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A lot of stuff I picked up last year wasn't from 2017 (though you're including reprints obv), and I haven't read most of what I did pick up in the last few months, and I absolutely haven't read any comics-with-a-spine published in 2017.
But the new Crickets was great, the linework racing as the Blood Of The Virgin protagonist's life becomes more frantic and the pace of the story tighter.
It's been so long between Pope Hats that I'd forgotten everything about the storyline that resumes and concludes here except for the terrifying boss. Always a gorgeous piece of comics to hold, though.
Shaolin Cowboy was the only new comic I bought in 2017 that was published by a company with an accounting department, an unintentional distinction which is oddly apt. This is the best work of Geof Darrow's career, a return to the shivering unease with American capitalism that was muted and mediated by Miller's overlaid text in Hard Boiled, here unfettered and amplified by a howl of anguished distress about the state of a citizenry and media consumption that could result in an IRL Trump presidency. I just wish the printing wasn't such dogshit compared to the Burlyman series; even better, that Dark Horse would revive the Hard Boiled format for him.
Speaking of, the preview edition of BTTM FDRS by Ben Passmore and Ezra Claytan Daniels would go hard as a European-style hardcover album when a publisher picks it up.
Daniels' own Upgrade Soul was fun, a mix of sci-fi, human drama and light horror that could have played as a late-90s Vertigo book.
Ganges #6 couldn't compare to the wonders of #5 - reading that felt like a rollercoaster, the physical sensation in the gut of "where is this going what is he doing omg he's really pulling it off," just at the depth of Huizenga's cartooning - but it's still an issue of Ganges, and therefore better than almost anything else in print. Supposedly this is a finale, and there'll be a collection imminently, but I'd rather just have time to pick up any random issue of the eleven year run and be sucked into Glenn's mental health spirals, anytime, for another eleven years.
Forty Two and Grab Back Comics were interesting counterpoints to each other, women using art to process their own lives or the culture around them in 2017. Horse Girl Dog Mom by Alison Dubois, though, was the small-press comic that most struck me as a reaction to Trump: a collection of short comics and photos and illustrations from the artist's first (...eight?) months of 2017, going through bad times of relationship and house and employment. Not mentioning geopolitics, but the sense of helplessness and uncertainty rang deeply of the greater world to me.
Twilight Of The Bat couldn't have the impact of Josh Simmons first Bat-bootleg, and isn't drawn by him, but everybody returns to the well if they do one good Batman story. This one is just as bleak and horrifying as any of Simmons' own post-apocalyptic wasteland work, with the Joker torturing a Batman even more grizzled and demented than in the earlier comic.
Can't remember which of the two Nicky Minus books I got last year was good and which was less good.
From what I've read of My Favourite Thing Is Monsters, I expect it'd be on my list.
― Haribo Hancock (sic), Wednesday, 24 January 2018 19:43 (six years ago) link