Best Of 2015: Carol Borden, The Cultural Gutter

List-making, especially lists of the best things, is not really my strong point. I can’t get past the fact that I haven’t read or seen everything. And then I have no idea how to rank things that seem so different. So when Popshifter asked me to participate again in the Best of 2015 lists, I decided to go rogue and offer my own idiosyncratic list of bests in comics and film this year.

Comics I Liked Just Two Issues In: Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott’s Black Magick (Image, 2015) and Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s Monstress (Image).
In Black Magick, Rowan Black is a police detective and a witch. She’s called away from a Sabbat ritual to deal with a hostage situation. But the man who is holding the hostages knows her. It’s a neat combination of police procedural and the supernatural. And it’s well-grounded in Wicca.

Monstress has a lovely steampunk feel and look that turns Art Nouveau Orientalism back on itself in a fantasy set largely in a possible/fantasy Asia—at least so far. Arcanic / supernatural creature, Maika, enters a human city and allows herself to be captured in order to discover what happened to her mother. Her captors torture and vivisect Arcanics to find their secrets and some of them even seem to like it. But they aren’t prepared for Maika’s connection to something dangerous and ancient.

Most Beautiful Creepy Comic: Emily Carroll’s Through The Woods (Magaret K. McEldery).
Through The Woods is a collection of five stories of ghosts, monsters, malevolent strangers, and loss. It reminds me of both Angela Carter and Richard Sala. And did I mention it is beautiful? It is.

Most Just Plain Creepy Comic: Weird Love (IDW Publishing).
Weird Love reprints romance comics from the 1950s and 1960s, but only the weirdest, most disturbing, and sometimes incomprehensible ones. Ventriloquist love! Teenage Swingers! Goddamn Commies! A remarkable number of female lion-tamers! Bear-punching!

Best Cats in Comics 2015:
Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’s Saga (Image) concerns a family brought together and driven apart by war. And by a romance novel. Lying Cat is sidekick to a galactic bounty hunter and what lying cat does best, besides being an awesome giant gray sphinx cat is say, “Lying” whenever anyone lies. Lying Cat is remarkably engaging for a cat who can only say one thing. But then most cats say very little.

The as-yet-unnamed cat in Monstress is much more well-spoken than Lying Cat, but this cat might be a liar as well. After all, talking, lying, and telling stories are closely related. He’s an orange tabby cat with two tails. Two tails are always a sign of great age in cats and foxes. He quotes the poets, appears to be helpful, and is very distinguished and long-suffering.

Jelly Beans, from Andrew MacLean’s ApocalyptiGirl: An Aria for the End Times (Dark Horse, 2015), is very much a regular, mundane cat. But you know, not every cat needs to quote poetry or tell you when you’re lying. Jelly Beans helps Aria feel less alone when she’s trapped on a planet that’s experienced an apocalypse, probably a nuclear one. He’s a very adorable, catlike cat.

Two Badass Ladies in Comics 2015: Cursed Pirate Girl in Jeremy Bastian’s Cursed Pirate Girl 2015 Annual (Archaia) and Violenzia from Richard Sala’s collection of stories, Violenzia and Other Deadly Amusements (Fantagraphics).
Cursed Pirate Girl is so badass she named herself that on her quest to find her missing pirate captain father. She has an eye-patch and nothing on or under the Omerta Seas is more clever or determined than her. Violenza is like an old pulp hero, as fancy as the Shadow and as violent as the Spider. She has two guns and a hood. Violenzia battles a mysterious cult made up of supervillains, Senators and vampires. And yes, she solves most problems by shooting them. but it’s a Richard Sala story, so it is also very artistic.

The Best Movie I Saw In 2015 That Also Makes Me Sad: Marcin Wrona’s Demon.
Demon addresses history in a wedding with a dybbuk and sweet music by Miąższ. Beautifully shot, funny and terribly sad. It’s even sadder that this is the last movie that Wrona made.

Best Road Trip Movies:
2015 was a pretty sweet year if you liked movies about road trips, or movies with car chases and sweet, sweet rides, in reverse alphabetical order. Gregory Jacobs’s Magic Mike XXL feels like a movie sent from an alternate universe where bros are all about the ladies and are Queer positive and movies are just diverse because they should be. Plus, it acknowledges the fundamental truth that nearly all problems can be solved with a road trip. And Steven Soderbergh’s cinematography and lighting is just beautiful.

George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road is also just plain gorgeous. Imperator Furiosa also solves some problems and tries to redeem herself with a road trip—taking the “wives” of the warlord Immortan Joe to a new home. But car chases and action and glorious cinematography aside, I think what I like most is how Furiosa and Max redeem each other.

I love the Fast & Furious franchise. I have some trouble with a couple of the films, but still, I love them. I see them in the theater every time. I love their diversity. I love car crashes and stunts and explosions. I love a film that has so many amazing stunts I always end up forgetting one. I love Vin Diesel. I love seeing Dwayne Johnson popping out of an ambulance window like he’s coming out of his own action figure blister pack. I love seeing people like Joe Taslim and Tony Jaa in big-ass Hollywood movies. James Wan’s Furious 7 is just plain satisfying.

Todd Haynes’s Carol has no explosions or gunfire, but it does have a long cross-country trip as Carol tries to escape her crappy husband Harge and be in a world with Terez, the young woman she’s in love with. But it’s the 1950s. And it’s a story by Patricia Highsmith, who also wrote Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. While I’m still not so sure how I feel about some of Haynes’s more voyeuristic and exclusionary shooting choices—from outside the car when they drive or outside the room looking in when they talk—his remote style works very well with Highsmith’s sangfroid.

Movie I Most Changed My Mind About In The Course Of Watching: Akiz Ikon’s Der Nachtmahr / The Nightmare.
I started out a little annoyed by the film’s club aesthetic. The club music. The strobing. (Seriously, if you are at risk of seizures, maybe don’t see this projected and skip the first ten minutes or so). But then the little homuncular creature entered the film. Teenager Tina contracts a homunculus at a rave. No one else sees it and all the trouble it causes, like eating whole eggs on the kitchen floor, is blamed on Tina. I still think most of the strobing is unnecessary, but by the time we reach the end, I was totally with the film. In fact, I forgive everything for the last scene alone.

Movie I am most perplexed by the critical reception for: Ryan Gosling’s Lost River.
I resisted seeing Lost River for a long time. I don’t live too far from Detroit, and feel a certain protectiveness about the city. It is a complicated place. Then I heard from Detroiters that they liked the movie, that it represented aspects of the city pretty well. Lost River is by no means a perfect movie, but it is a good one, maybe even an especially good first film. It’s more human than some of its influences, say, Nicholas Winding-Refn. And sometimes almost as beautiful as Mario Bava or David Lynch’s films.