Nothing says Valentine's Day like a best-of-2008 list!

Or more properly a list of my own favourite comics from last year, since my reading was a little too selective to be comprehensive: the most glaring gaps include Acme Novelty Library #19 (I slept on the earlier Rusty Brown stuff and couldn't really afford to catch up yet), Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby (Canada Customs have been protecting my delicate sensibilities from it) and The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard (I suck). Webcomics are a recurring blind spot, though KC Green's Horribleville almost joined the few here.

I also excluded reprints of anything that's already collected in English, because otherwise Popeye would've ended up at #1 on the countdown. To my mind it's the greatest comic strip ever, but still, boring. This bylaw does get fuzzy when applied to a book like Where Demented Wented; thus I strived, with a hateful scowl, to always rule on the side of Anti-Life. I second-guess myself way too much when it comes to year-end lists (surely Trondheim could be higher...shut up shut up shut up), so I'll just post the thing and hope for forgiveness, plus overlooked recommendations.

25. various comics by Kate Beaton
24. Dororo by Osamu Tezuka
23. Nocturnal Conspiracies by David B. (review here)
22. Chiggers by Hope Larson
21. Red Coloured Elegy by Seiichi Hayashi
20. Final Crisis by Grant Morrison, J. G. Jones, Doug Mahnke et al (that post about Final Crisis, Grant Morrison and Afrofuturism is here; a look back at the whole frenzied catastrophe is coming soon)
19. Casanova by Matt Fraction and Fabio Moon
18. Disappearance Diary by Hideo Azuma
17. Tokyo Zombie by Yusaku Hanakuma
16. Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella by Lewis Trondheim
15. Speak of the Devil by Gilbert Hernandez
14. Skim by Mariko & Jillian Tamaki
13. Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
(brief review of one individual issue here)
12. Fight or Run: Shadow of the Chopper by Kevin Huizenga
11. MOME vol 12, by various artists
10. Good-Bye by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
9. Black Jack vols 1-2 by Osamu Tezuka
8. BodyWorld by Dash Shaw
7. "Superman in Excelsis" (from All-Star Superman #10) by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (retrospective of sorts on the whole series here; you can see a potato I got Mr. Quitely to sketch here)
6. Ganges #2 by Kevin Huizenga
5. Omega the Unknown by Jonathan Lethem, Karl Rusnak and Farel Dalrymple
4. Kramers Ergot 7 by various (I wrote about it here)
3. Love & Rockets: New Stories #1 by Los Bros Hernandez
2. Travel by Yuichi Yokoyama
1. What It Is by Lynda Barry (I went to her IFOA appearance and wrote about how she's awesome; bonus spooky joke about John Updike dying!)