Looking Back at 2024: The Year in Comics
By Dan Brown It’s time to go over the last 12 months in comics to pick out the highlights. These categories are arbitrary, the choices are mine alone, and I invite you to chime in with your own selections! Best graphic novel of year: This goes to Walter Scott’s The Wendy Award, the latest chapter in the story of everyone’s favourite anxiety-ridden, coke-snorting young artist. It ends with Wendy, an MFA graduate from the University of Hell (i.e. Guelph), possibly turning her back on the world of art. Say it ain’t so! Best debut graphic novel of the year: I give this one to Maurice Vellekoop’s I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together, his memoir of growing up gay in Toronto as the son of strict Dutch immigrants. His lines are lively, and they evoke Seth’s work for me. Best local graphic novel: You gotta love the Curly Head Ballet from Doug Rogers, the only comic I know that was inspired by London’s Original Kids Theatre. It’s a trip! Barbenheimer of my summer: Montreal cartoonist (and Western Gazette alum) Gabrielle Drolet’s rat character went on vacation in Europe in the warmer months, as Drolet herself went on a parallel journey. Daily deadlines were no obstacle for the artist, and I hope she assembles these strips into an anthology. If the folks at Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly are as smart as I think they are, they’ll be the ones to publish it! Anniversary of the year: Goes not to a superhero, but to a giant lizard with the ability to breath nuclear fire! I’m talking about Godzilla, the kaiju who in November marked 70 years since his first movie appearance. Oh, no! They say he’s got to go! Go, go, Godzila! Comic villain of the year: I’m giving this one to a flesh-and-blood person, not a comic baddie. A big boo to sometime footballer Colin Kaeprnick for his idea to create a company, Lumi, that aims to replace the talented humans who make comics with AI-created work. Way to cheese off an entire industry! It’s about time: The winner in this category is Canada Post, which issued a series of stamps this year to recognize homegrown graphic novelists such as Chester Brown and the Tamaki cousins. Finally! Better never than late: Marvel Comics might have had a better year if they hadn’t belatedly given Roy Thomas a credit as one of the character Wolverine’s creators, a move which antagonized fans and likely made no one happy apart from the former Marvel editor himself. Least surprising plot twist of the year: Speaking of Marvel, I understand that the Krakoa phase of the X-Men’s history has ended, with our favourite band of mutants returning to mainstream society – thus confirming that as long as a comic sells, any change is temporary. Burgeoning trend of the year: Actor Elliott Page used a pop-culture con, the Calgary Expo, to speak out about the Alberta government’s policies on trans youth. Are we seeing cons become platforms for celebrities to speak out on issues? Something I’ll be watching for in 2025. Say what? of the year: Easily won by Marvel Studios, who used San Diego’s Comic-Con International to announce Robert Downey Jr. is returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a suit of specialized armour, only this time he won’t be playing Iron Man, he’ll be . . . Doctor Doom? “New mask, same task,” the popular actor enigmatically pronounced from the con’s stage. Non-news event of the year; At the same event, Marvel competitor DC had an announcement of its own: The company is changing its logo back to the one it used to slap on comics in the 1980s. Yay? Cause for concern: In snippets of footage from the upcoming Fantastic Four film, Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards still has that damn moustache. Not a good sign. Dearly departed: John Cassaday, Trina Robbins, Greg Hildebrandt and Ed Piskor are among the talented individuals who left us this year. Comic journalist of the year: Eisner Award nominee Rob Salkowitz, who writes about comics for publications like Forbes and Publishers Weekly, was a must-read in 2024. I also finally got around this year to reading Salkowitz’s book Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, which I greatly enjoyed. Person of the year in comics: It’s a tie between Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, who with their $1.3 billion-grossing Deadpool & Wolverine stopped superhero movies from their downward slide with a huge dose of fan service. We’ll find out in 2025 whether it’s a temporary pause or not. And now I wanna hear from you! What were the year’s comic highlights for you? Let me know in the comment box below. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Gabrielle Drolet’s Rats are the Barbenheimer of My Summer
By Dan Brown Montreal cartoonist Gabrielle Drolet is on holiday. And I’m loving every minute of her European vacation. If you’re a fan of online cartoonists, you may already know Drolet’s work. I found her on Twitter (the platform now known as X) and she posts on Instagram, too. Drolet’s comics have also appeared in mainstream outlets like the Globe and Mail and the New Yorker. She has a simple, expressive style — her work is funny, engaging and thoughtful.Oh yeah, she also likes to draw rats. A lot. At the end of June, Drolet posted that she was heading to the Continent to visit such destinations as Croatia, Hungary, Italy, and Slovenia.. “Leaving Canada for the first time in six years to lie on beaches around Europe,” she tweeted, adding she would be posting periodic cartoon updates. Her short narratives, typically no longer than one page, have been a highlight of my summer. She does them on the fly, often posting a comic that documents that day’s sightseeing. (Full disclosure: Drolet worked several years ago at the Western Gazette, where I mentor young journalists as my day job, although I’ve never met her in real life. And I hope very much to acquire some of her original work.) The young cartoonist is travelling in Europe with a group of friends. In a recent cartoon from Hungary, one of her companions asked the others to take a look at a tick bite on his back that had grown itchy. He turns his back so they can see the wound. They stand there gaping. “I’m calling our health insurance,” says one member of the group. “I”m texting a photo to my doctor girlfriend,” says another. “I’m making a cartoon,” Drolet’s rat self chirps cheerily as she documents the episode. That’s right – her preferred way of depicting herself in the autobiographical comics is as a rat wearing glasses. She draws her friends as turtles, cats, dogs, geese, you name it. Part of the joke is having animals say things humans are hesitant to express. In a Budapest nightclub, for instance, Drolet’s rat boogies with a friendly bunny. Finally, she broaches a delicate topic. “Hey . . . are you gay?” the rat asks. “I don’t know. Maybe!” responds her dancing partner. “I don’t know what to make of that!” “Me neither!” They then go their separate ways. Maybe the truth is I can’t fully explain why the anthropomorphizing is so droll. All I may be able to do is describe my reaction. These cartoons make me laugh and think, which is the highest compliment I can pay any artist. In a comic context, the question about substituting animals for people is always: What is gained? Why bother switching out people for animals that might be their pets? In the 2019 graphic novel Off Season, for instance, veteran graphic novelist James Sturm told the story of one couple’s disintegration amid the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. In my view, there was absolutely no reason to make the human cast of that book into canines who stand upright and wear clothes. It added nothing. With Drolet, the change makes her characters more innocent. Their emotions, by some strange cartoon alchemy, become more relatable. The over-arching theme of her art – making her way in the world as a young adult – comes through so clearly. One recent cartoon shows how Drolet dresses for travel: linen dress, baseball hat, fanny pack, SPF 50 everywhere. “God, I look like such a tourist,” she says to herself. “Then again, I AM a tourist.”Somehow, those lines are funnier when coming from a human-sized rodent. A few weeks ago, I wrote a column in this space wondering what the Barbenheimer of summer 2024 will be – the cultural event that everyone is talking about and remembers years from now. Maybe when Deadpool & Wolverine lands in theatres at the end of this week that question will be answered for most people. But not me. The Barbenheimer of my summer – the one thing that is getting me more excited than anything else – is the story of one rat’s adventures in Europe. Would it be too much to ask for a comics publisher to collect all of these images and publish them in a graphic-novel format? Drawn & Quarterly, I’m looking at you. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 31 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
