125 thoughts on “The Top 115”

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2. Congrats to everyone involved! Out of curiosity, why did you ask for “favorites, the best, or the most significant” as opposed to just one of those things? It makes the results a little hard to interpret…but maybe that was the point?

3. Robert’s got to answer that…but considering how many people prefaced their lists with a disclaimer (these are my favorites, not the best) I suspect it was probably a good practical move. If they felt they actually had to do best, people probably wouldn’t have voted…or more likely would have just said they were voting for their favorites anyway.

4. It’s funny: 5 of my choices made the top 115, and 5 were probably only voted for by me.

   I am really surprised Cerebus beat out Crumb… though perhaps that is more a case of votes split for different Crumb works.

5. Crumb is probably somewhat a case of vote splitting…but I think it may also be a case of his work maybe actually falling a little in status over the years? Or so I’d like to think, anyway, since I”m not a big fan of his.

   Peanuts, Nemo, and Watchmen were on my list…and otherwise I think it’s possible that no one else but me voted for the other 7. (no other votes for Ariel Schrag’s Likewsie, for example — alas. Oh! But there were a couple of other votes for Marston/Peter WW, I remember now, which pleased me.)

6. Joshua Paddison’s comments from another thread are worth repeating: “We are seeing a major bias towards works created by someone for most or all of their creative life. Assuming #1 is what we all know it will be, 6 of the top 10 will be newspaper comics (or Locas) that consumed virtually all of their creators’ time. So naturally those “works” will seem grander than single books or stories. If we had been allowed to vote for Daniel Clowes’s entire corpus, rather than single stories (we were even discouraged from voting for anthologies like Eightball in favor of Ghost World, etc), or the entire output of R. Crumb, I bet this list would look quite different.”

   I think this is spot on: if this list has a bias its towards artists who devoted decades to a “life work” (Schulz, Herriman, Jaime, Dave Sim) rather than produced many different smaller stories (Crumb, Clowes). I voted for the Crumb/Pekar collaboration because I wanted to get Pekar some recognition but I could just has easily voted for the counterculture Crumb, the Weirdo era Crumb or many other variations of Crumb. I suspect others were in the same boat. If Crumb were considered simply as someone who has a body of work that deserves to be appreciated in bulk rather than splintered off into artificial categories, he would have ranked higher, and indeed might be in the top 10.

7. I don’t know why, but I love this sort of analysis, especially when I can compare my votes with the totals. I’ll have to look at my list to make sure, but I think almost all of my votes actually made the top 115. Even Groo! That was one that I thought might be unique to me, so I’ll have to look at the individual lists to see who else is a fan.

   And of course, I end up looking at the results and noticing several that I could have (should have?) chosen instead. Well, if this becomes a Sight and Sound once-a-decade thing, I can revise it later, right?

8. Groo almost made my list…

   There was some weird consolidating going on, though, in the Top 115. Why is The Filth with The Invisibles, when they were completely separate projects?….On the other hand, Doom Patrol was separated from Flex Mentallo, even though Flex was a spinoff of DP. Seems illogical, but, of course, ultimately, who really cares.

9. I would’ve combined Jimmy Corrigan and Rusty Brown into one entry, “Acme Novelty Library.” There were in fact some issues of Acme that had stories with both characters. The two things I voted for that didn’t make the list were Dave Stevens’ “Rocketeer” and Miller’s “Sin City.”

10. Jones–

    I believe the wording of the question is, apart from the substitution of “comics works” for “films,” the same as the one Sight & Sound uses in their surveys.

    Derik & Jeet–

    The Crumb votes were all over the map. Figuring out how to group them was the biggest challenge I had. I’d have to go back and check for sure, but I think a total of 3 2/3 Crumb votes (1 for the Sketchbooks, and 2 2/3 for Genesis) are all that is not reflected in the above list. If one doesn’t count the American Splendor votes in his favor, I don’t believe he would have made the top ten, and even then he would have been at the bottom of it. Frank Miller got more votes than Crumb either way you count it.

    My defense of the Crumb groupings is that the counterculture-period material is of a substantially different character than the work of the ’80s and early ’90s. If one isn’t already familiar with him, one might even think they were by different artists.

    The #1 vote getter if you go by creators would have been Alan Moore by a whopping margin. Kirby would have been #2, with a healthy lead over Schulz at #3.

    Eric–

    I grouped The Filth with the Invisibles because two of the people who voted for The Invisibles voted for them together. No one voted for The Filth by itself. By a similar token, all votes for Flex Mentallo were for Flex Mentallo, and all votes for Doom Patrol were Doom Patrol. Everybody who voted for them treated them as distinct projects.

11. I like that that suggests that if Alan Moore and Jack Kirby had ever collaborated, it would have been by far the most popular comic ever.

12. About the list as a whole, a few general thoughts:

    a. It’s not such a great revolution from the earlier TCJ list: 6 of the ten titles on the top 10 are the same. While some cartoonists – Justin Green and Feiffer – have fallen, they are still on the longlist. There does seem to be a strong consensus on who the important cartoonists are.

    b. I appreciated the effort to include international cartoonists but they weren’t very well integrated into the list, in part because the people contributing their lists (myself included) are overwhelmingly oriented towards Anglophone comics. In some impossibly ideal list which gathers opinions from fans all over the world, I would imagine that Herge and Tezuka would rank much higher, at least in terms of historical importance.

    c. The list is much more populist – not to say more middle-of-the-road – than the earlier TCJ list. There are a few too many “serious” superhero titles here for my taste. Coupled with that is the fact this list seems less historically informed than the old TCJ list, which really did give you a sense of which Anglophone comics had the biggest impact in shaping the field.

    d. I enjoyed the exercise and am glad to have this list, but as with all canon formation there are intrinsic problems in ranking divergent works. As mentioned above, cartoonists who tend to work in a variety of modes and do smaller stories are undervalued in this list compared to those who do a large “life’s work project. I can’t see any way around this problem, except maybe by ranking cartoonists rather than works. But then you would get new problems of dealing with artists who collaborated on many projects (Kirby, Kurtzman, etc.). There is no perfect way to make these lists. But in the immortal words of Sam Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

13. Interesting that “Here” and “Master Race” are the only short stories to make the list. Probably says something for not only the stories themselves but the critical appreciations of both (would we care as much about Master Race were it not for that Benson/Spiegelman essay?).

14. @Robert Stanley Martin. That’s interesting about Moore and Kirby ranking so high. Kirby I understand but Moore I’m more ambiguous about. From Hell is great, as are a few of the shorter stories but I have very mixed feelings about most of his work.

15. I’m with Jackie on ACME. I voted for “ACME” rather than the individual stories because I love the fake ads, dioramas, copyright braggadocio, etc. as much as the narratives. They are all of a piece. I think it all should’ve been counted as ACME. Rusty, Chalky and Jimmy exist in the same universe don’t they?

16. Jackie–

    My issue with voting for things like ACME (or Eightball or RAW) is that they are clearly not going to be the final repository of the works. When issues of those go out of print, they are going to be permanently out of print. Anybody who comes to Jimmy Corrigan now is all but certainly going to be reading the Jimmy Corrigan collection. The same will be true of Rusty Brown/Lint when Ware ultimately wraps it up. I’m almost completely certain they (JC and RB/L) will be published as distinct books at that time.

    I want the top ten and top 115 lists to be in part a tool for neophytes to the works and even to comics as a whole. I want them to promote these works as worthwhile things to read. Grouping Ware’s work under the ACME banner pushes people towards the collectors’ market, and, rightly or wrongly, I believe that’s more likely to alienate them than not. I have to do it the way I think is best, and I openly admit others may disagree with my approach.

    As I said in the post, it’s certainly likely that people will come to different conclusions about how the list of top vote getters should look after inspecting the individual lists. And I invite those different conclusions; I’d like to see how people revise my editorial efforts. I might even end up agreeing with some of those revisions.

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18. @Robert Stanley Martin. That’s a fair enough point about “Acme”. With “Eightball” though I think those early issues will eventually be reprinted in a book — Clowes has talked about that. Again, there is no perfect way to do this and there are bound to be arguments around the edges.

19. I didn’t see anywhere in the requirements for voting that something must be currently (or soon) available in print in order to qualify as a body of work. Acme is a series in which each “issue” has been uniquely designed, and that packaging is part and parcel of the work.

20. I get that, Robert, but you could’ve promoted “the cheapest way of getting some of ACME is through the narrative collections” as was done with Peanuts (which I’m betting wasn’t being voted on for the last 20 years) or Locas (which is a section of an ongoing narrative).

    As for the representation of smaller works vs. lifelong ones: My happiest comics-buying moments involved a new book from Dave Cooper, but I can’t decide which of his ‘-le’ stories is better than the others, so I left him off. Same with another favorite, Renee French. I kind of wish I hadn’t done that. Oh well.

21. I think the last twenty years of peanuts has a lot of amazing things, actually. Schulz started getting really weird….

22. Not that this will clarify the issue in any way, but some of Ware’s miscellaneous work was collected along with new material in a large volume called either just “The Acme Novelty Library” or something like “Acme Novelty Library Report to Shareholders”, and it includes a lot of the ads, fine print, short strips, oddities, etc, while also being exactly the sort of book Robert would want to point people toward. That doesn’t resolve any questions about how to split votes, but it does add another wrinkle to the arguments.

    Really, though, I’m perfectly happy to accept Robert’s methods, since there’s definitely no perfect way to compile this data, and while it’s interesting to argue and debate, it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of difference when it comes to results.

23. I knew I should’ve said “I’m betting everyone but Noah ….”

24. Noah wrote: “I like that that suggests that if Alan Moore and Jack Kirby had ever collaborated, it would have been by far the most popular comic ever.”

    The thought of such a collaboration is very intriguing, but I don’t think it would not have taken advantage of the strong points of either creator.

    Kirby’s best work came when he was allowed to unleash his imagination creating characters and stories, after which a skilled editor and writer (Stan Lee) came in afterwards to smooth the rough edges, write the dialogue, and give the characters personality.

    Alan Moore doesn’t work that way.

    So, while a collaboration of Moore and Kirby might have generated some interesting work, the work probably would have been equally as interesting if the artist had been John Buscema or any number of other great artists.

25. “Kirby’s best work came when he was allowed to unleash his imagination creating characters and stories, after which a skilled editor and writer (Stan Lee) came in afterwards to smooth the rough edges, write the dialogue, and give the characters personality.”

    Oh, bollocks. Though Alan Moore doesn’t work like that in another way: he ensures that his collaborators get credit and a fair portion from the proceeds of their efforts, something Stan Lee clearly never cared about.

26. I think Moore’s moved away from the incredibly detailed scripts, at least in part…and he does seem to take care to collaborate with his artists. I’m not a huge fan of Dave Gibbons’ work, but his care and attention to detail works very well for Watchmen….

27. The point is, Moore’s best work occurred when HE was playing god — not the artist. Kirby’s best work occurred when He was playing god — not the writer.

    I just don’t see a collaboration by the two bringing out the best in either person.

    They wouldn’t go together like peanut butter and jelly — they’d go together like peanut butter and MORE peanut butter.

28. There is some weird shit on this list… and in very strange order. What it really needs is a second round to have everybody rerank the top 100. Not that I really want to do it or anything, but I bet that would be a better indicator of ranking.

29. Overall this list was a well conceived and organized effort. But I have to take issue with it so forcibly being referred to as an “international” poll. Yes there are people from outside America, but the vast majority of the pollsters seem to be native English speakers. The mere fact that not a single foreign work is in the top ten must be testament to the quite skewed polling base. I can’t help but be unswayable in my conviction that if this were a truly evenly dispersed “international” polling that there is no way Fantastic Four would have beat out TinTin or Asterix or any number of other French, Belgian, or Dutch works. Not to mention that the most prolific comics nation in the world, Japan, is not even represented until number 33.

    To call something international is to imply that it is “all over the world”, that it is cosmopolitan, but this is clearly not just Western dominated, but English language dominated. Obviously, to say international could just mean America and Canada but that is not what it is clearly intended to imply.

    Again, I think this was a worthwhile poll and I am excited to see it, but I think the criticism is valid and must be lodged.

30. This is a very useful list for librarians, for the purposes of reader’s advisory and collection development.

31. “I like that that suggests that if Alan Moore and Jack Kirby had ever collaborated, it would have been by far the most popular comic ever.”

    Maybe, but Promethea seems to be Alan Moore’s only non grim and gritty book on the list.

    Supreme is perhaps the most Kirby-esque thing he’s done, and it even includes a Kirby homage issue, but it isn’t on the list.

32. Russ, I didn’t say it would be good. I just said it would be popular!

33. Noah wrote: “Russ, I didn’t say it would be good. I just said it would be popular!”

    You’re right.

    But, like the oft-hoped for Beatles reunion that never occurred, it probably also would have been anticlimactic.

34. No lyonel feininger? or did i just miss his listing

35. No listing for Feininger, I’m afraid. There were two votes for The Kin-der-Kids, and one for Wee Willie Winkie’s World. I would have been willing to combine the votes in a single entry, but four were still needed to make the above list.

    Let me take the time to address a few other things in the above comments.

    First of all, in the poll announcement, which every participant I invited was referred to, I stated:

    In the case of features in alternative-comics series that were later published as distinct graphic-novel collections, please use the graphic novels when preparing your list. For example, if you would like to vote for work by Daniel Clowes that was originally published in Eightball, we ask that you vote for Ghost World, Ice Haven, or Caricature & Other Stories, etc. as separate entries.

    This was intended to cover The ACME Novelty Library, among other things. Now, I grant I could have written this a little more carefully, such as saying, “In the case of features in alternative-comics series that were (or will be) later published as distinct graphic-novel collections…,” but I think my view of those publishing situations is reasonably clear. The feature and the final book are what matter for the purposes of the poll, not the preliminary serialization or the publications that contain it.

    In any case, the announcement also stated this: “We reserve the right to count votes towards the final tally as we see fit.” I knew I would not be able to anticipate every stumbling block the lists presented, and I included this to protect my flexibility.

    I just looked at the TCJ Top 100 again, and there are 45 entries on that list that are not in any way reflected in the list above. (This does not include RAW, which I wasn’t going to include in this list. What I did with the one vote for it is explained in the above post.) For those curious, click here and compare.

    In closing, the rankings (or the failure to make the list at all) do not reflect my or Noah Berlatsky’s opinion of the aesthetic quality of the material. They reflect the number of votes received for the works by the poll participants. For the record, I voted for 2 of the works that made the top ten, and Noah voted for 3. Six of my other votes went to work that ended up qualifying for the Top 115, and 2 did not. Noah’s other 7 votes were for material that did not make the Top 115.

    By the way, no one submitted a list that matched the consensus top ten.

36. So, with the qualification that I only know a lot of these books from blurbs, what really jumps out at me when I’m looking for something to read is that the vast majority of them are either classic strips, superheroes or realist autobiographical/”life of x” narratives. There’s not a lot of thematic variety.

    How accurate is that? I was looking for “art SF” (like Delany or Dick) or elaborate formal satires (like Candide or Catch 22) or “costume stories” (like I, Claudius) or political works (like Animal Farm or All the King’s Men). And as I expected there’s nothing I’d call “anthemic feminist” (like Fear of Flying or the Handmaids Tale or Woman at the Edge of Time.) I also don’t see any psychological or espionage thrillers, classic mysteries, or romances — although I’m sure there are elements of those in the superhero works. Nothing straight, like Agatha Christie or John le Carre or Daphne du Maurier though.

    Are the blurbs just written for the subculture so that I’m missing this kind of material even though it’s actually there? It just seems like it isn’t getting made.

37. I sympathize, but we were at the mercy of the votes. We’re not endorsing the results as being anything other than the results. There’s an implicit conceit that this is the consensus view of the comics community, but that’s still just a conceit. (And that’s still a subculture, although with our efforts you don’t have any particular faction skewing things to suit their agenda.) On the plus side, we will be publishing the votes over the next two weeks, so if you’re curious as to what this or that participant voted for, you’ll be able to see. I wish I could address your concerns better, but this is what it is.

38. I don’t think it’s a comment on this list, Robert, so much as it is on what’s out there. Comics used to be a genre rather than a medium, and it’s only in the last couple of decades that it’s started really thinking of itself as a medium, and cartoonists are still primarily exploring the historical precedent of the genre, rather than exploring the full flexibility of the medium (at least narratively; that statement would not be true for the visual component.)

    This list (and probably I’d feel the same way about the TCJ list) makes that overarching trend particularly apparent, in a way that more idiosyncratic perspectives can’t.

    Unless I’m failing to recognize broader genre engagement due to bad marketing. But I don’t think that’s the case…

39. Caro,

    Ed Brubaker’s Criminal is a good, straight crime book. That Nick Cave guy has attempted to do art SF (his name and his book aren’t coming to me). I’d consider The Invisibles and Filth to be in the same sub-genre as Dick or Delaney. Some of Warren Ellis’ stuff, too. The Walking Dead is a successful horror comic, even though you don’t mention that genre. Brian K. Vaughan’s has some strongly political books: Y may or may not be anthemic feminism. Ex Machina pretty strongly condemns pragmatic, middle of the road politics, but it does feature what might be called a superhero. There’s Brian Wood’s DMZ, which is a political alternate history book.

    No, the field is not as diverse as literature, but I’d say it’s getting better.

40. Paul Pope — that’s the Nick Cave guy.

41. Of those you name, Charles, only Y the Last Man is on the list, correct (which speaks to Robert’s point about being at the mercy of the votes)?

    I wouldn’t consider Y the Last Man “anthemic” although I think it’s valid to challenge that. And there are Darwyn Cooke’s adaptations of the Parker novels, which are directly culled from crime lit.

    But still — I think the list really throws into relief a terrific obstacle for people coming to comics who aren’t interested in either the traditional comics genres or All Things Hipster.

    The list kind of solidifies my skepticism when people say that “comics is a medium.” To me an important aspect of a medium is that critical mass of diversity in the genres expressed via that medium. And pretty much any best-of list from literature or film easily produces a dozen sub-genres, whereas here we have 3.

    Maybe comics is just completely concerned with “visual genre” (whatever that is?)…but that strikes me as myopic, since there are stories in there and a lot of bandwidth devoted to the value of stories and characters so the diversity of narrative genre should be ripe pickin’s.

    But like I said, maybe it’s there even in this list and I’m just overlooking it. I tend to think you’re right though that it’s there, it’s just one offs.

    I think it would be good if this list triggered some conversation about why that is, though.

42. Moto Hagio’s Drunken Dream includes the kind of arty feminist SF you’re looking for, I think. Tezuka is also adventurous in terms of genre. As Charles says, so is the Invisibles…and actually I’d say Preacher too. Fruits Basket is romance, I think.

    I think manga probably has just a much broader range of genres…for example, Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku is a costume drama, tons of romance, Monster is a psychological thriller, Parasyte is arty sf…I’m pretty sure if I knew more I could match all of your requests with series.

43. The Invisibles is on the list, too.

    I don’t much disagree, but a few counter-observations:

    Is there a literary equivalent of Kirby’s FF or Ditko’s Spider-Man? I’m not sure what genre Krazy Kat or Cerebus belong to, but they’re very “comicsy.” My point is that you have to go to comics to get this kind of stuff (even if many don’t want this kind of stuff).

    I hate autobio as much as the next poster, but I don’t think it’s fair to call what’s represented on this list “Hipster.” Brown and Spiegelman aren’t the kind of guys infesting every bar in Hollywood, Itellyou.

    Though only Black Hole made the list, I realized through my own preferences, comics is a good medium for body horror. Some comics artists (e.g., Suehiro Maruo) can twist my stomach just as much as some of my favorite films do.

44. “My defense of the Crumb groupings is that the counterculture-period material is of a substantially different character than the work of the ’80s and early ’90s. If one isn’t already familiar with him, one might even think they were by different artists.”

    This is a defensible choice but it’s also true that the same thing can be said for many of the artists on this list who are grouped together in one. The early Dave Sim (who was doing a spoof of Barry Windsor Smith’s Conan) is very different than the middle-period Sim (who was satirizing politics and religion) who was again very differnt from late period Sim (who was creating his own religion and condemning women for their inate inferiority). The fact that this work is all under the label of “Cerebus” doesn’t disguise the difference. The same could be said of Schulz and Jaime — in many ways they’ve had three or four careers, even though they’ve kept the same cast of characters.

    Again, I’m not saying it should have been done any differently but it is the case that some of these decision are fairly arbitrary.

45. “the vast majority of them are either classic strips, superheroes or realist autobiographical/’life of x’ narratives. There’s not a lot of thematic variety.” Well, I’d say that the comic strips on the lsit don’t belong to a single genre but show a lot of thematic variety. You can’t really say that Krazy Kat, Terry and the Pirates and Gasoline Alley belong to the same genre. And indeed within each of these strips there was usually a mixing of genres: Terry, for example, mixed action-adventure, political intrigue, and romance.

46. Also, and I know this is controverial, I don’t think autobiography is a genre. Rather it’s a catch-all category for divergent attempts to tell stories about the cartoonist.

47. Noah — European comics are more diverse too, which I think gets back to the point I made the other day to Domingos about how not having access to more of them feeds insularity — this kind of insularity in particular. I should most likely qualify the trend to limit it to Anglophone comics.

    My experience with Japanese comics is limited, and Hagio is surely an exception, but — I don’t mean this as a criticism, but genre fiction is about attachment, and I’m not attached to the Japanese conventions for those genres. I’m attached to the Western conventions. I always feel a little cheated, like I’m substituting something because it’s the only option, when I look to Japan for them. I feel like a cultural tourist, so there’s always a distancing that I don’t have with European or Anglophone genre fiction. So it’s not that they don’t count for the academic argument…they do. But they’re not what I’m looking for. I don’t see any reason why North America can’t have that tradition too…

    Fear of Flying, of course, is not SF — I think I may have confused the genre there by picking two SF novels as the other examples. Another non-SF example is Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. That type of feminist literature is sort of historically bound to the ’70s, and comics just weren’t there in the ’70s…

    Jeet — As for Krazy Kat and Gasoline Alley — I ultimately side with Domingos here that their genre is children’s lit. There’s comparable diversity within children’s prose literature as well, but it still tends to be drawn together due to the complexity and maturity of the explanation of those themes. The Wizard of Oz or the Chronicles of Narnia — literature, but for children. Perhaps harder to write than adult literature — but nonetheless not the same thing as adult literature, or adult genre fiction.

    But I also think the conventions of the newspaper strip are dominant over anything thematic, which is why I picked that genre instead of children’s lit to call out. I think that’s true for Peanuts as well. Those strips largely established those conventions and I absolutely think that’s an achievement— and surely it’s the reason those strips continually rise to the top as so powerful for people. But those strong and recognizable conventions make the newspaper strip into a genre of its own — a comics-specific one (see below), but a genre nonetheless. We can credit those cartoonists with creating that genre, in the same way we can credit Christie or le Carre and their compatriots with creating their respective genres. The genre variation that you rightly observe I would place at the sub-genre level. But that, again, works against the notion that “comics” describes a medium.

    Media are neutral, malleable, able to recede into the background and be ignored or mis-recognized, in a way that genres aren’t. “Comics” is still very charged and rich with specific form — like genre. I think comics has the potential to function as a medium. I think in practice, it is still often thought of and deployed in ways much closer to genre. And I do not think theory has successfully figured out how to address the influence of the form on genre in comics – most attempts simply diminish the richness of how “genre” signifies in literature.

    And perhaps this notion that autobiography isnt a genre is telling about the definitional and practical confusion here. Autobiography is as much as genre as SF, which could be described as “divergent attempts to tell stories about the impact of science on human beings.” It’s as much as genre as romance – “divergent attempts to tell stories about love.” And so on and so forth. If you don’t think of autobiography as genre, you can’t think of those as genre either. At some point the terms are so detached that they become meaningless.

    Charles — I don’t disagree with your point at all — I think these are, or at least have historically been, comics-specific genres. But if comics is a medium and not a genre, then it should able to participate in all the genres that the other major narrative media (film and fiction) participate in, not just these “comics-specific” sub-genres. So I think in the aggregate the idea of “comics-specific genres” works against the notion that comics are a medium on par with film and fiction. It situates it more like SF with its myriad subgenres. But I do think it’s a case of how we look at things — Dr Strange, for example, is pretty deliciously gothic. We wouldn’t have to think of it as a comics-specific genre — we just do it out of habit. And Dr Who and James Bond are superheroes — so that’s not comics-specific either. I just think it’s very hard to stop thinking of comics as a genre, no matter how insistently we repeat that it’s a medium.

48. “And as I expected there’s nothing I’d call ‘anthemic feminist’ (like Fear of Flying or the Handmaids Tale or Woman at the Edge of Time.)” This is surely the listmakers rather than of comics, since there was a very strong genre of feminist comics in the underground in the 1970s and 1980s. I’m referring to titles like Wimmen’s Comix and Twisted Sisters. Interestingly, unlike liberal feminists like Jong and Atwood, most of the underground cartoonists were radicals of one sort or another. See this article: http://bitchmagazine.org/post/adventures-in-feministory-women-comics-of-the-70s-and-80s — Hilary Chute has been doing excellent work trying to recuperate this tradition and also linking it to a sophisticated sense of how various autobiograpical comics are.

    “Krazy Kat and Gasoline Alley — I ultimately side with Domingos here that their genre is children’s lit.” This is so wrong-headed I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s start with a few empirical observations. For nearly two decades the Krazy Kat full page strip ran in the “Theatre and Arts” section of the Hearst papers. Is it plausible to imagine that kids were racing to the “Theatre and Arts” section to read it, or that that the “Theatre and Arts” section was aimed at kids. Because newspaper comics were big business, syndicates and publishers did surveys to see which strips were popular, and also with which audience. Krazy Kat was only briefly popular with a wide audience and stayed in the papers, it has been argued, because of the praise it received from high-powered writers like Gilbert Seldes, Damon Runyon, etc. There were strips that were popular with kids (the Katzenjammer Kids, Henry, Nancy, the Sunday page version of The Gumps, the sunday page version of Gasoline Alley) but there were also strips that were not much read by kids but had a primarily adult audience (the daily versions of the Gumps and Gasoline Alley, Blondie, Mr. and Mrs.). So if Krazy Kat and Gasoline Alley were children’s literature they were a very strange form of children’s literature — one read almost entirely by adults! You can only blithely lump all these things together as “children’s literature” if you don’t know what these strips were like and also the nature of the newspaper audience.

    About romance, science fiction and autobiography as genres. I think part of the problem is with the elastic term genre, which I’m comfortable with. There is genre as a literary tradition and there is genre as a marketing category. As Samuel Delaney noted, its for reasons of marketing that Don Delillo’s “Ratner’s Star” is under fiction or literature rather than sci-fi/fantasy. My own take is that science fiction is a bunch of overlapping literary tradition (the Utopian tale, the near future extropolation, the space opera, etc.) rather than a single coherent genre. The same is true of romance, otherwise you would get the unhelpful lumping together of Pride and Prejudice with Harlequin Romances (“They’re both romances,” I’ve heard it argued, which seems to me to ignore the ironic dimensions of Austen’s work).

49. I should add that there is nothing wrong, of course, with genuine children’s literature or children’s comics. Barks and John Stanley did great kids comics which are deservedly celebrated. But the tone, intent, and audience for Barks’ Uncle Scrooge or Stanley’s Little Lulu was very different than the tone, intent, and audience for Krazy Kat.

50. It’s obviously the case that genres are incoherent, just as any category is incoherent. It’s also true that many genres are about marketing. But just because they are about marketing doesn’t mean that you can easily separate them out from more…respectable, perhaps?…traditions.

    As one example; early American music was separated into hillbilly and race recordings for mostly really unsavory marketing reasons having to do with racism more than with the music itself (lots of hillbilly blues was pretty indistinguishable from race music blues; similarly, race music made by rural blacks could have easily been classified under the hillbilly label.) However, the marketing division had huge implications for the development of country as a genre and R&B as a genre; implications that are still with us today. So saying “it’s marketing” doesn’t negate the integrity of the genre; on the contrary, marketing is one of the ways that genres cohere.

    Similarly, the fact that a work comments ironically on its genre doesn’t change the fact that it’s part of the genre. Superduperman and Plastic Man and Ambush Bug are all satirical takes on the superhero genre; they are all also part of the superhero genre. Jane Austen does ironize romance…but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t fit easily into the romance genre. I mean…have you read a lot of Harlequin romances Jeet? I haven’t…but my impression from my limited romance reading (Georgette Heyer, for example, or Janet Evanovich, or Paradise Kiss) is that humor and witty self-awareness are in fact pretty central to a lot of those stories. Austen remains a central inspiration for romance writers (as witnessed most recently by the attention devoted to Pride and Prejudice in Twilight), and I think it makes sense to think of her as at least a grandmother of that genre.

    Similarly, sci-fi is a bunch of overlapping traditions (literary, filmic, and otherwise). It’s also a marketing category. Those two factors intersect, and ultimately reify sci-fi as a genre. Among other things, the existence of the genre tends to *cause the overlapping traditions to overlap.* For example, Philip K. Dick’s Palmer Eldritch has elements of near-future extrapolation and dystopia and horror — and part of the reason all those three things go together is because it’s self-consciously sci-fi. Or Le Guin’s Dispossessed is Utopia and near future extrapolation, or Starship Troopers is space opera and utopia and near future extrapolation, etc. etc. Because the genre is seen as a genre, the overlapping traditions get repeatedly and even obsessively blended. In this sense, “genre” isn’t a category that you can make disappear through deconstruction; it’s a process in which its very incoherence has practical and ongoing effects.

51. Jeet, I’ll buy the observation that my ‘anthemic feminism’ has what you’re calling a ‘liberal feminist’ bias to it. I’m a little hesitant to call Atwood ‘liberal’ but she’s certainly not countercultural. As much as I love, say, Aline K.C.’s work, I would definitely not call it anthemic feminist. It’s relationship to the “feminist line” (as the article you linked to calls it) is just too erratic. It calls that feminism into question in some ways, and it’s not nearly as utopian. I did not realize until recently how erased the post-counterculture women were, and I find it really distressing. And I hereby offer Ms Chute dinner if she’s ever in DC to thank her for carrying the torch for that cause!

    In my head I think of the distinction as “women’s comics” versus “feminist comics,” because I’ve read so many of those women actively distance themselves from Feminism and many more seem to just take a less overt approach than the “liberal” Second Wavers, but I’m not wedded to those descriptors.

    I think you have a terribly wrongheaded notion of what “children’s literature” is, not the least of which by excluding anything for older children. It’s a pretty johnny-come-lately genre category, and marketing defines it to exclude YA although I think that is fairly recent. I think they think “children’s” is a perjorative. I was taught differently, and include things like the Leatherstocking Tales, the Jungle Book (which would be in my top 10 of all literature, children’s and otherwise), and Huckleberry Finn (etc. etc. etc.) If someone says “adventure narrative” and doesn’t qualify it with “children’s” (or “boys”) I’m going to think “Heart of Darkness” and “Apocalypse Now” long before I think Leatherstocking Tales and Last of the Mohicans.

    I think at the level that “Children’s lit” is operating as a genre category, the differences between books like that and Krazy Kat are largely attributable to characteristics of the newspaper strip, which I’m sure influenced my originally going with that as the genre. (Although I have to say Krazy Kat reads really close to those marvelously surrealist ’10s and ’20s children’s books to me, just for an older audience.)

    Of course you’re right that the strip was targeted to an adult readership, but that doesn’t mean it was intended to be “serious” reading for those adults. For that reason, once it’s out of its specific historical context, as it is when we read it in collections today, the impact of that “lightness” is to push it closer to serious work for children and away from serious work for adults. I don’t think that’s an insult — but it’s disengenuous to try and situate it alongside really ambitious work that is intended to be serious adult reading. Compare it to, say, Elmer Gantry, which was roughly contemporaneous. If newspaper strip can’t be a genre, then children’s lit is what’s left.

    Of course, you can argue that those books, along with, say, superhero comics and movies, are really, properly, for adults, if you want…but you’re just going to prove Domingos’ point. And of course you can view almost any book through the lens of any genre. But the question was classification, and you can’t classify all books in all genres without making classification useless as a critical tool. You have to pick a dominant category.

    You seem to be trying to get around this by recasting “genre” as “literary tradition”, but “tradition” is not a synonym for genre. The way you’re using it evacuates genre of the formal and thematic and structural characteristics that writers use when we conceive and produce genre, and makes it instead merely an artefact of historical practice. It’s a readerly approach, not a writerly one — exactly the kind of move comics people object to so violently when literary people do it to art. You’re a historian, so I’m sure it’s a valuable tactic from your perspective and for the types of things you’re looking for when you analyze work, but the term does have a different meaning in literature and eliding that specific meaning is not paying attention to the “literary tradition” which is arguably the most native for the term. “Tradition” in the literary context has overtones of “genealogy” — which is an alternative to genre.

    SF is indeed an umbrella genre with lots of subgenres (utopia, etc.) — but there is utopia that is not SF. And so on and so forth. Another umbrella genre is is “prose.” And likewise, “comics.” It’s genres all the way up!

52. I’d say Krazy Kat and Peanuts (which wasn’t exactly intended for children either) and so forth could be grouped under “humor” if you need a genre category. They are gag strips, after all.

    That’s sort of interesting to think about, too, because comedy/humor doesn’t really function as a literary category, but does function as a genre in film and theater. Is there some link between visual culture and humor, perhaps? If so that might be a refutation of Domingos’ claim that comics’ investment in humor is a sign of vitiated taste. It could just be a formal issue.

53. Wait, I know a word for that other than genre, for things like humor and satire and stuff. GACK. I need to search my email archives…I was just talking with someone about this…

54. Caro –

    “European comics are more diverse too, which I think gets back to the point I made the other day to Domingos about how not having access to more of them feeds insularity — this kind of insularity in particular. I should most likely qualify the trend to limit it to Anglophone comics.”

    There’s plenty of European genre work available in English though ( particularly crime, horror and sci-fi) – see http://www.europeancomics.net/ for exhaustive details of what’s out there – you just have to be willing to dig for it because it tends to fly under the radar. Most “mainstream” American comic fans ignore it because it’s not the nostalgic spandex crap they grew up with and “art” comics fans ignore it because, well, because it’s non-ironic genre work and they think it’s beneath them. Sadly, between the basement dwelling geeks on the one hand and the hipster snobs on the other, there’s not nearly enough attention given to precisely the sorts of works that might open comics up to a genuinely popular audience.
    And there is decent anglophone genre stuff out there too, I think. It’s just that, again, you won’t find much of it from either the arthouse publishers or the superhero merchants (unless safely fenced off in imprints like Vertigo).
    Still, some of the biggest commercial successes in anglophone comics over the past couple of decades have been non-superhero genre work – The Walking Dead, Sin City, Sandman, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Scott Pilgrim, Bone etc. – so there is clearly a market for it. Certainly in the library I work in, those sorts of books generally do far better than either superheroes or art comics (though I’m in the UK and maybe things are a little different here?).

    As for “anthemic” feminist comics, I strongly recommend Posy Simmonds (whose omission from this list is a crime second only to the inexplicable omission of Jacques Tardi) and also Linda Medley.

    “genre fiction is about attachment, and I’m not attached to the Japanese conventions for those genres. I’m attached to the Western conventions.”

    But…plenty of Japanese genre comics are at least as much influenced by Western conventions as by their own and I can’t imagine anybody suffering from a cultural disconnect reading something like Hayao Miyazaki’s wonderful Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind series.

55. I kind of like calling it “GACK”. I think that works.

56. Ian — I’m a little confused about that site. The title suggests that all the listed comics are available in English. But, for example, has Aristophane’s Faune, which is on there, been translated? I thought it was only available in French.

    I agree that you can find most things if you dig — I’ve ordered French comics from FNAC and amazon.fr and abebooks and some other place I can’t remember…but that’s ordering them in French, from France. They’re expensive — you have to really want them. I guess I’d say that in my experience, they’re de facto unavailable to anybody who isn’t already committed to reading European comics…

57. To answer for Ian: it would appear that only the books listed on the right hand side are available in English, and the list is far from complete as well. Also, it’s not filtered for quality and is filled with commercial dreck.

    I have to say that the average Anglophone comic reader’s disinterest in Eurocomics is matched very well by the general reader’s disinterest in Asian and European (non-English) novels (and even film; proportionately speaking i.e.).

58. For literature that’s definitely true — but admittedly it’s a lot more work to translate a French novel than to translate a French comic, if you read a little but not fluently.

    But it seems like the art film subculture is deeply fascinated by foreign film, almost to the detriment of American art film. I guess it’s easier to subtitle a film than to translate a comic? Obviously there are a lot of films that don’t get released in the US, but I’ve ordered films from France that have an English subtitle selection option…

59. I agree, the “authors” list is a bit confusing. Aristophane is there because The Zabime Sisters is available in English (from First Second) – everything listed under other works (including Faune) refers to a work not yet released in English (and I have no idea how complete the “other” section of kept since it’s not really the purpose of the site to track anything other than English language editions).

    I don’t actually speak enough French to dabble with importing from amazon.fr – the only stuff I import from Europe, via amazon.co.uk, is the occasional wordless work (I recently got the German edition of Trondheim’s Mister O, for example, since the NBM edition is out of print) – and, as with manga, there’s certainly plenty I’d like to read that hasn’t been translated. But I think the hundreds of European works that have been released in English so far provide rich pickings while I’m waiting for more to be brought over.

    Oh, you might also want to take a look at http://comixinflux.com/ too.

60. Ng Suat Tong –

    “Also, it’s not filtered for quality and is filled with commercial dreck.”

    It’s a database, not a review site. European comics available in English that aren’t “commercial dreck” are listed too – you’ll find most of them easier to find under “publishers”.

    “I have to say that the average Anglophone comic reader’s disinterest in Eurocomics is matched very well by the general reader’s disinterest in Asian and European (non-English) novels (and even film; proportionately speaking”

    You say “anglophone” but you mean “American”. Asterix and Tintin have sold millions of volumes in the UK over the years and are familiar to pretty much everyone.
    Also, hasn’t manga proved you can sell translated (genre) comics in numbers that rival or even exceed the domestic variety provided you market it right (i.e. to an audience that wasn’t raised on a diet of muscle men in tights and capes)?

61. Manga’s success depended on a lot of very specific factors, and is probably not reproducible, would be my guess. Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t or couldn’t have more translated works…just that extrapolating from what happened with manga probably isn’t all that helpful.

62. Noah, I think GACK should be the word for irony.

    It just beats me why publishers don’t offer non-English-language comics that they have no plans to create translated editions of to Anglophone audiences with printed translations on a flyer in the back of the book; it wouldn’t cost that much more. Or even just put translations on their website for download. Having to reprint the book with English words is the cost… It’d be like subtitles for comics!

63. Noah: “Is there some link between visual culture and humor, perhaps? If so that might be a refutation of Domingos’ claim that comics’ investment in humor is a sign of vitiated taste. It could just be a formal issue.”

    That’s partly true only, I accept Leopardi’s humor.

    I don’t see that link at all. People always told jokes and wrote funny books (books that are funny, I mean).

64. Caro: “…printed translations on a flyer in the back of the book”

    Maybe because they’ve found that it’s not worth the effort (i.e. very few potential customers)? Only the small publishers do that; like with some of the Feuchtenberger books and some of the Canicola publications.

65. I tried to use online translators for a couple of German-language comics I bought. That really sucked. I’d be a repeat customer for Caro’s idea, but it probably isn’t worth paying the translators to do even that.

66. On this humor and the visual: the comic novel is common in prose literature, people just don’t talk about comedy and humor as such very much. PG Wodehouse is really funny. Terry Pratchett; the Hitchhiker’s Guide. There’s Breton’s “Anthology of Black Humor.” Catch 22 is black comedy; White Noise is pretty much just comedy for the first bit. Vineland; Confederacy of Dunces, Pnin, … the National Book Critics Circle has a thing about it: http://bookcritics.org/blog/category/nbcc_reads

    But there’s also this: http://guides.lib.usf.edu/content.php?pid=92458&sid=801396

    I mean, there is such a thing as a “sight gag” but I don’t think it has a particularly special status. The Guardian did make a best-of list for them though: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/oct/18/sight-gag-comedy

    That Victorian Children’s lit site is also interesting wrt to question of whether YA should be excluded from “Children’s Lit”; the type of work represented on that page is closer to the conception I have from literature classes. The “Novel Stories” category in particular is definitely not works for young children or works of simplistic social relevance.

67. Nah, I know there are lots of funny novels. It just doesn’t seem to exist as a particular genre in the way it does in more visual media. Could just be historical accident, really.

68. Ok, right. I agree that it’s not a genre in literature. But that’s because it can occur in any genre – I think it’s historical precedent that makes it matter in theater — Greek historical precedent. And film probably borrows it. But “comedy” is also much more a marketing genre in film than a real genre. It’s a CLASSICAL genre, as is satire. But it’s not a genre in the modern sense.

    I had no luck recalling the word I was looking for. Basically things like humor and satire and irony are “modes” in literature, tonalities. Probably even devices in a broad sense. They can go to work in all the genres. If it weren’t 1:24 I could probably sketch out the broad-strokes history there, of the classical tonal genres becoming devices in the modern formal genres…

69. The whole argument that Americans don’t appreciate comics from Europe because they were raised on a comics diet of musclemen in capes and tights is elitist nonsense.

    When I was a kid, I read damn near every genre of comics there was. I loved Henry, Little Lulu, Nancy, most Disney stuff, Archie, Turok, Tomahawk, DC War comics (especially the ones with dinosaurs), Richie Rich, Little Lotta, Hot Stuff, Wendy, Sad Sack, most of the cartoon spin-off comics (Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Heckle and Jeckle, Mighty Mouse, etc.), and a host of other stuff. I also read superhero comics, but they were not something I zeroed in on until I was bit by the Marvel bug at the age of 13.

    But even then, though superheroes began overshadowing other genres, I still continued to discover new and great comics on my own — Pogo being a great example. I read it in the newspapers, but when I stumbled upon the Simon and Schuster book anthology reprints from the 1950s at a Salvation Army circa 1968 or 1969, I saw the strip in an entirely new light and devoured every Pogo reprint book I could find. Ditto for Dennis the Menace, Peanuts, and especially Mad. The Signet paperback reprints featuring the 1950s Mad comic book stories opened up a whole new world for me, and Kurtzman’s wry and funny viewpoint clicked with my own, permanently molding my own artistic outlook.

    So why, when I WAS exposed to European-style comics in my late teens, was there never an epiphany? Why did they never “click,” like so many other types of comics did?

    Beats me, but it sure wasn’t the fault of Superman or Spider-Man!

70. Oh wait, I see what you’re saying. That there’s something about visual humor that lets it more easily congeal into a genre: “the comedy” whereas in prose it’s just a device.

    I don’t know that that’s a feature of visual humor because it seems to be also tied to speaking. Maybe it’s a limitation or attribute of prose. Reading jokes is really tiring because it’s too punctuated. Prose narrative needs things that sustain, and one punchy joke after the other never builds that pace. So generally there’s something to tie it all together and give it that flow, and that something ends up being the “genre” rather than the humor. Whereas in the visual and spoken forms, you don’t need as much in between so the humor can dominate.

    But film and theater often do it the literary way too, mixing the funny bits in with sustained narrative…

71. ————————
    Ian S says:

    …There’s plenty of European genre work available in English though ( particularly crime, horror and sci-fi) …you just have to be willing to dig for it because it tends to fly under the radar. Most “mainstream” American comic fans ignore it because it’s not the nostalgic spandex crap they grew up with and “art” comics fans ignore it because, well, because it’s non-ironic genre work and they think it’s beneath them. Sadly, between the basement dwelling geeks on the one hand and the hipster snobs on the other, there’s not nearly enough attention given to precisely the sorts of works that might open comics up to a genuinely popular audience…
    ————————–

    Indeed so! Arguing that point of view, Kim Thompson’s “More Crap Is What We Need” essay:

    —————————-
    …What I see as missing from American comics is that bulwark of solid, unpretentious, accessible genre fiction – a more or less undistinguished mass of okay-to-good comics that might catch your eye and give you a thrill, that loyal fans would buy out of habit, and anyone else might just pick up for the hell of it.

    We don’t have that in the U.S. What we have is Art Comics on one end and Unimaginably Awful Super-Hero Shit on the other. The handful of cartoonists who try to explore some middle ground of decent genre fiction are few and far between, and are usually ignored by the super-hero fans and scorned by the “alternative” fans (unless it was done in the 1950s, in which case they’ve acquired that patina of coolness)…
    —————————-
    The whole thing at http://archives.tcj.com/3_online/e_thompson_071499.html …

    (The essay discussed in 2007 at http://forums.comicbookresources.com/archive/index.php/t-167944.html , where Ayo mentions, “This article is ancient. It’s from at least four years ago? I think it was four or five years ago when I first read it. It could be as old as 1999, though. All I know is that a lot had changed since Thompson wrote it…”)

    And Ng Suat Tong mentions it in this HU article – https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2010/05/review-the-unwritten-5/ – which has this quote:

    ——————————
    “All one can say is that that, while civilization remains such that one needs distraction from time to time, “light” literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or intellectual power.”

    “Good Bad Books” (1945), George Orwell
    ——————————-

72. Caro: “Whereas in the visual and spoken forms, you don’t need as much in between so the humor can dominate.”

    I don’t agree. A film comedy that does what you say above is not a very good comedy. The only “pure” genre that is better without a poor story and lousy acting by lousy actors is porn.

73. Calling Paul Pope the “Nick Cave guy” and citing his “attempts at scifi” are terribly dismissive descriptions of a thoughtful, hard working cartoonist. He certainly deserves better. For instance, 100% is a great book, one of the best to come from the Vertigo imprint.

74. Domingos: The vast majority of film comedies I’ve seen that are truly “comedies” and nothing else (i.e, can’t be put into another genre or are primarily “comedies” for marketing purposes) are actually indeed pretty bad. Slapstick may be the only instances I can think of that don’t fit that statement. Most of the good ones are at the very least parody or burlesque.

    That’s one reason why I don’t want to taint something good like Peanuts with the genre designation “humor.” “Comedy” as a genre has dreadful connotations to me.

75. “It just beats me why publishers don’t offer non-English-language comics that they have no plans to create translated editions of to Anglophone audiences with printed translations on a flyer in the back of the book…”

    A lot of Scandinavian comics publishers do this. Either with a translation on a separate page slipped into the book, or with translations printed in the bottom margin of the page. You see that a lot at MoCCA when the Scandanavians are all set-up together.

76. Paul Pope might’ve gotten better since that series of really big issues I read in the 90s, but at that time, he dressed like Nick Cave, postured like Nick Cave, drew characters that mostly looked like Nick Cave and talked about Nick Cave in his editorials. The series was about as good as that sounds. Personally, I don’t like Nick Cave.

77. Mike –

    Thanks for the link – I think Kim Thompson pretty much nails it (although he neglects to mention how hostile many comic shops seem to be to such material and how off-putting they often are to the people who might buy it).

    “And Ng Suat Tong mentions it in this HU article”

    If only he’d remembered it when he was savaging Blacksad, which – as slickly commercial as it might be – is precisely the sort of work that’s capable of drawing in a new, wider, more casual audience.

    Noah / Robert –

    Is there any way that the list above could be matched against a list of the top 100 selling titles (in bookshops as well as the direct market) of the past few decades? It would be interesting to see to what extent the list reflects what people actually buy, as opposed to what the respondents think people ought to be buying.

78. Oh come now; if comedy is good enough for Midsummer’s Nights Dream, it’s good enough for Peanuts. (not that I think Peanuts is worse than MND…but you get the point.)

    In film, Bringing Up Baby is a comedy, as is His Gal Friday. Both fine films.

79. Okay, disliking Nick Cave is just wrong. Damn it.

80. Well, his film scores are okay.

81. Murder Ballads is one of my favorite albums ever; The Boatman’s Call is fantastic; most of the early albums are great, for that matter.

    It’s hyperbolic and melodramatic, no doubt…but what’s wrong with that? Especially when you’ve got those big gorgeous gothic arrangements. Works for me.

82. Noah — Midsummer Night’s Dream is a medieval romance, and Bringing Up Baby/His Girl Friday are farces.

    It’s not that they’re NOT comedies. It’s just that calling them comedies or “humor” and nothing else isn’t descriptive enough to be useful. There are some films, though, that are JUST comedies, mostly slapstick films. It’s hard to put slapstick into any other genre, whereas most of the other subgenres of comedy (screwball, romantic, situation, grotesque, satire) have a lot of overlap with the classical and literary genres.

    Not to suggest that film and drama can’t have their own genres. But their subgenres are vastly more descriptive than the umbrella term, which has so much tradition that it doesn’t even have a consistent meaning within drama and film…comedy and tragedy aren’t “genres” in the modern sense when we use them to refer to Shakespeare: they’re just designators of “light” versus “serious.” That’s not a genre distiction in the modern sense of the term — it’s a distinction of tone (following classical precedent).

    I mean, what KIND of comedy would you call Peanuts (or Krazy Kat)? It’s not screwball, it’s not romantic…it’s not really fair to reduce it to satire when there’s so much more there. The fact that they’re so diverse yet so unified is why I think those strips deserve their own genre — but that, again, works against this push for comics to be a medium.

83. Ian: “If only he’d remembered it when he was savaging Blacksad, which – as slickly commercial as it might be – is precisely the sort of work that’s capable of drawing in a new, wider, more casual audience.”

    Why should a critic play the game of publishers praising crap? One thing is to agree that European crap would be good for business (as Kim Thompson claimed), another very different is to say that crap is filet mignon.

84. Pingback: Links: Legal Drug is Back!

85. By the way — howz come no Roy Crane stuff was selected (in the top 100, no less)?

    Just wonderin’

86. Not enough votes. Wash Tubbs got one vote, and that was all.

87. I’ve been out of town so I’m just looking at this. Interesting stuff. It inspires me to want to read some stuff I’ve missed out on so that is good.

    Question for those that voted for Black Hole; Did your copy have an ending? Mine was missing the ending.

88. For what its worth, here’s my list

    Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel byCharlotte Salomon. This work is usually talked about due to the tragic circumstances surrounding its creation and ultimate fate of its author. I remember seeing it before reading about Salomon’s biography and was filled with inspiration for the way Salomon drew figures and poses, as I struggled to find my own way to draw characters in a picture story. This is a singular work in so many ways: a long narrative drawn in a rich way that most long comic narratives would shy away from. There is also an intensity of emotion that you can’t miss even before you know the situation the work was born into. So, for its sustained richness of images and unembarrassed emotional force, this work seems to tower above almost every other work of graphic narrative. Somehow its example has been ignored, perhaps because its too strong to grapple with.

    Chimera by Lorenzo Mattotti. I enjoy looking at the neat panel borders in this comic, and then shifting my attention to the flurry of lines within those neat borders. I like to imagine the borders sketched out first, as little areas for Mattotti to pour out his heartbreaking work. I don’t know if he comes at those panels unleashing a torrent of jagged lines or if he methodically applies each stroke in a systematic way. Either way, Mattotti’s system is not just thrilling to read and digest, but enriching to anyone who attaches any value to the idea that one can express ones self through drawing.

    Der Palast by Anke Feuchtenberger. Hard to narrow down one Feuchtenberger work for this list. As a reader, I prefer her W the Whore work. But this album is something of a perfect object: the long size of the book and the shape of the characters. The imagery is ‘personal’ (who else could it have come from except for Feuchtenberger) but also communicates something that is not about unadulterated expression. As in many of my favorite works of art, the drawings are labored over not to achieve perfection, but to achieve shapes that convey a world of thought and feelings beyond the narrow scope of our brains. These drawings are for our hearts, all the parts of it.

    Hero’s Life and Death Triumphant by Frédéric Coché. For the scale, the ambition and for the heroic achievement, this work has to be on a ten best list, even if I find it somewhat lacking as a story. The overall punch of it is enough: page after page of gorgeous etched comics. Comics are always hard work, and the noble effort of this volume is always inspiring to me.

    White Boy page by Garrett Price from the Smithsonian collection. Specifically, I’m talking about the page with the large bottom portion featuring a richly drawn sky. That single page seems to be a secret influence lurking over the ambitions of many a contemporary cartoonist: the simplicity of the figures combined with the devil-may-care attitude that went into the drawing of the landscape.

    Der Kin Der Kids by Lyonel Feininger. I prefer it to Little Nemo by a long shot. I find it more interesting on a technical drawing level and the shapes to be far more pleasing aesthetically. Most of all, it has the visual bravado of Nemo, but it happens to be full of beautiful writing and stories. A pity that it was out of print for so long, only to be reprinted to mass indifference.

    Krazy Kat by George Herriman. My Krazy Kat collections will never be sold when I’m short on money or left behind when I move. I’ll keep going back to them for my entire life. When I’m feeling down, they make me happy. When I want to see some imaginative drawings, I know there will always be something in them that I missed before. When I want to see everything that comics can be—a world totally with its own laws of language, design and logic that is still more inviting than intimidating—Krazy kat is what I always want to go to first. As a work of art that makes you feel alive as a human and as an artist, Krazy Kat is still my favorite.

    Complete works of Edward Gorey. The last page in the last big Gorey collection is a heartbreak: a ruled page, awaiting detail. Gorey kept making books and I can’t think of a clunker. Together, they are full of all kinds of stories, all kinds of shapes and figures. The scope of Gorey’s ideas and tones are so vast that I don’t understand why he isn’t talked about more in comics circles. Often, with someone of Gorey’s caliber, I have the sinking suspicion that the work is ‘too good’ to be engaged in comics terms. It has such a distance from the rest of the pack that it becomes to seem like a strange anomaly.

    Walking Man by Jiro Taniguchi. Hard to limit myself to one work of Manga, but this one always leaps to mind first. I sometimes have the guilty feeling of liking Taniguichi more than Herge, and this is the work that usually pushes me into that thinking (Herge would have never let himself release a book this eccentric). I admire this book as an example of ‘perfect’ comics drawing (more perfect to me than Jamie Hernandez) but it’s the writing that gets it on the top ten list. An achingly calm story punctuated by moments of small action that feel monumental, this is a book that shows day to day life as not mundane but thrillingly odd.

    The autobiographical comics of Luc Leplae. I look at a lot of comics, and I yearn for more like these. The figures are drawn in a unique style and you can see Leplae brain trying to figure out the basics: where should i put text? How many drawings on one page? I suspect that if he had been in contact with other cartoonists, his style would have become more refined, more readable. And that would have been fine—-I like refined comics a lot. But I also like the thrilling originality of this work, and the energy that comes from it.

89. Hey Austin. All the lists are going to be printed over the next weeks; never fear.

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91. Conservative.

    At first I felt guilty that I didn’t respond, but now I am glad. The responses were “samey” enough as-is.

    I mean, there are so many people who share the same opinions, that the poll just does not accomplish anything but vary the rankings of the same old stuff.

    There are so very many people who do not share this (indicating The List) view of comics but I guess they didn’t get polled.

92. I think a lot of people voted for more obscure works, but they were either idiosyncratic one-offs or just outnumbered. The conservative choices are the ones most likely to be the one nostalgic choice in an otherwise adventurous list — and those add up.

    Robert, is your database of titles set up such that you could easily collate the remaining selections into a ranked list? The ones that got 3, 2, and 1 votes, maybe just alphabetized by author within each count-group (i.e., not as much internal care as you gave here…)? I’m curious how many total selections there were, as well. (Obviously we can cull it from the lists by submitter but I thought maybe you already have it in Excel or something…)

93. That’s a great list, Austin. I’ve been wanting to read the Charlotte Salomon work, but there doesn’t seem to be an affordable edition.

94. I mean, it’s worth pointing out that nobody shares exactly this view of comics. I don’t think anyone’s top ten was the consensus top ten. Look at the difference between Max Anderson’s list and Melinda Beasi’s list and Derik Badman’s list…and my list for that matter.

    There’s really a very wide range of tastes and perspectives represented by the 211 participants. As Caro says, the issue isn’t that certain people didn’t vote (though obviously the list has various biases) so much as that a consensus is a consensus. I would have loved Ariel Schrag to be in the top ten…but I know the consensus is what the consensus is, and the consensus is that I’m a little nutty for thinking Likewise is one of the greatest comics ever.

95. Noah: oh man, sorry about that! My favorite part of these lists is reading the individual ones—looking forward to reading these!

96. No, no, you don’t need to apologize! Just wanted to let folks know what was happening….

97. I was thinking that the most interesting thing about the consensus is how it’s kind of… *not*. Most of the titles that made it to the top 110 did so with ten votes or less (and a whole slew with as few as four). The top ten rank higher, of course, but even then, it’s not exactly a decisive majority. I’m guessing that the titles not in the top 110 got mostly one or two votes each. Am I wrong?

98. Well, nothing got a majority of the votes. Peanuts with 50 is highest, with about a quarter of people voting for it. One of four putting it in their top ten, though, is pretty impressive. That seems like a consensus there, anyway….

99. I suppose what I’m saying is that it seems like too small a consensus to qualify as “samey.” Then again, maybe I’m just desperately clinging to my own philosophies on the topic.

100. If you look at the list above, the number of votes is indicated after the names of the creators. Everything listed got at least 4 votes. If a work got at least 10 votes, it was at #34 or higher, and if it got more than 20, it was at #12 or higher.

     The works that top polls in such large surveys all but never get a majority of the possible votes. Citizen Kane has never managed it in the Sight & Sound movie poll, and someone I know who saw the tally in the New York Times’ poll on American fiction between 1980 and 2005 told me Beloved was supported by less than a tenth of the participants.

101. How many voters do they manage in the Sight and Sound polls? Twice as many as we got? More?

102. NPR is currently doing a poll of SF titles, and they made an interesting choice: they solicited nominations, they had experts cull the nominations into a short list of maybe 200 titles (?), and then they had people vote again for their 10 top out of the nominated list. I’m not sure how crazy I am about their top 200, but I easily managed to find 10 I really believed in to vote for.

     Looks like the voting is closed so you can’t see the list anymore, but here’s the link: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/02/138894873/vote-for-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-titles

103. Ha! That’s fun. Just glanced through it, but there are some truly, truly horrible novels on that list. David Eddings…that’s some bottom feeding going on there.

104. The last one, in 2002, had 145 critics and 108 filmmakers. They actually conduct two polls now, one for each group.

105. Hah! That’s not so many more than we managed. Good on us.

106. ————————–
     R. Maheras says:

     The point is, Moore’s best work occurred when HE was playing god — not the artist. Kirby’s best work occurred when He was playing god — not the writer.

     I just don’t see a collaboration by the two bringing out the best in either person…
     —————————-

     Yes; what usually gets missed when Stan Lee was credited as the writer in those comics he did with Kirby, is that Kirby — after Lee came up with “Next ish: Thing vs. the Hulk!” — created the plot, wrote the story, even provided rough dialogue that Lee “slicked up,” Lee also adding bombast to the captions.

     Although, Moore is careful when picking artists to collaborate with to have a story that plays up to their strengths; welcomes input and suggestions from them; and usually supplies such outstanding, creatively demanding scripts, that the artist can’t help but do their very best…

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108. I didn’t submit a list but I thought I’d comment on the ones I’m happy to see here, the ones I don’t think deserve a place, and the ones I would have liked to see make it.

     The ones that would definitely have made my list: Watchmen, Elektra: Assassin, Akira, Walking Man, Jimbo (Adventures in Paradise, Cola Madness, Zongo mini-series…), Krazy Kat. I love all of those. I’m also happy to see From Hell, Maison Ikkoku, Tintin and Black Hole made it (not that any of those are a real surprise) too. I never thought I’d say this but I need to read more silver-age Marvel (Kirby Fantastic Four and Ditco Spiderman particularly), along with Peanuts, Little Lulu and Newspaper serials like Terry and the Pirates and Dick Tracy.

     The only ones I’ve read and don’t much care for are A Contract With God, Lone Wolf and Cub, and 21st Century Boys. The first one I can understand as historically important but Lone Wolf and Cub is way too repetitive and generic; 21st Century Boys is entertaining and fun and ridiculous for a while but suffers from the same problems of the vast majority of long soap-opera manga, it just a sort of dissipates into a dull, emotional-indeterminacy. I liked the first couple volumes of Pluto but didn’t read past that. My favorite Urasawa manga is probably Happy!, which seemed so tongue-in-cheek and mean-spirited and bitter, even compared to the darker parts of 21st Century Boys.

     A bunch that I didn’t see on here but would have made my list (or just missed):

     Insects, Birds and Beasts (Luo Ping and Jiang Shiquan, 1774)
     Arigatou (Yamamoto Naoki)
     Elvis Zombies (Gary Panter)
     Ode to Kirihito (Tezuka Osamu)
     Alan Ford (Max Bunker and Magnus)
     Kamui Den and Kamui Gaiden (Sanpei Shirato)
     New Wave Comics (Mark Marek, 1983)
     Yoshiharu Tsuge’s weird short stories (Neji-shiki etc.)
     Hell Baby, Red Snake, and Panorama of Hell (Hideshi Hino)
     Gyo (Junji Ito)
     Gas Comix (Richard McMurry)
     Ed the Happy Clown (Chester Brown)

109. blah, forgot to add Red Colored Elegy (Seiichi Hayashi)

110. And Rough by Mitsuru Adachi

111. “It just beats me why publishers don’t offer non-English-language comics that they have no plans to create translated editions of to Anglophone audiences with printed translations on a flyer in the back of the book…”

     In the 1970s, French editions of Astérix were distributed in Britain with a leaflet explaining puns, caricatures, in-jokes and other references. I think they stopped when Hodder & Stoughton caught up with their translation backlog.

112. Were webcomics excluded or did they just not make this list

113. Webcomics were emphatically not excluded. They just didn’t get enough votes, unfortunately.

114. Very interesting read over the last week and I’d like to say, “Thank you,” to everyone that put this together. I think this to be a valuable exercise, but less reliable in framing a canon than the TCJ poll — more AFI than Sight & Sound, and, as stated “too populist” and less “historically informed.” Regardless, hopefully this had been successful enough as a Thing to see a future poll that includes more academics and creators, or simply less middling superhero fare.

115. Interesting about the Kirby spots at 10 and 11 on the poll. It indicates that only slightly more people value Kirby’s Marvel work with Stan Lee, than admire Kirby’s solo efforts. Despite the Kirby clan’s recent legal setback, I find it encouraging that almost half of the folks who rated Kirby, did so for what he did himself. What a shame that Stan Lee betrayed his collaborators’ trust under oath. Regardless of their legal obligations, Disney/Marvel should do the right thing by the Kirbys and Marvel’s other disenfranchised founding artists. There’s a really bad taste in all that popcorn, that the greater American public doesn’t seem to have noticed…yet.

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117. I should perhaps mention, Robert, and unsurprisingly given the incredible amount of work you’ve done here, but I just clicked the Fourth World link and it leads to amazon.com listings of Fantastic Four essentials.

118. Whoops. It’s fixed now.

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