisAn impossibly adroit consolidation of everything urgent in American life, told in a dazzling variance of styles by one of the preeminent cartoonists working.
37. Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton (webcomic, also in hard copy)Beaton’s sidesplitting webcomic remains some of the funniest literary humor ever written and her historical gags will have you racing to look up obscure Canadians.
38. Head Lopper by Andrew MacLean (three volumes, ongoing)A swords-and-sandals fantasy comic with stylish monsters and a simple, kinetic visual sense that carries the reader through edge-of-your-seat swordfights and creeping through its strange dungeons.
39. Hellboy in Hell by Mike Mignola (two volumes)Mignola’s wry hero finds himself where he was always going to end up: Back home in The Bad Place. The art is filled with cavernous blacks and stylized reds and Mignola’s love of folklore comes to the forefront in the best possible way.
40. Here by Richard McGuireMcGuire expands his strip for Raw, which is just several drawings of the same living room throughout history, into a genuine art object. Don’t expect a narrative, but do keep it around to flip through it for happy surprises.
41. High Soft Lisp by Gilbert Hernandez†Hernandez’s lovely collection of stories about his brilliant ingenue actress, Fritz, is the best reduction of his gifts in a single volume so far; it has meta-stories from Fritz’s B-movie adventures, tales of her childhood in Palomar, comedy, tragedy… the works.
42. Homestuck by Andrew Hussie (webcomic)Hussie’s vast webcomic is less a story at this point and more a way of life, or maybe a minor religion. Worth a try, and possibly a declaration of undying fealty, depending on your tastes.
43. The Immortal Hulk by Al Ewing and Joe Bennett (five volumes, ongoing)Ewing writes and Bennett draws a story of Bruce Banner on the lam and his alter ego a genuine horror fiction creation—conflicted, powerful, and terrifying. 
44. Injection by Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey (five volumes planned, two forthcoming)A dour, funny, very British sci-fi story about ghosts, bad decisions, class, and bureaucracy, with kinetic art by Shalvey that often blossoms into wonderful, mushroomy strangeness.
45. Is This How You See Me? by Jaime HernandezHernandez draws sentimental tale of middle-aged women attending a punk reunion concert and coming to grips with who they are and who they were.
46. Journalism by Joe SaccoSacco’s best collection of short work so far, a series of journalistic essays dealing with everything from the upsurge in immigration to his native Malta to the torture of detainees in George W. Bush’s War on Terror.
47. Killing and Dying by Adrian TomineTomine’s collection of stylistically variant short pieces is the best work of literary fiction on the market this decade in any form.
48. Kirby: Genesis by Kurt Busiek, Alex Ross, and Jackson HerbertA new “universe” of Jack Kirby-created characters that don’t reside in either the DC or Marvel IP hives, the adroit eight-issue miniseries was probably supposed to be a big franchise start for publisher Dynamite. They didn’t get Kirby Cinematic Universe out of the effort but they *did* get a beautiful book with terrific interiors laid out and occasionally painted by Ross.
49. Ladykiller by Joelle Jones (two volumes)Jones writes and draws a kinetic miniseries about housewife/hitwoman; it’s a book with something close to an ideal ratio of rendering to panel progression for an action comic.
50. Last Look by Charles Burns†A lovely look at regret and the high price some people unexpectedly have to pay for adolescent foolishness, rendered with the incredibly precise hand for which Burns has long been known, and, for the first time in his career, in color.
51. Le Major by MoebiusThe final comic about Major Grubert, the hapless hero of Moebius’s mischievous Man from the Ciguri and Airtight Garage comics, is only a sketchbook. It’s still perfect.
52. The Lie and How We Told It by Tommi Parish†A beautifully painted comic about identity and loss with a surprising digression and vast depth of character, especially for something so short.
53. Little Nemo: Return to Slumberland by Eric Shanower and Gabriel Rodriguez*Winsor McCay’s opulent Sunday strip is such a foundational text to the history of comics that it seems ridiculous to write a modern version, but Shanower and Rodriguez escape the problems of influence by making their work a longer narrative, filled with visual trickery that pays homage to the original work without drawing unflattering comparison—a difficult task indeed.
54. Madame Xanadu: Exodus Noir by Matt Wagner and Michael Wm. KalutaWagner’s Madame Xanadu series was the perfect bone to throw fans of his late, lamented 1920’s crime comic, Sandman Mystery Theater. It didn’t last, but its second arc features astounding interiors by Arthur Rackham-esque artist Kaluta, and a supernatural mystery plot with plenty of tension.
55. March by John Lewis and Nate Powell (three volumes)Lewis’s autobio, drawn by Powell, needs little introduction. It is a masterpiece both of the memoir form and of historical nonfiction.
56. Mark Twain’s Autobiography, 1910-2010 by Michael KuppermanKupperman’s genius for comic absurdity is at its apex in this book, a half-novel, half-cartoon masterpiece of light fiction.
57. Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus by Chester Brown†Brown has drawn quite a bit in recent years—this, his follow-up to his memoir Paying for It, about his experiences hiring sex workers and finally becoming partners with one, is the best of the lot. It’s a collection of Bible stories, some of them a bit tendentious (he insists on seeing Ruth as Boaz’s seducer) but all conceived with Brown’s breathtaking gift for simplicity. An angel is realized as feet dangling into the frame from above; God is a giant; Jesus is never pictured. It’s a lovely, surprisingly respectful book.
58. Mind MGMT by Matt Kindt (six volumes)An exceedingly dense and fun story of mind control and spycraft by writer-artist Matt Kindt, with subplots, palimpsests, and clues hidden in the gutters and the margins.
59. Ms Marvel by G Willow Wilson and Adrian AlphonaA clever and fun superhero book about a young Muslim woman who gets super powers; the art is just lovely and Wilson is as charming a writer as you could want.
60. The Multiversity by Grant Morrison, et alMorrison’s unified field theory of superheroes takes the form of nine one-shots set in eight wildly different universes, illustrated by a pantheon of gifted artists including Morrison’s best collaborator, Frank Quitely.
61. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris (two volumes planned, one forthcoming)A gobsmackingly beautiful murder mystery/bildungsroman/love letter to 1960’s Chicago/treatise on painting, done almost entirely in multicolored ballpoint pen.
62. My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf†A true crime comic with an ace up its sleeve: The author really did go to school with serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer. You go in expecting a gruesome horror story and you go out wanting to give a hug to every weird kid who got beat up in high school.
63. The Nib by Matt Bors, et al (5 volumes, ongoing)A comics newsmagazine that went from endangered to essential in little more than moments.
64. Notes on a Case of Melancholia, or, A Little Death by Nicholas GurewitchGurewitch’s Perry Bible Fellowship webcomic was always wonderfully tasteless, and his graphic novel is both funny and a work of prodigious artistic achievement in a new style for Gurewitch, reminiscent of Edward Gorey.
65. Nursery Rhyme Comics by various*An absolutely gorgeous collection of fairy tales by artists from Craig Thompson to Kate Beaton, some traditional, some cleverly bent.
66. Orc Stain by James StokoeStokoe’s higher-profile work is probably his Godzilla and Aliens comics, but his best is absolutely this bizarre fantasy series, his gorgeously busy renderings a total delight.
67. Pachyderme by Frederik PeetersPeeters draws the dreamlike story of a young woman wandering the halls of a hospital where either she or her husband lies unconscious during the aftermath of the second world war.
68. Richard Stark’s Parker by Darwyn Cooke, from the novels by Donald E Westlake (four volumes)An obvious labor of love for the late, lamented Cooke, a worthy successor to midcentury greats like Alex Toth and Bernard Krigstein. They’re back-pocket roman noir novels with Cooke’s gorgeous blacks soaking every page.
69. Patience by Daniel ClowesDan Clowes’s marvelous sci-fi opus departs from his usual realism and muted pastels, but it’s still filled with weird characters who seem like people you’d run into (or away from) at the grocery.
70. Picture This by Lynda Barry*Of Barry’s instructional comics, this is my favorite; it also contains Marlys, her little-girl alter ego, and is almost a workbook for making yourself happy. Unconventional, and lovely.
71. The Playwright by Darren White and Eddie CampbellA Julian Barnes-esque unsentimental love story, with Campbell’s frank gouache art a deadpan counterpoint to the quiet pomposity of White’s self-regarding hero.
72. Poochytown by Jim WoodringThe culmination of twenty years of fantastically strange stories by Jim Woodring, set in his sentient world of the Unifactor and starring his little generically anthropomorphic creation, Frank. A beauty.
73. Prince of Cats by Ronald WimberlyWimberly’s book is part Frank Miller ninja comic, part blaxploitation flick, part Romeo and Juliet. That it exists is a small miracle; that it works is a big one.
74. Prison Pit by Johnny Ryan (six volumes)†A perverted and disgusting romp through hell, starring a vile murderer named Cannibal Fuckface, who must dismember his way out of a space prison. Loads of fun.
75. Providence by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows (three volumes)†Alan Moore’s goodbye to the comics world is also an ode to HP Lovecraft and a skeptical assessment of the human race’s ability to pull itself out of its slump; it is both frank about Lovecraft’s faults and unfailingly progressive in its use of them, suggesting that true horror comes from the way we fail to honor people weaker than we are.
76. Puma Blues by Stephen Murphy and Michael ZulliA laid-back environmentalist sci-fi comic that went offline for more than twenty-five years and finally saw completion in 2015, Zulli’s Audobon-level renderings of animals make this book Beatrix Potter for the climate change generation.
77. Saga by Bryan K Vaughn and Fiona Staples (nine volumes, ongoing, on haitus)†Sure, it’s overpraised, but the gonzo sci-fi series is so briskly paced it’s hard to find time to complain about its thin characters and overwrought dialogue while you’re reading the book, and Fiona Staples’ vibrant art is beyond reproach.
78. The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman and J. H. Williams IIIGaiman’s beautiful return to his landmark superhero series is a total delight for the eyes thanks to his unbeatably weird imagination and the lush artwork of JH Williams III, a cartoonist who can apparently do anything.
79. Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O’Malley (six volumes)O’Malley’s six-volume faux-anime comic about Canadian hipsters living in a video game-ish version of Toronto has tons of heart and a wry sense of humor. 
80. The Secret Service by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons (three volumes)Arguably the best of Mark Millar’s sneery sci-fi titles, The Secret Service boasts wish-fulfillment fantasy of the highest order, given a little more humor than it might otherwise have by Gibbons deadpan artwork.
81. Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky (five volumes, one forthcoming)†An earthy, hilariously funny, reliably surprising book about a couple who start fucking and find that when they come together, they stop time for everyone but themselves. They use this power to rob banks.
82. Shadows on the Grave by Richard Corben†Corben remains one of the most important cartoonists ever to pick up a pen; his most recent collection of original short horror stories is among his best work.
83. Shaolin Cowboy: Shemp Buffet by Geof Darrow†Darrow sheds his penchant for comic monologues and absurdity in this volume, which is a single huge sequence of our hero, the Shaolin Cowboy, carving his way through hundreds, maybe thousands of zombies. 
84. Shazam! Vol. 1 by Geoff Johns and Gary FrankJohns is a smart writer whose aspirations have taken him some dumb places, but when he manages to connect, he often hits a home run. With Shazam!, serialized in the back of Johns and Jim Lee’s Justice League series, Johns and the marvelous superhero artist Gary Frank give the kid-friendly hero a clever, not-too-dark upgrade. DC’s New 52 experiment got a lot of grief for its worst missteps (which, to be fair, were around high-profile titles like Batman/Superman and and its giant profusion of multi-title sublines devoted to characters who could handle one monthly book, tops), but some of its reinventions were good, and this was one of the better ones.
85. Silver Surfer by Dan Slott and Michael Allred (five volumes)*Allred’s pop-art style was never better suited to a writer’s scripts than with Slott’s aggressively kid-friendly Doctor Who homage version of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s morose demigod.
86. Songy of Paradise by Gary PanterGary Panter’s exploration of epic poetry mashes up Dante and Milton in a messily beautiful book that jams arcane and silly symbolism together with medieval iconography.
87. Teen Titans: Games by Marv Wolfman and George PerezA lost gem from the golden years of DC’s attempt to best the X-Men, this graphic novel finally saw print in 2013. It’s Perez at the height of his powers and a solid Wolfman script from the glory days.
88. This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki*The Tamaki sisters’ young adult novel about a family on the cusp of huge changes is rendered entirely in shades of blue, its inking a constant delight.
89. To Have and to Hold by Graham ChafeeTattoo artist Chafee’s adroit graphic novel is the purest possible form of James M Cain short of digging the late novelist up and snorting him. It’s a remarkably assured piece of cartooning and characterization.
90. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North, Erica Henderson, and Derek Charm (12 volumes)*North’s adroit, funny scripts and Henderson’s hilarious art (no slight on Charm that she defines the book’s cartoony, deadpan style) make for a kind of lighthearted fun that ought to be the standard at Marvel Comics.
91. Upgrade Soul by Ezra Claytan DanielsAn extraordinarily weird story about immortality and family; really like nothing else I’ve read.
92. Usagi Yojimbo: Sensō by Stan Sakai*Everything Usagi Yojimbo is worth reading but this tale of samurai fighting aliens is particularly fun. As always, his work is good for young readers.
93. The Vision by Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta (two volumes)King’s moment of high-profile showbiz success may be more or less over, but his best work is still this Ice Storm-style take on life as an android with an android wife and kids in a very normal, non-android suburb.
94. When I Arrived at the Castle by Emily Carroll†Carroll’s painterly, generous graphic novel succeeds her lovely short story collection. It, too, has shades of Angela Carter, but the new work is more assured and the use of color especially daring. 
95. Woman Rebel by Peter BaggeBagge’s scabrous Hate is a fondly remembered alt-comics fixture and his cartoons at Reason magazine are one of the few reasons to read that publication, but he’s recently focused on biographies of famous women. This is his meticulous narrative of Margaret Sanger’s life, and its controversies.
96. Wonder Woman: The True Amazon by Jill Thompson*A portrait of the superhero as a young amazon with much to learn about patience and humility, told in Thompson’s assured watercolors, with special attention paid to the needs of younger readers.
97. Wondermark by David Malki (webcomic)Malki’s cultural landmark of a webcomic has the master comedian’s ear for quirks of modern life that don’t yet have names (see “The Terrible Sea Lion,” which has an entire form of internet trolling—sealioning—named after it).
98. Wytches by Scott Snyder and JockA Stephen King-style horror book with expressionistic art and deep characters.
99. xkcd by Randall Munroe (webcomic)Munroe’s silly, computer-nerdy webcomic is proof that you don’t need to be Wally Wood to make interesting narrative comics. There are plenty of great one-off gags, but Munroe’s masterwork is inarguably the cartoon linked above, a 3100-panel masterpiece called Time.

The Watch

This week’s big story

---

In March of 2017 I wrote to the now-dead author Ursula K. Le Guin to request an interview for a story about the Trump administration’s proposal, since rejected, to destroy the National Endowment for the Arts.

The email was one of a few—I cast a wide net, heard back from a couple of them, took an interview from a famous playwright instead, and moved on.

Working at speed for a daily newspaper as I was then, I found that time dilated for me, especially in the early days of the Trump administration. Journalists, always prone to self-aggrandizement, behaved during that period like people told that the building they’re in is on fire: frantically choosing what to save, where to go when home is gone, making sure everyone who can be rescued is accounted for. At that time yesterday was years ago as far as I was concerned, but, two days after publication, I was surprised — and delighted, her books have been with me since childhood — to receive a response from Le Guin.

Knowing that she had written angrily on her blog about the way Trump had turned national politics into an offensive circus, I had asked her if she would comment on what the NEA meant to American life, in keeping with her own exhortation to her blog readers to keep focus on the people Trump hurts, rather than on the vain, self-regarding president himself.

It’s a measure of her skill that even with the horrified brevity of my attention during those early months, when annihilation felt like a near-certainty and journalism felt like a sword with which to fight it, the email below stuck in my head, as her writing so reliably does.

On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 8:29 PM Ursula Le Guin <redacted> wrote:

Dear Sam Thielman,

Thank you for your generous invitation.   

I wonder if “what NEA means to American life” is quite the question that needs asking.  People conscious of the importance of art in daily life don’t need to read the answer; people uninterested in the arts or who hold them in contempt won’t read it.   

Perhaps the real problem is that people to whom the arts are extremely important — who listen to  popular music, watch movies on screen or tv, or take their kids to the public library — often don’t think of them as arts.   American culture encourages “art” to present itself as necessarily irreverent, revolutionary, distressing, formidable, esoteric, etc.  People whose art is country music or Zits* see NEA as elitist money going to elitist projects — nothing to do with them.  They’re the ones who need to hear that the songs and pictures and stories they value are indeed art, and will indeed be damaged by the malevolence of the Republican leadership toward public support of education and toward independent creativity.  

But I’m a product of the elite side of culture myself, and I don’t know how to reach them.

And frankly, at  87 I’m kind of tired of hitting my head against the wall.

With all good wishes,

Ursula Le Guin

That was the only time I ever had the opportunity to communicate with her; there are other writers I wanted very badly to meet and never had the chance—Gene Wolfe, author of The Book of the New Sun, who died last week, Lloyd Alexander, author of The Prydain Chronicles, who passed not long ago—and an email is, I’ll freely admit to you, an odd thing to treasure. But I do treasure it, and not just in the way I treasure a signed book, but because Le Guin was correct, and in a way that I have not thought enough about.

Her most famous novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, is about humility. It is, at first, an absolutely normal if beautifully phrased and perfectly economical wizard-school story, predating the first Harry Potter novel by nearly 30 years. But unlike Harry, its hero, Ged, discovers his power too early; he misuses it, causes tremendous harm, and is sent away from the campus to learn how better to master himself. It’s something Le Guin’s writing often examines—the way hubris can be harmful, even fatal.

Le Guin had an astonishing knack for keeping the main thing the main thing; she was, in that regard, the anti-Trump. “He is a true, great master of the great game of this age, the Celebrity Game,” Le Guin wrote of the president a few months before her death. “Attention is what he lives on. Celebrity without substance. His “reality” is “virtual” — i.e. non-existent — but he used this almost-reality to disguise a successful bid for real power. Every witty parody, hateful gibe, clever takeoff, etc., merely plays his game, and therefore plays into his hands.”

That strikes me as true. There are good reasons to avoid the kind of stigmatization that Trump’s self-appointment as The Subject We Must Always Be Arguing About creates. It’s very easy to hate Trump’s supporters for his actions, but that’s not the same as seeking to determine who carries out the president’s hideously inhumane policies like child separation at the border, who writes his policies and briefs, and who is hurt by those policies, and how to help them.

There is a swath of America that just doesn’t care very much about politics and is waiting for everything to get back to normal. Art is a way to demonstrate the limits of normalcy, to show that actually, even politically disengaged people have skin in the game—they just don’t know it or have forgotten. Country music, newspaper cartoons, and Clint Eastwood movies are at risk here, too. For better or for worse, Trump’s celebritized presidency has proven that those are the things people care about. They can be used as leverage.

*Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman’s newspaper comic strip about an adolescent boy, a kind of unofficial sequel to Calvin and Hobbes, less Hobbes. It’s pretty good.—Sam

---

Marking Time

Odds, ends, and observations

---

• Things I am reading/playing/watching/listening to:
  1. Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend. It is my first experience reading something by her and it’s good so far.
  2. Just finished Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals, a masterly history of white evangelical America. I recommend it highly, though the last few chapters are almost exclusively about the political organ the evangelical community became and less prominently about the theology. Still, can’t recommend highly enough; it made me less angry with conservative Christians, oddly, and I recommend being less angry.
  3. Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, a video game by FromSoftware, notorious for their difficult titles. If you’re playing it like an Uncharted game it is absolutely incredibly difficult and the story is elliptical and hard to uncover, but if you want the video game equivalent of Nabokov, which is to say leisurely, difficult, and witty, I can’t recommend it enough. I don’t know that I’ll buy a better game this year. I may not buy another game this year.
  4. Barry on HBO. Bill Hader, surprise, is a terrific director, and the idea for the show is very funny—a hitman decides to become an actor—and played so straight-facedly it’s all the more ridiculous. Stephen Root is improbably magnetic as Barry’s handler.
• This Week in Parenting
  1. We took my kid to an auto parts swap meet because his granddad is restoring an old roadster and wanted to hunt for exactly the right distributor cap. He—the two-year-old—had an amazing time. We’ve learned that the best way to deal with the wiggles is to just let him roam a little. Often he wants to walk from table to table in whatever restaurant where the food has lost his attention and greet people like a chef with his name on the marquee making sure the meals are good. Generally speaking people dig it, or at least are nice about it.
  2. I am not a spanker. I was spanked, I know and admire many spankers, but it ain’t my thing. The question, if you were disciplined that way, becomes how to make sure you’re not just duplicating the experience of being spanked by terrorizing your child when he does something wrong. Getting down on his eye level, speaking softly and low to him, and asking him to repeat back what he shouldn’t do next time (“no throw car;” “no run street”) has yielded good results for us so far.

This post is free! Please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription.

I consume far too much conservative media. Any is too much, but I have a mild obsession with learning what the right thinks and why, especially the Christian right, and so I trawl the home pages of The National Review, The Federalist, Christianity Today and The Daily Caller for information—not the information imparted in the articles, but the information omitted from them, and from any sort of coverage, and I carefully keep track of the stories that remain important to the regular readers of these—and darker, more obscure—outlets.

Something has departed from American civil discourse in the last few months; a kind of pretense that, however contemptible and offensive, saved a number of us from annihilation. I’m working to name the thing. It’s a confounding task.

Here’s an example: In 2012 there were 15 bias-related murders according to the FBI’s hate crimes division, which is not exactly known for its liberal standards on the topic. This is pretty good, all things considered—not a lot of race-related murders. 

Also in 2012, The National Review, the magazine begun by William F. Buckley to protest Brown v. Board, fired writer John Derbyshire for racism in a column denouncing his post for reactionary website Taki’s Magazine, though editor Rich Lowry did take pains to name him “a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer” in the same post. Another Review bulletin dubbed the piece unworthy of its author, who “always gave me the impression of an Oxford don” but ultimately “had more courage than sense.”

Indeed, Derbyshire’s cultivated courageous donnishness was always delivered with a skillfully naughty, slightly hectoring friendliness that never quite masked his profound distaste for people other than white whose religions were other than Christian. “It is good to be reminded, too, with forceful supporting data, that the 1924 restrictions on immigration to the U.S. were not driven by any belief on the part of the restrictionists in their own racial superiority but by a desire to stabilize the nation’s ethnic balance, which is by no means the same thing,” he asserted in Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative in 2003, in a wry and respectful semi-dismissal of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique, the ur-text of contemporary American anti-Semitism. 

MacDonald, Derbyshire explains, was removed from polite society because “he got the Jew thing,” as someone said to him at a party. Though he personally does not have the Jew thing and resolved to do his best not to get it “so far as personal integrity allowed,” “if, however, you have got the Jew thing, or if, for reasons unfathomable to me, you would like to get it, Kevin MacDonald is your man.” MacDonald had not yet been declared persona non grata by his university, but he would be five years later.

It’s worth examining what Derbyshire represented within the complicated framework of conservative intellectualism during this period of detente between its factions of crabby paleoconservatives, pre-Vatican II Catholics, born-agains, libertarians, Bushie neocons, and all combinations of the above. Like Buchanan, he would have described himself in the moment as a paleoconservative; someone concerned primarily with preserving social mores, public respect for religion, and not afflicted with the same concerns about deficit spending or socialized medicine that bedeviled his frenemies elsewhere in the Review, beyond his concern about the propensity of the latter to encourage laziness in the lower orders.

---

Factions and Fictions

There is a lot to be said here about the interpretations of German-American philosopher Leo Strauss, whose affinity for deception plays a central role in both strains of contemporary conservatism. I’d rather not say it; it’s tedious and Strauss’s work, whether it intends to or not, functions as a theory of elitism and leaves its two factions at war over only the worthless question of which one ought to be considered elite. Suffice it to say that Buchanan, Derbyshire, MacDonald, Steve Sailer, Joe Sobran and the rest of the comfortably stodgy old Catholics and their allies and protégés defined themselves during the Bush administration in opposition to what they rightly understood to be the fad of neoconservatism.

The neocon movement, especially Andrew Sullivan at The New Republic and David Brooks and ultrahawk Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard, preached Strauss’s gospel of lies. Lies were necessary to the concept of nation-building, they wrote, and told each other, and themselves. The Great Deceptions must not merely be believed by the masses in order to have an idea of nationhood, they must be aggressively practiced by the elite (which is to say, writers at The New Republic, The National Review, and The Weekly Standard and any politicians who knew what was good for them) on those masses if the nations in question are going to be built. Imagine The Secret, except armed to the teeth.

This is how we ended up with absurd pronouncements that of like “an aide” (almost certainly Karl Rove) to the Bush administration memorably waving off New York Times reporter Ron Suskind with the novel insult that Suskind was a part of “the reality-based community.”

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (full article here)

Rove, or whoever he was, was right about that last bit, at least. Having failed to create a democratic Iraq using the power of positive thinking, Iraq’s ostensibly well-meaning architects gave up the ear of the last president and moved on to the next one, having received the requisite career boost for their participation in the activities of the Oval Office, never mind that those activities killed half a million people. They didn’t mind the occasional R-rated movie, after all, and some of their best friends were gay, or black, or women.

In hindsight, it was easy to see happening if you were interested in conservative media as an observer rather than a consumer. A Bush-unaligned part of the intricately linked world of conservative publications was engaged in a very different project from the self-appointed great actors of history: It had appointed itself the filtering mechanism for the rest of the press and the parts of culture that its viewers found suspicious or alien. “Politics is downstream of culture,” Andrew Breitbart, progenitor of Trumpworld’s most effective mouthpiece, famously said. 

This part of conservatism was engaged not with problems of democracy in faraway lands, but with degeneracy in our own. “Lots of Christians have the false idea that The Benedict Option foresees the greatest challenges to the faith coming from state persecution,” wrote Rod Dreher in The American Conservative, referring to his own project of supposedly Benedictine withdrawal from American public life. “Though I do believe that is coming, by far the greater threats to the churches come from the culture in general, and from internal collapse.” The targets here are familiar: In the piece quoted, Dreher was writing about the scandal of widespread child abuse in the Catholic church, which he blamed on homosexuality.

The Taki post that got Derbyshire fired began as a sort of Modest Proposal making light of the African-American fear of cops who murder them, or at least it pretended to be that for a few lines before it, too, descended into a purer and more earnest expression of Derbyshire’s concerns about degeneracy. Like most bullies, Derbyshire was less kidding than maintaining a veneer of kidding so he could say, “I’m just kidding,” which he did when he was criticized for the article’s ugliness. But the veneer had cracked open wide enough for the squirming putrefaction animating it to be visible, and it got him tossed into the outer darkness: the same stagnant toilets of the internet to which MacDonald, Sobran, and others like them had been banished. And, in that still, lightless excrescence, something was growing.

---

“Which race of smiley face do you use when your employer texts you on the weekend?”

Jump forward a few years. A symptom of that growing thing, but probably not the thing itself, seems to be neoreactionism, nauseatingly abbreviated NRx by its adherents, among whom Trump advisor Steve Bannon and many other ascendant political movers are numbered. It is a political philosophy embraced by conservatives across the social and religious spectra but especially by conservative Catholics, such as Harvard Law’s Adrian Vermeule and Sohrab Amhari, who both write for right-wing religious journal First Things, which briefly hosted political disinformation blog The Gateway Pundit. The various strands of right-wing media often come together like that.

James Duesterberg wrote a sympathetic and informative 2017 pocket history of the movement for University of Chicago literary magazine The Point, “Final Fantasy.” The author points out that, though the antics of neoreactionary thought leaders like Curtis Yarvin, who blogs as Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land are often risible and their policy ideas absurd, it has “a more savage bite” than its ludicrous social prescriptions suggest. 

“[W]hy are we required to believe in political correctness, rather than simply being forced to accept progressive policy as the rules of the game for our time?” Duesterberg asks. “And why, after all, are liberals so threatened by dissent?”

Throughout his Point article, Duesterberg maintains the same just-asking-questions posture as Derbyshire in his review of The Culture of Critique, but his agreement with, at least, the premise of neoreaction—that social-justice warriors run society and have made it into a wasteland—seems clear. “Want to earn enough money to support your family? You’ll need a college degree, so you’d better learn how to write a paper on epistemic violence for your required Grievance Studies 101 class,” Duesterberg writes. “Want to keep your job? You’d better brush up on climate-change talking points, so you can shift into regulatory compliance, the only growth industry left. Want to relax with your friends after work? It’s probably easiest if you like movies about gay people, pop music that celebrates infidelity and drug use, and books about non-Christian boy wizards. Want to communicate with other people? Better figure out how to use emoticons. Which race of smiley face do you use when your employer texts you on the weekend?”

This was, essentially, Donald Trump’s campaign platform. Not his vacuous ramblings or his personal dishonesty, criminality, and cruelty, but his proposal to voters: The world you live in is worthless and has been overrun by self-righteous scolds who want to pick your pocket and invade everything that gives you the slightest pleasure in the name of an obviously irreligious “morality” that you quite rightly resist; they’re the same people who depress your wages, change your health insurance plan twice a year, and send your job to Mexico when you turn fifty. You’ve been terrorized by the invasion of the diversity officers, Obama chief among them.

It’s the basis of Trumpworld’s rallying cry every time someone shares a story about kids teaching each other to change the smallest children’s diapers in our new immigrant baby jails, a video of a toddler who doesn’t recognize his horrified mother at the airport after months of captivity, an interview with schoolchildren weeping in uncomprehending despair having returned from the first day of elementary school to find that their parents have been rounded up by the secret police. Now, in your misery, they tell us, you know how WE feel, we who spent the Obama administration in fear for our precious, notional liberties. The stakes, for conservatives, are entirely imaginary, but they are a matter of bone-deep belief.

---

Equal and Opposite Reaction

While Yarvin and Land are its founders, reaction’s champion du jour writes under the nom de guerre Bronze Age Pervert; his work has leapt into the White House via Michael Anton, “the brilliant, bespoke Straussian who went to work for Trump’s National Security Council for a while,” according to Andrew Sullivan, now of New York Magazine in a piece called “The Limits of My Conservatism.” 

Anton cuts an interesting figure and has been profiled several times, the best one probably Rosie Gray’s, from March, 2017. A financial services goon, Anton published punishingly lengthy blog posts in support of Trump at the Unz Review, a project of former American Conservative publisher and Republican politician Ron Unz. Anton’s most influential post was certainly “The Flight 93 Election,” in the Claremont Review of Books, in which he argued that Americans had to “rush the cockpit” despite—in fact, because of—the possibility of destruction if they did not.

The nesting dolls go like this: the Review of Books is an enterprise of the Claremont Institute, founded by Henry Jaffa, patron saint of the West Coast school of Straussian thought, bankrolled by billionaire Carnegie heiress Sarah Scaife, whose extreme hatred of immigrants and virulent racism aligns perfectly with the Institute’s mission and its subsequent embrace through the Review of Books of Trump, who also hates black people and immigrants.

It’s easy to get lost in warring philosophical schools and old grudges between conservatives, but the cheat code, always, is bigotry—racism, antisemitism, and, always, misogyny.

Here’s some of Bronze Age Pervert’s philosophizing, glowingly reviewed by Anton and pushed enthusiastically to the White House: 

[A]ncient “public-spiritedness” [is] free men accepting the rigors of training together so they can preserve their freedom by force against equally haughty and hostile outsiders and against racial subordinates at home. Any “racial” unity of the Greeks was therefore only the organic unity of culture or language, but never became political: such people would never tolerate losing the sovereignty in the states they and their recent ancestors had established to protect their freedom and space to move. But to draw any parallels to our time is absurd: these men would have never submitted to abstractions like “human rights,” or “equality,” or “the people” as some kind of amorphous entity encompassing the inhabitants of the territory or city in general. They would have rightly seen this as pure slavery, which is our condition today: no real man would ever accept the legitimacy of such an entity, which for all practical purposes means you must, for entirely imaginary reasons, defer to the opinion of slaves, aliens, fat childless women, and others who have no share in the actual physical power.

A perhaps overremarked facet of the Trump administration is that its ideologues don’t come through the usual channels—no columnists left tony positions at the Times or the Washington Post or even the National Review to work as speechwriters for Trump, to their frustration, I’m sure. Instead, Trump staffed his advisory ranks from the anti-news sycophants at Fox News, where the intellectual life, such as it is, has little to do with policy or reportage and more to do with broad theories completely divorced from measured data like those of Mr. Age Pervert. 

The tone of Trump-era conservative intellectual life trends toward self-help and whites-only feel-goodism, with a tonal spectrum that ranges from the spittle-flecked stemwinders about dirty immigrants from Tucker Carlson to professorial disquisitions on women’s place in the home from the most popular of these intellectuals, Jordan Peterson.

Much of this is to do with Trump’s own bottomless intellectual laziness, but it is also a product of his preferences, namely the aforementioned racism, and the ressentiment, as M. Duesterberg would have it, of a paleoconservative class expelled from movement conservatism in favor of witless neocons for what it believes was simply its realism about race, gender, and the inferiority of Islam. With their unexpectedly successful rushing of the cockpit, as Anton would have it, they were suddenly given the opportunity to exercise real political power. 

Yarvin, Derbyshire, Carlson, Bronze Age Pervert: These are the thinkers of the contemporary right. Some may have access to the halls of power and most may not, but the fact is they are read by the few in the Trump administration who at least pretend to literacy, and even the old neocon guard, rather than seek approval among authority-weidling women, black people, and gay people, have chosen like Sullivan to re-investigate racism to see if there isn’t something interesting they can salvage. And they have found conservatism’s old wounds rich with a festering, suppurating intellectual life.

So it would be fair to call reaction’s politics ascendant in the years between Derbyshire’s dismissal and Duesterberg’s essay.

---

Conservatism Unlimited

As the Trump administration shifted into gear in 2017, it made no bones about its distaste for immigrants, and neither did the reactionary outlets that shared its ideology. That year Breitbart was aswarm with articles about Ebba Åkerlund, an 11-year-old killed by an Islamic State militant in Sweden. The administration itself opened a hotline for Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) through the Bush-era Department of Homeland Security’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. This is not an emergency helpline; rather, it is a hotline through which people can inquire about whether or not people convicted of crimes have been deported. Trump also ordered the Department of Justice to establish an “Alien Incarceration Report” showcasing crimes by immigrants, who offend at a much lower rate than citizens and whose neighborhoods are generally safer than neighborhoods without them, according to the government’s own National Criminal Justice Reference Service.

On the third of this month, a right-wing gunman in El Paso killed 22 people, most of them over 55, and shot 24 others who survived, including a four-month-old baby. In April, a right-wing gunman killed an elderly woman at worship in a synagogue and wounded three others, including the rabbi. In July, a right-wing gunman opened fire on the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California, killing three and wounding 13 before he was shot to death. The Proud Boys, a far-right gang whose leader, Enrique Tarrio, is chair of Florida Latinos for Trump, started two riots in Portland this summer, one on June 29 and one on August 18. 

Since the El Paso murders, the police have arrested “dozens” of young men, teenagers, and one woman threatening or credibly believed to be planning mass attacks—not just shootings but also bombings. Conor Climo, a 23-year-old Nevada man, was arrested for communicating with neonazi group Atomwaffen division about bombing a synagogue and killing patrons at a gay bar. James Reardon, a 19-year-old man who attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville where neo-Nazi James Fields ran over Heather Heyer with her car, was arrested for threatening to attack a synagogue. Police found a long gun, body armor, a gas mask, and antisemitic literature in Reardon’s home. After his arrest, researcher Emily Gorcenski found a photo of Reardon with Fields at the Charlottesville rally.

These are unusual crimes: They are committed against strangers, based on those strangers’ status or perceived status as a member of an outgroup, and all are coming from the right, often with the explicit stated purpose of starting a race war.

In their manifestos, some of these killers have parroted what we in our capacity as a nation of boiled frogs have come to regard as anodyne, if distasteful, conservative talking points: that immigrants are an invasion, that demographic diminution is “genocide,” that morality derives from strength and that strength derives from eugenic theories of heritable positive traits and that these traits include intelligence. None of this is true; Stephen Jay Gould spent much of his late career debunking scientific racism.

But in this iteration of conservatism as in the previous one, thank Strauss, its truth or falsity is not of much consequence; those qualities are a product of the enlightenment, which, the intellectuals of the right inform us, is a lacuna in the true history of humanity, which is darkness extending eternally on both sides of it. The days of the reality-based community are once again numbered.

To people like Brenton Tarrant, the act of slaking his bloodlust on dozens of worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, including, among the dead, a three-year-old, is politics. He says as much in his manifesto, claiming that the birth rates of non-natives are so high that the people themselves must be culled. Christchurch may be in New Zealand, but the memes and and imageboard culture he jokingly cites in his manifesto are pure Americana; Patrick Crusius recognizes them as such in his own manifesto before his murder of 22 people in El Paso, which cites Tarrant. John Earnest, in his own document describing his reasons for carrying out the murder and assaults at the synagogue in Poway, also approvingly cites Tarrant.

Tarrant’s seventy-odd-page screed, which he called “The Great Replacement,” has surpassed even The Culture of Critique (which codifies many of the same claims about the coming subordination of the white race as Tarrant’s document) as literature of political influence. It is contemporary conservatism’s purest distillation.

The killings are consistent with paleoconservatism, reactionism, or fascism, as it is most properly called. Pat Buchanan, himself a paleoconservative, agrees with me on this point: “Now, there are no excuses, or defenses, for what happened in Christchurch. But there is an explanation,” he wrote on the blog The Unz Review after Christchurch. “All peoples to some degree resent and resist the movement of outsiders into their space. Some migrants are more difficult than others to assimilate into Western societies. European nations that had not known mass migrations for centuries were especially susceptible to a virulent reaction, a backlash.”

Paul Nehlen, an avowed fan of The Culture of Critique, is a former Republican candidate for Congress, whose primary candidacy against Paul Ryan received fawning coverage from Breitbart News and an endorsement from Fox News’s Laura Ingraham and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. If Tarrant’s writing is the literary framework for present-day conservative thought, Nehlen is its avatar. He was less equivocal than Buchanan in his analysis of the spate of white nationalist shootings in an interview on White Nationalist podcast The Gas Station. 

“We’re gonna find ourselves in a situation where we’re the ones who tear it down,” Nehlen said. “We aren’t necessarily going to be the ones who are going to build it back up, be great if we are. Be great if we could do it in that timeframe, but it’s gotta be torn down. This whole neoliberal façade that we’re all walking around in has got to be torn down, has got to be destroyed. So that’s where I stand on things. I’m not backing away from this kid [John Earnest, the Poway shooter]. I’m heralding his arrival. And I will look forward to his eventual release. Maybe some folks will show up there and he’ll be sprung [from prison]. So peace be upon him.”

It may be true that our current prosperity is simply an all-too-brief respite between dark ages. But it is not true that white people are superior to other races, or that there is no truth. Nor is it true that there is some kind of especially worthy cultural product, or indeed, any cultural product at all, that is generated by contemporary conservatives and their sympathizers; there is nothing to conserve. Rather, their project is a soulless, aching void, an irrational perception of slights and wrongs so great that they act as plenary indulgences for any monstrosity, no matter how great, any murder, any incarceration, any rending apart of mother and child, of body and soul, and all of the movement’s intellectual force is now directed at arguing its case in favor of this infinite license.

It is not a complicated evil, but it is a forceful one, and the force of civilization and dignity ought to prepare to meet it with refusal, silence, and, so far as it is still possible, the merciless application of the law, because if we do not, we will have to meet it with violence, and that is one of the only two things it wants. 

The other is a platform to argue for the inhumanity of the great mass of us who deplore its wickedness, and, in the presidency, it already has that.

This post is free. If you enjoyed it, please consider supporting Graphomania.

Officially New Year’s Eve! Here are the ten best things I wrote in 2018. I hope you enjoy at least one of them.

• My examination of the way the CIA gamed the media to get Gina Haspel confirmed https://www.cjr.org/analysis/the-cias-unprecedented-pr-push-to-make-gina-haspel-its-director.php

• My explainer of what exactly Vladimir Putin wants out of Donald Trump, and what he seems to be getting: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/when-putin-asked-for-help-on-sanctions-trump-listened
• My examination of the group of Russian right-wing maniacs trying to use the NRA as a recruiting vehicle for credulous and/or horny Republican operatives and officials https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/exclusive-russian-gun-group-with-ties-to-nra-backed-by-right-wing-extremists
• My profile of comics deity Frank Miller https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/frank-miller-xerxes-cursed-sin-city-the-dark-knight-returns
• My investigation into the group of contrarian waiters who didn’t want raises and turned out to be an astroturf group working on behalf of restaurant owners https://www.cjr.org/analysis/77-referendum-astroturf-tipping.php
• My explanation of why the Republican line of idiotic, illiterate questioning of tech execs on Capitol Hill is more sinister than it looks https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/google-should-have-been-grilled-more-intelligent-lawmakers-house-republicans-ncna947221
• My interview with Marcy Wheeler: https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/emptywheels-marcy-wheeler-knows-more-than-she-tells-but-she-tells-a-lot.php
• My laundry list of reasons for the press to step back and take stock of itself after the Maria Butina indictment: https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/tldr-from-russia-with-love.php
• My essay on comics as therapy https://woollymag.com/culture/comic-books-are-self-care.html
• My feature on the Kalashnikov factory in Florida that *probably* does not exist. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/rick-scott-sanctions-and-a-shady-gun-maker-with-russian-ties

That’s it! It wasn’t a particularly glamorous year but I’m surprised by how proud I am of my work, which I think mostly holds up pretty well. I’m also *incredibly* proud of the work of my colleagues at the Tow Center and the wonderful people at CJR who let me hang out in their office and yell story ideas in the morning meeting.

In general I spent a lot more time parenting and husbanding and drawing and reading and walking than I did last year. I’m glad I did, and I think it made my writing better, too.

1. I would rather eat glass than directly engage with people who think it’s necessary or at all useful to police the content of artistic work for political respectability as determined by the least generous contextual interpretation of that work and a similarly magnanimous assessment of the intentions of the people who created it.
2. I shit from a very great height indeed on the notion that craft-based criticism is worth much when it comes from people who call themselves artists but whose main contribution to comics as a medium takes the form of horny Twitter selfies.
3. Sex comics are a really odd form of art that has mostly fallen out of vogue but a lot of astonishing artists, notably Robert Crumb, did them on their way to creating some of the most beautiful visual art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Straight American and European men illustrating their most depraved sexual fantasies make for queasy reading for a lot of people; that’s fine. Nobody has to like anything, just as nobody has to make art anyone else likes. These comics really help other people, believe it or not! Whatever you may think about them, the act of making a drawing from memory is not an act of violence, as I keep seeing it described. You can call it violence, but you will be completely wrong and incapable of having a discussion about art with anyone because you don’t know what words mean.
4. It’s really telling how many people who have a problem with Crumb, with Manara, and with their American and European contemporaries, luuurve manga and preach it generally as gospel to everyone who will listen without for an instant considering manga’s regressive and sexist qualities. Crumb drew a lot of gross stuff but he never drew tentacle rape. Either it’s okay or immoral to depict the extremely weird sex stuff that bugs you or turns you on or whatever in your work. I’m going with the former, thanks.
5. People can be tarred as sexual predators when there is an accuser and not before. If all you have as evidence are interviews featuring a bunch of old guys hee-hawing about their almost certainly embroidered sexual exploits, please jam a sock in it.
6. I keep seeing comics twitter types say some variation on “I know five people who are just as talented as R Crumb and they’re not personally shitty!” Actually, you do not know five people who are as talented as Robert Crumb. There are probably not five people alive who are as talented as Robert Crumb. An entire industry of confessional alt-comix came into being ex nihilo because of Crumb and multiple successive generations of artists have learned from him, in good ways and bad. You may like your friend Saffron’s stippling or whateverthefuck better than Crumb’s but Crumb’s influence on comics is not simply that the guy is good at crosshatching. This is one of those weird cases where an artist’s obvious technical supercompetence obscures his actual contribution to art and I sort of sympathize but seriously, when you say this shit you sound like one of those boors in the 20th century wing of an art museum who looks at a Joan Miro painting and says “I coulda done that!” No, you could not have, because then you would have done so.
7. As the nauseating spectacle of #comicsgate winds down due to a number of its partisans realizing that they’ve been hilariously grifted out of roughly a million dollars–no kidding–collectively, I was very annoyed to see a bunch of people tweeting incredulously that they were surprised Frank Cho wasn’t a part of the comicsgate bandwagon and had in fact gone out of his way to dump on the whole clownshow. This is what happens when you are so incredibly invested in seeing people who disagree with you as irreducibly evil and corrupt that you pay no attention at all to what they’re saying. If you deliberately misunderstand people, you will find them hard to predict! Frank Cho is a person of color rose to prominence by writing a humor strip about a pretty woman constantly disappointed by lunkheaded men. He likes drawing cheesecakey pinups and doesn’t like being picked on by silly prudes on social media, which is different from being a frothing misogynist.
8. Guys, a lot of comics are extremely grim and unpleasant, in terms of the material they explore and originate. That is their nature, largely because of the way they evolved over the 20th century and as a response to that period’s excesses. I find that response to those excesses to be energizing and encouraging and even somewhat optimistic because of the way it resists sanitization and exportation into the larger monoculture, a gelatinous mass of contract law and 1950’s cultural mores mostly owned by the Disney and Warner Bros corporations that I personally consider hugely offensive and disturbing in a way that I absolutely do not find Crumb’s sex fantasies or Alan Moore’s horror comics. If you prefer to carefully dictate the terms on which you consider works of art acceptable for publication and distribution to the artists and publishers by means of boycotts and public pressure campaigns, congratulations on being an evangelical Christian, I guess.
9. So there you go. I can’t stop people from saying really ignorant and foolish things and of course I wouldn’t if I could but my god, it makes me tired and discouraged about the future to see it in such an unending flood.

I’m back from Iraq. It was a wonderful experience and full of some of the most interesting people I’ve ever had the privilege of meeting and I hope to go back there soon. I’m accidentally backing into a niche of consulting on fake news for various people and places and I hope it’s something I’m doing well. It’s a strange world. I’m so tired I can barely see at the moment.

I think I’ll start out with some comics:

• Holy shit, Mark Russell and Steve Pugh’s The Flintstones is fucking magnificent. I haven’t read a work-for-hire comic that good in years. Many years. I have to to read his new Snagglepuss comic immediately. I can’t believe I’m typing any of this. But yeah The Flintstones is an Anatomy Lesson-level reinvention of a classic character, and it’s REALLY funny and quite sad. Five stars out of four.
• A Walk Through Hell by Garth Ennis and Goran Szuduka is probably the single most frightening comic book I’ve ever read in my life. It’s so upsetting and disturbing, I just can’t even tell you about it. Holy shit. It’s about a pair of cops on the trail of a child murderer who end up in a warehouse that appears to contain… Hell? It’s hard to tell exactly what’s happening at the moment in it, four issues in, but the parallel narratives of the police case that went down before the cops walked into the warehouse and the story of what they find when they go inside are just riveting. The art is pretty good; there aren’t a lot of visual fireworks in the writing yet though there are some really amazing/horrifying ideas. I’m hoping we’ll get a little more room for the artist to work in coming issues.
• Anders Nilsen, whose art is just astoundingly gorgeous, has a new series with a lot of different threads going at once, called Tongues. It remains to be seen whether Nilsen can keep all the balls in the air, though based on past performance I’d say we’re in capable hands, but purely on a visual level the book is just eye-popping. There’s a recent trend toward (I feel) excessive simplicity in contemporary art comics and I have very little use for it; I like Bryan Lee O’Malley’s stuff a lot but in general I find the Hello Kitty-style quasi-anime school of not really doing much rendering in handmade ink on fair-trade artisanal paper to be incredibly lazy-looking and tiresome and weirdly insulting of actual anime which is often rendered to the hilt. It’s nice to see someone moving in the opposite direction as fast as his pen will carry him.
• Yes of course I’m reading the final League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, yes I absolutely love it, no I don’t think Alan Moore is a misogynist, yes Kevin O’Neill is one of the all-time great underrated artists and I hope they rename Ruskin after him. If you haven’t read the previous installments you probably won’t get all the in-jokes but the only person who gets all the in-jokes is Jess Nevins, Cruden to the LoEG’s King James Bible, and you can get Jess to explain them to you pretty easily on Twitter and on his website. The League is all women now, interestingly, and, being as it is a series about hardcore status quo changes happening pretty much nonstop, it has to go a long way to surprise me but it has done exactly that in both issues I’ve read so far. I just adore this series. I can’t say enough good about it—it’s one of the great works of literature of the last twenty years and I’ve treasured every page. It has a lot of Moore’s favorite tics in it but honestly, who cares, in many ways it’s the summation of his entire career and he can repeat himself a little if he wants to. (Providence was pretty much wholly original on that score, interestingly. I feel like he still has more good work in him, but on the other hand I’m glad I feel like that at the end of his career rather than silently wishing he would go away).
• Warren Ellis and Jason Howard have a new book called Cemetery Beach, which I’m excited about because I was one of the six people on earth who read and loved Ellis’s Trees, a sci-fi series about an earth invaded by completely nonhuman aliens. I wish I understood why people are hot and cold on Ellis; his supposedly “bad” books like Jack Cross have some absolutely thrilling visual stuff in them and his good ones are transcendent. Anyway Aftershock Press, which also publishes A Walk Through Hell, recently put out a trade paperback of his megaweird book Shipwreck, which apparently will have more installments though it feels pretty compact and complete to me. I recommend that, too; it’s in a similar vein with his great Karnak miniseries over at Marvel and his absolutely bizarre meta-retcon of Supreme with Tula Lotay, called Supreme: Blue Rose. For more conventional action stuff by him, I’ve recommended The Wild Storm on here every time a new issue comes out and I regret nothing.
• I’m liking Coates-Yu on Captain America though I really did love Mark Waid’s ten-issue run the year previous. Coates has been finding his sea legs on Black Panther and I’m encouraged by the direction he’s taking Cap if not the development of the characters, which is a little lacking, especially by comparison to Waid’s two books, which were so slick. I’ll read absolutely anything Yu draws so it’s fine with me if the story is a bit expositionally clumsy and overreliant on ruminative captions. I want this series to really take off but I’d rather it happened sooner than later; the decompression of comics stories seems to have meant that nothing is really required to happen in the course of a single issue anymore and I find that frustrating as someone who schleps down to the shop every week, rain or shine.
• Waid’s Doctor Strange in Space is pretty fun so far although I worry it will suffer the same fate as his Hulk book, which got crossovered into oblivion fairly quickly. At the moment it’s very light and fun and I hope the higher-ups don’t drag the character into too many corporate events so the series has a chance to grow. I am and will continue to be a serious Waid partisan.
• I wait with bated breath for the final installment in the ongoing Kurt Busiek Astro City ongoing, and I look forward to the graphic novel next year, too. I love AC and I’ve loved the recent stories a lot; he keeps finding ways to bring in superhero-universe archetypes that surprise and delight me, 19 books into this series. The most recent is a kind of Sandman analogue called the Outsider whose recent adventures have been really fun in a way that is both metanarratively interesting and then meta-metanarratively interesting in the ways it recalls Grant Morrison’s shenanigans on Animal Man and some of the odder Sandman issues. Busiek reminds me of something Alan Moore wrote about Rick Veitch, that he’s such a reliable craftsman that people take for granted work that would be astounding if it came from anyone else; I agree strongly on Veitch and think the same compliment applies to Busiek. Also I want that final Batman: Creature of the Night issue to come out, goddammit.
• Frank Miller’s Xerxes is over; it was a lot of fun to read if significantly lighter than 300. The real pleasure in it was watching Miller get his mojo back over the five issues. By the end he’s at the height of his kinetic powers and it’s a relief to see his colorist, Alex Sinclair, learning to work with him. Miller is a genius for emphasis and sometimes he just gives up on a page after putting the few things it needs on it in black ink; by the end of the series, Sinclair has figured this out and stopped trying to draw in backgrounds with gradations of green and orange.
• Daniel Mallory Ortberg wrote a Rick & Morty comic; a one-shot about Krombopoulos Michael, the cheerfully amoral hitman played by Andy Daly in a very funny episode of the show. I love Daniel; he published an essay of mine I’m really proud of a few years ago but I also just admire his writing—his jokes at the Toast were some of the funniest humor prose I’d ever read and he communicated a brilliant, tactile understanding of online culture while also being more deeply literate, something digital culture has a lot of trouble with. Anyway his Krombopoulos Michael comic is funny and good and I hope he writes more.
• Batman #50, the wedding issue, was fun; it reminded me a lot of the old special issues that got filled out with pin-ups after an extra-long story, except in this case the little mini-posters I used to cut out and tape up on the inside of my locker are actually part of the story. There’s a fantastic Frank Miller page, a Neal Adams page, pretty much everybody you could want who’s still alive and capable of drawing.