The Greatest Comics Ever Sez ILC [no longer the "Best" -mod]

42 points.

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"Gerber... came up with the very satisfying conclusion to what has to be the most outrageous epic ever to run in any comics magazine, bar none. I'm referring to the Headmen/Bozos/Nebulon saga, of course (in DEFENDERS #'s 31-40 and GIANT-SIZE DEFENDERS #5, with peripheral portions scattered here and there in other issues as well). This was insanity incarnate, distilled and purified. The Headmen, Nebulon, ludberdites, bozos -- even Gerald Ford -- all cavorted for oveer ten issues, with the culmination being a philosophical exchange among Dr. Strange, Nebulon and President Ford, held in nether-space. And that's not to mention about a half-dozen-or-so brains and minds being switched from head to head, by (you guessed it) the Headmen -- so often and so unpredictably that you needed a scorecard to tell whose mind was in whose brain was in whose body. But viewed as an artistic whole, the blasted thing makes sense -- damn good sense. Gerber constructed a multi-part masterwork that, to my knowledge, stands unique in comics. It was a fitting capstone to Steve's riotous reign on THE DEFENDERS, and is perhaps the finest sustained effort (with individual portions already classics) in the first fifty issues of the magazine."
- quoted by Tep.

"This is the maddest run of superhero comics any major company has ever produced. Ludicrous villains (including a man with a melting face who Harry Redknapp always reminds me of), brains and minds getting swapped from body to body in a way that is almost impossible to follow, and all sorts of great and funny dialogue. The art is functional though repetitive - but it gets everything across okay. I'd rather have this than fancy stuff that isn't easy to read, especially when the story gets so insanely complex. I treasure these comics."
-Martin Skidmore

Availability: Not as far as I know. But if Essential Defenders 2 and 3 ever come out that should sort you out.

43 points.

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As a by-product of an enormously successful toy range and cartoon
series, I suspect many may feel there's a lack of authenticity or
'real love' here. But Transformers captured the imagination of 80s
children spectacularly in the UK and the British version of the comic
reflected that 'love' well, portraying the epic good/evil battle with
satisfying fervour and theatrical characterisation and plotlines,
largely thanks to the comic's dominant writer Simon Furman and his
frequent partnership with Geoff Senior whose rigid but dynamic
illustration style met Marvel's esteemed benchmark comfortably. (Best
stories: The Enemy Within, The Smelting Pool, Target 2006, Prey-Fallen Angel sequence)
- Steve M

Availability: Yup - in nine volumes. (Transformers fans may be able to vouch for the accuracy of this info)

43 points.

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Ahem, yes. The first thing I should say is that Vic Fluro was not among the five voters for this. The second thing I should say is that this is one of the funniest 2000AD parodies I've ever seen. All those years of reading godawful pre-Alan Moore future shocks were worth it after all. Also a testament to the value of just sitting down and scribbling.

Availability: Not only is it available, it's free!

Also, that Transformers cover is marvelous.

44 points.

Seaguy has to be one of the most enchanting comics I've ever read. A dreamy, melancholy, marvellously odd book, its writer claimed it's a riff on the Medeival quest epic but to me it feels like a skewed version of a Nintendo game, the bright hero battling through three levels of the playful and uncanny before the reset button is pressed. Were it not for the several horribly sad moments you could also see it as Grant Morrison doing something for kids. But Chubby sums it up best - "Da Fug?" Whatever the explanation, though, everything in Seaguy makes a kind of unconscious sense. (And the art is perfect, too)

Availability: February 1st

Yay Defenders making the list!

Doing the entries is taking a bit longer but is good fun!

46 points.

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I was hoping to grab some ILX comments on this but no such luck, server too busy (feel free to add comments by the way!). It's the one where Neil Gaiman's Grand Design starts to be revealed, it's got all sorts of Endless malarkey in it, it's got the serial killer's convention, it's got the Shakespearean interlude (best thing in it IMO), it is by reputation tightly plotted, basically it's where the most talked-about comic of the 90s started to build up steam and lay the foundations of its enduring cult.

Availability: Perpetual.

47 points.

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"The world feels real (even in the face of impossibilities such as superheroes and prehistoric leviathans that threaten humanity) because it’s visually grounded. Yes, the visuals themselves are idealistic, iconic, and there’s a reason for that. These images are impressed on the American (and Canadian) psyche as part of our history. Again and again and again, Cooke shows that he has a masterful eye for design and a keen historical accuracy that evokes a feeling of Postwar America (even if that America never really existed.) Edwards Air Force Base, Las Vegas, googie architecture and design, the first stirrings of the space race and the Cold War, sprawling noir cityscapes, newsreels, talking-head public affairs shows, Blue Note record covers, automobile design, commercial design and propaganda are blended together seamlessly into a visually stunning whole."
- from Matt Maxwell's review at his place

Availability: DC, notoriously, are ripping off The Kids by issuing this series as two GNs rather than one. Volume 1 here

Potentially others too, I will email.

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Given the proximity, yet higher position, of Seaguy to it, I'm just chalking it up to lack of exposure. I don't remember the series ever having been reprinted (maybe the Headmen storyline could have been? But not that I remember), and it must be close to 30 years old now.

Curse my lack of quarter bins!

Thanks for the kind words WRT my New Frontier babbling, Huk.

47 points.

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"I've never read another comic as kinetic and streamlined as Akira." - Wooden

I think if this list was ranked on 'importance' Akira would be even higher - back in the late 80s it was probably the most famous Japanese comic, and I think was a lot of people's first real actual encounter with the vast and much-whispered-of world of 'manga', plus then there was the whole film thing. All I can remember about it now are explosions and motorbikes though (no bad thing in itself).

"Where do you start with something as big as Akira? The 1988 feature length landmark anime stunned nerds world-wide with its high concept storyline, sophisticated animation and cyberpunk inspired themes, and single-handedly kicked Japanamation into the mainstream. But to many fans, the anime version is a pale shadow of the 2,000-plus-page manga on which it was based.

Originally serialised in Japan between 1981 and 1993, Katshurio Otomo's sci-fci tome was a revelation to many western comic fans when Epic serialised an English version in the early 90’s. A bold and breathtaking epic of potent narrative strength and astonishing illustrative skill, Akira is set in the post-apocalypse Neo-Tokyo of 2019, a vast metropolis built on the ashes of a Tokyo annihilated by an blast of unknown power that triggered World War III. Against this background, Otomo skilfully weaves multiple story strands, involving doped up biker gangs, psychic children, secret government experiments, mad scientists and corrupt politicians, revolutionaries, religious cults, suprisingly tragic and tender relationships, and an investigation into the nature of time and consciousness. These are interspersed with huge set piece action and battle scenes that take place over entire issues of the original manga, and entire plotlines, barely touched upon in the anime are explored, with previously incoherent story strands drawn together to form a much more complete version of the story.

Riding high on the success of his award winning manga: DOMU, Otomo’s vision is executed with extreme confidence. Like his contemporaries; Jiro Tanaguichi, Yukinobo Hoshino, and Akima Yoshida, Otomo eschewed the traditional ‘big eyes’ approach to manga, with a gritty and super-detailed drawing style, that owed more to Moebius than Tezuka. Standout scenes abound. The biker battles in the early issues. Akira’s awakening, Kaneda’s many escapes from certain death, the satellite laser attack on Tokyo, Tetseuo’s battle with the US navy, and his destruction of half of the moon, all leading to an incredible climax, and one of the most satisfying last pages of a comic that I’ve ever had the pleasure to read...

If you haven't got a copy, go out an buy, borrow or steal one. You wont regret it."
- Droid

Availability: Droid sez - "After years of only publishing only the first volume in Europe, Dark horse comics have recently reprinted the entire series with the original black and white artwork over 6 volumes - 350 (or so) pages per volume, though it’s worth seeking out the original Epic editions purely for the excellent colouring throughout, and for overall ‘swankiness’. Graphitti’s full colour hardback editions, released in the late 90’s should be bought on sight.

http://www.darkhorse.com/search/search.php?frompage=userinput&sstring=akira

49 points.

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"One of the great things I enjoy about Kochalka is his ability to draw floppy things. Floppy elves, floppy kitties, and most amazingly, the floppy snow."
- Chris Piuma on ILE, back in the day.

Availability: Website here. Buy it here.

49 points.

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"With all due respect to Warren Ellis and his inspired mixture of hard science, pop science, science fiction, pulp heroism, history, mythology (ancient and modern) and, of course, fantastical spandexed foofery, Planetary would be just another admirable hair in his beard were it not for John Cassaday. Each panel offered by Cassaday merges a stark Spartan precision with lush verisimilitude and a overwhelming sense of importance - a scene featuring the 3 archaeologists of the impossible shoot the shit bears the same weight as a scene depicting ethereal aliens gliding silently on gossamer butterfly wings over the open grave of a monolithic stone corpse. And each moment is important - Planetary spans the 20th century and the globe, and does so with an infectous cynical wonder that turned what could have been a hoary exercise in lifeless wink-addled postmodernism into am awe-inspiring ornate triumph."
- David Raposa

Availability: This looks like a good place to start.

50 points.

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"Of all non-children's comics made in Europe, Corto Maltese is the one that is perhaps most often compared, favourably, to "real" literature. I won't go into the discussion whether such comparisons are in any way relevant, but it's interesting to note that Corto Maltese is still very much reliant on the comic form. It's not one story in one book, but a series of albums and short stories. This form allowed Hugo Pratt, the man behind the series, to build upon the personalities of the characters, to have them disappear for years, or even decades, and then just return to the series. For example, one couldn't understand the "I love you, but I want to kill you" relationship between Corto and Rasputin by just reading one story - you have to know their history from the beginning. Also, the series form allowed Pratt to change the style of the comic from historical realism to high adventure to fantasy; and towards the end, mix them all into a wonderfully dream-like blend.

So what is Corto Maltese? It is a story about the titular character, a shipless sailor, one of the coolest characters ever to inhabit the comic realm, who divides his fellow human beings not into "good" and "bad", but into "sympathetic" and "unsympathetic". It is, if you need to narrow it down to a genre, a "historical adventure" taking place in the 1910s and 1920s; however, Pratt treats the history of different areas and different peoples of the world with more respect than most other writers, and even though Corto Maltese has its share of adventure, more often than not it turns into poetic movement, captured by Pratt's highly idiosyncratic storytelling as well as his impressionistic, flowing pencil line."
- Tuomas

Availability: You can get English editions of some of the stories but if Amazon is anything to go buy you'll be paying scalpers' prices for them. Better to check them out in the original, for example here.

This is an interesting view, because as you certainly know, during the run of the series Pratt's line got less and less detailed and more and more impressionistic and simplified. I think his broad srikes fit quite well with the last two Corto stories (The Secret Rose and Mu), since they're grounded more in dreams than in reality.

Have you seen the Corto Maltese animated feature, Martin? It's quite good.

It's worth noting that comics have never really made it as an adult medium in the UK or US. There's been the odd breakthrough success like Maus or Jimmy Corrigan, but not a general adult audience, so something that is an adventure story, and therefore not evident to everyone as Serious Literature, but isn't colourful superhero action, is stepping into territory where the potential audience is very small. And the magazine was never translated into English, which surprised me - I'd have thought the numbers across North America and the UK would have made that worthwhile.

51 points.

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2000AD was where I learned about comics, and it makes sense to me that my favourite 2000 story should be my #1 pick in this poll. The ABC Warriors is for me the epitome of that special mix of violence, adventure, crude energy, satire, wit and attitude that men call thrill-power: no other comics give me that particular kick, and it's still a big chunk of what I'm looking for.

The story is simple: in the future robots fight the wars while humans deal with the tactics. The ABC Warriors (Atomic, Bacterial, Chemical) are all robot veterans of planet-scarring conflicts who are brought together to clean up Earth's Martian colony. Each of the Warriors has their own special skills and their own particular flaws and obsessions (my personal favourite is General Blackblood, the portly robot war criminal who drinks his enemies' oil) - their mixture is highly combustible, and the Martian setting allows for further doses of lunacy (cyborg baboons, low-gravity bike cults, hallucinogenic plagues, rogue dinosaurs).

The six-page episodes mean that the pace is blisteringly fast, but what lifts it above other 2000AD strips for me is three creators on peak efficiency. Pat Mills' mystical concerns hadn't yet overwhelmed his ability to tell a bitingly nasty (and very funny) story and the series is filled with broad-brush one-panel character bits and crazed sci-fi ideas. Kevin O'Neill is the absolute master of manic robot art and his designs here are superlative. And Mike McMahon (he and O'Neill draw half the series each) - well, to my mind there has never been a British artist who does action scenes so well. On the Warriors (and contemporary Dredd stories) he was Britain's Kirby. The artists were helped by the fact that 2000AD gave the strip its coveted centre pages, allowing them to mix the frenetic action with gorgeous double-page spreads and splashes. Vibrant, dumb and crackling with life, it's my favourite comic.

Availability: Amazon has it under the title "The Meknificent Seven" and with a fine McMahon cover spoiled by odd colouring choices. But inside it's a peach!

51 points.

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"A most unusual comic book experience" ran the tagline on every issue of Larry Marder's Tales Of The Beanworld, and whatever you thought of the series that at least was hard to deny. The Beanworld high (and highly original) concept was of a comic where the suspense lies not in the character's activities, but in their environment. The Beanworld is a complex working ecology, mapped out by Marder and revealed bit by bit across the 20+ issues and several mini-comics, ashcans and guest appearances. Readers would piece together clues as to the nature and purpose of Beanworld characters and events: as far as I know, much was never finally revealed. You can delve into the Beanworld further here.

Availability: Not in print, but Amazon Marketplace and eBay often have the trades (3 volumes) in stock.

51 points.

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"Obviously Miyazaki is as close to a household name as almost any comic artist in the world, thanks to animated movies, which is where he and this story started. It may be the greatest movie adaptation, though that does limit this, ever produced. He adjusts to comics exceptionally well, giving the art more texture than in animation, using the variety of panel sizes and the page unit. But mainly, this is a great story, an anti-technology and rampant capitalism tale of ecology, war and pacifism, with a terrific central character. The volumes I have quote the Comics Journal saying it's the best graphic novel ever, and that isn't a crazy claim."
- Martin Skidmore

"This is the first graphic novel I ever read and I think I’m lucky to have started off with such an incredible story. It opened my eyes to the way that comics had the ability to show sound and movement in addition to plot. The creatures and problems in this story are invented yet familiar. It’s science fiction and fantasy and drama and action. It’s the best fucking story you’ve never read! The good news is that VIZ is releasing new editions of the series in slim, large trade paperback size. I think this is going to mean more volumes to buy (8 instead of 4), but it’ll be a hell of a lot cheaper than your complete Bone or Sandman library. What’s it all about? “It has been a millennium since a global war destroyed human civilization. Only a tiny remnant of humanity survives. The Fukai, a thick jungle whose spores and plantlife are poisonous to humans, covers much of the Earth’s surface. Feeding on the pollutants of the former human civilization, the Fukai continues to expand, enveloping the outposts of mankind and consuming them. Giant mutated insects are now the dominant form of life. One of the islands of humanity is known as the Valley of the Wind. Protected from the spores by strong winds from the sea, these winds also power a forest of windmills to perform work and pump water from underground wells. Nonetheless, the inhabitants of the Valley must still be vigilant to ensure that the fungi do not gain a foothold amongst their crops and water supply.” And that’s just be beginning…"
- Vermont Girl

Availability: Yes, in America at least - this is a how-to-buy guide

52 points.

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Most 2000AD stories, even the greatest ones, were based on recognisable adventure genres transposed into the future. Future sport, future cops, future war. Nemesis The Warlock stands apart from the rest, though, a highly individual and semi-deranged vision of the future that's probably the most original thing the comic ever published.

Again it's the amazing character designs of Kevin O'Neill that give the strip its power. Nemesis is a freakish satanic centaur - his arch-enemy, Torquemada, is a kind of cybernetic Klansman. Torquemada rules an empire of fear sustained by inherited hypertechnology nobody truly understands: his mission is to cleanse the galaxy of 'deviants', its other alien inhabitants. Nemesis is the 'arch-deviant' a Warlock possessed of weird psychic/magical powers who flies around in a sentient ship. Over the course of four books they fight to a highly apt and satisfying conclusion (the series of course continued beyond this very natural endpoint - a shame as the quality dropped off rapidly).

The atmosphere of the strip is dark, mysterious, blackly humourous - for a while the titular hero is hardly seen (and not obviously a hero at all). Later books see the focus shift to Torquemada - 2000AD's single finest villain - and his baroque designs for galactic conquest. Mills scripts throughout, and is on excellent form, juggling a cast of grotesques (latterly including the ABC Warriors) with glee. O'Neill puts in superb work on Books I and III, Jesus Redondo does a decent job on Book II, but the series' high point is Book IV, drawn by Bryan Talbot and set in the Gothic Empire, whose shapechanging aliens have modelled their society on Victorian Britain and claim not to be 'deviants' at all, a view Torquemada is quick to disagree with.

Availability: The first two books are in print, but III and IV appear not to be - hunt for them on eBay, in the lovely old Titan Books editions, confusingly called Books 2 and 3, as they never reprinted the original Book II.

53 points.

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"The apocalyptic scenario is a hoary old chestnut, as is the idea of being THE LAST MAN. What Brian Vaughn hit upon with Y: The Last Man (still a pretty lousy title) is that you may well be the last man but what about all the women?

The first issue of Y is a masterful example of how to suck your readers in. Five or six scenarios from around the world before the cataclysm happens. And then bosh, all the men die. No explaination, no reasoning. All the men (except Yorrick our hero and his monkey) die out. What next?

What next is four months later, women grieving, taking control. Vaughn has thought this through, he has wondered exactly what might happen, from millenialist cults, to straight-forward coping. And of course in the middle of it is Yorrick, a man who might hold the key to what happened, a potential solution and mainly a man the the rest of the world wants to shag/kill/experiment on. A great fugitive piece, a well thought out piece of speculative fiction. And a fantastic artist in Pia Guerra.

The most addictive on-going at the moment."
- Pete Baran

Availability: Trades aplenty for DC's critical hit. Here's the first.

53 points.

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"The huge bat crashing through Bruce Wayne's window is perhaps the ultimate symbol of the 'grim and gritty' era of the superhero."
- Wooden

Classic origin stories are not generally classic comics - for most of the iconic characters, their first appearance is clumsy and rushed, something to be got out of the way before the action starts. So it's not surprising retellings of the origins became de rigeur in mainstream comics - here was a chance to give these stories their 'proper care'. In DC's case, the wholesale reboot of their continuity in 1985 meant that creators had an extra carrot - the opportunity to craft that 'definitive' story about a character. Batman: Year One was not the first or last of these, but it was probably the most radical and certainly the best.

Having had the opportunity to tell the last Batman story, Miller approached the first in a similar spirit of uncompromise. The central fact of the Batman - his parents were murdered; from this everything follows - was starkly presented and constantly emphasised. The city in which he operates was presented as a hellish cesspit, the kind of place which might deserve his extralegal methods. Supporting characters were given fresher, sharper definition. And it all worked - this was gripping, brutal, shocking stuff when it came out, much grimier even than Miller's Daredevil, which I'd read bits of but which in comparison came off as a streetwise superhero comic. This, though, was a crime thriller that happened to have a cape in it.

I think if I read it again now I'd be more drawn in by David Mazzuchelli's (gorgeously coloured) art, which back in 1986 was a bit too weird for me. In contrast to the granite-carved figures of Dark Knight Returns, his characters (even his Bruce Wayne) seemed lonely and vulnerable. It's so natural now to think of him as an 'indie' artist, you almost forget how good this stuff was.

Year One has been enormously influential. On the good side, it cemented a link between superhero and crime storytelling which has led to a lot of good comics since. It also concisely and powerfully defined Batman as a character, which is a bit more problematic. Year One's Batman worked for Frank Miller - it's not always worked since.

Availability: Unsurprisingly, yes.

-- Ned Ragget (jordan...), November 12th, 2004. (later)

IDENTITY THIEF

2. I am super-pleased to be the person blurbing Kochalka. I continue to be awed by his floppy snow.

3. I'm glad that Beanworld made it on the list. There are four volumes. Is he still working on it?

You should have those other comments in yr gmail now. Hope I haven't held this up as a result.

Like Andrew, although I suspect my #1 choice will not make it I am deluding myself that other people have voted for it and it's still to come.

[crying silently]

54 points.

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[Comment pending.] (feel free to submit one to the same place you sent the votes!)

Availability: Epileptic 1 is here, but it's not the full story - an omnibus volume, which I think is coming soon, will include books 1 and 2.

54 points.

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"Despite its rapid descent into self-indulgence after the first arc, Promethea has to be given its dues for being the most consistently experimental mainstream title on the stands. A formal triumph."
- Wooden

More comments to come (hopefully!). Until the very last ballot Promethea had the unfortunate distinction of having the most votes outside the Top 60 (34 points from 7 different people!).

Availability: Five books, four currently published with the fifth on the way. Here's Book 1.

56 points.

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"Ice Haven represents Clowes' big shift into new areas of comics storytelling and language - having refined and redefined his verbal language and the mechanics of his plots into things of beauty almost totally divorced from the rough sardonic savagery of the early issues - he takes a step back, into the form, reinventing and recreating it from the ground up, using the reader's basic knowledge of comics-as-object - what a newspaper strip is, what a comic is - to make us put the story together ourselves, playing detective to uncover Random Wilder's bizarre cry for help and to make all these strange, disparate little strips into a cohesive whole.

How long before Batman shouts something in a speech bubble half-off-the-panel?"
- Al Ewing

Availability: You might actually - gasp! - have to visit a comic shop for this one!

xpost - me neither. I think Nemesis was the only 2000 AD strip I voted for. I would've voted for the Apocalypse War, though.

56 points.

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When 2000AD started running Zenith I was sceptical - for all its panache, and for all that Grant Morrison knew his way round a cliffhanger, this was still a bit of a naff Watchmen pastiche, right?

Well yes, it was. But there were a lot of them about in '87, and Zenith has aged better than all the rest. British creators may have helped invigorate the superhero genre in the last 20 years, but this is still easily the best attempt at doing a British superhero comic. Not that Zenith is a superhero: he's a pop star with superpowers, the costume is a prop. There's a fantastic single panel in the fourth and last Zenith story with him gormlessly waving maracas on a 'trippy' background in the video to what you presume is his 'indie-dance' single. It's little details like that which make me like Zenith - you wouldn't get the Dazzler going baggy.

So much of the fun of Zenith is in the details and little nods to UK pop culture - of course that's how Michael Heseltine would act if he had superpowers; how could we have ever doubted that Richard Branson was a megalomaniac wannabe-supervillain? I really wish George Formby's "Mr Wu's A Superhuman Now" existed. And they get about four episodes of screen time, but "anarchist superteam Black Flag" are still deliciously well designed and very recognisable.

And you don't just get a UK Watchmen from Zenith, you get the UK Crisis On Infinite Earths too, 140 pages of mayhem starring every previous two-bit UK superhero Morrison could dig up. Including Acid Archie, the house-music-loving robot. Once you're past the portentious first few episodes, Zenith is ridiculously good fun.

Availability: Out of print. Titan Books published the whole story in five books which you can find used sometimes. I assume DC/Rebellion will want to reprint it soon though given the name writer.

actually it's going to have all six volumes!

Availability: You might actually - gasp! - have to visit a comic shop for this one!

expanded re-formatted graphic novel version coming from Pantheon next year though

Availability: Out of print. Titan Books published the whole story in five books which you can find used sometimes.

Phase 4 never got reprinted, the Titan books only covered the B&W material.

59 points.

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"The premise alone would be enough to carry this one. Moore at his most playful, O'Neill at his most beautiful. The plotting is ridiculously tight."
- Wooden

"Having explored the birth of the modern-day superhero in '1963', Alan Moore starts his retiral from hero comics by going back yet further to the birth of science fiction itself. Stymied by a legal wrangle which prevents him from using two of the main characters he intended, Moore creates analogues for the Invisible Man and Fu Manchu and weaves them seamlessly into the Victorian world where fictional icons such as Alan Quatermain, Henry Jekyll and Captain Nemo are some kind of steampunk JLA.

The real joy, however, is that Moore knows his subject intimately and the sheer volume of detail he's crammed in is astounding. Almost nothing in any of the panels is accidental, from Ally Sloper in a crowd scene to Brobdingnagian skeletons, and after reading the scripts you can only wonder at the scope of the task presented to Kev O'Neill and how he rose to the challenge.

It's perhaps impossible to describe the effect this book had on me - at a time when I was slowly becoming interested in comics again, and was able to indulge myself in them for the first time in maybe 10 years, this book dragged me kicking and screaming back in, and turned me into the slavering fanboy I am today. For shame, Mr Moore, for shame."
- Aldo Cowpat

Availability: Aldo sez - "Both Volumes are widely available, but also seek out the Absolute edition for a script to page comparison, and Jess Nevins' annotations book "Heroes & Monsters" is highly recommended for the painstaking recording and tracing of all the references and in-jokes Moore and O'Neill have scattered throughout."

60 points.

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A beautiful comic and often as close as the form gets to pure visual storytelling - the potential of comics to channel an individual's vision wonderfully realised. Frank is a "non-specific anthropomorph" who has adventures in a dreamlike landscape. The adventures can switch suddenly from the whimsical to the mysterious to the repulsive and disturbing - no moral or meaning is ever made explicit, which only seems to add to the experience. The feeling of reading Frank is closer to a really good art installation than a really good mainstream comic - not for everyone perhaps, but there's nothing else quite like it.

Availability: The Frank Book! Go get it! Also - Woodring homepage, much goodness.

60 points.

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[Comments pending. I remember Yummy Fur as being a good, if mournful read, though I was occasionally frustrated by the protagonist's personality - in retrospect he reminds me of Graham!]

Availability: Several Graphic Novels - "Ed The Happy Clown", "The Playboy" and "I Never Liked You" being key. I don't know if Brown's Gospel retellings that appeared as a back-up story are collected anywhere, though, and I don't know what he's been up to in the last 5 years or so - can anyone fill me in?

xpost

I found League 2 way better than the first one... having a coherent plot helped a lot, even if it was a stolen one. Moore is really making progress, from just stealing characters to stealing plots as well.

60 points.

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"Phoenix was the life work of the ‘god of manga’ Osamu Tezuka. Wildly ambitious in terms of scope, story and structure, it is a unique and powerful work, which reflects all of the essential themes that Tezuka explored during his amazingly productive 35 year career as a Mangakai.

Serialised in Japan http://en.tezuka.co.jp/manga/backlist/hi07/ between 1954 until his death in 1989, Phoenix is the most intellectually challenging of Tezuka’s works. Over the course of 12 volumes, Man’s quest through the ages for the mythological Phoenix, and for immortality is used as a framework to analyse the meaning of life. The stories converge on the present from both the future and the past, whilst the setting jumps from ancient Japan, to an Orwellian future world thousands of years in the future. T he same characters reappear in different incarnations, united only by the constant moral and humanist theme, and the presence of the mythical Phoenix watching from the shadows. This audacious concept is best summed up with Tezuka’s own words:

…every country has a legend about a mysterious bird such as the phoenix. In these legends, the symbol of supernatural lifeforce takes form as a bird…

I wanted to utilise this phoenix to portray Japanese history in my own way. The theme would be about man’s attachment to life, and the complications that arise from greed…

…I wanted to start from the beginning and then the end of a long story. The story would then return to the ancient period right after the dawn of man. I would then continue to go back and forth, between past and future. In the end, I would set the story where past and present converge – the present. This story, set in the present, would tie all the previous stories together to form a long drams running from the dawn of man to the distant future. Each story would stand on it’s own and would seem to have nothing to do with the other stories, but the final story would tie everything together…

Each episode would portray life from various angles and set up different problems. Moreover, the style of the episodes would vary from one to another, covering a range of genres: science-fiction, war story, mystery, comedy….

The artwork throughout the volumes is also something special. As with most of Tezuka’s work, Phoenix is influenced by the work of Disney and other early American animation studios; the characters, especially in the sci-fi stories, possess the old school manga ‘look’ (big glossy eyes, pointy hair, tiny mouth), yet at the same time the detailed and measured style is much more reminiscent of Tezuka’s ‘serious’ works, such as Adolf, Buddha, and Black Jack, than the ‘big’ Tezuka manga such as: Astro Boy, Jungle Emperor Leo, or Ribbon No Kishi. As with much of Tezuka’s work, the compositions and use of panel layout are consistently innovative, and propel the narrative through the heavier sections of the story.

Phoenix is one of those rare works that transcends the medium in which it was created. It is, for want of a better word, truly ‘deep’, yet it maintains its charm, playfulness and innocence throughout. It is a true testament to Tezuka’s position as the ‘god of manga’, and rightfully deserves a place of honour in every true comic fan’s collection.

Availability: First four volumes are available (at a very reasonable price) from Viz:

http://store.viz.com/browse/PHOENIX/GRNOV/s.N5buDtoJ , though they seriously confused things by releasing Vol. 2 (A tale of the future) first. There is also a story from Vol. 4. (Karma) in Fredrick L. Schodt’s ‘Manga, Manga, Manga’ anthology. For the multilingual, the entire series is also available in both Japanese and French editions.

There is also a series of Phoenix anime: Dawn 1978, Space Firebird 2772 (1981, aka Phoenix 2772 ?), Karma (1986), Yamata (1986), Space 1986 (1986), though to my knowledge, only Space Firebird 2772 (1981, aka Phoenix 2772 ?), is available in English."
- Droid

xpost - That does sound good.

61 points.

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[Comments pending. Journalistic/oral history account of the Bosnian war.]

Availability: Yes.

This latest batch of winners has been kind of surprising! Not in a bad way, mind you.

I don't think so. I Never Liked You and The Playboy are both autobiographical and completely different.

That's all for tonight - sorry for drawing this out so long!

(Were there any Wilkie Collins references in League? I don't remember any, which seems a bit strange.)

You must have missed the MOONSTONE OF ULTIMATE DOOM arc.

i'm really fascinated by that description of "frank" which i haven't read - i did a search and found this story about jim woodring - makes me want to read it even more now. (sorry about the caps)

"HE WAS AT A PARTY TELLING SOMEONE THAT HIS THERAPIST HAD REFUSED TO CONTINUE WORKING WITH HIM AFTER SEEING HIS STUFF. THE PERSON EXPLAINED THAT THEY WERE A THERAPIST, AND THAT THEY WERE SHOCKED THAT ANY FELLOW PROFESSIONAL COULD BE SO NEGLIGENT. DID HE HAVE ANY OF HIS WORK ON HIM, THE THERAPIST WANTED TO KNOW. HE DID, AND IT WAS TAKEN AWAY. A FEW DAYS LATER JIM GOT A CALL FROM THE THERAPIST SAYING THAT UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WOULD HE TREAT HIM EITHER. HE REFUSED TO SAY WHY."

One of my New Year's resolutions is going to be to read a non-triumvirate comic, I'll have to see what's available (one of the nice things about Amazon is that I'll bet they have a "my favorite French comics in translation" list or some such).

YUMMY FUR
Yummy Fur as an irregular comic title fell roughly into 4 eras. There was the early punk borderline stream-of-consciousness nonsense, which later coelesced into the developing narrative based around the "pilgrim" character of Ed The happy Clown. The most well know/received work is the autobiog stuff (Apartment, Playboy, Little Man, I Hate You), which later dissolved into the (to me) uninspiring final issues – defended by some as minimalist romance, but largely seen (I think) as lazy and dull.

The collections of the early stories (Ed the Happy Clown) are an attempt to retrospectively legitimise the early issues of YF, but it is apparent to anyone who reads those early issues that there was no such "master plan". Things, quite sick things, just occurred to Brown. And then he drew them and sold them as a comic. I lapped up the shoddy drawing (which either rapidly improved, or were kept deliberately "base" from the get go), and the genius spark that lay behind the images kept me going back to the wretched comic shop in the (usually dashed) hope that the next issue had finally arrived.

So early editions of YF covered: vampires, frankingstein, experiments on masturbating squid, canibalism, a man with the president's head on his cock and a man that can't stop shitting. The transition to autobiography cleared away the scatalogical humour (I don't count Little Man as such) and the wackiness for tender "slice of life" sketches. This was inspired by his "friend" Jo Matt - at the time producing the work collected into the "Peep Show" trade book - but surpassing him both in maturity (faint praise) and sheer narrative ability. I Hate You is the stuff of indie-movies, a simple adolescent love story, and a gem. The Playboy is a frank exploration of his obsession with soft porn, and is largely remembered for explicitly showing how Brown used to wank (over a chair, with some sort of weird "rolling" technique, don't you know).

The baffling Underwater (did that even finish?) and the tedium (even to French Canadians) of Luis Riel rarely showed (me) the talent aparent in those early YF issues. It had the disappointment of watching John Lydon slide to the point of fronting a Channel 5 documentary on sharks. I still live in hope that he will write something on the Chris Ware scale of cross-over into serious art. Though of course, I think YF was that anyway.

Love those hand drawn frame edges.

(I'll do Safe Area later - must get back to work.)

The Nikopol Trilogy (Gods in Chaos, The Woman Trap, Cold Equator) by Enki Bilal
One of the best sci-fi comics ever by one of the best comic artists ever.

Anything by Clare Bretécher
Bretécher is the mother of all realistic human relationship comics, and a master of wry humour.

Anything by Ralf König
König is the German heir of Bretécher, even though his humour is more outrageous and his characters more sympathetic. He's probably the best observer of relationships and love in the comic world today. He writes mostly about gay men, but his stories certainly have an universal appeal. Sadly, only a handful of König's comics have been translated in English.

Mafalda by Quino
Basically an Argentinian version of Peanuts, with more pondering of world politics added. Onbe of my favourite comic strips of all time.

Alack Sinner by Carlos Sampayo and José Munoz
A comic film noir updated to the present day, quite a grim and pessimistic story. Sampayo and Munoz are Argentinians living in France, but the comic takes place in New York. The art is beautiful, though not to everyone's taste.

Valérian by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières

The classic French sci-fi comic, Valérian stories have been released ever since the late sixties. The newer albums aren't that good anymore, but the stuff from the seventies and eighties is brilliant. Valérian has inspired many sci-fi films, including (apparently) Star Wars and Dark City. Mézières was also responsible for designing the aliens in Luc Besson's Fifth Element.

Those are just a few recommendations, I can provide more if needed.

62 points.

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"Don't let the dreadful movie put you off: the Gerber run of the comic is maybe the most scathing and funny satire in American comics, ever. It started as a comedy cameo, but once he had his own series, it developed enormously, after a few parody issues (fantasy, kung fu, etc.), into an exceptional title. Colan was the perfect artist, and the strength and coherence of the next year is extraordinary. It was erratic after that, starting with the insane lots-of-text-plus-illustrations #16, but the best moments are exceptional - after a weedy Star Wars parody, issue 24, 'What Do You Do The Day After You Save The Universe', is a masterpiece, one of my favourite single issues of any comic ever. The post-Gerber issues are nearly as bad as the film, by the way - a bunch of writers who simply didn't get it. The Essential collection is as great a buy as you can hope to find."
- Martin Skidmore

Availability: That Essential HTD in full.

63 points.

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"Mysticism? Ninjas? Apocalypse? Telepathy? High-powered cyborgs? Little blue mutants? Id-driven foul-mouthed anti-establishment anti-hero? And last but not least, ELEKTRA IN ALL HER HEADSCARFED NAME-TAKING OH-NO-SHE-DIN'T-JUST-OH-YES-SHE-DID GLORY??"
- Leeee

I'm not sure I'd want to read Elektra again despite remembering zero about it, but when it came out Sienkiewicz' radical art and the general fucked-upness of the comic took the top of my teenage head off. Total style overload.

Availability: Yes.

As for Elektra, I'm surprised it made it as high as it did, since it seems overlooked as these things go. If you want to read more lengthy comments about the book, make with the clicky to read a column I wrote on Elektra earlier this year.

63 points.

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"If you think about Pulp, or Noir, or Detective, or Storytelling, or Action, or Emotion, or Cool, or Titles or Words or Pictures or Anything that actually Works in Comics... then you're probably thinking about Eisner. If you're thinking about Eisner, you're probably thinking about The Spirit.

NOW GET ON YOUR KNEES"
- Al Ewing

The chosen picture is totally unrepresentative but I liked it!

Availability: I plead a certain amount of ignorance. The Spirit Archives series is ongoing and pricey, reprinting the newspaper strips the character originated in - and several volumes aren't by Eisner, being written and drawn when he was fighting in WWII. If there are good collections for readers of more limited budgets, let us know about them! The 80s and 90s comics reprints should still be available if you dig in back issue bins, too.

(Smack dab?)

64 points.

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The devotion of entire broadsheet newspaper pages to a single full colour comic strip seems to this UK reader like an act of quite staggering commercial generosity, especially when the strip was as downright ravishing as Windsor McCay's Little Nemo In Slumberland. An American reply to - and consummation of - the golden age of Victorian fantasy illustration (Rackham etc.), Nemo is rarely less than beautiful and at its best (the sequences at the North Pole, for instance) it's hard to think of a more exquisite strip.

But of course it's not just eye-candy. The composition of the strips is superb too - McCay must be one of the most elegant of storytellers - and the idiosyncratic dialogue is deeply charming. Frank at No.39 comes close to what dreams feel like - Nemo will always be what we'd WANT them to feel like. Its effect on comics is vast and wide-ranging: Chris Ware's meticulous compositions, Watterson's commitment to the fantastic and beautiful, even the baroque fantasias of later fantasy art - they all start here.

Availability: There used to be a 6-volume, large format Complete Little Nemo available - I have Volumes 1-4 and they're some of my most treasured books. I'm not sure it's still in print, in fact I think it isn't. You could do worse than pick this up, edited though it seems to be (you could also get McCay's hilarious Rarebit Fiend collection, which is actually the best introduction to him, but isn't what we've voted for here).

I am pretty sure that the President Duck stuff is from the Gerber run, but I don't own those comics - if I'm wrong, my apologies to Martin (and Howard).

Howard the Duck and Nemo both seem low on the list, although I'm not sure I even voted for Nemo, because it's been so long since I've read it (for the most part I only voted for things I had read somewhat recently, so that nostalgia wouldn't prove the only factor for any vote).

As far as The Spirit -- Kitchen Sink did oodles of reprints at one point (I have boxes of them), but then they went out of business, and I think they came back into business, and I have no idea what's in print at this point, nor by whom. Even if they're not in print, I suspect they're easily had from stores with large inventories, or used from places like Amazon/Powells (not because I think people are rushing to get rid of their Spirit comics, don't get me wrong).

68 points.

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I just titled a series of company mailouts "The Fact Is..." and felt far too pleased with myself. "Far too pleased with himself" is not an accusation Grant Morrison is unfamiliar with, but for all its intricacy, dubious wordplay, misdirection and indulgence Flex Mentallo is ultimately worthwhile. A love story to the imagination, the comic is (one one level) Grant asking himself - and us asking ourselves - "Why do I, a grown man, still care about fucking superheroes?". The comic ends up a rejection of cynicism and a defense of escapism, and even if you end up thinking it's a load of cobblers, well, thanks to Frank Quitely it still looks bloody gorgeous.

Availability: Naughty Grant! Flex himself is based a little too closely on the himbo from the Charles Atlas ads and Mr Atlas was not amused by his metafictional exploits. But like The Fact's green-edged, singed cards, you can find the four issues if you know where to look (search for comics and gmail on the ILC Search page, for instance). Meanwhile check out The Annotated Flex Mentallo (which features an essay by the Pinefox' brother!!)

I'm interested in how people voted generally - any distinction between 'favourites' and 'greats' for instance? And of course I'm interested in what people think will win and do well (though I plead again - DONT POST YOUR BALLOTS until the rundown ends next week).

I think I've told this story before, but why I have so many Spirit comics (or have had, since I've given many away, too) and don't know how much they cost: one of my exes, when she wasn't yet an ex, and my best friend from college both worked for Kitchen Sink Press around the time Crumb and The Crow 2 were coming out, i.e. when the going-out-of-business was on the horizon. My ex's immediate boss was fired to cut costs, and in a fit of pique she filled ex's car with merchandise from the stock room, including boxes of Crow Zippos (over 30 of them), Eisner and Moebius comics, Li'l Abner, and so on, and said, "fuck them, take this, merry Christmas."

-- Huk-L (handsomishbo...), November 18th, 2004.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Maybe for the same reason I haven't - as Tom pointed out, the reprints are way too expensive.

-- Wooden (josephgoode...), November 18th, 2004.

If you want a taste, the first Smithsonian book (the one edited by Martin Williams) has a couple of the best stories. And there's a good one in Feiffer's "Great Comic Book Heroes" as well.

PREDICTIONS:
Safe bet winner: Watchmen
Dark horse (Not-So-Dark Division): Calvin & Hobbes

But they are all Dark Horse Star Wars and Aliens collections :(

(It is very good for Tintin too - but I have almost all the Tintin)

I realize things are different in Finland, Tuomas, but geez, your incredulity gets repetitive. Are you determined not to take peoples' statements at face value any time they don't reflect what things are like for you?

Tuomas, my library doesn't even carry books.

Voting: the top four couldn't have been otherwise, they're part of me. After that it's great and enjoyable -> enjoyable -> great.

Headscarf.

I see what you mean. I'm sorry.

69 points.

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"For Valerie's story."
- Andrew Farrell

I don't think I've ever sat down and read V as a whole. I bought it as a DC monthly series, having read the odd segment in issues of Warrior. It was - and probably is - strange how the initial narrative force (who is V?) diffuses so much, but of course that's characteristic of Alan Moore, who loves suggesting enormous upcoming fights but then sleight-of-hands them away into something (generally) more subtle. Further comments very welcome!

Availability: Very widely available and in print as a trade.

At 32 pages? Edited indeed! The Taschen edition runs 430pp, and only covers the original nine-year run!

You’re more likely to find the Taschen in remainder stores than in second-hand shops, actually – apparently it’s one of the worst-selling books they’ve ever done, and got tax-written-off in large quantities to at least Canadian and Australian enterprises. It was run from the same plates as the Fantagraphics multi-volume editions that Tom treasures, though, so is well worth the drastically reduced price.

FLEX MENTALLO

Availability: Naughty Grant! Flex himself is based a little too closely on the himbo from the Charles Atlas ads and Mr Atlas was not amused by his metafictional exploits.

Though DC actually won the court case, and still spinelessly promised not to reprint it so that the Atlas company wouldn’t bother suing and losing again. But the next Doom Patrol book should get up to the early Flex appearances (pre-Atlas parody, I think – when he was a shambling, amnesiac hobo), so if that ever comes out, it’s probably going to be a testing of the waters.

THE SPIRIT
If you want a taste, the first Smithsonian book (the one edited by Martin Williams) has a couple of the best stories. And there's a good one in Feiffer's "Great Comic Book Heroes" as well.

If I remember rightly, the current edition of Great Comic Book Heroes only reprints the essay, and none of the accompanying stories from the ‘70s one. With any luck, once they’re done cranking out the US$50 hardcovers, DC will start doing some paperbacks, but only starting with the post-war stuff. Of course, for DC to ever do ANYthing sensible with their collection policies requires a luck stockpile the size of a Finnish library.

70 points.

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This run is an excellent example of how a very weary franchise can be revitalised simply by dint of having someone come along and think a bit about its premise. Chris Claremont established the idea of mutants as a persecuted minority and then blithely wrote eleven hundred issues with barely a thought about what that might mean beyond giant mutant-bashing robots and the X-Men having something else to moan about.

Morrison comes on and gives us mutants outing themselves, mutant ghettoes, mutant chic, actually quite nuanced arguments over which way a 'mutant movement' should go, humans who want to be mutants as well as humans who hate mutants, 'trans-species' villains, mutant celebrities, all within the context of X-Men as basically a sci-fi comic rather than a superhero one. It was all pretty broad-brush stuff but enormously refreshing and indicative of somebody who'd actually thought a bit about real-world racial/sexual politics and how a metaphorical treatment of them might work.

Now strictly speaking most of this had been touched on by other writers but a) the overall tone of the series had been relentless persecution and b) Morrison did it better - there seemed infinitely more at stake in the debates between Professor X and a slick-haired preppy mutant snot in a "Magneto Was Right" T-Shirt than in endless wafflings between X and the real Magneto.

It's not all great - the art is very inconsistent (Quitely and monthly art being essentially incompatible, there's a lot of guesting going on) and after the outrageous initial reveal the big blockbuster storyline drops the ball somewhat. At its frequent best though New X-Men was electric, funny, smart and thoroughly mainstream storytelling.

Availability: 7 volumes in trade paperback from Marvel, or the actual issues are 114-154. The first volume is E For Extinction, and it's a good idea to start there even though the Riot At Xavier's book is actually the best one.

73 points.

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"A technically breathtaking, hermetically sealed graphic novel. Perfect."
- Wooden

Being one of the best comics storytellers of all time is rather more useful if you're telling a comics story, not an extended op-ed piece. Jaka's Story is one of the planks on which Cerebus' and Sim's reputation rests - it's also one of the sections of his 6000-page epic least reliant on the overall story. It may have started 112 issues into the comic, but all you really need to know is the stuff you pick up very quickly - Cerebus is hiding at Rick and Jaka's. He loves Jaka. Jaka is married to Rick. Cerebus' aardvarkicity is, for once, irrelevant.

Sim talked about how he wanted to theme a story around boredom without it being boring - after his densely plotted earlier epics he wanted a book where simple things happen slowly. He succeeded - and the things that do happen in the story are larger for the space they're given, and for the fact that they're based on human reactions to other human choices. One of the things you can say about Cerebus as a whole is that it turns out that there's no such thing as a 'typical' book or a 'good starting point' - but for what it's worth this is probably the best one.

Availability: Still in print, still widely stocked, Amazon has it.

73 points.

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"It's hard to simply pin down the greatness of Carl Barks. He didn't break any rules or revolutionise anything, and his work is pretty much all Disney ducks, Donald and Scrooge. I guess the Scrooge work is better, because although Donald was a corporate figurehead, the colossally rich and infinitely greedy Scrooge was Barks's own. What it comes down to is complete mastery of his medium: I'm not sure that comics have produced a more deft writer, and his art was flawless. He made the absolute most of some pretty narrow characters, using Donald's fatal flaws masterfully, and Scrooge's combination of vaulting ambition, mostly financial, and low cunning were a great mix for a long and completely satisfying run of stories (1947 to 1966). The one reasonably sensible criticism I've heard of these comics is their politics: certainly they are full of colonialist assumptions, every time the adventure takes them out of the 'first world', but it seems pointless getting too agitated about that sort of thing when it's half a century in the past. I recommend any and all of the Gladstone albums unreservedly."
- Martin Skidmore

Availability: I plead almost total ignorance. A lot of the gladstone albums Martin mentions seem to be in print and available at Amazon, though.

76 points.

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"Grant Morrison is a man who understands the obvious when no-one else will, and the obvious thing to do with the DC Universe's greatest heroes is invent enormous and implausible ways for them to save the world. (also, make them heroes)"
- Andrew Farrell

Morrison's JLA was probably the last time I really loved reading a monthly comic. It was also probably the last time good mainstream comics were written as monthlies, rather than with one eye on the trades. Reading the collected JLA can be a bit too-much-ice-cream, as hyperbole piles upon hyperbole and the breathless pace overwhelms you. Month-on-month, though, Morrison got it just right. The more epic it was (five-dimensional spirits picking up the moon; megaplanets guarding the edge of reality; Superman turned into a living synapse in a cosmic brain) the better it got. Each issue took maybe 10, 15 minutes to read and then you could de-adrenalise and look forward to the next one.

I wrote an article about Grant Morrison once for the Edinburgh Review. It talked about how the then-current JLA was 'comics techno'. Dance music had jettisoned the bits of music traditional critics (yes yes I secretly meant R0ck1sts!) went for like lyrics and melody, and had privileged rhythm and flow and kewl noises instead. And JLA had said "sod that" to 25 years of dialogue and characterisation as yardsticks for mainstream comics respectability and had gone with the mad huge stories and cosmic-scale dynamism and kewl moments. (This analysis is full of holes but I still like it.)

The Howard Porter art was completely appropriate in theory - Kirby meets Image, what could go wrong? - but rarely gelled. Other than that JLA is dumb reprehensible 90s comics Done Right and can represent its era with justified pride.

Availability: All trades in print, check on the cover to make sure it's Morrison, though, he's been a hard act to follow. "Rock Of Ages" is probably the best individual trade.

"V For Vendetta" is over-rated... the art and storytelling technique is impressive, but it trails off very badly after the break (from when Warrior magazine folded).

Hmm, it's true that his "indigenous people" are somewhat stereotypical, but he usually still treats them with at least some respect. Remember the issue where Scrooge's greed is about to destroy the land of the pygmy Indians? Barks has been criticized for his depiction of the Indians (they all look and act the same), but ultimately they're the heroes of the story.

I think Tom's analysis of Morrison's JLA is good - I think this is the best title ever for this approach, in that he obviously can't start coordinating lots of character stuff with all the Supes and Bats titles alone, besides all the others, and given the level of power of Supes, WW, GL, Martian Manhunter and so on, the only threats that work have to be on the grandest scale. I've always thought that if you take over a comic, one thing you have to think about is its USP - what makes this special, what distinguishes this from the other hundreds of titles out there? With the JLA it's the unchallenged iconic status and the level of power available, and I think Grant came up with the biggest, grandest threats possible to pit them against. I thought that moment in the final story when all seems lost and Batman is in telepathic contact with Superman saying something like "Mageddon may have destroyed the last universe. It may have wiped out the 10,000 greatest heroes of all time on Wonderworld. Heaven may have given up hope for this universe. But Clark - it hasn't faced US yet!" was a perfect moment, and very representative of what he did so magnificently with this title. I've read the whole lot five times now, perhaps more than I've reread any comic book series. I think it should have been higher (and so should Scrooge, of course). (This USP approach is what Tom also describes for the X-Men, obviously - I do actually remember having a conversation with Grant about this notion, which seems obvious but isn't apparent in most writers' work.)

Sorry Tuomas - Unique Selling Point, usually, i.e. what is it that makes this item special and different from (usually better than) the rest.

82 points.

"If some Samurai films are transplanted western, this is more like Shane - every episode shows another little diorama, and then.. someone's getting killed! Every once in a while the plot moves on a bit, giving the story of one man's fight against a clan an actual epic quality"
- Andrew Farrell

"This is an astounding work, 8,500 pages telling a single story, except obviously much of it is episodic, working as discrete stories. I'm pretty convinced that anyone with a tolerance for the comic medium and any taste for Kurosawa's samurai movies would love this thrilling and beautiful epic. Kazuo Koike is one of Japan's great comic writers, respected for his research and imagination as much as the strength of his characters and stories, and artist Goseki Kojima is one of the five or so greatest comic artists I've ever seen, an absolute master of pacing and design. Some of the individual panels stay in my mind more than anything by any other artist. The story is of the shogun's executioner, whose family is massacred by a rival clan. Only his baby son survives, and he takes him with him on his long and hard road to final vengeance. The child is the masterstroke: my favourite stories are those that give plenty of play to a small child who has been brought up in a completely focussed, completely alien way. There are moments when Kojima is called on to put something in this toddler's face that shocks and almost scares veteran warriors, and he pulls it off. This might be the greatest lengthy series comics have ever produced."
- Martin Skidmore

Availability: 28 volumes from Dark Horse - Volume 1 listed here

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83 points.

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"You can't read it, my god it's drivel, but they're some of the best looking comics I've ever seen."
- Charles Bromley

"There's a lot said about Ditko's Strange being some freaky hippy-style Yin to Nick Fury's Yang, the straight world and the freakish hippy-incense world taken to extremes of hypereality within the same insane comic - but taking Ditko's Strange on its own, you're just blown away by the sheer freshness of it. paths through Escher-like zones, moving through jaws set to snap closed - wierd creatures with rayguns for heads, every building in the ordinary city concealing at least one room filled with strange masks, eldritch bowls and people in outlandish headgear. Magic isn't appalling rhymes (that comes later, with Stan forcing his limp doggerel onto poor Bill Everett's pages) - it's living, sinuous tendrils of mad, manic energies, bulging eyes in sweating faces about to break from the sheer mental strain. Strange doesn't just wave his hands - and what hands, as the Ditko fingers flex like never before - his whole body often seems to be at work, posing in ways other artists just couldn't. And, as always, Stan gains lyrical energy from Ditko's wild cool, taking one look at these genius pages and spinning some of the wierdest and wildest prose of his career."
- Vic Fluro

I bought the Essential Dr Strange yesterday, prompted by its high placing in the poll. I think the way it deals with the unearthly and extra-dimensional has been so enormously influential that the original stories can now look ordinary because they're inventing this visual shorthand for oddness. Also, if you've got a hero whose schtick is making lots of hand gestures, then of course you need Ditko doing the art!

Availability: Reprinted, with the immediate post-Ditko run, in Essential Dr Strange Vol.1

If we end up with Maus/Watchmen in the first two spots I'm going on a rampage.

84 points.

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"I don't really think the Romitas are in the same class as the Ditkos. Especially #25-33, the comic's peak. My all time favorite is #30, a quiet little story with no super-villain, just a cat burglar, that sums up everything good about Spiderman. It was also the first Marvel comic I ever bought."
- Charles Bromley

A game of two halves, both hugely important for how cape comics developed. The Ditko run introduces the hard-luck hero to comics: Peter Parker's problems are soapily intractable and (something imitators often forgot) can be very darkly funny - the glorious #25 with J.Jonah Jameson's Spider-Slayer, for instance. The Romita era on the other hand was one of Stan Lee's canniest marketing moves - realising the traction his comics had gained in the student market he sent Spider-Man off to college: the results were slicker, smoother and a bit sunnier but still hugely readable (and they introduced sixties comicdom's ideal woman too).

Availability: You need Essential Spider-Man Vols 1 and 2 and half of 3. But also, if you see them cheap, the Marvel Tales 80s reprint issues are a good bet - you get the stories in colour and the charming period lettercolumns too.

88 points.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/alec.gif

"Having got bogged down in Bacchus, Eddie looked for a way out of his mental block. He found this, maybe the best autobiographical comic ever written. It shares much in common with several other things, such as Dave Sim's 'Guys', which Eddie's 'The King Canute Crowd' pre-empts at least in part, but what comes across most strongly is just how much Eddie cares for the people he's portraying and the frustration he feels at trying to give as much time to his art as he feels while remaining a good, and responsible, boyfriend, husband, and eventually father.

Available currently is 'The King Canute Crowd' (Eddie holding down a job and doing comics on the side), 'How To Be An Artist' (Eddie struggles for recognition at the height of the comics boom, while trying to be socially responsible, and eventually moves to Australia) and 'After The Snooter' (a middle-aged Eddie, in Australia, settles into life). Yet to be collected are the remaining issues of Bacchus Magazine not covered therein, and the first two issues of 'Egomania' (containing the still-to-be-completed 'History of Comedy'). Whether this will happen is anyone's guess, as Eddie has found it all too much (particularly in light of his experiences over 'From Hell' and the movie) and decided to give Anne proper support by winding up Eddie Campbell Comics and getting a proper job. Top Shelf are intending to keep his 'Alec' collections in print."
- aldo_cowpat

Availability: Wiser heads than me will be able to fill you in on this.

88 points.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/halojones.jpg

"The front page of the issue of 2000AD was pretty simple: tall girl, robotdog, alien or two in the background, fashions of the future. And two captions: Where did she go? Out. What did she do? Everything. In retrospect it was designed to hit a certain spot in the teenager's brain, but it hit it with laser precision."
- Andrew Farrell

There are two ways to read Halo Jones. One way - the most likely way - is to read it as a graphic novel. The advantage of this is that you get to enjoy the very careful plotting - throwaway lines and events in even the most all-action episodes have repercussions or echoes several episodes on. Read as a whole the joints show a bit, and the occasional wholesale borrowing is a bit glaring (though I remember being gobsmacked reading Michael Herr's Dispatches at school and finding that bit with the ears...) but Halo herself is as engaging as ever and Moore's setpieces are still funny, surprising and gut-wrenching.

But the way I read it was an episode at a time, in 2000AD, in the middle of assorted macho 2000AD strips (many of which I love very dearly). 2000AD was a sci-fi comic, and Alan Moore took it seriously as such and wrote a sci-fi story, rather than an action strip with robots in it. Almost every one of Halo Jones' 5-page episodes had a great little SF concept in it - a guy (or was it girl?) whose constant cosmetic surgery had left them un-noticeable; future shopping trips planned like military expeditions; the shame of learning to speak Cetacean to follow a dolphin pop star; the horror of war in an ultra-gravity environment. Halo Jones is most famed for being a people story in the middle of 2000AD's ultra-violence (and it is, though bits of the stuff I found really moving at 13 now read like one of Halo's holo-soaps), but it's also an idea story, and its ideas have barely dated.

Availability: One of the jewels in Titan Books' 2000AD crown, the complete Ballad is in print in the UK and in most bookshops. In the US I'd guess Rebellion will be reprinting it as soon as they can.

60. Defenders (Gerber)
59. Transformers UK
58. Ultimate Future Shock
57. Seaguy
56. Sandman: The Dolls House
55. DC: The New Frontier
54. Akira
53. Sketchbook Diaries
52. Planetary
51. Corto Maltese
50. ABC Warriors 1st series
49. Tales of the Beanworld
48. Nausicaa Of The Valley Of Wind
47. Nemesis The Warlock
46. Y The Last Man
45. Batman Year One
44. Epileptic
43. Promethea
42. Eightball #22
41. Zenith
40. League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen
39. Frank
38. Yummy Fur
37. Phoenix
36. Safe Area Gorazde
35. Howard The Duck
34. Elektra: Assassin
33. The Spirit
32. Little Nemo In Slumberland
31. Flex Mentallo
30. V For Vendetta
29. New X Men (Morrison)
28. Cerebus - Jaka's Story
27. Uncle Scrooge
26. JLA (Morrison)
25. Lone Wolf And Cub
24. Dr Strange (Ditko)
23. Amazing Spider-man #1-50
22. Alec
21. Ballad of Halo Jones

Ha, I was mates with the writers of about a third of the choices so far (mainly Alan and Grant, plus Eddie Campbell, Pat Mills, Neil Gaiman and of course Al Ewing), and met several of the others (Miller, Sim, Eisner, Chester Brown, Warren Ellis, O'Neill, McMahon, Talbot - actually he could go into the mates list really - and Kirby certainly still to come!). I published work by Alan (series of articles on writing comics), Grant, Gaiman, Campbell, plus a couple of Sim covers and a Talbot one, and some involvement with Mills, McMahon and O'Neill, and Warren was going to do a title for me had the company not gone under, so I have had professional contact with quite a lot of the people here.

Ha, there isn't much to that beyond showing off, is there? Sorry. Couldn't resist.

*what i *think* this might be - halo's need to move on somehow implies a distinterest in the worlds created at every stage: moore's revealed disbelief in the hoop or the ship feeds back into yrs ("if he thinks they're throwaway so do i")
**this may also be an age thing: halo is LET DOWN BY LIFE, well jeez get OVER yrself lady WHO TH'FUCK ISN'T!! (= probbly not how i reacted to it when i wz in the mid-20s)

Damn my typing!

I don't imagine Tintin will be outside the top 10.

There's been four Morrison books: Seaguy is at #57. I imagine there's more than one Moore to come, though: From Hell will surely do well, Swamp Thing possibly so. 1963, Captain Britain, Miracleman, that Superman story probably not.

But as I was saying to DV in the pub yesterday, I have no real idea about the readership of ILC, so I could be very surprised (as I was with the Morrison showing today).

And Zenith makes five! Morrison triumphant!

If only From Hell & Swamp Thing make it, that would mean that my #1 vote (not one of the above titles) didn't.

Less pleasing (to me) is the placing of Cerebus. As you no doubt remember from other threads (not least my Cerebus summary thread) I am a huge Cerebus evangeliser. Yet I put it in 4th place, because Jaka's Story is one of my least favourite books - a 'whole plot' Ceberus would have easily been my #1 pick. (I think at the time I said this on the voting thread, but that since JS had been nominated it didn't seem worth making a counter nomination) Is it fair to say, however, that a 'whole plot' nomination wouldn't have got nearly as many votes as JS did?

I think Watchmen will feature far lower than people expect if at all. I didn't vote for it, and from the tone above I suspect a couple of others may not have. Time will tell.

I only have one top 5 comic still to appear, and it's an Alan Moore title.

i suspect the borrowing of "war being long over" idea bugged me more than is fair, possibly: bcz by then moore had very much established the life-kix-halo-in-teeth trope, used it half a dozen times at least (SPOILERS ALERT: ludy bailing; brinna's death; toby's crime; rodice bailing etc etc SPOILERS OVER), and so you kinda knew there wd be a similar HAHA-FUCK-HALO denouement except this time i KNEW WHAT IT WZ GOING TO BE (bcz i had already read it long before in FW); so this pissed me off - it seemed a weak idea where the others were all strong

(actually this emphasises how much the power of story arc depended on unrepeatable coups-de-theatres - read em again, knowing what's to come, and there's not quite enough there... or rather, as i said above, there's lots there but it's all throwaway - i prefer the characters we lose to the one we're increasingly stuck with) (ie i no longer wish to date her) (she will be relieved to discover) (haha STOP PRESS: HALO BACK!! "Mark S no longer wishes to date me," said the long-missed traveller in a prepared statement)

i still love the gibson art though

New X-Men Availability: 7 volumes in trade paperback from Marvel, or the actual issues are 114-154. The first volume is E For Extinction, and it's a good idea to start there even though the Riot At Xavier's book is actually the best one.

Forget the trade paperbacks: the hardcovers are actually cheaper, print the art bigger, and collect the stories in the arcs that Morrison prefers them to be collected. But mostly they're cheaper!

Aldo - Alec actually started almost ten years before Bacchus, and you've forgotten one of the available books: Three-Piece Suit, collecting Little Italy, The Dance Of Lifey Death, and his absolute masterpiece Graffiti Kitchen. There's no more new Alec material from the latter days of Bacchus Magazine to collect, though it did reprint the odd page or short that don't fit in any collection (and there are a couple of shorts that never got reprinted there either).

Since it folded, he has done a great Alec four-pager (I Have Lost My Sense Of Humour) for a Dark Horse anthology, and has been making fits and starts on a new novella (The Fate Of The Artist).

Which Dark Horse anthology is that? I must have missed it.

It's at times like this I think I have too many comics.

On the plus side for everyone, Top Shelf is definitely continuing to carry all the Eddie titles.

yes, this is true. I think there should be more Watchmen love.

It's SO true, and yet it also seems like such an obvious answer to the poll that it would be a little anti-climactic.

91 points.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/mad.jpg

"Growing up in Revolutionary Ethiopia was not conducive towards a budding comics addiction. Western products and artifacts vanished from shelves, new books were gone, American TV shows were replaced by Soviet and East German programming and comics became well, scarcer than they had been before.

Tintin and Asterix were always available for some reason so their absence was not felt. For some reason there was a preponderance of Archie comics floating around but I loved superheroes and looked forward to catching up with the Avengers, the X-Men, and my favorite Dr. Strange.

Finding a bunch of tattered comics lying around someone's house, abandoned by an older sibling who had emigrated or coming across a bunch of tattered comics at the second hand bookstore that was my second home was was always exciting, as was finding someone else who collected and who I could trade with.

In one of these batches, I came across something with the covers missing and held together with tape. I flicked through it and was somewhat lost, B&W, and the drawings looked ---off. I really didn't get it and went back to my faves. Later, I came across another one and ignored it, later again I sat there trying to figure them out, I guess the pop culture references were pretty much lost on me but I noticed more and more detail, figured out some references and warmed up to the art (that visual for smell is the classic in my mind) and found things that really shocked me –Mickey Rodent which was probably the first time I got everything (who didn't know Disney?) but also found somehow disturbing but in a glorious way.

MAD was probably my first introduction to satire, shaped what I consider a charming offbeat sensibility and some consider to be my weirdness. My future love of "underground commix" (a term I hate) is directly related to Kurtzman, the following years I still love and I still love my superheroes but MAD is well…., I know Alfred E. Neuman and so do you thanks to Kurtzman and that alone is crucial and I would not be who I am without this man and his work."
- H.

"Reading the original MAD – the comic book version – can be a letdown at first, because you're constantly thinking you would have loved it more had you been a starry-eyed adolescent reading it under the covers in 1955, instead of a dutiful student of the medium reading it in a library during a particularly long lunch break. But Harvey Kurtzman’s writing is so hilariously idiosyncratic – full of bad puns, mangled Yiddish expressions, and weird phrases repeated for no reason–that it’s still laugh-out-loud funny, and it makes much of the magazine itself (post-Kurtzman) seem like the product of corporate-think. And Bill Elder’s artwork is so cluttered with out-of-nowhere details that you can read a story ten times and still stumble on something you hadn’t noticed before.

Availability: The first five MAD paperbacks are cheap and readily available. If you want something that actually looks like the original publication, you may have to shell out for the pricier MAD archives being reprinted by DC - unfortunately, only one volume has appeared so far, and the series seems to have ground to a halt."
- Justyn Dillingham

98 points.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/top10.jpg

"When Alan Moore has fun, I have fun."
- Leeee.

If I've got my chronology right, this hugely entertaining cops-and-capes soap started the recent wave of "police procedurals meet superheroes" titles. Another notch on Moore's creative bedpost, then.

"Yes, it's a superheroic cop procedural done in a "realistic" manner (and no small share of credit goes to Gene Ha & Zander Cannon for that - YOU WILL BELIEVE that a dog can wear a Hawaiian shirt & still make time with the lovely ladies), but it's also contagiously giddy, with every page (hell, every panel) filled with warm fuzzy in-jokes and ridiculous conceits (cf. the blind Zen cab driver, the Norse Pantheon as mundane dysfunctional rabblerousers) and some fantastically nuanced character work. Even in the sections where the glee factor is mitigated by death and pornography and drug use, there's no wallowing in the existential mire - unlike some other funny books that forget to keep it funny while keeping it real, Top Ten takes these moments in stride and balances them with a favorable helping of happiness. If Mr. Moore's taking the piss out of the usual cliches, he's doing it with a charming shit-eating grin hidden beneath his barnacles; if Mr. Moore's simply having himself a grand old time spinning a fun catch-all yarn, then bully for him, and us, too."
-David Raposa

Availability: Two trade paperbacks, in print and widely available.

101 points.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/corrigan.gif

"OK, ignore the hype. This isn't "the best graphic novel ever written". It isn't "the first graphic novel that treats the reader as an adult". And it isn't "the book that will convince you to read comics".

What it is, is a very successful, award-winning (including the Guardian Prize For Literature in 2001) semi-autobiography about an average guy who gets the chance to meet the dad he never knew. What it is, is an exploration into family history, about abuse and neglect leading to abuse and neglect, but also about love and desperation and what that might force you to do 'for the best'. What it is, is an engaging, sometimes tragic, compelling read which is capable of standing as literature in a way that non-comics readers can understand and enjoy; a talent few books have, no matter how much we kid ourselves about the mass appeal of comics.

Perhaps Jimmy is a little too pathetic to be real, but we can all identify with him. And at times, we all are him.

Available anywhere comics, or even books, are available. Seek out the
hardcover for the family tree on the inside of the dust jacket."
- aldo_cowpat

103 points.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/batmandkr.jpg

"I love Frank Miller. I don't care about the dubious politics -- DKR is visceral. Miller's art is at its dirtiest, most beautiful (thank God for Klaus Janson's inks)("Sin City" comes bloody close though), and I'm convinced, the passage where Superman rises through the sky is the most rhapsodic prose I've ever read this side of Finnegans Wake. The prose and the pacing had me glued to the book the first time I read it standing in line to get some hack-artist's signature onto a worthless poster, hair standing on end, and among the sweaty nerds where I stood, I felt like I was in a sea that was about to erupt into elemental violence, my feet would fall out from under me and all I could do was hold onto the book and keep reading."
- Leeee

Availability: Unlikely to go out of print this side of the actual apocalypse.

Okay, this was my #1. I'm actually really pleased it's in the top 20 (although top 10 would be better HA I KILL ME). I could go on about it, but Leee really sums it up. It's got just enough of everything I like in a comic and does it in such a casual, friendly way without the changing-the-medium baggage of something like Watchmen.

As fo DKR, despite admiring Miller's considerable craft, I can never get past the politics like Lee does.

106 points.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/invisibles.jpg

"The most sustained headfuck in the history of the medium. Wilfully, mischeivously, joyously confusing."
- Wooden

"A comic, so the first issue's letter page said, about "everything - action, philosophy, paranoia, sex, magic, biography, travel, drugs, religion, UFOs, and the secret of who runs the world and what happens to you when you die". It managed a lot of those, it nearly killed Grant Morrison, and it changed my internal workings completely."
- Andrew Farrell

Availability: The last time I checked the reprint history of the Invisibles was a bit fucked, with big chunks going missing in Vertigo's then-capricious reissues program. I don't know if this has been sorted out - the 7-volume trade reissue seems complete, are there missing issues here and there?

Not my favourite stretch of the poll, this. I'm far too British to like MAD; Jimmy Corrigan was too sour for me; I liked DKR when I was 13 in the way one might like a Sven Hassel book at 13; and I'm one of the squares who got bored of Invisibles somewhere around the last volume. Top 10 is fun, though!

And yes, it is all collected in trades now.

I'm (pleasantly) surprised @ Top Ten's high finish - I actually just threw together a comment for that entry that does in 100ish words what Lee's did in about 10. But, yeah, it's a lot of fun - I forget if I went so far as to claim it's the best thing Moore has done (which I'd say more for shock value than for validity), but it's probably my favorite thing of his, if only because it's atypical of what I expect from him. Also, I love the dog.

BTW, Tom, you're doing a fantastic job. You inspired me to go out and buy The Essential Howard The Duck last weekend, and after devouring the entire thing in two sittings, I am now forever in your debt.

Also great job Tom, and thanks for putting some of my comments in - they were late and a bit short, so I didn't expect to see them.

is Top Ten even current?

I still feel the Dark Knight Returns love, and think it is not good that it's not in the top five.

I should like to make it clear that I was not voting for Smax when I voted for Top 10. That is all.

Also DV still not getting the extent to which the second Dark Knight series tarnished the first.

Hate!, Love & Rockets, Ghost World, and the Morrison Doom Patrol.

Comics that I'm expecting to see in the top 15 (probably within the top 10):

Watchmen, Maus, and the Lee/Kirby FF, Peanuts. I love these comics, but have a lot less invested in them than some folk seem to (except maybe the Lee/Kirby FF, and maybe also Peanuts, but anyways).

Great list so far -- of everything that's showed up so far (and that I've read, obviously) only Y: The Last Man hasn't really done it for me. Admittedly, I haven't read those Transformers comics since I was a lad, but they got me hooked on comics in the first place, so I'll always love them for that at the very least.

112 points.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/thimble.jpg

""Thimble Theatre" enraptured newspaper readers for a full decade before a lightbulb flashed above E.C. ("Elzie") Segar's head and he worked his most popular creation into the strip. The period refered to here reflects everything after the character of Popeye was introduced, though Segar's B.P. run of 1919-1930 (when the strip chronicled the adventures of Olive Oyl and her family) is worth seeking out, too. There's no question that Segar's work is deserving of the same canonical status attributed to Herriman and McKay -- don't forget that Krazy Kat and Little Nemo were also transformed into lackluster cartoons. Looking over Segar's work, you'll notice that a great majority of his panels feature tight borders and close-ups and a lot of word balloons filling the additional space, but Segar was the cleanest draftsman of his era. Later on, in the run reflected here, he also became pretty good with shading, capturing light sources, and weighing positive/negative space. His work was incredibly detailed and became the de facto gold standard for newspaper strips -- you may see flashes of Herriman and McKay in the odd strip like "Mutts," but Segar's style is all over the modern newspaper comics page. And I'm pretty sure that "Thimble Theatre" is the only strip to ever inspire two fast food restaurants -- Segar was so good, he even influenced biscuits."
- ng

Availability: The "complete E.C. Segar Popeye" series of books by Fantagraphics seems to be largely out of print, but I assume that's people's best bet. Any helpers?

Comments added on MAD and Top 10 upthread.

Moore quit the comic b/c of copyright ownership issues.

It surely isn't the best comic ever written, but it's certainly my favourite, mainly b/c of Ian Gibson's art. Rodice Olsun is my favourite ever comic character, and I wish there's been a bit more of her in it.

Sometimes (once quite recently) I have this dream, where I go into a bookshop, and find HJ book 4. Either written by moore w/gibson art, or written by a hack. It is always soul-destroyingly awful.

This thread is great, and I should check this board out more often, I think.

anyone influenced by such considerations would be a FULE - like if I failed to vote for The Day The Law Died on account of The Apocalypse War's lack of thrill power.

having said that, I did fail to vote for The Day The Law Died. And everything else.

As for Popeye, I had it at #2 and revere it almost as much as my #1 (I hope Tom will be using my comments on same shortly, so I won't say what it is) - I've read and reread every Segar Popeye daily (if I could only keep 20 comics, the seven Fantagraphics volumes collecting these would be among them), and I think he was the greatest continuing-story strip cartoonist ever. These are funny and exciting adventures, told with extraordinary verve and a storytelling ability that makes him maybe the single greatest influence on the comics of the last seventy years, and I'd recommend them to anyone.

(My surprise was very much because I'd never heard of them rather than I considered them bad.)

Damn DV, and you were so nice about me earlier! I like DKR a great deal, and it would have made my list if we had some more votes, but I really think Calvin & Hobbes is gloriously wonderful.

1: Watchmen
2 equal: All comics evah (except Watchmen)

You had them the wrong way round!

If Mark thinks Watchmen is the worst comics ever, he needs to read the issue of Dazzler where she is fighting the Enchantress by roller-skating out of the way of her mystic bolts, and then Odin turns up and decrees a singing contest should settle the fight, and although I don't recall if it states what Dazzler sings, it is stated in another issue that she performs a disco Bob Dylan medley, so I like to think it's that.

Except he would of course love it. As I sort of do too, really. Damn.

114 points.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/doom.jpg

Generally on a Grant Morrison book you tend to get one of two things. You might get the superhero-loving Morrison writing larger-than-life (larger-than-anything) stories of cosmic derring-do with monster cliffhangers, ideas and surprises galore. Or you might get the Morrison who is fascinated by the nature of reality and needs to fuck with your head in order to explain it all to you. The two aren't entirely separate - X-Men has a certain amount of mindwarp eschatology; Invisibles is on some level a superhero book - but for the full-on worlds-in-collision both-Grants-at-once experience, you need his late 80s stuff. And in the context of this poll that means you need the Doom Patrol.

Not everything in Doom Patrol works - bits of it in fact are a fucking mess. OK, lots of it, but some of that is a great fucking mess. This is a writer setting out his stall and saying, well, this is what I'm into, are you into me? You the reader can whack yourself on the head and say "Enough is enough, Grant" when the Shadowy Mr Evans and the Sex Men appear to be out to prove every critic right - and then three issues later you can be almost in tears as Mr.Nobody's dreams of a brighter tomorrow get shot down. You can groan as Grant invokes Jack the effing Ripper issues after you were bouncing with glee to see him riff on Struwwelpeter. You can gasp and laugh at his bouncebackability when, denied the use of John Constantine, he simply invents Willoughby Kipling, who is John Constantine squared. And of course you can sigh at the greatest love story in comics - no, not Cliff and Jane, you sillies, I mean the boundary-smashing love between a revolutionary gorilla and a brain in a tank.

My first issue of the Doom Patrol was #43, perversely enough one of the few not drawn by Richard Case, a real Forgotten Hero (Morrison can be unlucky or misguided when it comes to artists on his ongoing series but it's impossible to imagine DP without Case's angular, awkward art). It had two men going deep into the Pentagon and asking about the nature of the universe, it had sick childrens stories (which turned out to be from a real book (no, a real real book)), it had bone-headed horrors fighting an old guy in trunks and a guy in a wheelchair, and on the last page some weirdoes turn up who turn out to be the heroes. I had never read anything like it before in my life - and sometimes that kind of first impression knocks 'criticism' flying.

Availability: After long years with only the first trade paperback sporadically available, DC are finally! reprinting the series - two trades so far, which take you through most of the 'critically acclaimed years'. The 'OK I'm bored with it now' years - which are of course just as good - will follow soon. WHATEVER YOU DO do not buy any monthly comic currently coming out calling itself Doom Patrol.

I still thing the Doom Patrol in Space bits (where they're stuck in a war between the someone and the someone else) stick out like a sore thumb, but I really like the rest of it.

Does it strike anyone as a bit strange that GM's run on Doom Patrol mirrors Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run? Both run lasted the same length (DP - #19-63, ST - #20-64), both hit the ground running from where the (to be polite) mundane story previously left off and went gloriously batshit insane from there, both feature guest appearances by the JLA early on, both feature interspecial (or interkingdom) love...

I am sad, for that was my first place vote (waah).

And if folks want to read more of me blathering about the book, make with the click.

120 points.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/asterix.jpg

The joy of Asterix lies in its balance of cosily running gags (the bard, the pirates, the cauldron when he was a baby) and the situation-specific comedies and satires. It's probably the most successful ever instance of the comic as sitcom - a core location, a recurring cast, a situation, and the laughs coming almost automatically from that.

So much of Asterix' humour comes from its verbal gags and puns that it seems only fair to mention Derek Hockridge, Anthea Bell, Robert Steven Caron and the other translators who've made Goscinny and Uderzo's work come to life for English-speaking audiences (who provided the bulk of its votes here!).

Availability: All Asterix books are still in print in the UK - is this the case in the US too? Where you start is up to you - the first adventure, Asterix The Gaul, sets things up nicely, but each story is complete in itself. I have particularly fond memories of Asterix And The Soothsayer, if you want a recommendation.

The current Doom Patrol: I haven't read it, but everything I've read around it makes it sound like a perfectly ordinary superhero team book with a twist of what John Byrne considers 'strange'. And a character called 'Nudge'. (jesus.)

Fun things to do with new DP #1: "The results are conclusive, gentlemen! We've come into existence to replace more complex versions of ourselves! BUT - SO HAS THE PRESIDENT!! And in his new simplified iteration he plans to START WORLD WAR III!!! SOUND THE ACTION KLAXON etc"

127 points.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/maus.gif

"Maus isn’t quite the great work everyone wanted it to be. The anthropomorphism is its deepest flaw: using cats and mice to stand in for humans blurs the specific horror of the Holocaust, since Nazis and Jews didn’t belong to different species. Spiegelman has said he meant the metaphors to “break down” as the book progressed; it’s never worked for me. But Spiegelman’s crude, stark artwork works better than “good” drawings would to tell the story, and his conflicted account of his relationship with his father is shattering – his portrayal of himself is more unflattering than any of Crumb’s self-portraits, even."
- Justyn Dillingham

"Maus...I finally read both parts this year, after hearing about it for over a decade, all the awards it won, the Pulitzer Prize, the way it changed the comic medium and made comics acceptable graduate-class level literature. It's the story of the Shoah, where the races and religions have been replaced by animals, which can seem a bit gimmicky at times but works very well overall. But it is more importantly the story of "what happens after..." the story of the relationship between Art Spiegelman's brash New York cartoonist and his aging, difficult Holocaust survivor father Vladek. And above all it is the heartbreaking story of Art's mother and brother, whose ghosts are always hovering over the pictures."
- Jocelyn

"Strip away all the accumulated praise, the litsnob's oily approval for this "graphic novel," and you still have an eminently,
compellingly *readable* book. I first read it in an English seminar on autobiographies; even with the onset of Lit-major-burnout, I still could not stop myself from reading it."
- Leeee

"Availability: Likely to stay in print about as long as the Bible, as long as there are teachers who want to introduce their students to the wonderful world of comics (all two of them)."
- Justyn Dillingham

130 points.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/hate.jpg

HOLD ON A MINUTE, did I really say that Asterix was the best sitcom in comics?! I take it all back! This is! Buddy Bradley is one of the all time sympathetic anti-heroes - often wrong, rarely malicious, sometimes unlucky, generally idle, regularly cantankerous. A socialised nerd in a generation of socialised nerds, clever without knowing what to do with it. If he'd been born ten years later he'd probably be on ILX. If you want to know about 'pop culture in the 90s' (god help us) you need look no further than HATE. This was our youth.

(Also it has the most surprising death in a comic ever.)

Availability: Six volumes, in print, starting with "Hey, Buddy!"

(Don't expect anything tomorrow, though, it's Club FT)

144 points.

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In the early 90s it was practically one word, "HateandEightball", the two most celebrated indie comix of the era, on everybody's pull list. It's kind of appropriate (and the appropriateness will only multiply next post) that Hate's rollercoaster examination of the tension between being 'alternative' and the pull of everyday life rubs up pollwise against Eightball's most famous moment which covers similar territory in a completely different way.

I've not seen the film but a bit of research the plots are entirely different. Ghost World the comic isn't a 'love story' in any sense other than the obvious - it's a comic about a close teenage friendship and if you want to draw an exact line, rather you than me. Enid is one of the smartest, sharpest characters in comics - the graphic novel is at once a celebration of that and a fairly pitiless look at the traps smartness and sharpness can drag you into. Her world - and it strikes me now that this is the most true-to-teenage thing about it - is an odd half-step away from realism. Much, as is ever the case with Clowes, is left unsaid: no lessons are drawn. I think if I read it again now I'd take away something entirely different whatever I did seven years ago. But I do know that for all its occasional sadness it's not a depressing book, just a very human one.

Availability: In print and likely to stay that way for a while thanks to the film.

1) Watchmen
2) Tintin
3) Peanuts
4) From Hell
5) Calvin & Hobbes
6) Fantastic Four
7) Krazy Kat
8) Fourth World
9) Swamp Thing

160 points.

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"Sometime in the late 80s, Harvey Pekar wz moaning in the Comix Journal abt the good press Love and Rockets got: the burden of his complaint being that it wzn't what *he* called realistic, for a start all the girls were too pretty. Pekar was already quite high on my list of blowhard bores, this shifted him over into my Bad Guys column for good, I think - but at the time I couldn't formulate my counter to this argt. Now I can I think.

i. Of course (as usual) the argt looks straight past Beto's Palomar stories. First bcz Beto's castlist wz from the outset rich in grotesques, male and female. Second cz Beto has always been v.open abt the fact that his side of L&R is pretty much orthodox MAGIC REALISM (ie NOT Pekar's kind). Like the way Joss Whedon ran Angel against Buffy, the fact that this small creative unit, of obv.v.similar background and input (=Los Bros) were running these two things in parallel (so that they're dense w.commentary and varied perspective on each other) is only a factor you omit if yr outlook is, well, self-involved anglo-parochialism (culturally speaking)?
ii. But writing this up and trying to characterise the Jaime wing - tales of punkah gals in Hoppers - I realised that Magic Realism is his thing too, albeit less overtly Marquezian in topic and handling. Basic to both is the treatment of "realism" as a style-technique rather than a shaping moralism or a politix. And basic to Jaime's version is the fact that Hopey and Maggie et al live in this bleak semi-squalid bohemian margin precisely bcz their lives are ruled and shaped by a nested sequence of fantasies of escape. Early on, this iz the ProSolar Mechanics/Caped Superhero stuff; later on, it shifted to the world of Mexican Wrestling; in between, uniting both -was a Romantic Quest which everyone involved (characters/writers/readers) mistook for an Eminently Realisable Fact of Life - it wz dreams of entering the self-created (and already vanished) community that the Hernandez Brothers had actually been in the thick of, US West Coast Punk c.77-81. Trotsky has a paragraph somewhere on the inability of hardcore realism as a style to open itself to dreams and visions and hope and CHANGE (it's in literature and revolution but i totally forget where): well what i think L&R did so well (ie as well as anything i ever encountered) wz a translation of Magic Realism's play with history and myth, into a space many of its readers took to be the world they lived in. Los Bros combined a virtuoso handling of the unfolding of time (largescale and local) (but not actually that unusual in comicbook writing) with a more than usually acute sense of how fantasy fulfilment - which jaime shifts in and out of as easily as both bros handle flashbacks and flashforwards - is both necessary and compensatory, a needed motor and a risky prison. It's not that Magic Realism is exactly absent from eg the entire history of the Superhero Genre; it's more that between them the brothers seem to be able to see this element from both ends, in particular how deliberate flight from Received Fantasy (eg into the Street-Credible Self-Reliance of Punk) can simultaneously limit yr options and then - paradoxically - recapitulate the traps (ie of immersion in Receieved Fantasy) within the delimited zone

iii. plus also those lesbo chix are HOTT"
- mark s

Availability: Fantagraphics, in print, buyers' guide from Amazon here

(x-post)

1) To draw it realistically, with humans. This would've been the politically correct way of doing it, but as Scott McCloud points out, realism in comics tends to distance the reader. And let's face it, besides everything else Maus is a gripping yarn.

2) To draw it with caricature humans. The result could've easily been grotesque (think of Peter Bagge drawing the scene in the death showers), and he would've surely been accused of treating the holocaust too lightly.

Of course, he still could've drawn it with all the folks being the same species of animals, but I kinda understand the choice he made. Even though the Jews weren't a different species, they were sure made to feel that way. In my opinion, the anthropomorphism does work as a psychological description of racism, but not as political symbolism.

Love & Rockets availability: omigawd just go for the 530-page PALOMAR collection fr Beto and the 760-page LOCAS collection for Xaime (when o when will my local Japanese-owned chain bookshop get this damn thing in stock?)

I know I definitely had some queued before The Great Slsk Crash Of Olde London Town (where I lost everything I had queued, my userlist, the works) but I'm not sure how far I got through them. (Currently queued, lots of Carl Barks stuff)

Downloading cbr files rather than trying to find the comics themselves when you want to read them - C/D?

Btw, no Queen & Country yet = I really hope it is in the Top 10. Preferably instead of Swamp Thing or the FF.

When I say rounding up comments thats partly a euphemism for 'writing them' - some of the top 8 are comics I want to do justice to!

I hope so too. You had more bones than me for actually saying this, as I'm sure we're in the minority.

165 points.

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"The actual jokes are regularly not as important as the pure and simple joy of having your life in front of you, and nothing to do with it."
- Andrew Farrell

"Calvin & Hobbes is, for me, the greatest comic strip that started in the last fifty years. In terms of comedy comics art, it may be the best ever, and add writing that, for me, ranks with Schulz, and you have a really magnificent strip. The art has a humorous energy that has rarely been matched anywhere in comics (comparable with Baxendale and Bagge, say), whether newspaper strips or comic books, and he achieves an extraordinary amount and variety of action in the tiny space newspapers allow nowadays. Most importantly, it may be the funniest comic strip ever, full of great gags.

There are people who don't care for the repetition, the grotesque snowmen and catastrophic sledge rides and Spaceman Spiff and all that, but I am always pleased to see them again, the same as I always was with Charlie Brown on the baseball mound or Lucy in her psychiatric advice booth, and I think he works these riffs brilliantly, with endless invention and wit. He's a real wordsmith too - I'll never forget the strip where Calvin discusses the practice of making nouns and adjectives into verbs, which ends with him saying approvingly, "Verbing weirds language."

He also created some great characters - Calvin's hyperactive brat and his always amusing dad of course, but especially Hobbes, a great character considered straight, wise and warm and also childish, but the masterstroke is the refusal to ever settle the question of whether he is a stuffed tiger and only animate in Calvin's fantasy life, or some magical creature whose real nature is only manifest to Calvin: there is a great sequence where Hobbes ties Calvin to a chair, and his parents are certain that it was impossible for him to have bound himself; and there is a great Sunday where Calvin takes dozens of photos of Hobbes pulling hilarious faces, but the photos are all identical. (See an old strip by Crockett Johnson named Barney for some similar notions.) When I feel low at home, these rank with classic Simpsons cartoons for me as a way of cheering myself up."
- Martin Skidmore

Availability: Several collections, all in print.

181 points.

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"The weightiest comic I've ever read. I'm not close to fully understanding it, but thank god someone's not afraid to make a hugely challenging comic book like this."
- Wooden

"The best and most sprawling of Alan Moore's collaborations with Eddie Campbell, where he takes some piece of time and space (in this case Jack The Ripper) and tilts the universe along various axes, to see what's written in the grain."
- Andrew Farrell

Thread about From Hell: "Who will help the widow's son?"

Availability: Yes

I'm assuming Wathcmen will be in the top six of course. How sad yet thrillingly vanguardish it would be if the ILC poll marked its fall from the fanboy podium.

It does look like we're either going to have three Moore books in the top ten (do you see, etc) or Swamp Thing isn't going to place. I'm not sure which would surprise me more -- Swamp Thing not placing at all, or placing in the top six. (I have no real guesses left for what will make the list because of variations on that: there's a lot of stuff -- Bone's another -- that I would have expected to make a top 60, but would never have predicted to make a top 10. Maybe Tom has tricked us and after #1 there will be a #0 and a #-1, and if we send Wizard $5 we can find out what #1/2 is.)

185 points.

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The influence of this run remains huge. Firstly it launched Alan Moore as a 'name' writer, a big deal in itself if this poll is anything to go by. Secondly the mix of visceral unpleasantness, psychological darkness and high-flown prose style pretty much founded the entire Vertigo house style (which has in turn impacted on most other post-80s 'horror comics'). And thirdly Moore's reinvention of Swamp Thing - a hugely unpromising character in late 1983 - served notice that the big two comics publishers were treasure troves of intellectual properties, sitting waiting for the right person to come and see the diamond in their rough. Alan Moore is the angel on the shoulder of every newbie writer pitching 'new takes' to Marvel and DC.

Is the run any good, though? Yes, it still is. I re-read it just as this poll was starting and was hugely impressed, though actually less by Moore's writing than by the art. The industry in 1983 was still newsstand-based, and seeing Bissette and Totleben's twisted visions on the racks is as near as I'll come to the shock of the weird that must have accompanied the breakthrough of a Ditko, say. Nothing before and not much since looks like Swamp Thing did - grotesque forms and shapes blending into one another, everything horribly organic, smeared and seemingly decaying. Bissette's jagged page compositions and Totleben's liquefying inks made and make Swamp Thing a supremely queasy, individual book. The Veitch run had a more lucid, darkly amusing tone - appropriate given the rather wackier stories he illustrated.

The Moore run is in three broad parts. The first has some of the series' more effectively chilling moments but its focus is on reimagining the title character and its parameters, and on getting its protagonists to fall in love. The second, the "American Gothic" storyline, sees Moore playing around with stock horror tropes, discussing the nature of evil, sketching out what would become the 'Vertigo Universe' and inventing John Constantine. The third and in some ways strangest turned the comic into a superhero and sci-fi book as Swamp Thing went off into space, fought Batman and met Adam Strange. Never frightening but a lot of fun.

If you've not read Swamp Thing before you'll hopefully love it. I've found that re-reading the comics, knowing what happens next kills some of the interest for me, and Moore's prose can be a little cumbersome - though his typically ironic dialogue is as well-honed as it's ever been. But that doesn't really detract from a fine, visually outstanding and important comic.

Availability: I think DC/Vertigo has now reprinted the whole run.

I mainly know Swamp Thing through black and white issue by issue reprints that Vertigo issued in the 1990s. I was struck by how well it worked as issues, with much of the episodes being very self-contained. I don't know how well these would work when compiled together, as in would the story appear all disjointed and stuff.

196 points.

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"By a transcendental act of alchemy, Jack Kirby transforms plot hole-ridden, cliched scripts into comics gold. Trippy as fuck, almost dadaist at times, these issues capture the spirit of the Sixties as well as anything the Beatles ever recorded (coming from the man who was born in 1978)."
- Wooden

"I have mixed feelings about recommending the entire run of this series (my reasons are petty: I find all four of them annoying as hell), but I wouldn?t hesitate to put FF 48-50, the high point of all superhero comics, in my top ten of anything ever. In the story of Galactus, the god-like devourer of worlds, and his Christ-like herald, the Silver Surfer, who rebels against his master to save humanity, Kirby created a modern myth to match anything the Greeks and Romans ever came up with. Entire seasons of Buffy are unimaginable without this epic. Just a glance at the panel where the Silver Surfer first appears gives me the cold chills.

Availability: In addition to the cheap (Marvel Essentials) and pricey (Marvel Masterworks) reprints, the entire Galactus trilogy, plus ?This Man, This Monster!? from FF 51, is reprinted in full color in the new book Marvel Visionaries: Jack Kirby."
- Justyn Dillingham

Thread: Here

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213 points.

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Ned Raggett on Charles Schulz

"?Well, what are YOU doing here?? sneers a girl named Violet to a boy named Charlie Brown. ?Who asked you to come around?? snarls another girl, Patty. ?NOBODY! Go on home!? The two watch him trudge sadly away, a dark cloud hanging over his head. Then one of them remarks, with the perfect innocence of the young, ?You know, it?s a peculiar thing about Charlie Brown ? you almost never see him laugh!?

Imagine that you?ve never received a Snoopy greeting card, never seen any of the TV shows ? that you?re somehow unfamiliar with the whole concept. Then marvel at the sheer implausibility of this most ubiquitous of 20th-century pop phenomenons, embraced by everyone from kindergarteners to Umberto Eco to NASA, the 49-year work of a deeply troubled, melancholy man who poured his lifelong neuroses into a comic strip about failure and disappointment as it was experienced by a group of absurdly precocious children. It sounds like the premise of a Philip Roth novel. ?Peanuts is like the diary of a manic depressive,? Dan Clowes once said. So why was it so strangely comforting to read?

Because it rang so true to life. Charlie Brown?s traumas were funny, but they were also real, recognizable to any kid who ever bombed out of a spelling bee in the last round or struck out in the last inning, and Linus?s perpetual war with Lucy has to be one of the least sentimental accounts of sibling rivalry ever to reach the comics. And it was never dourly realistic ? Schulz?s wry sense of the outlandish redeemed everything. (?I?m aware of my tongue!? Linus complains to Lucy in a classic Sunday page; Lucy doesn?t understand ? until she does, and clutches at her mouth in horror) Then there was Snoopy, whose surreal flights of fantasy seemed like a complete retreat from seriousness. But remember that the World War I Flying Ace episodes, in which Snoopy repeatedly screams ?Curse this stupid war!?, were first published during the height of Vietnam.

"I have heard it said that children know a lot more about what is going on around them than adults are willing to admit," Schulz wrote in 1975. "But I have also observed that children understand much less of what is going on around them than we think they do." Childhood is wonderful, yes - but it is also a terrifying place in which inexplicable things happen. Favorite teachers go away and never come back, your parents punish you for no reason, other kids are nice to you one day and mean the next. Very few works about childhood acknowledge it, but children are well aware that adults live in a different world - and Peanuts acknowledged that fact by presenting a world in which adults don't seem to exist at all. Somehow, it made sense - just like we took all of the peculiar stylizations of the strip (the doghouse only seen from one angle, the fact that an opposing team is never seen during any of the baseball games) for granted, never doubting the essential truth of what it said to us."
- Justyn Dillingham

Availability: I'm not sure. Of course Peanuts collections are readily available, but systematic compete collections seem to be rarer, and the first volume dealing with the 60s is listed by Amazon as a 2006(!) release.

Thread: here

Alternatively, are they too diluted across stories, eras and timelines to chart indivudually?

Or is it just ... us?

Sorry, I mean crosspost.

The bulk of the superhero stuff published wasn't written in discrete arcs, though, which is probably a voting factor -- likewise, unless I'm misremembering, all of the creative-team-based runs ("Lee/Kirby FF," etc) nominated are as easily (and more cheaply) available as self-contained graphic novels. (In my case, I didn't vote for anything I haven't read in the last few years, because I don't want to vote for the memory of something over the experience of it.)

On top of that, there's a pressure for superhero fans to vote for non-superhero books, but no pressure for non-superhero fans to vote for superhero books -- and when that latter group does so anyway, with most genres there's a greater degree of consensus among non-fans than among fans.

213 points.

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"I've been inclined for many years, not entirely seriously, to describe Krazy Kat as resembling Tom & Jerry (plus Spike) if it were written by James Joyce and drawn by Picasso. Obviously it's not really like that at all - but then I found out that both Joyce and Picasso were huge fans. Apparently when Gertrude Stein was in America, she had to phone Pablo and read out each new Sunday page, then mail it to him. Other fans have included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, De Kooning, Mencken, Chaplin (there was a Krazy Kat ballet produced in 1922, and critic Gilbert Seldes said that only Chaplin could have properly portrayed Krazy), Disney and W.C. Fields.

Herriman was of mixed race, a 'creole' in his own words, and I suspect that fed into his extraordinary use of language, a unique blend of dialects (NYC yiddish, Tex-Mex, New Orleans creole) and artistry - what other gag strip has produced language like "the limbo of useless unconsciousness" or "howling among the halls of night"? It's as inventive and extraordinary visually, with all sorts of odd influences - he got to Ford's Monument Valley first, and there are lots of Navajo design touches, but it's the strange surreality, the ever-shifting backgrounds, that make it unlike anything else before or since (he's been the least influential comics great - I can only think of Spain's Mariscal as a real follower), and we shouldn't undervalue the vitality and expressiveness of the main characters.

Another bizarre feature is the central character, both male and female as need arises, and her relationships: the mouse who hates him/her and bombards her with bricks, which she interprets as signs of love, and the dog who loves her/him and therefore loathes the mouse. No one understands anyone else, nothing quite makes sense, but he mined this nonsensical but simple set-up for over thirty years. There are countless readings of this: ideas about the social construction of race and gender seem very apt and fascinating to me. The romantic understanding of the brick only appears when the Sunday pages start (in 1916, after three years of vaudeville gag strips), and it's here the greatness resides. It's the beauty and imagination and wit of these full pages, at least when not tramelled by having to rearrange panels for half-page publication in some papers, that makes me rate this as the greatest thing comics have ever produced."
- Martin Skidmore

Availability: Fantagraphics are reprinting all the full-page Krazy Kat strips, and have reached 1932.

Thread: here

249 points.

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"What other comic can claim to be a kick up the arse to a stagnant medium, a wry commentary on genre conventions, a consumate exercise in narrative structure, an essay on power and responsibility, a meditation on aging, and a page-turning thriller? There can't be many works of fiction in any medium which operate on quite so many levels. And every time I read Watchmen, a new facet, detail or pattern makes itself apparent."
- Wooden

Forget the "realistic superheroes" albatross and the ending that flies in the face of it. The reason to love Watchmen is its formal, mechanistic precision, and the huge number of eyebrow-raising moments that precision generates. The ideas in Watchmen have been imitated ever since, for better or worse (generally worse because Moore's successors seem to either love superheroes too much or hate them too much). Moore and Gibbons' formal achievements haven't been borrowed as often - perhaps because they are so closely associated with Watchmen.

The pair of them figured out ways to tell two or three overlapping stories at once and then applied them meticulously and thoroughly. It allowed Moore to amp up the complexity of the storytelling and get elbow-deep in the dramatic irony that had become such a feature of his scripting. It allowed Gibbons to develop a recurring image-bank for the comic that enhanced its already highly individual look. The plot of Watchmen is fairly simple, but the telling of it is dense and wonderfully stylish. Most importantly, the 'Watchmen Method' enhanced - and created - the most human moments in the story, and it's these that make it such an enduring favourite.

Availability: Wherever comics are sold, I suspect.

Thread: here.

251 points.

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"Timeless, universal, masterful, I love Tintin with both my head and my heart. Captain Haddock is one of the greatest fictional characters ever created."
- Wooden

"All in all, Tintin is probably the most perfectly balanced comic ever made. It has its share of everything: adventure, drama, verbal and physical comedy, even a surprising amount of tragedy and cynicism, considering Tintin was supposed to be for kids mainly. It's not a perfect comic, which is totally understandable, considering it ran from 1929 to the seventies. In the first handful of stories Hergé's right-wing stance and his imperialist attitudes were clearly visible - most notably in Tintin's Congo adventure. But after his famous meeting with the Chinese student Chang, which resulted in "The Blue Lotus" and a character named after Chang, Hergé's portrayal of non-European cultures grew more and more sympathetic.

One thing about Tintin which separates it from many other children's comics (for example, from Spirou and Fantasio by Franquin), is that, despite the fact the comic was produced as teamwork ever since the forties, it was still Hergé's personal vision. It's been often pointed out that Tintin himself is an empty character, without any defining characteristics. This allowed him to bend to Hergé's changing views on life, from the blue-eyed imperialist of the early thirties to the world-weary revolutionary of the seventies. It is also noticable that the one story where Tintin actually shows his emotions is Hergé's most personal, and a perpetual fan favourite: "Tintin in Tibet". Tintin's blandness, of course, is contrasted with the comic's wonderful cast of quirky, memorable supporting characters. Most famous of these is Captain Haddock, a reformed drunkard with an endless vocabulary of swear words, and one of the most beloved comic icons in the history of the medium.

Even though Tintin has its good guys and bad guys, during the run of the series things get less and less black-and-white. In the final three Tintin stories Hergé is already deconstructing the whole concept of children's adventure comics. The final panel of what was to be the last finished Tintin story, "Tintin and the Picaros", is actually quite pessimistic. Even though Tintin has supposedly "won", all he has managed to do is replace one dictator with another. The cynicism of the latter Tintin albums obviously doesn't stop one from enjoying the wonderful sense of adventure of the previous stories, but it's worth recognizing there's much more to Tintin than that."
- Tuomas

One of the things I love about Tintin is how it never forgot its magazine adventure strip roots. The rhythm of a Tintin book is generally hugely satisfying - a thrill a page, a cliffhanger a page, and a resolution in the first panel or two of the next one. Sometimes the adventure takes a while to get going, though. And sometimes it never happens at all - my sometimes-favourite Tintin book, the gloriously untypical The Castafiore Emerald, is a warmly knowing succession of false trails, cliffhangers that lead nowhere, and suspense deflated. Perhaps the cleverest Tintin book, its parlour game atmosphere is unique.

Contrast that with the breakneck pace of early yarn The Broken Ear - another rather uncelebrated favourite. Tintin chases round the world after two, then three, duplicated idols, encountering hair-raising melodrama and slapstick sight gags in roughly equal measure. The journey between the two books is a huge one - from frenetic storytelling to sophisticated plotting, from Tintin basically alone to a large and rich cast. But what remains constant - aside from Tintin and Snowy themselves - is Herge's clean, detailed, immediately satisfying artwork and a sense that the story could go anywhere at any turn of the page.

Availability: All titles remain translated in print, in both the single album format and in 3-in-1 editions, with the exception of Tintin In The Congo and Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets, which are available as collections of the original magazine strips, uncolourised. The 1946 colour version of Congo is available in the original French and some other languages, but not in English (whether never translated or out of print, I don't know.)

Ha, xpost. Okay, that's really weird.

TINTIN vs. ASTERIX
OPO: Tintin

But basically - that's it, true believer! Thankyou for your comments and your patience.

http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/tintinxmas.jpg

"Warmly knowing" is a perfect description of the Castifiore Emerald. Bang-up job Tom!

*(i will try and explain my dislike of it in a few days maybe)

I'm ecstatic that Tintn made it out on top, even tho it was my number 2 slot, one I have no problems with.

Castiafore is also my most beloved and not sure why it is considered so atypical. Bianca tho is tho of my all time faves. What I'm more surprised abt is that I always thot ppl disliked that one - finding this many pl who say they like/love it is unusual.

As Tuomas pointed out the details in stories, as at the end of Picaros how NOTHING has changed with the toppling of the new goverment is what makes Tintin one of my enduring chldhood loves.

Thank you Tom for organizing this.

Things I voted for that didn't make it:

Blueberry
If...
Dan Dare

Tintin was a great surprise (to me) winner. I must advance the day when I get into Tintin.

Thanks for running this Tom, UR a star.

well... I like it. I think it works better if you aren't that familiar with the DC Universe, because you get to go "Wow!" as all these weird superheroes are introduced. I also like the way there are lots of FITES in it.

Seriously though, great thread, it's inspired me to check out a ton of things. For example, I have never read Krazy Kat or Tintin (although for some reason I'm much less interested in them than in some other things on the poll).

hating superheroes = comics rockism

Things I voted for that didn't make it:

Queen & Country (this makes me sad)
Fables
Powers
Hellboy
Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits
Sleeper
Uzumaki
Sandman (?)

(x-post - DV I almost said "ILC in rockism shocker!" but held back)

Notable indies also came off mixed - some strong showings but Maus outside the Top 10? Chris Ware in the lower end of the Top 20? These are the comics generally held up as being 'better' than superheroes when I've seen That Debate online, not old newspaper strips and Tintin.

I was surprised it wasn't in the top 10, too, though.

ie they are mid-length storybased and medium-length narrative is the thing we are best programmed to talk around (peanuts and calvin and hobbes eg did have narratives longer than one strip sometimes, but they were rarely more than a few strips and there's no guarantee that any two non-completist peanuts lovers actually encountered-valorised-fetishised-memorised any shared given narrative.... hence less to "discuss"?)

Castiafore is also my most beloved and not sure why it is considered so atypical.

I think some Tintin fans don't like the albums from Castafiore Emerald on, because this is where Hergé starts to get more postmodern and "mature" and loses the child-like sense of wonder of the former albums. The Castafiore Emerald (which I still love a lot) intentionally lacks the adventure part, the plot taking place in one setting and revolving around misunderstandings and false alarms. Flight 714 and Tintin and the Picaros do have a suspense plot of sort, but they're more about the characters and Hergé's growingly black humour than adventure. Also, in both of these albums the "good" guys (like the millionaire Carreidas or General Alcazar) aren't that good any more, whereas the bad guys are more pathetic than evil. This if course a more adult approach to Tintin, but I'm not sure whether it actually fits the spirit of the comic. In my opinion, the perfect Tintin run would be from The Blue Lotus to The Castafiore Emerald.

I was thinking about that... not much manga here, and the manga that is here is very much the stuff that's been safely repackaged for whitey. Still, I suspect we do not so much hate it as not know it.

Several xpost - Herge considered 'Emerald' a narrative excersise - he wanted to produce a Tintin story which kept up the suspense, but in which nothing actually happened. In my opinion he succedeed admirably.

Of course, the best period in Judge Dredd is the early 400s, when _I_ first started reading the stories.

For this reason, and also to see how influential top picks were for putting entires into the bottom reaches of hte chart, I'd be interested to see how many number one votes each title had. Is this going to be included in the stats, Tom?

Top work on the whole project, by the work!

Also, progs were inevitably missed, and so became grailish. I still dream of them.

A fun poll, generally pleasing results and exciting to have it unfold over a few days. Thanks, Tom!

Or maybe it's because I had my fill of the Holocaust as a kid and preferred to read about the X-Men.

(On second thoughts, tho', this probably aint the thread for this discussion.)

60. Defenders (Gerber) 42pts
59. Transformers UK 43
58. Ultimate Future Shock 43
57. Seaguy 44
56. Sandman: The Dolls House 46
55. DC: The New Frontier 47
54. Akira 47
53. Sketchbook Diaries 49
52. Planetary 49
51. Corto Maltese 50
50. ABC Warriors 1st series 51
49. Tales of the Beanworld 51
48. Nausicaa Of The Valley Of Wind 51
47. Nemesis The Warlock 52
46. Y The Last Man 53
45. Batman Year One 53
44. Epileptic 54
43. Promethea 54
42. Eightball #22 56
41. Zenith 56
40. League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen 59
39. Frank 60
38. Yummy Fur 60
37. Phoenix 60
36. Safe Area Gorazde 61
35. Howard The Duck 62
34. Elektra: Assassin 63
33. The Spirit 63
32. Little Nemo In Slumberland 64
31. Flex Mentallo 68
30. V For Vendetta 69
29. New X Men (Morrison) 70
28. Cerebus - Jaka's Story 73
27. Uncle Scrooge 73
26. JLA (Morrison) 76
25. Lone Wolf And Cub 82
24. Dr Strange (Ditko) 83
23. Amazing Spider-man #1-50 84
22. Alec 88
21. Ballad of Halo Jones 88
20. Mad Magazine 91
19. Top 10 (moore/ha) 98
18. Jimmy Vorrigan (ware) 101
17. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (miller/varley) 103
16. The Invisibles 106
15. Thimble Theatre 1930-1938 (segar) 112
14. Doom Patrol (morrison/case) 114
13. Asterix (goscinny/uderzo) 120
12. Maus (spiegelman) 127
11. Hate (bagge) 130
10. Ghost World (clowes) 144
9. Love and Rockets (los bros hernandez) 160
8. Calvin and Hobbes (watterson) 165
7. From Hell (moore/campbell) 181
6. Swamp Thing [moore run] 185
5. Fantastic Four [lee/kirby run] 196
4. Peanuts - 1960s 213
3. Krazy Kat 213
2. Watchmen 249
1. Tintin (herge) 251

Actually, does anyone want to explain Dark Phoenix to me? All I know is Jean's acting a bit funny - Jean's power is rising rapidly - Holy fuck what's going on? - Oh no she's dead - wait, who's this? - wait wait wait - oh no she's a demon (big plan to open the hellmouth involving a tall building?) - hooray, jean was stuck beneath the ocean. The first half sounds like it might be entertaining, the second half is everything that gave X-Men a bad name.

(I'm done now)

I think I should stay away from ILC for a few hours & go back to breaking my company's database.

Akira
League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Howard The Duck
Elektra: Assassin (upcoming!)
New X Men (does this count?)
Amazing Spider-man
Batman
Thimble Theatre
Asterix
Ghost World
Swamp Thing
Fantastic Four
Peanuts
Tintin

Now, Big Numbers The Movie - I'd watch that.

I forgot 61-100, sorry, Alan remind me tomorrow on the secret email.

there was a short-lived '60s krazy kat cartoon that stuck very close to the original in concept (ignatz, brick, officer pupp, weird backgrounds) but was very VERY mediocre in pretty much every way.

Only things with more than one vote counted.

61. Summer Blonde
62. Dan Dare: Rogue Planet
63. Fourth World
64. Powers
65. Goodbye, Chunky Rice
66. Get Your War On
67. Enigma
68. Tank Girl
69. Miracleman Book III
70. Captain Britain
71. Bone
72. Groo
73. Bad Company
74. Fantastic Four 232-260
75. Action
76. Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits
77. Pogo
78. Cages
79. Terry and the Pirates
80. Fables
81. Master Race
82. Queen And Country
83. If....
84. JL* (Giffen/DeMatteis)
85. Blankets
86. Barefoot Gen
87= Naughty Bits
87= Billy The Fish
89. Viz
90. Julius Knipl, Real Estate Lawyer
91. The Poor B@stard
92. Whizzer And Chips
93. Superman: Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?
94. 2001 Nights
95. Sleeper
96. Urusei Yatsura - Perfect Collection
97. The Diary Of A Teenage Girl
98. Nick Fury, Agent Of Shield
99. Hellboy - The Chained Coffin
100. Plastic Man

Plastic Man, Master Race, the Byrne FF, the Fourth World comics and
Powers all got 5 votes without breaking the top 50.

Most votes:

16 - Tintin, Watchmen
15 - From Hell, Kirby FF
14 - Krazy Kat, Peanuts, Swamp Thing, Calvin And Hobbes
13 - Maus
12 - Asterix, Halo Jones, Jimmy Corrigan
11 - Hate
10 - Ghost World, Doom Patrol

Amazing charts to follow.

It's given me enormous pleasure seeing Magnus posting on ILX!

Elektra (2005)
Directed by Rob Bowman

Plot Outline: Elektra the warrior is released from the hospital after a near death experience to become an assasin

Cast
Jennifer Garner -Elektra Natchios
Terence Stamp - Stick

Writing
Raven Metzner
Frank Miller - character
Zak Penn -screenplay
Zak Penn -story

Plot Outline:
"Ray", a man of mystery, gets people out of trouble, asking for favors in return

It suddenly occurs to me that I'm not sure of the distinction between superhero comics and adventure comics like Tintin. I think they both disinterest me for similar reasons, about the way narrative and suspense is used to pull the reader in.

Oh, and welcome back from the dead ILC!

But on a positive note, I've read the Top 10 trades and a few of the Lone Wolf & Cub books thanks to this thread - both brilliant. I liked the Queen & Country trade I read, also. So thanks, ILC.

The ILC All Time Greatest Comics NOMINATIONS THREAD (Deadline: 31st October)
The Greatest Comics Of All Time (ILC Mix) - Voting Instructions and Advocacy Thread
The I Love Comics Greatest Comics Ever Poll - Nominations Changes

Based on this, could someone change 'best' to 'greatest' in this thread title to make it easier to find?

I would have loved to see Robinson's Starman or Walt Kelly's Pogo, though.

It's been 10 years since we did this poll, should we redo it? I for one think my ballot would be quite different now.

I can't imagine that the results would be radically different. Primarily because I'm hard-pressed to think of many major works that have come out in the past decade (which is not to say there haven't been any, just that they're escaping me presently). Morrison's DC work is the only thing that immediately springs to mind. I guess increased ease of access to older stuff via reprints/digital releases might mix things up a bit. And I'm sure we'd see some flash-in-the-pan critical darlings fall out of contention now that the shine is off those particular apples (goodbye, Goodbye, Chunky Rice).

Primarily because I'm hard-pressed to think of many major works that have come out in the past decade

I think way more in terms of ouvres than works these days I guess, but Building Stories, The Love Bunglers, Kramers 7, You'll Never Know, Bodyworld (and Bottomless Belly Button), Orc Stain, Marble Season, Fun Home, Morrison's Batman run, King City if you don't just consider Graham's work a continuum... Woman Rebel was so great I can't believe it was effectively forgotton about by the time it came out in shops. Crawdads Welcome.

Yeah, the likely reason that I can't think of much great stuff from the past decade is that I'm super behind on almost everything (e.g. I've read all of L&R right up to when the annuals started, all of Acme through Jimmy Corrigan but not much beyond, etc.).

I'm sure there's been piles and piles of great graphic novels. Even though there is still much left to be desired, this is probably the best time for comics ever because of the overall quality, (slowly) increasing freedom and variety.

Anyone read Susceptible, Polina, Blue Is The Warmest Color, Understanding Monster, Infinite Kung Fu or Today Is The Last Day Of The Rest Of Your Life? Or books by Brecht Evans and Kerascoet?
All that stuff if supposed to be very good. I've got some of them but I haven't read any of them. I'm not interested in most of them.

Nearly all of the big classic comics aren't to my taste.

Tintin winning kinda annoys me tbh (I didn't know about this board/poll when it was going on). I admire it more than like it, it's not something I ever want to read. May be because I was never exposed to it as a kid but it all just seems so flat and lifeless.

That's just the surface style, ligne claire (which Hergé pioneered), but if you actually read it, it's one of the funniest and most humane comic series ever made.

http://www.darkhorizons.com/assets/0010/1980/tintin_article.jpg?1259866710

Anyway, on top of the comics already mentioned, a lot of pre-2004 stuff that wasn't available in English when this poll ran has now been translated: Persepolis, Thorgal, Dungeon, Epileptic, the Albebaran series by Leo, You Are There by Forest & Tardi, other books by Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar, Manu Larcenet...

That's just the surface style, ligne claire (which Hergé pioneered), but if you actually read it, it's one of the funniest and most humane comic series ever made.

I have Tintin in America, which I got for my daughter and we've read it a few times. The art and composition is very refined, controlled, perfectly executed etc. But yeah it just doesn't connect with me, it just sort of rolls along aimlessly: Tintin gets in a trap, gets out, gets in another trap, gets out, ad nauseam. I know I'm in the minority here, the appeal eludes me.

Tinitin in America is just Herge warming up, it's about a tenth as good as him at his best in later years. Seriously, give some of the later ones a try, you will be astounded at the jump in quality.

Also, I doubt ILC is busy enough these days to justify another poll.

i don't love herge the way i do barks but that's probably because i didn't discover him till i was an adult. early tintins are very clumsy and often hard to read for a lot of reasons -- 'tintin in the congo' is prob one of the worst comics i've ever read. from 'the shooting star' on they're pretty much all classic. the episodic-ness doesn't go away but everything else changes for the better, tintin himself never comes off as much more than a genial blank everyman but the characters around him (espec captain haddock) become wonderfully real and engaging.

'tintin in the land of the soviets' is worth reading just for the part where tintin falls into the basement of an old house and realizes that he's stumbled onto 'lenin and trotsky's secret stash of stolen gold!'

tintin is great

also i think poll results would be much different in 2014 for reasons mentioned. i bet fun home would go top 10.

I think pretty much all of Land of Soviets was based on a single anti-Soviet Union book Hergé read? It's true that the early books were very much informed by the prejudices of the era and Hergé's Catholic/conservative worldview... So you have anti-communism in the first book, general European stereotypes of America in the second one, colonialism and racism in the Congo adventure, etc. But I'd say Hergé's change towards a more liberal and anti-colonialist stance that came with The Blue Lotus is all the more remarkable when you consider where he started. Certainly there are still some individual dodgy moments in the later books, but considering that a lot of adventure literature of the era (30s/40s/50s) was way dodgier when it comes to issues race and politics, the post-TBL books have stood the test of time really well.

Anyway, if enough people think we could do a new poll, I'd volunteer to run it. I have a summer holiday coming up, so I have some spare time.

i would nominate, vote, chat

oh is Tintin in America just the second book? I have no idea about the chronology obviously.

i don't love herge the way i do barks

I was aware of Barks early on but didn't really get into it until the recent reprints, which are amazing. of course, I was softened up for this material by Duck Tales, Don Rosa, etc. when I was younger.

Tintin in Congo is the second book. Hergé wanted to do America after Soviet, but his very conservative newspaper insisted on showing the greatness of the Belgian colonies.

My ballot would be

1. Barks
2. Tintin

And then a lot of other stuff. Probably not the only European feeling like that...

new poll without comic strips perhaps?

Tinitin in America is just Herge warming up, it's about a tenth as good as him at his best in later years.

This is even being generous.

new poll without comic strips perhaps?

Why exclude comic strips?

because of the currently-rolling-out comic strips poll

Oh, I had no idea it's rolling now, I thought the whole poll had been abandoned. I guess it makes sense to poll non-newspaper comics only, then.

Now that should produce completely different results. Three of the top ten (Peanuts, C&H and Krazy Kat) ineligible.

So, it seems most people agree we could do this? If we advertise it on ILE, I think we'll get enough voters.

Advertising on ILE didn't help you spot the ex-Mordy poll, which you were waiting on like the rest of us.

1) Do we really think anyone on ILE will vote?
2) If they do, will it just be Watchmen/From Hell/Whatever the last thing the Guardian said "wasn't just for kids"/the latest Marvel movie, and if so does it add any benefit?
3) Given that the books which have been mentioned above that might break through are emphatically not the sort of thing non-comics readers will be reading, see point 2.

I am going to run the IPC/Fleetway/DC Thompson poll I threatened to in the Mordy poll on ILE soon, I think. That probably has a better chance of pulling in non-ILC voters.

So, it seems most people agree we could do this? If we advertise it on ILE, I think we'll get enough voters.

― Tuomas

Or just run the poll on ILE?

don't even think about starting it until we get the strips poll finished!

(I don't think it's worth doing either btw, doubt we'd get 35 respondents and few voters will have opinions on last-ten-years comics. But!)

I don't think it's worth doing either btw, doubt we'd get 35 respondents and few voters will have opinions on last-ten-years comics.

Pretty much my feeling on this.

Advertising on ILE didn't help you spot the ex-Mordy poll, which you were waiting on like the rest of us.

Well to be honest, I'd given up on waiting for it, since the nominations were like two years ago. I thought the whole poll had been abandoned.

If they do, will it just be Watchmen/From Hell/Whatever the last thing the Guardian said "wasn't just for kids"/the latest Marvel movie, and if so does it add any benefit?

If I remember correctly, the 2004 poll was advertised on ILE too, and that didn't change the results the way you claim. But just to be sure, the poll could have a rule that you have to vote for at least 20 comics or something, so we won't get ballots with just Watchmen and Maus and Strangers in Paradise in them,

Or just run the poll on ILE?

Nah. We have a board called "I Love Comics", and IMO it's been consistently the best sub-board on ILX, so I don't see any reason why the poll can't be done here. If we advertise it on ILE and people can't be arsed to click a link to the poll thread, then I don't think they'll be committed enough to put together a ballot either.

I am going to run the IPC/Fleetway/DC Thompson poll I threatened to in the Mordy poll on ILE soon, I think. That probably has a better chance of pulling in non-ILC voters.

When did you plan on doing this?

don't even think about starting it until we get the strips poll finished!

Of course not.

I don't think it's worth doing either btw, doubt we'd get 35 respondents and few voters will have opinions on last-ten-years comics.

Pretty much my feeling on this.

Mine too, fwiw.

So none of you three would vote for anything that was published in the last 10 years? (Including earlier stuff that's only been translated into English post-2004?)

Anyway, one further point is that there are a lot of ILXors who weren't around in 2004. (And several 2004 ILXors aren't around anymore.) I think many newer posters would be happy to have their say.

I probably would if I put any thought into a ballot -- I just don't have the interest or energy in putting any thought into a ballot.

Maybe there could just be a thread where everyone posts their putative ballots? And then, assuming anyone were so inclined, someone could crunch the numbers after the fact. I'd honestly almost be more interested in just seeing the more obscure stuff that individual people rate highly but would never make it into the top results of a poll.

Tuomas, if you want to do it then do it. The fact that everybody else who's commented seems to think it's a bad idea doesn't seem to be putting you off so go for it.

I'm not in a position to do the one I'm talking about for at least a month so fill your boots.

I don't feel I've read enough comics in the last decade to vote, but I'd be interested in the results for sure.

Maybe there could just be a thread where everyone posts their putative ballots? And then, assuming anyone were so inclined, someone could crunch the numbers after the fact. I'd honestly almost be more interested in just seeing the more obscure stuff that individual people rate highly but would never make it into the top results of a poll.

It's common practice after a poll has be run to do a thread where people can post their individual ballots, exactly for this reason.

The fact that everybody else who's commented seems to think it's a bad idea doesn't seem to be putting you off so go for it.

Er, the reason I revived this thread is exactly because I wanted to hear what think about the idea before starting any polls. If everyone is against it, I won't run it, but so far I'm not sure about this "fact" of yours... As far as I can tell, so far three people have said the poll is not worth doing, two people have said it is, and everyone else hasn't yet taken a stance.

I don't feel I've read enough comics in the last decade to vote, but I'd be interested in the results for sure.

It'd be perfectly okay to have a ballot with no post-2004 comics in it! My point was merely that there are enough new comics and new ILXors that the results might be different than in 2004, but that doesn't meant everyone has to vote for newer stuff.

I'm not going to get into a pissing contest but sic, William C, Ward, Chap and (implicit) me have either questioned it or taken a 'no' stance. Mordy has said yes and I assume you do too. Old Lunch broadly positive but uncommitted. Not sure exactly who you think "everyone else" is on ILC these days.

Do it if you want to do it, don't if you don't. I think I can promise on behalf of those on ILC nobody will bitch and moan and say it's been done before or link to this thread (except for lols at the outset maybe). I'm sure even some of us querying it will vote.

The main reason I'm more interested in ballots than poll results in this specific instance is the weird way that comics wind up being grouped for voting purposes. Like, there's going to be a lot of vote splitting between people who vote for L&R as a single entity and those who vote for Blood of Palomar/Love Bunglers et al. I'm way more interested in seeing which specific Barks story someone rates highly as opposed to the completely unsurprising high placement of Uncle Scrooge in the poll results.

That said, I would certainly vote. Although I'd probably vote for discrete runs/storylines that more than likely won't make it into the final results.

I understand your point, but voting for separate stories instead of runs would mean a lot vote splitting, so Love & Rockets and Uncle Scrooge might not make it to the top 50 at all.

If I do this poll, I guess I could do it so that you'll vote for specific series (like Jaime Hernandez' Locas, Hergé's Tintin) and runs (like Claremont's X-Men, Barks' Uncle Scrooge), but you can also name your favourite story within those series and runs, and those stories will be mentioned when the results are revealed.

my ballot would be pretty different this time around -- i'd read embarrassingly few comics 10 years ago.

i think seeing everybody's individual ballots would be the best reason to do a new poll; i wouldn't hope for terribly different results. hooded utilitarian ran a pretty good comics poll a while back, with lots of really interesting, diverse ballots, and the final results were almost identical to the TCJ greatest-hits list from 15 years ago.

Yeah, I actually feel that just a nominations thread without counting/ranking would be better. The results are usually boring so you could save yourself the work. Just reading recurring nominations seems enough and I'd like an unrestricted number of nominations. And if too few people nominate, it won't feel like a bummer.

I'd probably vote for quite a few short stories of titles I really don't want to get in results.

I don't really see the point of just posting ballots without a vote... That sort of a thread would be the equivalent to ILM's "your top 20 albums in genre X" threads, which almost never lead to any proper discussion, and I doubt doing that here would either. Those threads are mostly just people posting lists and others patting their back because they like Album Y too, and I don't think that's very interesting.

as opposed to people saying "Too high", too low" and "I voted for that"?

Why wouldn't it provoke discussion? We can still dispute and comment on each other's choices. I was reading the fantasy/SF/speculative books and animation poll threads recently, the results bit is always inferior to the nomination discussions.

And I'd prefer that we could choose as many things as possible just out of interest to see what turns up.

I think more in-depth descriptions of the comics with reasonings would be great. Because it would suck if we just named the usual suspects on a list with no commentary.

Whatever way you choose, I'm most looking forward to saying why I didn't respond well to some classic comics and why I don't think even most of my favourite comics deserve classic status.

I think I'd find a best comic of the last decade poll more interesting than another all time one.

I honestly have no idea what are considered the stone cold classics of the last ten years and it'd be cool to find out.

Now you're talking. Ten years ago is about when I started reading more comics after a decade away (except for Cerebus, L&R and a couple other indie titles).

Maybe a "best comics of the 00s" poll? 2004 to 2014 would be a weird period to poll, and extending it to 2000 would still mean most of the usual suspects are left out.

Published then or written then? Popeye/Thimble Theatre - despite the fine showing in these results - has only really become widely available in the last decade through the Fanta reprints. Same goes for the early Gasoline Alley material once Skeezix turns up. Or the complete Trigan Empire.

Also, most of the 00s comics on the original list (Y the Last Man, Planetary, Promethea) hadn't even finished when the first poll was done, it'd be interesting to see whether people rate them as high now that they can read the whole story.

(x-post)

I'm thinking of comics first published in the 00s... If we include reprints of older material, there'd be endless debates on what's eligible and what's not.

Also, even though there's the all-time comic strip poll, I think a 00s poll would have to include strips as well. It'd be weird to poll this millennia without including webcomics.

I thought you wanted debates! JOKES BRUV

Anyway, on top of the comics already mentioned, a lot of pre-2004 stuff that wasn't available in English when this poll ran has now been translated: Persepolis, Thorgal, Dungeon, Epileptic, the Albebaran series by Leo, You Are There by Forest & Tardi, other books by Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar, Manu Larcenet...

So (some of) these don't count then?

Most of them would count, I think only Tardi and Thorgal would be left out. I'd say that comics that started in the 90s but have been running well into the 00s should also count. Something like The Invisibles wouldn't be eligible (because it had only a handful of issues in 2000 before it finished), but Dungeon would (it started in 1998, but the majority of the books have come out in the 00s).

idgaf tbh, setting arbitrary boundaries for polls only ever causes "endless debates on what's eligible and what's not" ime.

Something like The Invisibles wouldn't be eligible (because it had only a handful of issues in 2000 before it finished)

I reckon if people wanted to vote for just those issues then why not? (seems unlikely anyone would)

Similarly if someone wanted to vote for just the last 50 or whatever issues of Cerebus they could (haha).

Of course there could also be a rule that if something was first translated into English in the 00s, it'd be eligible. This'd be a bit weird for me, because then you could vote for books like Valérian and Laureline or Blake and Mortimer that I used to read as a kid, but I'd be willing to accept that if people want it.

(xxpost)

I don't think it'd make sense to allow people to vote for individual issues, because the votes would be totally split. When it comes to ongoing series, I'd say only writer/artist runs or stories clearly demarcated as a whole (like Final Crisis) should be eligible.

What I meant was, you could vote for a series that spilled into the 00s, but you would only be considering the portion of the run that was published in that decade when voting. A vote for Cerebus would not be a vote for High Society, Jaka's Story et al but rather a vote for a cartoon aardvark annotating the Torah.

Or a vote for Promethea would only be a vote for issues 5-32.

I think the first 10 Planetary issues were in the 90s as well.

That doesn't make much sense. You'd vote for the whole story, not just the 00s part. Cerebus is ineligible because most of is pre-00s, Planetary is eligible because most of it isn't.

When it comes to ongoing series, I'd say only writer/artist runs or stories clearly demarcated as a whole (like Final Crisis) should be eligible.

I personally have a hard time divorcing that from Morrison's larger Batman epic. Are we getting really granular and saying Batman/Return of Bruce Wayne/Batman & Robin/Batman Inc. are also all separate entities for the sake of this particular poll?

Nah, Morrison's whole Batman run would be considered as one entry. Ditto for any other continuous writer and/or artist runs. But Batman #682-683 would also count if you vote for Final Crisis, since they were a part of that finite story and were labeled as such.

This am confusing.

But I like said upthread, if you vote for a longer run, you could also name, say, three of your favourite stories within that run, and then if that run makes it to the top 50, I'd list the individual stories that got most mentions.

(xx-post)

Okay, I'll try to make it more clear:

* A continuous run by writer and/or artist with the same character(s) appearing throughout: counts as one entry. Example: Morrison's Batman, Simone's Secret Six, Trondheim's The Spiffy Adventures of McConey.

* A crossover or other multi-artist/writer story that's demarcated as one whole (usually by giving individual books the same label): counts as one entry. Examples: Infinite Crisis, Civil War, Dungeon.

* Individual books that don't share the same characters or aren't otherwise labeled as one whole count as separate entries, even if they are by the same artist/writer. Examples: books by Jason, which are stylistically similar to each other (they all feature anthropomorphic animals), but each one has a unique plot and characters.

Is Birds of Prey 104-109 part of Gail Simone's Secret Six? If not, are the mini series and the ongoing separate entities because they're an essential linking piece (from memory)?

Would we nominate Blab! or Blab! #10 or "The Trumpets They Play!" (from Blab! #10)? Would we nominate Love and Rockets New Stories or "The Love Bunglers"?

Comics are a really messy medium for this stype of quantification.

How about Don Rosa's Duck Comics? They're hardly a 'run', they don't fit with anything from the nineties - which is really the period where most of his greatest work was made - but they're probably what I reread the most and with biggest enjoyment during the period.

Would we nominate Blab! or Blab! #10 or "The Trumpets They Play!" (from Blab! #10)?

None, they're all from the '90s (Blab! overall ran from '88 to the mid-00s, but was most commonly published in the '90s)

Would we nominate Love and Rockets New Stories or "The Love Bunglers"?

Are you nominating The Love Bunglers, or the contrast between Beto's sci-fi and pulp material with Xaime's chcaracter work? Do you want to be voting for the Ti-Girls?

How about Don Rosa's Duck Comics? They're hardly a 'run', they don't fit with anything from the nineties - which is really the period where most of his greatest work was made - but they're probably what I reread the most and with biggest enjoyment during the period.

They definitely count as separate stories, because there are pauses between them and there's no real continuity from one story to the next. Except for "Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck", but that's from the 90s.

Would we nominate Love and Rockets New Stories or "The Love Bunglers"?

I guess technically L&R would be more of a 80s/90s comic, but since there been quite a lot of material released in the 00s too, I would allow for individual stories to be nominated, such as "The Love Bunglers". Love & Rocketes as a whole definitely wouldn't count as one entry; I don't think any anthology comic should be nominated as a whole, unless it's all by one artist or writer/artist team.

Actually, scratch that last comment: I would allow for both Beto's and Xaime's 00s work to be nominated as a whole, so that would mean one entry for each.

Is Birds of Prey 104-109 part of Gail Simone's Secret Six? If not, are the mini series and the ongoing separate entities because they're an essential linking piece (from memory)?

The two minis are definitely part of the whole run, since the second mini continues directly from the first, and the ongoing from the second. Crossovers between two series would technically count as being part of both (so the Final Crisis Batman issues are both part of FC and Morrison's general Batman run).

I guess technically L&R would be more of a 80s/90s comic

uh, New Stories started in 2008. It's far more of a '10s comic than even a '00s comic.

Actually, scratch that last comment: I would allow for both Beto's and Xaime's 00s work to be nominated as a whole, so that would mean one entry for each.

what the holy heck

why would you nominate Fatima The Blood Spinners as being the same thing as Marble Season, or Chance In Hell as being the same thing as Julio's Day, or Sloth as being the same thing as Birds Of Prey?

Okay, I have to admit I've never really read Beto's comics. Xaime's part of New Stories are pretty much a direct continuation of what he did before in L&R, so it's all part of a big whole for me. I guess that's not the case with the other guy?

Anyway, like I said above, nominating and voting for runs makes much more sense than individual issues/stories, because with the latter there'd probably be so much vote splitting we might not get coherent results at all.

none of those six are even IN New Stories! one is a DC superhero comic!

If Tuomas is willing to put in the time/effort, I'd be up for this...

Let's not get too knotted up over what counts. Tuomas can group stuff or not as he likes. If people disagree with his categorisations, they can presumably re-do the numbers themselves if they care so much. I'm more interested in being exposed to what other people are loving than worrying so much whether it's #8 or #15.

none of those six are even IN New Stories! one is a DC superhero comic!

Ah, okay. My comment was a bit misworded, what I meant is that you can nominate their 00s work in Love & Rockets as two wholes. Obviously any comics they've done outside it count as separate entries.

So. what's the deal with the comic strip poll? Is it gonna finish anytime soon? Maybe I could already start the nominating process for this poll while it's running?

sic plans to jump back in in september. go for it.

Are you doing the 00s Tuomas?

Yeah, that was the idea.