Category Archives: Best Comics Poll

Participant Lists H-K

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The following lists were submitted in response to the question, “What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?” All lists have been edited for consistency, clarity, and to fix minor copy errors. Unranked lists are alphabetized by title. In instances where the vote varies somewhat with the Top 115 entry the vote was counted towards, an explanation of how the vote was counted appears below it.

In the case of divided votes, only works fitting the description that received multiple votes on their own received the benefit. For example, in Jessica Abel’s list, she voted for The Post-Superhero comics of David Mazzucchelli. That vote was divided evenly between Asterios Polyp and Paul Auster’s City of Glass because they fit that description and received multiple votes on their own. It was not in any way applied to the The Rubber Blanket Stories because that material did not receive multiple votes from other participants.

Flint Hasbudak
Cartoonist, Totuk

Ken Parker, Giancarlo Berardi & Ivo Milazzo

COMMENTS

Tough question! But to put a few in mind, I’ve always admired these.

A list can be very long. And obviously there are many I haven’t read yet.
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Greg Hatcher
Contributing Writer, Comic Book Resources

 

Detective Comics, Archie Goodwin, et al.

COMMENTS

The best comics run of all time? If you mean just character and story, I’d go with the Archie Goodwin-Walt Simonson Manhunter. That was just brilliant. Modern creators are still going back to the stuff, there—ninjas, clones, superheroic anti-heroes that are willing to use lethal force. Not to mention an approach to the art itself that was 20 years ahead of its time. Look at the original Manhunter today, and Simonson’s layout and lettering doesn’t look dated at all.

But really, I’d take it a step further. I’d add that the comics in which those seven Manhunter installments appeared, Detective Comics #437-443, were themselves great comics. Goodwin was writing the Batman lead feature as well, and he kept luring guys like Alex Toth and a young Howard Chaykin to illustrate them, along with stalwarts like Jim Aparo and Dick Giordano. It’s also where you found the original “Night of the Stalker” by Steve Englehart, one of the greatest Batman short stories ever.

[On The Defenders Stories] Social commentary and satire masquerading as Marvel soap opera and amazingly successful today.

[On The Marvelman [Miracleman] Stories] I think Miracleman is a better superhero deconstruction than Watchmen, which (heresy!) hasn’t aged well, and also I’ve gotten so sick of superhero writers cribbing from it that Watchmen is tainted for me. But this is mostly because if you have to choose between Watchmen and Miracleman, Miracleman is better.

[On Smile] This is kind of an upstart entry, but the craft involved just knocks me out, and the entire project serves as a primer of the kind of thing mainstream comics ought to be doing and just…don’t do.
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Charles Hatfield
Associate Professor of English, University of California at Northridge; author, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature; contributing writer, The Panelists, The Comics Journal

 

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green

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David Heatley
Cartoonist, Deadpan, My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down; contributing artist, The New Yorker, The New York Times

 

“The Hannah Story,” Carol Tyler

COMMENTS

I hate having to actually rank these because this kind of thing changes all the time in my head. Here’s a stab at it though.

Runners-up: Peanuts (1950s era), Charles M. Schulz; Perfect Example, John Porcellino; The ACME Novelty Library, Chris Ware; Affiches—film posters by Albert Dubout; Wilson, Daniel Clowes; My New York Diary, Julie Doucet; Norakuro, Suiho Tagawa; Dirtbag (mini zines), Dave Kiersh; Annual Illustrated Calendars, Leif Goldberg; Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green; It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Seth; “Bomb Scare”, Adrian Tomine; Schizo, Ivan Brunetti; Nowhere, Debbie Drechsler
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Jeet Heer
Co-editor, A Comics Studies Reader, Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium; contributing writer, Comics Comics, The Comics Journal

 

ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS!, Lynda Barry

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Danny Hellman
Contributing illustrator, The Village Voice, Guitar World

 

Alack Sinner, José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo

COMMENTS
This list is all about the art; screw the writers. [Note: Danny Hellman only included the names of the cartoonists/pencilers in his lists above and below. The editor added the names of separate scriptwriters and inkers. This was done for the sake of completeness and editorial consistency.]

And some highly honorable mentions: Abandoned Cars, Tim Lane; The Arcade Stories, Spain Rodriguez; Batman: The Killing Joke, Alan Moore & Brian Bolland; The Captain Marvel, Jr. Stories, Mac Raboy, et al.; Cheech Wizard, Vaughn Bodé; Cochlea and Eustachia, Hans Rickheit; Coochy Cooty, Robert Williams; Ed the Happy Clown, Chester Brown; El Borbah, Charles Burns; The Howard the Duck Stories, Steve Gerber & Gene Colan, with Steve Leialoha, et al.; Idyl, Jeffrey Catherine Jones; The Incal, Alexandro Jodorowsky & Jean “Moebius” Giraud; Maakies, Tony Millionaire; The MAD Stories, Bob Clarke; The MAD Stories, Paul Coker, Jr.; The MAD Stories, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder; The Metamorpho Stories, Bob Haney & Ramona Fradon; The Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Stories, Jim Steranko; The Spirit, Will Eisner; Snappy Sammy Snoot, Skip Williamson; Trashman, Spain Rodriguez; Trots and Bonnie, Shary Flenniken
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Sam Henderson
Cartoonist, Magic Whistle

MAD, Harvey Kurtzman, et al.

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Alex Hoffman
Cartoonist, Libertarian Rabbits from Outer Space; Editorial cartoonist, When Falls the Coliseum

Life in Hell, Matt Groening

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Ben Horak
Cartoonist, Grump Toast

The Arrival, Shaun Tan

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Kenneth Huey
Contributing cartoonist, Commies from Mars; Illustrator; “Humanoid,” Church of the Subgenius

Head Comix, R. Crumb

COMMENTS

Any “best of” list naturally invites a vigorous “sez who?” After all, who among us is truly qualified to judge the comparative importance of, say Lyonel Feininger’s The Kin-der-Kids vs. John Byrne’s run on The Fantastic Four? So, I’ll do something a bit more modest. Off the top of my head, these are ten features that have meant a lot to me over the years.
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Jelle Hugaerts
Contributing writer, Forbidden Planet International

Conte démoniaque, Aristophane

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Mike Hunter
Contributing writer, The Hooded Utilitarian

“Here,” Richard McGuire

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“Illogical Volume”
Contributing writer, Mindless Ones

“Lint,” Chris Ware

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Domingos Isabelinho
Contributing writer, The Hooded Utilitarian

The Cage, Martin Vaughn-James

COMMENTS

Here’s my top ten (restrict comics field). If my top ten included things from the expanded field it would look quite diffrent with things like: Jacques Callot (Les Misères et malheurs de la guerre [The Miseries and Misfortunes of War]); Francisco de Goya (Los Desastres de la Guerra [The Disasters of War]), Los Caprichos [The Caprices]); Katsushika Hokusai (Fugaku Sanjûrokkei [Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji], Fugaku Hyakkei [One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji]); Charlotte Salomon (Leben? oder Theater? [Life? Or Theater?]); Francis Bacon (Triptych May-June 1973); William Hogarth (A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress); Pablo Picasso (Songe et mensonge de Franco [Dream and Lie of Franco]).
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Cole Johnson
Cartoonist, Sleepover Comics

 

Tricky Cad, Jess

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“Jones, One of the Jones Boys”
Writer, Let’s You and Him Fight

 

Thor, Jack Kirby & Stan Lee

COMMENTS

MASSIVE DISCLAIMER: You’ve asked for “the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant,” and this is a list of my favourite comics as of 29 June 2011. It sure as hell isn’t the ten “best” comics!
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Bill Kartalopoulos
Instructor, Parsons The New School for Design; programming coordinator, Small Press Expo; contributing editor, Print magazine

 

Histoire d’Albert, Rodolphe Töpffer

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Megan Kelso
Cartoonist, Artichoke Tales, Queen of the Black Black

Goodbye, Chunky Rice, Craig Thompson

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Abhay Khosla
Contributing writer, The Savage Critics

 

“Master Race,” Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein

COMMENTS

I don’t want to overthink this because otherwise this’ll turn into a thing with me… Also: I question that lists like these are a good idea. But whatever, who cares. Thanks for asking. Oh: if I have to pick just one, for The Fourth World, let’s go with The New Gods. But that would be the incorrect way of looking at that work, and not how I understand they’re being published currently, so I’m going with The Fourth World.
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Molly Kiely
Cartoonist, Tecopa Jane, Saucy Tart

 

La Perdida, Jessica Abel

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Kinukitty
Contributing writer, The Hooded Utilitarian

 

Seiyô Kottô Yôgashiten, Fumi Yoshinaga

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T. J. Kirsch
Co-creator & illustrator, Uncle Slam Fights Back; illustrator, She Died in Terrebonne

 

David Boring, Daniel Clowes

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Sean Kleefeld
Writer, Kleefeld on Comics

 

Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud

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Best Comics Poll Lists

Best Comics Poll Index

Participant Lists F-G

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The following lists were submitted in response to the question, “What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?” All lists have been edited for consistency, clarity, and to fix minor copy errors. Unranked lists are alphabetized by title. In instances where the vote varies somewhat with the Top 115 entry the vote was counted towards, an explanation of how the vote was counted appears below it.

In the case of divided votes, only works fitting the description that received multiple votes on their own received the benefit. For example, in Jessica Abel’s list, she voted for The Post-Superhero comics of David Mazzucchelli. That vote was divided evenly between Asterios Polyp and Paul Auster’s City of Glass because they fit that description and received multiple votes on their own. It was not in any way applied to the The Rubber Blanket Stories because that material did not receive multiple votes from other participants.

Duncan Falconer
Contributing writer, Mindless Ones

Rogan Gosh, Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy

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Andrew Farago
Curator, Comic Art Museum; co-author, The Looney Tunes Treasury

Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye, E. C. Segar

COMMENTS

Given twenty spots, I think I’d veer farther away from the classics, but this is my take on it as of right this minute.
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Matt Feazell
Cartoonist, The Amazing Cynicalman

Conan the Barbarian, Roy Thomas & Barry Windsor-Smith

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Larry Feign
Cartoonist, The World of Lily Wong

Nancy, Ernie Bushmiller

COMMENTS

Some comics I would consider “great,” but not my favorites, such as Peanuts. I have confined my list to my favorites and greatest influences.
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Bob Fingerman
Cartoonist, Beg the Question, From the Ashes

Le Garage hermétique, Jean “Moebius” Giraud

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Craig Fischer
Associate Professor of English, Appalachian State University; contributing writer, The Panelists, The International Journal of Cartoon Art, The Comics Journal

Blueberry, Jean-Michel Charlier & Jean “Moebius” Giraud

COMMENTS

This was a real horror to put together, and I’m sure that tomorrow my choices would be 90-percent different. But c’est la vie!

Below is a list of favorites, without any claims to being an “objective” canon…

The ACME Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Rainy Day Saturday Afternoon Fun Book, Chris Ware (Pantheon, 2005). I prefer this big red book to Jimmy Corrigan and Ware’s other extended continuities. I find Shareholders more mordantly funny and more stylishly designed, and I’m nuts for Ware’s microscopic, hilarious prose and faux advertising. Comics as sublime, heartfelt graphic design.

After the Snooter, Eddie Campbell (Eddie Campbell Comics, 2002). My favorite autobiographical comic, in a field of formidable achievements (Binky Brown, American Splendor, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Fun Home, etc.). I love the way Campbell’s Snooter vignettes build a network of motifs and themes that playfully capture the rhythms of domestic life. Snooter works pretty well as part of the Alec: The Years Have Pants omnibus, too.

Ballad for a Coffin, Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean “Moebius” Giraud (Dargaud, 1972). Moebius was lukewarm about this Blueberry volume, but the trajectory of the plot—from Leone-style hijinks to chilling scenes of dead, water-logged corpses to a dead-end for Mike Blueberry—feels as barren, absurd, and frightening as a Beckett play. And you can see the avant-garde Moebius style sluicing under the “Gir” visuals.

The Fantastic Four #62, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott (Marvel, May 1967). This comic includes much of what I value about Silver-Age Marvel: melodramatic, passionate overwriting (thanks, Stan!), densely detailed panel backgrounds, and a double-page collage of Reed Richards careening through the Negative Zone that remains one of the coolest images I’ve ever seen. (Thanks, Jack!)

Forty Years with Mr. Oswald, Russell Johnson (Self-published, 1968). Johnson wrote and drew the Mr. Oswald strip for over 60 years (!), and gradually built a self-contained world out of bigfoot characters, the details of hardware retailing, and middle-class anxieties over bankruptcy and crumbling social status. Can we really call our era the Golden Age of Comic Strip Reprints as long as Forty Years remains out of print?

Hey, Wait, Jason (Fantagraphics, 2001). When we’re kids, the world seems full of endless possibilities, but Hey, Wait artfully depicts how a tragic event can bring that optimism to an end. Jason’s elegant minimalism is deceptively simple—-I’ve used Hey, Wait as the central text in a graphic novel class for six weeks without exhausting its depths—and there’s no comics artist alive who modulates pace better.

Jean qui rit et Jean qui pleure, François Ayroles (L’Association, 1995). A 24-page mini-comig big enough to capture a profound theme (the unfairness of life), Jean is also a study in the uniqueness of the comics medium: it’s dependent on the proximity of two panels in a single space to achieve its effects. Viva L’Asso, a mighty current in contemporary comics!

The Land of Nod #2, Jay Stephens (Black Eye, July 1966). The premise of this comic is simple: a nameless character, little more than a stick figure, tumbles into an escalating series of mishaps, and cries out for a superhero named “Captain Rightful” to save him. This is maybe the funniest comic I’ve ever read, the cartoon equivalent of an improvisation by a prodigiously gifted stand-up comedian.

Pluto, Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki (Viz, 2009-10). My favorite comic of the 21st century so far is unabashedly sentimental—more characters weep in its eight volumes than in twice as many pages of any other comic—but it’s also a postmodern essay on originality, copying, and the elastic definition of what it means to be “human.” (That latter theme is, of course, borrowed from Tezuka the trailblazer.)

Terry and the Pirates 7/9/39 Sunday page, Milton Caniff (1939). Sure, there are more famous Terry Sundays (Flip Corkin’s patriotic speech, Caniff’s “Ring out the Old” farewell), but in the 7/9/39 strip Caniff wrings an entire page’s worth of drama out of Pat Ryan just talking on the phone. The relentless shifts in framing and angles mount an implicit argument for the connections between comics and cinema.
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Anja Flower
Illustrator

Une Semaine de bonté, Max Ernst

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Erica Friedman
Writer, Okazu; president, Yuricon & ALC Publishing

Kirihito Sanka, Osamu Tezuka

COMMENTS

The Mighty Thor – Stan Lee/Larry Lieber/Jack Kirby
Some of the finest classic Marvel work I’ve ever read. Not bound by laws of physics or sense, but fun stories—this is what got me into comics in the first place.

Wonder Woman – George Pérez/Len Wein/Greg Potter
Towards my last few years of collecting American comics, this series kept me going. The reboot was handled just as I would have hoped—art and story flowed beautifully. Powerful stuff every issue. When Pérez left this title, I left American comics.

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories – Moto Hagio
There are no words to describe this book. These are “classic” stories in every way. Even when we’re reading something that has been done a dozen times before or since, there is an emotional commitment in these renderings that drags you in whole. Art and stories combine for one-two sucker punches to your own weak points.

Ode to Kirihito – Osamu Tezuka
This is quite possibly the most horrible book I have ever enjoyed. By the time I finished it, I realized I was in the presence of genius.

Thermae Romae – Mari Yamazaki
It would be very easy to dismiss this as a silly story, but aside from the amount of research that goes into it, and how ultimately goofy it is, Thermae Romae is a tale about humanity…and about how some things never change, nor should they.

Fun Home – Alison Bechdel?
Another moment with genius. This autobiographical tale is neither raw, nor emotional. It’s coldly executed, with intellectual honesty, and then more intellect heaped up over it to re-clothe the pain in creative finery. This book hooked me over and over as I read it.

Gunjo – Ching Nakamura.
One more “genius” title. This is the raw emotion and brutality we will never see from Bechdel. Because it is so brutal, those moments of tenderness that leak through the cracks are profound and painfully gentle.

Yokohama Shopping Log – Hitoshi Ashinano
Nothing happens in this series. Humanity dies away quietly and gently in the world’s twilight, and we watch it through the eyes of an android who celebrates the lives and rituals and hobbies and small happinesses of human life day after day.

Birds of Prey – Gail Simone/Ed Benes
I’m not sure what to say about this except that, if this series had been running when I was collecting American comics, I might have stuck with it.

One Piece – Eiichiro Oda
Can 62 million people be wrong? Not in this case. I’ve been reading One Piece for a really long time now, and I’m still reading it. I could be reading it 10 years from now. That thought makes me kind of happy. It’s a story about a rubber pirate. What’s not to like?
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Shaenon Garrity
Cartoonist, Narbonic; contributing writer, Comixology.com, Otaku USA

Ernie Pook’s Comeek, Lynda Barry

COMMENTS

If there was an eleventh slot, I’d go with Sheldon Mayer’s Scribbly.
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Richard Gehr
Contributing writer, The Village Voice, The Comics Journal

Doonesbury, Garry B. Trudeau

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Larry Gonick
Cartoonist, The Cartoon History of the Universe

Uncle $crooge, Carl Barks

COMMENTS

Man, this was hard! There were so many others that just missed the list…
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Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz
Cartoonist, Too Negative

Krazy Kat, George Herriman

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Diana Green
Cartoonist, Tranny Towers

Promethea, Alan Moore & J. H. Williams III

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Jason Green
Comics Editor, PLAYBACK: stl; contributing writer, Shots in the Dark

Blankets, Craig Thompson

COMMENTS

I tried to not overthink this too much, so I put it together based solely on what came to mind right away, which means I surely missed something. If you asked me tomorrow, this list would probably be quite different. I tried to concentrate on books that were “significant” in the way they made me think about how comics work, and what comics are capable of.

And a quick list of honorable mentions that came to mind but I decided didn’t quite make my top 10:

Strangers in Paradise, Terry Moore; I Kill Giants, Joe Kelly & J. M. Ken Niimura; Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard; Howard the Duck, Steve Gerber & Gene Colan, et al.; Moon Knight, Doug Moench & Bill Sienkiewicz; Scud: The Disposable Assassin, Rob Schrab; The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.; Superman: The Man of Steel, John Byrne, with Dick Giordano; Sin City, Frank Miller; V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird; Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi; Dominion C1 Konfurikuto [Dominion Conflict 1: No More Noise], Masamune Shirow; Gansumisu Kyattsu [Gunsmith Cats], Kenichi Sonoda; Astro City, Kurt Busiek & Brent Anderson, with Alex Ross, et al.; Hellboy, Mike Mignola
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Steve Greenberg
Editorial cartoonist, Ventura County Reporter, L.A. Observed, Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

“The Supremos,” from MAD, Mort Drucker

COMMENTS

Other favorites:

9 Chickweed Lane, Brooke McEldowney; Bizarro, Dan Piraro; The Editorial Cartoons, Tony Auth; The Editorial Cartoons, Clay Bennett; The MAD Stories, Sergio Aragonés
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Geoff Grogan
Cartoonist, Fandancer, Look Out!! Monsters

Prince Valiant, Hal Foster

COMMENTS

And there are many, many more.

These lists are always a fun—if a bit silly. The best stuff is the stuff you keep returning to year after year across a lifetime—and for an artist, the stuff you keep learning from.
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Patrick Grzanka
Honors Faculty Fellow, Barrett, The Honors College, Arizona State University

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

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Paul Gulacy
Illustrator, Master of Kung Fu; co-creator & illustrator, Sabre

Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz

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Best Comics Poll Lists

Best Comics Poll Index

Manga and the Best Comics Poll

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Though manga has been a fixture of the American comics scene since the mid-1980s, it wasn’t until the anime boom of the following decade that publishers began to get savvier about what they were licensing and how they were packaging it. The shift away from manly-man titles towards teen-friendly material, and from floppy to trade paperback, had a big impact on who bought manga; once found only in comic book stores, manga now appeared in big chains like Borders and Walmart where young fans of the Dragonball and Sailor Moon TV shows could find it. By the mid-2000s, manga sales were robust enough to crack the USA Today bestseller list, inspiring more companies to jump into the licensing game.

The manga gold rush came to a crashing halt in 2008. A confluence of forces — economic recession, abundant scanlations, rising paper costs, teen fickleness — forced all but the biggest and best-financed publishers to cease operations.

It comes as little surprise, then, that many of the manga on the Best Comics list are ones that outlived the market’s dramatic boom-and-bust cycle. Lone Wolf and Cub, which ranked 48th in the Best Comics Poll, made its Stateside debut in 1987, just one year before Marvel Comics began releasing AKIRA (#40) and VIZ began publishing Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (#73). Rumiko Takahashi’s beloved romantic comedy Maison Ikkoku (#73) is another long-lived series, going through three editions since 1993, when VIZ first acquired the North American rights.

Equally important is the role of the American comics establishment in anointing certain manga as masterpieces. AKIRA, Buddha (#71), Lone Wolf and Cub, and 20th Century Boys (#96) are all Eisner winners, while Pluto (#48), A Drunken Dream & Other Stories (#96), The Walking Man (#73), and Yotsuba&! (#73) were past nominees. The American industry hasn’t neglected creators, either; Comic-Con International has bestowed its Inkpot Award on some of the list’s best-known contributors, including Osamu Tezuka, Rumiko Takahashi, and Hayao Miyazaki.

But perhaps the most striking thing about the top vote-getters is how many of their creators embody the Great Man stereotype. Consider Osamu Tezuka, whose Buddha and Phoenix both made the cut. His role in the history of manga is analogous to Beethoven’s in orchestral music. No musicologist would reasonably claim Beethoven to be the first person to write symphonies, or even the first great innovator within the genre, but Beethoven’s distinctive compositional approach — particularly towards motivic development — had a profound impact on the musicians who came after him. Likewise, Tezuka didn’t invent shojo manga — as some critics have claimed — nor was the he the first person to pioneer the use of “cinematic” layouts. But the popularity and artistry of Tezuka’s work, and the uniqueness of his vision, cemented his reputation as one of the medium’s most important creators, someone who cast the same, anxiety-producing shadow over his successors that Beethoven did over his. (Small wonder that Tezuka’s last project was the bio-comic Ludwig B.)

Moto Hagio, author of A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, occupies a similar place in shojo manga history. Along with writers such as Riyoko Ikeda and Keiko Takemiya, Hagio played a pivotal role in transforming comics for girls, drawing on myriad sources — Frances Hodgson Burnett, Shotaro Ishimonori, Ray Bradbury — to create bold, taboo-busting stories that spoke to the concerns of teenage girls. Perhaps her greatest innovation was to apply Tezuka’s “cinematic” techniques to her characters’ interior lives, immersing us in their emotions and memories in the same way that Tezuka thrust readers into the action. Throughout her work, Hagio placed a premium on subjectivity, using fluid layouts, unbound by grids, and employing an elaborate code of visual signifiers to represent the full gamut of emotions — symbols found in contemporary shojo titles such as Fruits Basket (#73).

[An aside: As Shaenon Garrity observed in her essay about “lady comics,” Hagio’s most representative work has yet to be translated into English; A Drunken Dream is an anthology of short stories spanning Hagio’s career, and not fully indicative of her narrative skill. Tezuka, on the other hand, is fortune enough to have had many of his best-regarded works –- Astro Boy, Buddha, Ode to Kirihito, Phoenix –- translated into English, making easier for readers to appreciate the depth of his artistry.]

And no responsible manga critic could overlook the significance of Katsuhiro Otomo, whose AKIRA was one of the most widely admired — and imitated — comics of the 1980s. If Tezuka was the artist who translated Walt Disney from screen to page, Otomo was the one who brought the grittier world of 1970s cinema to Japanese comics. AKIRA owed a visual debt to Star Wars, but Otomo’s storytelling was, at heart, more attuned to the mood of the early 1970s. His story was complex and political, a grand, paranoid fantasy that questioned Japanese enthusiasm for technology and cast a doubtful eye on the government. Otomo’s artwork, too, was peerless; countless manga-ka – Naoki Urasawa included – imitated Otomo’s blocky character designs, sleek vehicles, and meticulously detailed cityscapes. And Otomo wasn’t afraid to cross the line into outright horror, as Kaneda’s grotesque bodily mutations attest.

As with any list, there are some outliers: Yotsuba&!, a slice-of-life comedy about a bachelor who adopts a tot with green pigtails, seems more a sentimental favorite than a classic title. The same could be said for Fruits Basket, which sold like hotcakes in the mid-2000s, but is already beginning to look a little dated. I say this not to diminish either series, but to observe that canon-building is a difficult and fascinating process; works that might seem essential to us now may recede in importance (and vice versa).

So what do these nominations tell us about the current state of manga in the US? First, that visibility and longevity were key factors in determining which titles made this list, and which ones didn’t. Second, that critics gravitated towards artists whose work could be labeled as “great,” “important,” or “pioneering” –- in short, artists whose work neatly conforms to Western notions of genius, a peculiar standard for a medium that is unabashedly conceived as mainstream entertainment. Third, that readers tended to nominate titles that fell within respectable genres; some of manga’s most distinctive voices –- Kazuo Umezu, Yoshiharu Tsuege, Suehiro Maruo –- are absent from the list. And fourth, that only a tiny amount of manga has been translated for English-speaking audiences; seminal works such as The Rose of Versailles, GeGeGe no Kitaro, The Song of the Wind in the Trees, and Left Hand of God, Right Hand of the Devil have yet to be licensed here, begging the question of what results the next Best Comics Poll might yield.

Best Comics Poll Index

Embalmed Ones, Fabulous Ones, Those That Tremble as if They Were Mad

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There are no outrageous surprises on the collated Eurocomics list (though individual choices, of course, are more idiosyncratic). Rather, the critics who participated in the poll chose works which (a) have been translated into English, (b) have been canonically sanctioned as works of influence and merit by important critics, and/or (c) span the major periods of Eurocomics production. Perhaps a good way to discuss such a diverse group of books is to pigeonhole them into chronological periods, like so:

The Origin: The comics of Rodolphe Töpffer (published in Switzerland between 1833 and 1846). Töpffer’s status as the inventor of the comic book, and as the format’s first accomplished artist, was solidified by David Kunzle’s Töpffer biography (2007) and the Kunzle-edited collection Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips (2007). These resources certainly made it easier for me to teach Töpffer, and learn to appreciate him myself. When I first read The Story of M. Jabot (1833), and noticed how Töpffer repeated words and images every time Jabot was trying to recover from a humiliating incident, I laughed out loud. Not bad for a comic book almost 200 years old.

The Classics: The Adventures of Tintin albums by Hergé (published in Belgium and France between 1930 and 2004); Astérix the Gaul by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (published in France in 1961); the Moomin books and comic strip by Tove Jansson (published in Finland between 1945 and 1993); and the Corto Maltese albums by Hugo Pratt (published in Italy and France between 1967 and 1992).

Boy reporter Tintin remains amazingly popular, influential enough to spawn both the upcoming Steven Spielberg / Peter Jackson Adventures of Tintin blockbuster film, and such alt-comics emulators of Hergé’s visual style (called la ligne claire, the clear line) as Chris Ware and Jason Lutes. Tintin’s worldwide popularity remains unsullied by Hergé’s own collusion with the Nazi occupiers of World War II Belgium, as discussed in Pierre Assouline’s Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin (1998; first English-language edition 2009).

Astérix is likewise part of the canon, albeit one drawn in a knockabout bigfoot style rather than in la ligne claire. Readers everywhere recognize Astérix and his sidekick Obelix, and probably learned most of their knowledge about Rome and the Gauls from Goscinny and Uderzo. It’s interesting that the majority of HU critics chose the first Astérix volume, Astérix the Gaul (1961), as their choice; personally, I prefer the albums from the mid-to-late 1960s, like Astérix the Legionary (1967). If you haven’t read any Astérix yet, though, maybe you should start from the beginning — and stop before Astérix and the Great Divide (1980), when Goscinny dies and Uderzo takes over the writing.

Although not as well-known in the United States as Tintin or Astérix, Tove Jansson’s Moomin comic strips and children’s books have been wildly popular during the last 60 years in Finland, Sweden, Europe, and elsewhere. (A far-flung example: New Zealand alt-cartoonist Dylan Horrocks has been a world-class Moomin fan since his early childhood.) Today, North American comics readers have come to love the oddball characters and storybook milieu of Moomin courtesy of Drawn and Quarterly’s translations of the complete run of the Moomin comic strip and several Moomin storybooks (including Who Will Comfort Toffle? [1960]).

In the case of Corto Maltese, the influence runs in the opposite direction, from America to Europe. Inspired by comic-strip dramatists Noel Sickles (Scorchy Smith) and Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon), Italian artist Hugo Pratt developed his own realistic style, and his own adventure character, freebooter Corto Maltese. Of all the works in the “Classics” category, Corto Maltese is the hardest to find in English — virtually all the Corto volumes published in America by NBM and others are out of print — but the inky beauty of Pratt’s images is a universal language.

The Revolutionaries: Blueberry by Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean “Moebius” Giraud (1965- ); Alack Sinner by Carlos Sampayo and José Munoz (1975-1988); Arzach by Jean “Moebius” Giraud (1975-76); The Hermetic Garage by Jean “Moebius” Giraud (1976-78); Fires by Lorenzo Mattotti (1986).

Like Corto Maltese, Blueberry and Alack Sinner are European reflections of American genres. Blueberry is Charlier and Giraud’s take on the Western, featuring Mike Blueberry, a cowboy and cavalryman increasingly trapped in post-Civil War political conspiracies, while Alack Sinner is a scarred noir detective who navigates the ideological hotspots (the Vietnam War, the feminist movement, Black Power) of Sampayo and Munoz’s own time. I call Blueberry and Alack Sinner “revolutionary,” however, because both deviate from and deconstruct genre through new techniques in art and storytelling; later Blueberry albums reflects the seismic changes in Giraud’s art when he adopts his “Moebius” persona (about which, more below), while the Alack Sinner story “Life Ain’t a Comic Strip, Baby” (translated in Fantagraphics’ Sinner #5, 1990) self-reflexively inserts Sampayo and Munoz into their fictional noir world.

It’s established comics lore how genre cartoonist Jean Giraud ingested hallucinogenic mushrooms, enthusiastically embraced the ‘60s counter-culture, and, under the pseudonym “Moebius,” wrote and drew the trail-blazing story “The Detour” (1973) for the relatively conventional French comics magazine Pilote. What followed was an explosion of creativity from Giraud — he co-founded perhaps the most influential comics magazine in history (Métal Hurlant [1974-2004], which off-shot into various languages, including America’s Heavy Metal [1977- ]) while continuing to explore unsettling, surreal territory in his Moebius-signed art. The four gorgeously-drawn, ferociously colorful, wordless stories that constitute the original Arzach cycle are named after a stone-faced pterodactyl rider who glides through a fantasy world with to its own subterranean cause-effect rules. Even trippier is The Hermetic Garage, which grew from a two-page throwaway in Métal Hurlant into a fully-formed science-fiction universe (and odd tribute to Giraud’s favorite authors, including Samuel Beckett and Michael Moorcock). Moebius’ comics sputter in and out of availability in English, which is a shame, though in the case of Arzach the language barrier isn’t a problem.

Lorenzo Mattotti’s Fires, perhaps the most radical of the “revolutionary” comics, combines Moebius’ subjective storytelling with the themes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as a naval officer struggles to understand his encounters with a tropical island culture. Most importantly, Mattotti’s painted images are so tactile and vibrant that critic Paul Gravett calls Mattotti “without doubt the most dazzling colourist working in comics today.” While I can point to numerous cartoonists influenced by Munoz and Moebius— Frank Miller is influenced by both — I’m hard-pressed to identify someone who’s followed Mattotti’s repudiation of ink line and explorations into solid blocks of color. Of all the entries on the Eurocomics list, Mattotti’s aesthetic is the closest to sui generis.

The Contemporaries: Epileptic by David B. (1996-2003) and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2000-2003).

Both Epileptic and Persepolis were published by L’Association, the French art-comics publishing collective founded in 1990 by David B. and other prodigiously talented cartoonists (including J.-C. Menu, Lewis Trondheim and Patrice Killoffer). The excellence of the L’Asso backlist ensures the collective’s place in the canon, but other factors contributed to its popularity in the United States, most notably the translation and dissemination of key books via Chip Kidd and Pantheon’s graphic novel division, and Bart Beaty’s celebration of L’Asso in his “Eurocomics for Beginners” column in The Comics Journal and in his scholarly book Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (2007).

Epileptic is David B.’s searing chronicle of growing up in a family disrupted by a brother with severe epilepsy and depression; the scenes where B(eauchard)’s parents turn to macrobiotic diets and communal living to “cure” his brother’s disabilities are among the most harrowing and truthful I’ve ever read in an autobiographical comic. Paradoxically but effectively, David B. opts to depict his life in Expressionist visuals, depicting his brother’s epilepsy as fluid demonic patterns, and self-help gurus as looming, out-of-proportion golems. Marjane Satrapi adopts some of B.’s strategies—autobiography rendered in stark black-and-white graphics—but she has her own story to tell, about her childhood and young adulthood in post-Islamic Revolution Iran. 9/11 and the rise of Jihad vs. McWorld tensions turned Persepolis into a transatlantic bestseller.

I expect this list of canonical Eurocomics to expand considerably in the coming years. If we repeat this exercise in ten years (as the British Film Institute does with their “Top Ten Poll”), I’m sure that the effects of Fantagraphics’ Jacques Tardi reprint project will place a book like Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches (1993) on the list. (Actually, I’m surprised that Trenches didn’t make it this time.) And maybe in a decade new translation projects — A Blake and Mortimer collection? An anthology of Italian underground comics from magazines like Cannibale and Frigidaire? — will lead to a revised Eurocomics canon, though it’s hard to imagine the dethroning of Tintin. But who knows? We didn’t expect the fall of the Berlin Wall either.

Best Comics Poll Index

Participant Lists D-E

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The following lists were submitted in response to the question, “What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?” All lists have been edited for consistency, clarity, and to fix minor copy errors. Unranked lists are alphabetized by title. In instances where the vote varies somewhat with the Top 115 entry the vote was counted towards, an explanation of how the vote was counted appears below it.

In the case of divided votes, only works fitting the description that received multiple votes on their own received the benefit. For example, in Jessica Abel’s list, she voted for The Post-Superhero comics of David Mazzucchelli. That vote was divided evenly between Asterios Polyp and Paul Auster’s City of Glass because they fit that description and received multiple votes on their own. It was not in any way applied to the The Rubber Blanket Stories because that material did not receive multiple votes from other participants.

Katherine Dacey
Writer, The Manga Critic


Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Hayao Miyazaki

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Marco D’Angelo
Writer, Sono Storie


X-Men, Chris Claremont & John Byrne

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Alexander Danner


The Rabbi’s Cat, Joann Sfar

Instructor, Emerson College; contributing writer, ComixTalk

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Mike Dawson
Cartoonist, Gabagool!, Freddie & Me, and Ace-Face: The Mod with the Metal Arms


My New York Diary, Julie Doucet

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Kim Deitch
Cartoonist, The Search for Smilin’ Ed, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Alias the Cat


Dick Tracy, Chester Gould

COMMENTS
This is in no particular order.

Well, Genesis by Crumb would be number one.

And Palestine by Joe Sacco might be number two, but then I haven’t read his newest book.

Wimbledon Green was awfully good.

I have not read it yet, but what I have seen so far of Harvey Pekar’s posthumous book Cleveland, illustrated by Joseph Remnant, looks very promising.

Lots of other comic books by Crumb could be included. I think the strip “August 1976,” by Nina Bunjevac, that recently ran in Mineshaft magazine was quite excellent. I know I’m leaving out a ton of things.
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Martin de la Iglesia
Contributing Writer, International Journal of Comic Art


The Walking Man, Jiro Taniguchi

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Camilla d’Errico
Cartoonist, Tanpopo, Helmetgirls


Bakuman, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

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Francis DiMenno
Director, Emily Williston Memorial Library and Museum; contributing writer, The Lemon Basket


Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

COMMENTS

If obliged to select only one [of The Complete Crumb editions], I would select Volume 6, “On the Crest of a Wave”. If this is not suitable, than I would select Robert Crumb’s body of work in Zap Comix.

Watchmen, A Brief Appreciation

I don’t want to brag, but I spotted Alan Moore as a genius right around the time of “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” I showed that particular story to all my friends. You can ask them.

And Watchmen was a signal accomplishment for its time, right up there with Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Rônin, and Daredevil: Born Again. It still holds up well over 25 years later. It is still one of the few graphic novels with the density and complexity of a good novel.

Quite frankly, I’ve made this peculiar sub-genre of literature my field of study for over 40 years. (Yup, I’m that old.) Watchmen is at or very near the top of the heap as far as I’m concerned.

Moore himself would probably tell you himself that he is thoroughly steeped in comics lore, and that he borrowed quite a few of the genre’s tropes to tell his story. Harold Bloom called it “the anxiety of influence.” It’s not by any means a bad thing. Nearly all authors draw upon genre conventions of one kind or another to tell their stories. What really counts in the end is how they use those narrative conventions.

Watchmen will stand because it was one of the very first self-aware works of graphic art, and one of the very first graphic novels truly worthy of the name…
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Alan David Doane
Publisher/editor, Comic Book Galaxy; writer, Trouble with Comics, The ADD Blog


Ice Haven, Daniel Clowes

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Randy DuBurke
Cartoonist, Hunter’s Heart; illustrator, Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography, Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty


Master of Kung Fu, Doug Moench & Paul Gulacy

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Randy Duncan
Professor of Communication & Theatre Arts, Henderson State University


Concrete, Paul Chadwick

COMMENTS
This list is not designed to impress anyone with my “good taste.” It is not meant to be a canon-building exercise based on an objective standard of quality. It is a very subjective list of work in comics form that has been (and, in most cases, continues to be) important to me.

Formalist that I am, sometimes I am responding to the intellectual experience of appreciating skillful, even innovative, use of the comics form (3, 4, 5, 8, 9).

In other instances it is an emotional experience of connecting with characters (2, 6, 7, 10).

A couple of the comics provide me with the sublime experience of being transported to fantastic worlds by the audacity of the concepts and the power of the artwork (1, 7).
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Kathleen Dunley
Faculty Chair, English, ESL, Reading & Creative Writing, Rio Salado College


It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Seth

COMMENTS

[About the vote for The ACME Novelty Library] If I have to narrow it, I’d say Volume 18 [“Building Stories”].
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Paul Dwyer
Cartoonist, I Shot Roy!


Cages, Dave McKean

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Joshua Dysart
Scriptwriter, Violent Messiahs, Unknown Soldier, Neil Young’s Greendale


Wee Willie Winkie’s World, Lyonel Feininger

COMMENTS

But I just can’t do ten. It’s driving me crazy…

11. Journey, William Messner-Loebs; 12. Wasteland, John Ostrander & Del Close, et al.; 13. The Tale of One Bad Rat, Bryan Talbot; 14. The Spirit, Will Eisner; 15. Love and Rockets, Gilbert Hernandez & Jaime Hernandez; 16. American Flagg!, Howard Chaykin; 17. Two-Fisted Tales, Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis, John Severin, Wallace Wood, et al.; 18. Dalgoda, Jan Strnad & Dennis Fujitake; 19. Krazy Kat, George Herriman; 20. Luther Arkwright, Bryan Talbot; 21. The Frank stories, Jim Woodring; 22. Roarin’ Rick’s Rarebit Fiends, Rick Veitch; 23. Bacchus, Eddie Campbell; 24. Kozure Ôkami [Lone Wolf and Cub], Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima; 25. Eightball, Daniel Clowes; 26. MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.; 27. Nexus, Mike Baron & Steve Rude, with Gary Martin, et al.
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Joe Eisma
Illustrator, Existence 2.0/3.0, Morning Glories


The Invisibles, Grant Morrison, et al.

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Austin English
Cartoonist, Christina and Charles


The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey

COMMENTS

Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel, by Charlotte 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.

The 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.

The 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.

The 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.

The 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 Taniguchi more than Hergé, and this is the work that usually pushes me into that thinking (Hergé 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’s 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.
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Jackie Estrada
Co-publisher, Exhibit A Press; administrator, The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards


Little Lulu, John Stanley

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Al Ewing
Scriptwriter, Zombo, 2000 AD


The New Gods, Jack Kirby

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Best Comics Poll Lists

Best Comics Poll Index

Participant Lists Br-C

Posted on by

The following lists were submitted in response to the question, “What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?” All lists have been edited for consistency, clarity, and to fix minor copy errors. Unranked lists are alphabetized by title. In instances where the vote varies somewhat with the Top 115 entry the vote was counted towards, an explanation of how the vote was counted appears below it.

In the case of divided votes, only works fitting the description that received multiple votes on their own received the benefit. For example, in Jessica Abel’s list, she voted for The Post-Superhero comics of David Mazzucchelli. That vote was divided evenly between Asterios Polyp and Paul Auster’s City of Glass because they fit that description and received multiple votes on their own. It was not in any way applied to the The Rubber Blanket Stories because that material did not receive multiple votes from other participants.

Matthew J. Brady
Writer, Warren Peace Sings the Blues

Elektra: Assassin, Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz

Caroline Bren
Cartoonist, Young Youth; Writer,!!!!!!h4cked!!!!!!

The Autobiographical Stories, Aline Kominsky-Crumb

COMMENTS

Special Honors:

Horror comics curated by Karswell; Sorcery, Steve Jackson & John Blanche; Gadget, Haruhiko Shono

Casey Brienza
Contributing writer, The Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

Hanazakari no Niwa, Sakai Kunie

Scott O. Brown
Scriptwriter, Nightfall and Atlantis Rising

Black Hole, Charles Burns

Alex Buchet
Contributing writer, The Hooded Utilitarian

Fuochi [Fires], Lorenzo Mattotti

Kurt Busiek
Co-creator & scriptwriter, Astro City; scriptwriter, Marvels

Fables, Bill Willingham & Mark Buckingham, et al.

Sean Campbell
Writer, Don’t Cross the Streams

All-Star Superman, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely

Bruce Canwell
Associate Editor, Library of American Comics; scriptwriter, Batman: The Gauntlet

Tintin in Tibet, Hergé

COMMENTS
Click here to read Bruce Canwell’s comments on his selections.

Greg Carter
Creator, writer Love Is in the Blood; co-creator, writer, Perfect Agent

Nana, Ai Yazawa

COMMENTS

[On Kabuki] Scarab is my favorite single volume.

[On Hopeless Savages] Ground Zero is my favorite volume.

Scott Chantler
Cartoonist, Two Generals, Northwest Passage, and the Three Thieves series

A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories, Will Eisner

Jeffrey Chapman
Assistant Professor of English, Oakland University

The City, Frans Masereel

Hillary L. Chute
Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago; author, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics

A Child’s Life and Other Stories, Phoebe Gloeckner

Seymour Chwast
Illustrator & graphic designer extraordinaire; cartoonist, Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Graphic Adaptation

Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay

Michael Clarke
Contributing writer, Communication, Culture & Critique and Television & New Media

Cerebus: Jaka’s Story, Dave Sim & Gerhard

Robert Clough
Writer, High-Low; contributing writer, The Comics Journal

Hicksville, Dylan Horrocks

COMMENTS

This is one of those impossible questions, and my answers might tend to vary over time. My answers are a combo of what I think is “best” as well as those comics that drew (and draw) the most marked aesthetic reaction.

Brian Codagnone
Cartoonist, Misfits

Bloom County, Berkeley Breathed

Sean T. Collins
Writer, AttentionDeficitDisorderly; contributing writer, Robot 6 and The Comics Journal

Rusty Brown, Chris Ware

Barry Corbett
Cartoonist, Ginger & Shadow and Embrace the Pun

Bizarro, Dan Piraro

Roberto Corona
Cartoonist, Welcome to Heck; penciler, Egypt

Daredevil: Born Again, Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli

Jamie Cosley
Cartoonist, Animal Office Funnies; illustrator, Priscilla

Groo the Wanderer, Sergio Aragonés, et al.

Dave Coverly
Cartoonist, Speed Bump

The Spirit, Will Eisner

Warren Craghead
Cartoonist, How to Be Everywhere

The Codex Nutall

Corey Creekmur
Associate Professor of English, The University of Iowa

Gasoline Alley, Frank King

Tom Crippen
Contributing writer, The Comics Journal, The Hooded Utilitarian

Buddy Bradley, Peter Bagge

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Best Comics Poll Lists

Best Comics Poll Index

Favorites vs. Best

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What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?

That’s the initial question Robert Stanley Martin presented for voters in our best comics poll. Voters could vote for the best comics, their favorite comics, or the most significant comics. Which made me wonder, what’s the difference?

From the poll answers, it’s clear that many people do see a definite difference between “favorite” and “best”. For instance, in commenting on his list, cartoonist Larry Feign noted that “Some comics I would consider “great,” but not my favorites, such as Peanuts. I have confined my list to my favorites and greatest influences.” Even more emphatically Melinda Beasi in comments said that “I will say for the record that I would have refused to participate if I’d been required to come up with a list of “best” comics. I only caved because Noah insisted they could just be favorites.”

A simple distinction between “favorite” and “best” would be, perhaps, subjective/objective. “Favorite” is what I like myself, for personal or idiosyncratic reasons. “Best” is what is objectively superior, by some sort of universally applicable criteria. So one could say, for example, “I don’t really like Crumb’s work very much personally, but I recognize that he is such an objectively great illustrator that he deserves a spot in the top 100 comics.” Or you could say, Dokebi Bride may be one of my favorite comics ever, but of course it isn’t the kind of work of genius that deserves a place in the top 100 comics.” Crumb is not a favorite, but perhaps a best; Dokebi Bride is not a best, but a favorite.

Obviously, these distinctions are useful and meaningful, or people wouldn’t use them with such frequency. Still, I think they have some limitations.

First, it’s worth pointing out that no one is actually in a position to determine whether a comic is “best”, because no one has read every comic ever created. No doubt there’s at least a few people out there who have read every comic on the list of 115 best. But is there anyone who has read every comic on every list submitted by all 211 participants? For that matter, there are whole traditions of comics that aren’t even hinted at on our 115 best comics list, most likely because none of the people who submitted a list are familiar with them. There’s a massive comics scene in Mexico; I believe there is a significant comics tradition in India; there is a comics tradition in China. Do we know for certain that nothing created in those places is better than Watchmen or Peanuts or Little Nemo? Or, for that matter, how do we know that some obscure mini-comic distributed to 12 people and seen by no one else isn’t the best comic ever? Even the most cosmopolitan and knowledgeable comics reader is going to have seen only a tiny fraction of all the comics ever created in the world, which means any “best” is only “the best that I’ve seen” — or, in other words, a favorite.


Ultrapato by Edgar Delgado. It could be one of the best comics of all time for all I know.

On the other hand…I wonder if it’s possible to see something as a favorite entirely divorced from objective, or at least communal, ideas about quality. “What I like” isn’t an arbitrary effusion of my individual romantic selfness; it’s a variegated hodgepodge of standards picked up from others, many of which (a dislike of clichés, for example, or an antipathy to slick advertising art) don’t even make sense outside of a social milieu. Even what one chooses to read tends to be influenced by ideas about “best” — I doubt I ever would have looked at Little Nemo if so many people (whether acquaintances or, through his comics, Chris Ware) hadn’t told me that I should. “Favorites” exist, not in isolation, but in social spaces where personal likes are disseminated and codified, where they bleed into collective determinations of quality. Would I be such a fan of Peanuts if one of my closest friends was not also a Schulz devotee?

In some ways, the best/favorite split mirrors the general human problem of objectivity/subjectivity or culture/self. Eric Berlatsky (that’s my brother!) got at some of these issues in a recent comment.

There’s a fairly large gap between “objectivity” and “subjectivity”–and there are alternatives to both approaches. That is, even if there is no concrete unassailable criteria for judging art, this does not automatically mean that you’re left with “different strokes for different folks”. Criteria for judging individual works tend to be defined by groups…or “the social”… not by the work itself or the individual onlooker. So, Jeet knows what “kinds” of things are appreciated by the social (or a particular interpretive community, a la Stanley Fish). So…even if he doesn’t particularly like something as an individual, he can say “it is good.”—This is based on a kind of broad social agreement (or a less broad agreement within an interpretive community) about “what kinds of things are good.” Thus, Jeet can disagree with himself (“I don’t really like it, but I know it’s good, anyway). None of this has much to do with objectivity…but it doesn’t have much to do with “what kind of art is good is purely subjective.” Even the belief that artistic judgments are subjective comes from the social (and the notion that there are objective criteria for judging art is probably social as well).

I’d agree with that…and maybe elaborate that the issue isn’t just that subjective/objective is simplistic, but rather that there’s not really any place from which one can determine whether it’s simplistic or not. The self is embedded in language and, indeed, in images. How can you separate you from the world that makes you? Or (more trivially) how can you tell whether Watchmen is your favorite because it’s the best, or the best because it’s a favorite? Are you shaping the list, or is the list shaping you?

This is why I think Robert was right to ask for best, or favorites, or most significant. Not because all of those are acceptable, but because it’s unclear that they are even systematically distinguishable. The appeal of best-of lists, I think, is not that they embody either absolute standards or individual enthusiasms, but rather that they tie both together into a single frustrating, fascinating knot.