Daily OCD: 1/12/11

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:

• List: At Seen, Sam Humphries ranks It Was the War of the Trenches and The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec Vol. 1 by Jaques Tardi together at #4 on his Best of 2010: "Jaques Tardi is a badass. A titan of French comics, he writes and draws his comics with a relentless focus. Thick lines and dark shadows spill from a tide of incessant ink. Under his pen, sticky subjects must bend and yield to his cynical, humanist worldview. […] Both books are thrilling to experience. […] Regardless of country, these are amongst comics’ greatest treasures, and it’s intoxicating to have them in our hands."

• List: At The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log, Blank Slate Books publisher Kenny Penman places Love and Rockets: New Stories #3 at the top of his Best of 2010: "I’d started to take L&R for granted… This came up and gently whispered in my ear and I was deeply in love all over again. Comic of the year."

• List: Among London shop Orbital Comics' staff favorites for 2010, Jim Woodring's Weathercraft: "The book is every bit as beautiful, weird and mesmerizing as I expected, and serves both as great introduction to Jim Woodring’s wondrous world and a wonderful treat to those already familiar with it."

• Review: "What’s amazing is that [editor Glenn Head] found the comics anthologies of the days to be wanting in terms of having things he wanted to read and look at, and so he gathered up a huge cast of creators and proved that there was another way to go in assembling such books that had its own creative gestalt. That’s all any reader can ask of an anthology, whether or not its contents interest them in particular. Hotwire should have some stories that any alt-comics reader would find to be top-notch…, and for a certain segment might prove to be the anthology made just for them." – Rob Clough, The Comics Journal

• Plug: Robot 6's Brigid Alverson discovers the comic strip art of Lyonel Feininger (which we collected in the imaginatively-titled The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger)