Then I'll have a nice month where I read 12 books (which is still not many), then I'll dry up again. I'll still go months without reading a comic. I'd hoped that as the pandemic rolled on, things would more or less return to normal and I'd be back to reading voraciously.
By the time February 2021 emerged around I'd only read 30 comics from the previous year. In a normal year, I would read around 450 graphic novels, which would easily give me a wide selection of books with which to fill a top 75 year-end list. They robbed me of the joy I took in reading comics. Those early months of the pandemic exhausted me, and in strange ways. One month later, our kids were locked in the home with us, attempting to do school over Zoom while my wife attempted to teach school over the same. In February 2020 I had just posted my 2019 round-up, the 75 best books I'd seen from the year. Not ideal for Christmas shoppers or big clicks, but it's always felt more ethical, more responsible, giving me a chance to better do the due diligence of checking out as much as possible from the year in question. I publish my annual best-of-the-year list every February. That is more the case for this present list.
While for marketing reasons I title these lists as the "Top 75" or "The Best Comics Of The Year" (because that's the kind of thing that people want to see, they want the combat and conflict of the Best vs Not The Best, not some wishy-washy list of one guy's recommendations), I've also been pretty up front that (in light of human subjectivity combined with inability to read everything) the whole concept is a bit ridiculous. And also, this edition of The Annual Thing will be a little different from those in the past. Been awhile, eh? I'm exactly three years late with this thing. (Did you know that Cross Game is now out of print? Isn't that just insane?) (Just pretend I'm not speaking from experience here.) I guess also, a good chunk of those 2016 under-the-radar critical masterpieces might even be out of print now. Except for that a 2016 critic was already gearing up to start reading 2017 books, and any 2016 books they read in 2017 they've probably forgotten ever existed because it wasn't part of their year-end list. Nobody wants to read today in 2023 a list of the best graphic novels of 2016, even though a critic today in February 2023 would have a much better chance of having read all the good stuff from 2016 than a critic in December 2016. Recent films, recent games, recent books, recent songs. We're trained and we in turn train each other to only truly perk our ears up when discussing the recent. We're all too much prisoners of the cult of the new. Pity the books that came out in the pandemic years.
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