The Comics Journals GREATEST COMICS OF ALL TIME

for me, top 3:

Doonesbury
Peanuts
Maus

its EC for me, so had to go MAD

Kirby's Fourth World is, unfortunately, in the bottom 50 so I can't vote for it here... kinda wanna go Peanuts instead

POX

1. Krazy Kat by George Herriman
2. The Death of Speedy Ortíz (L&R) by Jaime Hernandez
3. Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau
4. Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay
5. Peanuts by Charles Schulz
6. Mad Comics by Harvey Kurtzman and various
7. The Weirdo stories of Robert Crumb
8. Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
9. From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
10. The Fantastic Four by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby

Little Nemo for me, though it bugged me at the time (and still does) that stuff like Love & Rockets gets broken into sperate arcs but Pogo, Doonesbury, nearly 10 years of Fantastic Four or 40-odd years of Frank King's Gasoline Alley are one item.

yeah the L&R votesplitting is weird

otm

I'd still have the complete Locas works of Xaime in my top 10 though

poll inspired by recent thumbing-through of Comics Journal back issues btw (so much lolsome critical outrage!)

I still have all my late 90s issues including this one. And a framed poster of the Seth cover of this issue I got at SPX back in 99.

Abstain. I wil not have my vote counted as an endorsement of the Security Council's silent war.

I was reading an issue from 1990 - contained a 10 PAGE rebuttal letter to something Harvey Pekar wrote lol. Also blazing indictments of the racism and mysogyny of Aircel comics.

So CJ thinks all the greatest comics of all time are from the USA? Or is this just a list of greatest American comics?

100 best English Language Comics.

voted donald duck, carl barks is a fukken genius

The Journal published a 20th-century comics canon in its 210th issue (February 1999). To compile the list, eight contributors and editors made eight separate top 100 (or fewer than 100 for some) lists of American works.

am thinking of getting some Carl Barks Donald Duck for my daughter, is there a good collection y'all recommend

Torn between Thimble Theatre, Gasoline Alley and Dick Tracy.

I'm going Uncle Scrooge but this is a ridiculous thing to choose.
Shakey, occasionally Carl Barks Library sets show up on ebay and you can get them for under a hundred bucks:
http://cgi.ebay.com/CARL-BARKS-LIBRARY-Uncle-Scrooge-Vol-3-ANOTHER-RAINBOW-/250822872066?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a66354c02

if i HAD to pox
Peanuts by Charles Schulz
Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay
Donald Duck by Carl Barks
EC's "New Trend" war comics by Harvey Kurtzman and various
The Spirit by Will Eisner
Uncle Scrooge by Carl Barks
Gasoline Alley by Frank King
Mad Comics by Harvey Kurtzman and various
Gasoline Alley by Frank King
Terry and the Pirates by Milton Caniff

i'd also condense Carl Barks work into one and then just add Love and Rockets

shakey mo, fantagraphics are going to be doing a complete barks series in the next year or so, save yr pennies for that (i don't think they're publishing em sequentially, and are starting with some of the juciest years/stories)

anyway, john stanley>>>>barks

ooh! thx for the heads up

things too high on this list: Pogo, Barks, Binky Brown, Peter Arno (above charles addams or geo price? no way), Palestine, Hirschfeld (who is plainly an illustrator), Cages, Understanding Comics

i wld swap herge, or pratt, or baxendale, or munoz and sampayo, or franquin, or moebius, or breccia, or etc etc etc for many many of these ppl, and i'm not sure much is to be gained by comparing herriman w say ditko

still, it is v v hard to pick three, let alone one, today i wld say

peanuts by schulz
krazy kat by herriman
jungle book by kurtzman

in terms of the comics that have had the most profound and lasting effect on me, the people from whom i've learned and stolen the most, has to be one of the following:

Krazy Kat by George Herriman
Peanuts by Charles Schulz
Jaime's Love and Rockets stuff in general
RAW Magazine, edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly
R. Crumb in general, especially the Zap Comix stuff and sketchbooks
The New Yorker cartoons of Peter Arno Saul Steinberg
The Fantastic Four by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
The theatrical caricatures of Al Hirschfeld
The Amazing Spider-Man by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Amphigorey by Edward Gorey

voted for Herriman's Krazy Kat cuz it hit me early and hard and best resembles what i'd most like to do myself. and cuz Hunt Emerson made such good use of the influence, love him forever. could just as easily have gone for Amphigorey.

wish Gahan Wilson were here. and, for that matter, while we're including folks like Hirshfeld and Gorey, why not Maurice Sendak? dumb question, i guess, but i'm a fan, i can't help it...

i wld swap herge, or pratt, or baxendale, or munoz and sampayo, or franquin, or moebius, or breccia, or etc etc etc for many many of these ppl

not EL though, be fair

^ cosign, but am happy with the GREATEST [english language, heavy emphasis on american] COMICS OF ALL TIME framing

Calvin and Hobbes easily

I <3 stanley but barks is king

My heart sez Wig Wam Bam. And so does my head.

BEST PANELS EVER:

Izzy's black outline against the Hopey photos. Izzy foregrounded against Maggie's journal memories. Hopey's brother encountering Bumpers like Moses before the burning bush.

That's comics - there are no better moments than that.

http://media.s6cdn.net/cdn/images/post_11/176504_16686911_l.jpg

My top 6:

Feiffer by Feiffer
Mad by Harvey Kurtzman and various
Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar
The Acme Novelty Library by Chris Ware
The Death of Speedy Ortíz (L&R) by Jaime Hernandez
The Buddy Bradley saga by Peter Bagge

though there was plenty I like more than some of these in the bottom 50 IIRC

i have to sharply differ with ward on this one, if anything barks is too LOW on this list -- i'd definitely rank him way above kelly, spiegelman, and feiffer. giving him two entries was probably overkill, although his run on donald duck (late 40s/early 50s) is definitely stronger than the later uncle scrooge stuff. hard to compare him with stanley since the latter was more a writer than an artist (at least on lulu), though stanley was certainly a genius in his own right and should have been in the top 50.

i used to be annoyed that crumb's sketchbooks were on the list, but now that i've looked at a few of them, i'd say they're probably the best work he's ever done.

my favorites:

Peanuts by Charles Schulz
Donald Duck by Carl Barks
Thimble Theatre by E.C. Segar
EC's "New Trend" war comics by Harvey Kurtzman and various
The Sketchbooks of Robert Crumb
The Death of Speedy Ortíz (L&R) by Jaime Hernandez
The Fantastic Four by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
The autobiographical comics from Yummy Fur by Chester Brown
Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
The Idiots Abroad (Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers) by Gilbert Shelton and Paul Mavrides

Idiots Abroad is v good but my favorite Freak Bros are like the one pagers of "aw Fat Freddy ate all our pot brownies."

i actually prefer some of the staff lists to the final one: http://archives.tcj.com/3_online/f_curtain.html

looking at those lists, you get a sense of why the final roundup is so skewed. for one thing, a lot of ppl DID vote for non-english comics, and almost everyone seems to have voted for separate love and rockets books. i think one entry for jaime's local stories and one for gilbert's palomar stories would've been plenty, and it is a bummer that no one could even agree enough on dave sim's 'high society,' which is easily top 50-worthy.

the politics on this nonsense must run high, stanley would undoubtedly be in the top 10 if fanta had been reprinting lulu

it is a bummer that no one could even agree enough on dave sim's 'high society,' which is easily top 50-worthy.

wow yeah is Sim not on here at all? that's a travesty.

we are def going to disagree p sharply, JD, if you think dave sim belongs anywhere near a top fifty... or top hundred... or top thousand... (i am not a fan, but i can only fight so many battles at once on this thread!) i do seem to remember that sim's exclusion was p 'controversial' at the time - and was taken as a part of general fantagraphics dislike for him and his 'politics'. sim often strikes me as a comics equivalent of kubrick - a 'master' of the form and fan favourite generally disliked by critics. there's also sim's aesthetic alignment w eisner, rather than kurtzman, a bit of a no-no for groth and his TCJ 'school'.

for a long time, i thought barks was strictly an american phenomenon, a joke played on european comic fans, until i found that in fact it's only in britain that he means so little, compared to the adoration he gets in the usa, and france, and germany, and holland and so on. so perhaps, in part, its a childhood thing - just as herge may mean much less to american readers. or maybe i just don't get it, or maybe the new fantagraphics series will convince me otherwise - but on the whole i can't get past the talking ducks, the one-dimensional nature of the characters and their situations, the (to my eyes) bland model sheet corporate drawings, all undercut by barks' very sour, reactionary faith in power and money, and his deep mistrust of people, and their potential for goodness, or at least acting in good faith. even at the level of fantasy i don't think barks is especially engaging - there's more life and sly wit in the fox and crow strips reprinted in that superb spiegelman/mouly anthology of childrens' comics.

whereas john stanley's comics are STILL often laugh-out-loud funny - just like, yeah, "fat freddy got burned again"

I'd put the first half of Cerebus, up through Melmoth, in my top 10...probably bumping From Hell.

critics don't like Kubrick?

Am I really the only person on here that's been getting the Dick Tracy reprints? Seriously, they're a revalation.

no, i have the first five books. Gould is a genius.
My pox is mostly just driven by what moves me emotionally; i.e. what i read when i was a kid more than anything else.

i wouldn't say i'm a FAN of sim's, i find his public persona and professed beliefs to be well beyond loathsome to the point where i can imagine them swamping future appreciation of his work, and i doubt i'll ever finish cerebus considering how insufferable it's supposed to have gotten after a certain point. but i do think 'high society' is pretty excellent.

ward, you may have a point about the childhood thing -- i didn't read herge as a child and tbh it took me years to really appreciate tintin (and i confess i still find it a bit slapstick-y for my taste sometimes, especially in the early albums) -- but barks is someone whose best work seems more and more wonderful and rewarding to me every year. you're right that his view of people is very dark and even misanthropic, right down to the way the characters treat each other (scrooge, who don rosa turned into a sort of selfless horatio alger hero in his epic 12-part biography, is really a cold-blooded SOB in most of barks's stories; donald rarely shows any affection for his nephews, who generally treat him with amused contempt), which i can see putting some ppl off. on the other hand, i don't see any great faith in power and money -- the moment at the end of 'only a poor old man' when scrooge suddenly realizes how empty his life has been is one of the all-time great moments in comics for me. and i do find lots of his stories to be hysterically funny, particularly the one where donald tries one ridiculous scheme after another to get on a quiz show and a classic christmas story in which donald and scrooge try to clobber each other with steam shovels.

and i think his art at its best was far from bland; apart from donald and the nephews, barks invented all the characters himself with no input at all from the disney studio, so they couldn't really be 'model sheet drawings'! he drew so many full-page and half-page spreads that just knock me over, like this one from the story i mentioned above: http://disneycomics.free.fr/Ducks/Barks/show.php?s=date&loc=1949/W_CP_1-01R.

yeah, i find lots of barks one liners and cartooning memorably hysterical
UK WUK!

doing Cerebus clearly broke Sim's brain but the guy is just such a master formalist and his accomplishments are so singular and unique... I come back to those mid-period books a lot, they are so rich, so perfectly executed.

sim's exclusion was p 'controversial' at the time - and was taken as a part of general fantagraphics dislike for him and his 'politics'.

yeah, but this was nonsense, given that fully 50% of the Fanta owners included Cerebus on their lists

IIRC it was generally agreed that if they'd know how the results would shake out, they would have offered voters a chance to reach consensus on whether to nominate someone's entire ouevre or selected stories, for grwater consistency. but I really like the accidental consensus that results! like, enough people independently divided up Death Of Speedy from "L&R" or "the Maggie & Hopey stories", and Kurtzman's Mad & Kurtzman's war books from "Kurtzman at EC" and "EC Comics", and Tantrum & Sick Sick Sick both from "Jules Feiffer," etc, that those show up specifically, but other people get "forty years of work. just that dude generally."

I just couldn't get into Krazy Kat. I hope Nemo is the old timey comic that does it for me (when I finally get some)

Terry & The Pirates is the 'classic' reprint that I've struggled most with, never got past the first volume. Rip Kirby, on the other hand, is the worst printed - an awful lot of the pages are dreadfully thickly lined (see Glamourpuss' passim, I guess).

for a long time, i thought barks was strictly an american phenomenon, a joke played on european comic fans, (snip)

I have fond childhood memories of reading Donald Duck comics (possibly by Barks, possibly not), so I am open to the idea of Barks being a comics genius. Krazy Kat is the one where I really find myself thinking that no one really likes it that much, or has even read it, but pretending to like it is a sure sign that you have ascended into the ranks of the comics fandom illuminati.

My little Nemo vote didn't register! damnit.

i went with 'peanuts.' nothing wrong with 'ghost world,' tho.

nothing wrong with it, but it's not even arguably better than everything else on the list

I haven't read everything on the list, but I certainly liked Ghost World more than, say, City of Glass or anything by Chris Ware. With the latter two, I can admire the formal brilliance, but GW made a bigger impression on me because it managed to capture a certain age and a certain mindstate better than almost any other piece of fiction I've come across.

I understand not caring for Krazy Kat, but implying others do not, or that the love is a pose, is Krazy.

you don't understand - my opinions are objectively correct. Anyone who claims to disagree with them can only be pretending.

Well, maybe. I subconsciously think that anyway.

<throwsbrickatDV>

lol

Maybe we should have a thread where people confess to never having read the comics that always appear in lists of greatest comics ever. "The Spirit... that's the one about the dog? I think I read an issue once". and so on.

go for it. the ones i'm guilty of on this list are never being able to get myself to finish binky brown (never appealed) and i never got a copy of Jungle book (though i have plenty of Kurtzman besides)... things like Hirschfeld and Arno quite frankly don't belong on this list at all imo

i'd never even heard of this Jungle Book before now.

Jungle Book is solid but highly overrated on this list. Found a used copy not long after this issue came out and was super-excited. After I read it I decided it pales compared to MAD or the War Comics.

RONG

jungle book is the purest example of kurtzman's writing/drawing/lettering - the quality of the artwork alone is enough to justify its ranking on this list.

this is by far from being the best page, just the best I could find on a quick google, but even so that wash technique, the expressive stylisation of the figures/faces - just superb:

http://deniskitchen.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/A_HK.jungle88.bg.jpg

I have never read any of:

Palestine by Joe Sacco
Paul Auster's City of Glass by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchell (honestly what is this doing on the list? so random)
Tantrum by Jules Feiffe
The Kin-der-Kids by Lyonel Feininger
Feiffer by Jules Feiffer
Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green (this seems like something I might enjoy, just never come across it)
Polly and Her Pals by Cliff Sterrett
The New Yorker cartoons of Peter Arno (gimme a fucking break with this bullshit)
The Jungle Book by Harvey Kurtzman (never seen a copy)
The Mishkin saga by Kim Deitch (I like Deitch but don't even know this one...?)

with a lot of the older strip stuff, my only exposure has been the excerpts in the Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (some of which are really short, like Gasoline Alley, others are really long. Would LOVE to have that Gasoline Alley reprint book tho, just based on what I've seen)

i would've voted for mad if i noticed it was on the list, but i didnt so i voted for c&h

There's five reprint books of gasoline alley stuff, one giant sunday and four chronological.
they're among my faves.
shakey you should REALLY find some feininger, Sacco and Sterrett
the City of Glass book is one of the best examples of a great job of translating a book to a comic and (somewhat) improving it also prior to asterios polyp it was generally considered Mazz's best work

I need to start picking up the Gasoline Alley reprints too. So many good strips getting high quality archives these days.

Speaking of, I've got the first volumes of Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie on their way. Excited for both.

Jungle Book is not Kurtzman's best writing but it is an amazing burst of pure comics

things like Hirschfeld and Arno quite frankly don't belong on this list at all imo

lol @ "the people who set the parameters for this list 12 years ago made them wrong!"

The Mishkin saga by Kim Deitch (I like Deitch but don't even know this one...?)

"I like Kim Deitch but I have never read anything by him"

hirschfeld and arno are illustrators imo and not narrative artists but please let's not have this argument
and yeah the mishkin saga covers all the Waldo comix so you probably have read some of this and are just not aware of it shakey

DUDES:

Best comic ever.

See?

THE END.

Arno is straight-up a cartoonist, don't think I've ever seen a plain illustration by him

Hirschfeld as a caricaturist and nothing else you could argue against, but the blurb in the actual magazine makes a good case to dismiss your specific point...?

didn't they just start reprinting 'polly and her pals'? those sunday pages are incredible, just bursting with energy. love those art deco potted plants. can't decide whether or not i prefer it to the 'gasoline alley' pages.

all of feininger's comic book work has been reprinted in a single slim volume, very much worth picking up. very weird and not like anything else in comics.

there's a lot of stuff on this list i would've happily moved to include bushmiller's 'nancy' or aragones' 'groo.'

IGW is reprinting oversized polly stuff, it's pricey but gorgeous.
since you really wanna have this argument, i consider cartoonists illustrators. if you're doing one panel, you're not making comics. larson is not a comic artist. Watterson is.

"magic in the gutters" and all that McCloud jazz.

Not as sold on Groo as most folks, but Bushmiller is one of the pinnacles of the form.

also there's LOADS of straight arno illustration including some cheesecake
i'm not devaluing his work as a draftsman or a cartoonist in any way. it's just not comics any more so than it's cinema.

i would add Usagi Yojimbo, Dungeon, Nancy, Lil Abner (Capp's assholishness has not served him well in the eyes of history) and Dick Tracy just off the top of my head

panel cartoonists are telling a gag

illustrators are providing an unnecessary decoration to someone else's story

and I'm sticking by the magazine making a case on Hirschfeld until you refute it specifically! going to sleep now the rap poll's over though if you want to let it all drop.

xpost: Dungeon is not English language

yeah, i simply don't agree with you.
but you're right re: dungeon
Cages is CRAZY overrated

fanta has their own hardheaded attitude regarding what constitutes GREAT and MEANINGFUL and i think it's done more good than bad in the long run but you can't discount the general partisan idiocy that they won't let go of

Cages is CRAZY overrated

+1

if you're doing one panel, you're not making comics. larson is not a comic artist. Watterson is.

i think one-panel stuff counts as comics -- i mean, watterson did a bunch of strips that were just full pages or single panels. i'd rather have 'far side,' 'dennis the menace,' bill mauldin's WW2 cartoons, etc., included than not. admittedly there has to be a line drawn somewhere -- hirschfeld is definitely not comics.

i'd say the magic formula is 'words plus pictures,' but then that'd leave out all pantomime comics!

I think single-panel comics that feature recurring characters do count as comics. For daily strips, the "magic in the gutters" is the time lapse between yesterday and today. One anonymous kid making another anonymous kid cry is not necessarily comics, but Billy making Jeffy cry is.

for me it needs to be a story told through multiple pictures. I'll copy to hieroglyphics before I will Oliphant.

wait Arno cheesecake?!

anyway dismissing him for having done some illustration work is like dismissing The Death Of Speedy for Jaime having drawn a picture of Aquaman and Namor shaking hands in Amazing Heroes. EXACTLY LIKE IT.

admittedly there has to be a line drawn somewhere -- hirschfeld is definitely not comics.

again, at least do the politeness of refuting the specific argument FOR Hirschfeld made in the issue*

*[furiously hopes he's remembering the actual issue and not Kim T or Spurge posts on message boards after it came out]

in fairness, i haven't yet read the actual issue this list was published in -- coincidentally enough, i finally found and ordered a copy on amazon about a week ago. but 'definitely not' was too strong, you're right. again, whatever quibbles we might have about what is and isn't comics, including stuff like new yorker cartoons and sketchbooks definitely made the list more interesting than it might otherwise have been.

i would've liked to have seen them put out a list where they recused themselves from including anything that they personally published and then made a separate list of JUST what they published and then had a third party merge the two
if you're the goddam publisher as well as journalists who dictate what should be canon or not you gotta get some objective distance

in fairness a lot of this stuff they hadn't yet published when they made the list (krazy kat, peanuts, barks, pogo) (assuming they ever do publish pogo).

Yeah but there's no way that they give twenty six separate slots to L&R books and a single one to Peanuts if the Hernandez bros publish with D&Q

i like the idea of giving separate slots to peanuts, i.e. -- "66. the ones where rerun is on the back of his mother's bike." "89. the ones where sally talks to the school building."

the joe garagiola era deserves acknowledgement

Interesting statement from Tom Spurgeon today, brought on by an excerpt from Tim Kreider's big Cerebus piece in TCJ #301.

"Cerebus was probably the book least well-served by the rules we put into place in compiling the lists. We placed a premium on agreement between writers to keep a critic from rushing in with a personal favorite and getting a work no one else felt strongly about on the list. While there were votes for the comic book overall as well as High Society, Jaka's Story and Church and State, there seemed to be little agreement over which one was worth of inclusion. With the Hernandez Brothers, there was a much greater range of support for certain works. That may not have been the wisest group of standards a magazine has ever put together, but I swear it wasn't a direct blackballing."

just the most foolish choice to break anyone's work down into chapters rather than oeuvre unless you're gonna apply that rule to EVERYBODY'S work, schulz included

"That may not have been the wisest group of standards a magazine has ever put together, but I swear it wasn't a direct blackballing."

This makes me (irrationally?) angry.

just the most foolish choice to break anyone's work down into chapters rather than oeuvre unless you're gonna apply that rule to EVERYBODY'S work, schulz included

sorry it's been a while, where did Li'l Folks and It's Only A Game rank?

oh, cmon. fifty years of strip work does not deserve to be considered at the very least by decade? especially if you're slicing the L&R apple so thin? Why not just rank Locas for crissakes?

shrug: The Comics Journals GREATEST COMICS OF ALL TIME

Kreider's Cerebus piece is really good btw, eager to see his actual review of the entire work

the hooded utilitarian did a poll of the top 115 comics, and lo and behold, it's not much different from the TCJ list:

http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/08/the-top-115/

except for Cerebus at 16