I haven’t done one these in at least a year or two, but 2012 was kind of a big year for me, and I wanted to write something, anything, about all of my favorite things. So, you know, I guess this is another one of those BEST OF lists, only you should know that my opinion of such things really shouldn’t matter that much at all in the grand scheme of pop culture. I mean, really, I never even watched the music video for Gangnam Style, so to think that I’m someone who understands this stuff is kind of ridiculous.
Plus, I liked Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance more than the Avengers. My tastes are questionable at best. Anyways, without further ado…
PERSONAL STUFF
I graduated from ETSU in December, so this was the first year of my life where I wasn’t tied down to education, taking classes or anything. That’s kind of terrifying to think of considering that I’ve spent my entire life up to that point in school. Not wanting to go soft or get lazy, I immediately started up multiple projects that I’m proud to have accomplished. Other Sleep is the biggest one, and while I’m not as far along with it as I thought I would be earlier in the year when I started, the fact that I’m still even working on it and haven’t cast it aside is a big deal. I also self-published Burst Reach 2, went to Heroes Con, had a table at a local con where I did pretty well, have been producing some kickass posters for local punk shows, contributing to local zines, and last month got my first freelance gig designing an animated banner ad in Flash. After taking a week to learn the ins and outs of Flash. That was a pretty masochistic thing to do, but I pulled it off and made money in the process, so I absolutely succeeded at not falling out of practice like I was afraid of doing. By the way, here's the flyer I did for a show earlier this month:
Also, I met a girl, and we’ve been dating like, 4 months now, my social life has improved a bit, and I may or may not be trying my hand at stand-up comedy sometime soon. Not bad, not bad at all, 2012. You were much better than last year, despite killing my dog and two of my favorite artists of all time.
MUSIC
I spent the first half of the year completely in the dark when it came to new music, the bulk of my purchases being 90’s punk albums and some old Wu-Tang Clan stuff, but then things happened and I ended up listening to quite a few new albums. Here are my top three:
AESOP ROCK - SKELETHON: I’m usually picky about rap, but Aesop is one of my favorites. His last album, None Shall Pass, came out 5 years ago and still sounds just as good today as it did when I first heard it, but Skelethon is something else entirely. His lyrics have always had an imaginative, meandering quality to them, but here things are a bit more focused and in several cases uncomfortably introspective while still remaining pretty dense. No one rhymes like Aes does, in my opinion. When the first single, Zero Dark Thirty dropped, I listened to it repeatedly because in some strange way, it managed to capture precisely how I was feeling at the time I first heard it. This is absolutely one of his best albums, period.
HEAVY CREAM - SUPER TREATMENT: These girls came to play in Bristol back in June, the first of several great bands that my friend Sterlin has brought here, the first show I made a flyer for, so maybe my love for this album exists with just a bit of nostalgia thrown in, but they played a fierce show and this album has so much energy. Fuzzy guitars, screeching vocals, catchy hooks, I’ve listened to it so many times and I’m still not tired of it yet.
PURITY RING - SHRINES: The two friends who sort of introduced me to Purity Ring weren’t expecting me to like it, but they were wrong. This is an album I listen to a lot when I’m not feeling too well. Weirdly and morbidly sweet, yet violent, lyrics, plus electronic beats that stick in my brain and put me at ease. A lot of witch house fans enjoy this album, and I agree.
Runner up: GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR - ALLELUJAH! DON’T BEND! ASCEND!: The only album aside from Skelethon this year that made me FEEL something, this is the band’s first album in a decade. Delirious, emotional, aggressive, dark, and extremely sublime.
Oh, yeah, the new Crystal Castles album ain’t half bad either.
VIDEOGAMES
Uh, actually, I only played two new videogames this year, I think: LOLLIPOP CHAINSAW (reviewed here) and TOKYO JUNGLE. Both are stupid, insane, and so much damn fun and I love them both to death. I would like to play JOURNEY, but haven’t had the chance to. As for everything else that came out this year, like Borderlands 2, Assassin’s Creed 3, Dishonored, Black Ops 2, whatever else? I couldn’t care less. I realized and accepted this year that I’m not the “hardcore” gamer I used to be, and that’s okay. I got Dead Space 2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution for Christmas and am in love with both, but they’re older games. I’m comfortably behind the curve.
MOVIES
DREDD 3D: Screw Avengers, forget the Dark Knight Rises, THIS is the comic book movie of the year. It’s not a special effects extravaganza like Avengers, and it has no intentions of trying to express “big ideas” like DKR, it’s just an hour and a half of Judge Dredd doing what he does best. The movie keeps things simple and brutal, with great design work and a nice, growling soundtrack. Seriously, you have no idea how much it kills me to have to wait another two weeks or so in order to get my hands on the Blu-ray when it comes out.
DJANGO UNCHAINED: Definitely the best movie I’ve seen this year, one of Quentin Tarantino’s strongest. Unflinchingly brutal, hard to watch in places. A bit too long, but that doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t even have to explain why you need to see this movie.
THE RAID: REDEMPTION: Between this and Dredd, I just think all decent action movies should have a similar, John Carpenter-esque plot of “our heroes are stuck in a building where everyone is trying to kill them.” This movie has the best knife fights, gun fights, and martial arts fights I’ve ever seen in a movie, just straight up, no-nonsense brutality. I want someone to count the number of times people get punched, kicked, shot, and/or stabbed in the neck in this movie.
Runners up: 007: SKYFALL and LOOPER were both incredibly good, but they didn’t hit me nearly as hard as the above movies. Oh, and GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE, which I reviewed here.. God bless Neveldine/Taylor, I hope they never stop making insane over-the-top action movies with bone-shattering camera work and editing.
The Dark Knight Rises is the most disappointing movie I watched this year. It was just dull and messy and it felt like everyone involved, with the exception of Tom Hardy, was phoning it in. Bane was cool, the coolest Bond villain ever, it’s just too bad he was in a mediocre Batman movie instead. Prometheus was pretty stupid too, but it’s also so goddamn pretty and has such a wonderful score that I HAD to see it in theaters twice and by the collector’s edition. The moral here is that if your movie looks like a comic out of an issue of Heavy Metal from the 80’s, I will enjoy it no matter how bad it is.
COMICS
I made a decision earlier this year to quit buying new Marvel and DC comics. I was only reading a few cape comics at the time anyways, so it’s a decision which had little impact on my life. I broke that decision with Hawkeye, I must admit, but aside from it? I don’t miss superhero comics at all. That said, I read a LOT of good books this year, most of them published by Image, so here’s the massive list, in no particular order:
Prophet (Brandon Graham, Giannis Milonogiannis, Simon Roy, and Farel Dalrymple)
Copra (Michel Fiffe)
Change (Ales Kot and Morgan Jeske)
Fatale (Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips)
Manhattan Projects (Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra)
Multiple Warheads (Brandon Graham)
Orc Stain #7 (James Stokoe)
Godzilla: The Half Century War (James Stokoe)
Saga (Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples)
BPRD: The Long Death (Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and James Harren)
Hellboy in Hell (Mike Mignola)
Casanova: Avaritia (Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba)
Zegas (Michel Fiffe)
The Mire (Becky Cloonan)
The Zaucer of Zilk (Al Ewing and Brendan McCarthy)
Prince of Cats (Ronald Wimberly)
Sharknife ZZ (Corey S. Lewis)
Wild Children (Ales Kot and Riley Rossmo)
Nowhere Men (Eric Stephenson and Nate Bellegarde)
Ragemoor (Jan Strnad and Richard Corben)
Hawkeye (Matt Fraction and David Aja)
And probably some more I’m just failing to remember.
The quality of indie comics just keeps going up while Marvel and DC continue to make terrible decisions and put out mediocre books that just don’t appeal to me at all. I’m hoping/expecting this to become more apparent in 2013...
That about wraps it up I think. I'm looking forward to 2013, yes. It'll be a weird year, I'm sure.
[Brett]