Time for some funnies (and some more smut):

#5. Phil Foglio

These days Phil co-writes with his wife Kaja, but before he married he was very much a one-man band (which would probably work as the name of a XXXenophile story ).

I love Phil for his quirky art style, his off-the-wall humour, his clever (if, at time, painful) wordplay, his fourth wall jokes, the quirky jokes he plants in the background of his scenes (such as the mad scientist's lab with a complex piece of electrical apparatus with a sign reading 'Do Not Place Tongue Here. Again.'), and especially for the love he shows for any topic he tackles, even when he is making fun of it (What's New?, with Phil & Dixie could not have been written by someone who did not love gaming).

Plenty of excellent work that falls in our time period: What's New?, with Phil & Dixie (from Dragon Magazine); Buck Godot, Zap Gun for Hire; the Stanley and His Monster and Angel and the Ape mini-series for DC; XXXenophile (the funniest pornography you're ever going to read)...

Maybe they all had different names they were born with ?

Unlike Sienkiewicz, strangely enough!

Wait, wait.. am I the first list to have...

# 5 Gilbert Hernandez for Human Diastrophism


And call this a sideways vote for Jaime, too - But I only got so much space on the list.



What I like about Gilbert is the scope of his work. There are A LOT of characters running around multiple countries, and his Palomar cycle of stories has been going for decades - both real time AND fictional time.

And he did Blood of Palomar, which is basically my favorite fictional comics story. There's a serial killer running around the Mexican village of Palomar, see... but instead of a plot-driven police procedural, this is - basically - a series of characters having transformative events in their lives. It's subtle, epic, funny and scary as $%^^. And it shows us that monkeys can be terrifying.

Indeed he will. Tomorrow, in fact.

Cei-U!
I summon the sneak preview!

And we're back to the idiosyncratic choices. This creator has made at least one previous appearance in this year's event, and she's responsible for one of my favourite comics. There are a lot of reasons why we like a series. Some series are like a roller coaster - full of thrills and excitement, and others are like a maze - full of mystery where you can't wait to see what surprises await around the next corner... but for me, there's one series which feels like coming home to a nice comfy chair and warm, friendly company, and I get that feeling every time I go back and re-read it. That series is 'Castle Waiting', by my #5 choice.

#5. LYNDA MEDLEY

The key word when I think of Lynda Medley's work is 'immersive'. You don't feel like you're reading 'Castle Waiting', you feel like you're experiencing it. Her world feels so real that you feel that you can reach out and touch it, She builds environments which feel like you could step inside the comic and wander around in them, and the characters feel almost like people that you could conceivably meet... and that you'd WANT to meet.
She has an incredible gift for dialogue, character, body language, pacing. There is seriously, so much going on in this comic that you just don't see because she's not calling attention to it. If you're not paying attention, you don't even notice it... but when you do, it's astounding the virtuosity with which she engineers these stories and characters. It's just so damn charming, and it means that a reader can be just as riveted and invested in a story about a young man trying to figure out how to keep a goat from straying from its pen, as they would with yet another headlong action story about saving the world from destruction.







Unfortunately, creator owned, self-published comics is a harsh mistress and the series is currently on hiatus, but I hold out hope that one day, the world will become a better, more just place, and I'll be able to return to Castle Waiting and see these beloved and much missed characters again.

It did.