The year-ish in review-ish.

I see all sorts of people have been doing year-end wrap-ups with all kinds of crazy categories and whatnot. Well, I've been busy! That Rick Olney meltdown thread isn't going to read itself, you know!

In order to catch up, I got a few books out of the library and have read approximately the first quarter of each of them. With that knowledge under my belt, I can confidently hand out the following awards:

Most Awkward Book of the Year:

Premillennial Maakies: The First Five Years, by Tony Millionaire. At 12.25" by 4.75", this long, slender hardcover is the Bob Barker's Microphone of comic strip collections. I tried reading it in bed, and it made my elbows hurt. This book was also a shoo-in for the Most Unwieldy Book of the Year award before I realized that was redundant. Favorite strips so far: main strip, p. 34, mini-strip, p. 53. Look them up in your own copy!

Most Mental Book of the Year:

Abraxas and the Earthman, by Rick Veitch. I don't know if it's possible for mushrooms to drop acid, but if it were, this book is what it would be like if a peyote cactus ate those mushrooms and washed them down with a large bottle of Robotussin. Better than Star Trek IV!





Most Narrowly-Focused Comics-Related Publication of the Year:

Writing for Comics with Peter David, by Peter David. Ignoring Soulsearchers, David has only co-written 27 stories in his entire career, according to the GCD. Will one lucky reader of this book get to co-write number 28? I mean, the early parts are interesting, and I assume the parts about writing with Peter David come later, but that just doesn't seem like it would be very useful.