Category Archives: Best Comics Poll

Participant Lists A-Bo

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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.

Jessica Abel
Cartoonist, La Perdida, Mirror, Window; co-editor, The Best American Comics series; instructor, School of Visual Arts

Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter

Max Andersson
Cartoonist, Pixy, Death & Candy

Klas Katt, Gunnar Lundkvist

Deb Aoki
Cartoonist, Bento Box; writer, Manga About.com

Wan Pîsu [One Piece], Eiichiro Oda

COMMENTS

1. Akira
Just a tour de force of graphic storytelling. Epic in scope and ambition with breathtaking art, Akira is a uniquely Japanese statement on power, corruption, rebellion, friendship, betrayal, innocence lost, and so much more. It still blows me away every time I read it.

2. Lone Wolf and Cub
A masterwork. If you’ve read Frank Miller’s Daredevil or Rônin, and you haven’t read Lone Wolf and Cub, you are really missing out. Beautiful brushwork, cinematic pacing, gut-wrenching action, heartbreaking, and historically fascinating.

3. Sailor Moon
I grew up reading shôjo manga, so women creating comics was nothing new to me. But for a generation who experienced this shôjo adventure series, being exposed to the Sailor Moon manga (and anime) series was a watershed moment. While the U.S. comics biz thinks “strong female characters” must carry big guns and have even bigger boobs, Naoko Takeuchi showed how a comics creator can inspire and engage female readers without talking down to them.

4. Ranma ½
Frequently mentioned as a “gateway drug” to manga, Ranma ½ was many readers’ first encounter with the kind of wacky, gender-bending fun that manga has to offer. This light-hearted romantic comedy is a rare comics series that appeals to both male and female readers—it’s little wonder that Rumiko Takahashi is so popular. She may be a bit repetitive, but when she finds a formula that works, it works really well.

5. Emma
So elegantly drawn, so beautifully told. Kaoru Mori does so much with facial expressions and how she develops her characters. The short stories in volumes 8 and 9 illustrate how well she created her world and the richly realized characters who live in it. Her painstaking attention to historical accuracy never weighs down the story—she immerses the reader in a fully realized world, and shows the changes that occurred in England from the late 1800s to the early 1900s through the lives of the people, not just dry facts. If I ever want a pick-me-up, I read Emma, Volume 10—the most satisfying ending to a manga or comics series I have read.

6. Love and Rockets
At a time when I was reading X-Men and Daredevil, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez showed me that comics could be about other stuff I cared about—like punk rock—and worlds I never knew, like life as a Latino in southern California. It made me realize I could draw comics about my experiences as a Japanese-American gal growing up in Hawaii, balancing my punk-rock and art-school life with my family traditions.

7. Elfquest
When I first encountered Elfquest, I was in the sixth grade. It’s hard to appreciate how revolutionary and different it was when it came out: a black-and-white comic by a female creator, high fantasy, and not from one of the Big Two (Marvel and DC). I love the original story-arcs of this series because they were so well thought-out, and infused with so much love for the characters and their readers.

8. Vagabond
Again, a beautifully drawn series. Takehiko Inoue really captures what it’s like to swing a sword knowing that you could cut off someone’s arm, or be sliced or stabbed in return. As you read this story, you really feel the weight of the sword, the feeling of flesh being cleaved, the blood, the fear of dying, and the exhilaration of battle. Breathtaking art, with a smartly told story about a young man who discovers that true strength comes from the spirit, not solely from his sword.

9. Bone
Ask anyone to recommend a comics series to a friend who doesn’t usually read comics, or to a kid. Nine out of 10 times, people will recommend Bone. For good reason! It’s action-packed, funny, wonderfully drawn, and terrifically well told. This deserves to be in print forever.

10. One Piece
Every time I read One Piece, I’m just astounded at Eiichiro Oda’s inventive character designs, his infectious enthusiasm, and the heart and humor with which he infuses the story. The rest of the world is completely in love with this series—it’s one of the highest-selling in Japan today, selling millions of copies each time a new volume comes out, and breaking sales records every time. It definitely deserves more props in the U.S.

Bonus:

11. Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
I know this one will be picked by almost everyone you ask, but I can’t exclude it from my list! I sometimes blame this whole “make all superheroes dark and gritty” trend on Frank Miller. But when it came out, it was shocking, astonishing, and punch-in-the-gut bats**t crazy (no pun intended). (O.K., maybe it was intended. Never mind.) I remember where I was when I first read it—how many comic books can you say that about?

Michael Arthur
Cartoonist, Funny Animal Books; contributing writer, The Hooded Utilitarian

Klezmer, Joann Sfar

Nate Atkinson
Assistant Professor of Communication, Georgia State University

Doom Patrol, Grant Morrison & Richard Case

Derik Badman
Cartoonist, Things Change and Maroon; writer, MadInkBeard; contributing writer, The Panelists, The Hooded Utilitarian

King Cat Comics and Stories, John Porcellino

J. T. Barbarese
Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University

Pogo, Walt Kelly

COMMENTS

Bill Elder’s work in the Fifties and early Sixties for MAD magazine, particularly the film and comic strip parodies (of Archie comics, especially).

Roz Chast, anything she does or has done for The New Yorker. Pure genius.

R. Crumb’s Zap stuff, and his creation of the single most memorable alternative-comix character, Mr. Natural.

Whoever did the art for the original Classics Comics version of Treasure Island and Frankenstein

Will Eisner’s A Contract with God.

Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman (especially Season of Mists).

Watchmen.

Charles M. Schulz, who along with Jules Feiffer essentially defines sophisticated mid-20th-century American irony.

Herblock’s Cold War political cartoons (viz., his sequence on the Cuban Missile Crisis).

Walt Kelly’s Pogo.

And if illustrators were allowed: Boris Artzybasheff’s work on Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao, and Joe Mugnani’s amazing drawings for Ray Bradbury’s October Country.

Edmond Baudoin
Cartoonist, Le voyage and Le chemin de Saint-Jean


Corto Maltese, Hugo Pratt

Jonathan Baylis
Cartoonist, So… Buttons

Preacher, Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon

COMMENTS

Faves, not Best, right?

Child/Teen in Me
1. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – Frank Miller – something about the combination of the crazy collector’s market at the time, HOT books and all that, with a story I actually loved at the time. What was I, 13?
2. Fantastic Four – John Byrne (particularly #245 – “Childhood’s End”) – something about Byrne’s FF run made me a fan for most of my life. I actually own the original art of the page where Franklin causes H.E.R.B.I.E’s destruction.
3. Lone Wolf and Cub – Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima – Liked the Frank Miller covers on these books when they were published by First, but loved the stories inside. So glad Dark Horse collected the entire series years later. So worth the wait.
4. Swamp Thing – Alan Moore, Steve Bissette & John Totleben – My one summer at a sleepaway camp, my grandmother bought me a bunch of comic books. Like a dozen Archies, and an Alan Moore Swamp Thing. I threw out the Archies.

Adult in Me
5. American Splendor – Harvey Pekar – Easily my biggest inspiration for doing my own auto-bio comics, even though I read Chester Brown, Seth, and Joe Matt first.
6. Grendel – Matt Wagner & Others (entire Comico run) During Web 1.0, I sought out this entire series and then read the whole thing in one fell swoop. One of the more ambitious projects of its kind that I’ve ever read.
7. ACME Novelty Library – Chris Ware – Somehow, I lucked out and actually caught this at Issue #1. Brilliant from the first page. I remember the hilarious moments, like those fake ads, more than the depressing Corrigan ones people always seem to refer to.
8. Metropol – Ted McKeever – Found these in London when I did a semester abroad at a comic shop owned by an ex-pat from Brooklyn! Something about it just hit me the right way. No one is like McKeever.
9. Preacher – Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon – Easily Ennis’s best work. It strikes so many chords with me with its combination of macabre humor and romance.
10. Yummy Fur – Chester Brown (entire run, not just storylines turned into graphic novels) – These simply knocked me on my ass.To go from the surreal and fantastic Ed the Happy Clown to the most frank, revealing auto-bio comics of its time. Amazing.

Books I wish I could’ve included somehow: Asterios Polyp, Beanworld, Bone, Blueberry, Concrete, Daredevil: Born Again, Donjon [Dungeon], Maus, Miracleman, Moonshadow, My New York Diary, The Sandman, Strangers in Paradise.

Melinda Beasi
Writer, Manga Bookshelf

Maison Ikkoku, Rumiko Takahashi

COMMENTS

A fairly arbitrary list of ten of my favorite comics, subject to change at any particular moment, and in no particular order.

With one major exception, I restricted this list to completed series (or, at least, completed in Japan, and very nearly completed here).

Terry Beatty
Co-creator & artist, Ms. Tree; inker, The Batman Adventures

Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff

Robert Beerbohm
Comics historian, BLBComics.com; pioneering comic-book retailer

Donald Duck, Carl Barks

Piet Beerends
Cartoonist, Idiosyncs and Light Bulb Face

Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson

COMMENTS

I think this would have worked better with a separate list for comic strips and single-panel comics (à la The New Yorker and political cartoons).

Calvin and Hobbes is my favorite by a wide margin, even though it hasn’t influenced my own work at all. Such a fantastic strip. Watterson is an amazing talent, and quit before the strip ever showed any signs of weakness, or a lack of new ideas. He went out on a high note, and never, ever sold out.

Alice Bentley
Office manager, Studio Foglio

Furûtsu Basaketto, Natsuki Takaya

COMMENTS

Thank you for putting this project together!

[About the vote for Girl Genius] It’s not just loyalty to my employers that prompts me to list this—I really feel they are doing some groundbreaking work.

Eric Berlatsky
Associate Professor of English, Florida Atlantic University; author, The Real, the True, and the Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation

The Far Side, Gary Larson

COMMENTS

[About the vote for the Locas stories] If I had to choose one “graphic novel,” I’d probably go with Wigwam Bam. Ghost of Hoppers is also really good!

[About the vote for the Ambush Bug stories] The DC Comics Presents and Action Comics guest appearances, the Ambush Bug mini-series, the Son of Ambush Bug mini-series, the Nothing Special, and the Stocking Stuffer. Not the recent mediocre revival.

Noah Berlatsky
Publisher, The Hooded Utilitarian; contributing writer, the Chicago Reader, Comixology, Splice

Daruma [Not Know], Jiun Onkô

COMMENTS

Since I am hosting this, I gratuitously insist on having it noted that the last two I cut off my list were Art Young’s Inferno and Marley’s Dokebi Bride.

Sean Bieri
Cartoonist, Jape; design director and illustrator, Detroit MetroTimes

Illegal Batman, Ed Pinsent

Corey Blake
Writer, www.coreyblake.com

Bone, Jeff Smith

“Bobsy Mindless”
Contributing writer, The Mindless Ones

Flex Mentallo, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely

Kristin Bomba
Contributing writer, Comicattack.net

Nijusseiki Shônen [20th Century Boys], Naoki Urasawa

COMMENTS

Bone, by Jeff Smith. No other comic I’ve seen can hit such a wide range of readers, in terms of age, sex, or genre preference. Nearly everyone who has seen it loves it. It sells like crack. It’s fantastically drawn, well written, and a truly great read.

Fruits Basket, by Natsuki Takaya. It wasn’t my very first manga, but it was the title that turned me into a serious manga reader.

Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, by Brian Azzarello and illustrated by Lee Bermejo. This brilliant mini-series paints Luthor in a sympathetic light, detailing why he despises Superman so thoroughly.

Ôoku: The Inner Chambers, by Fumi Yoshinaga. It’s hard for me to pick one of Yoshinaga’s works, but I would feel remiss for not including any of them. Ôoku, with its beautifully simple style (yet incredible amount of detail), historical setting, rewrite of history, and intriguing view of feminism make it an absolute must-read for anyone.

Ayako, by Osamu Tezuka. Again, it’s hard to pick one Tezuka work, but I have a special interest in stories about outside influences on traditional cultures, so this one really clicks with me.

20th Century Boys, by Naoki Urasawa. Because it’s brilliant.

52 by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, and Mark Waid (with layouts by Keith Giffen), from DC Comics. An amazing undertaking, publishing a comic every week. But they pulled it off, and kept the quality consistently high from issue to issue.

Y: The Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. One of my first real forays into comic books was this brilliant story about the literal last man on Earth.

The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman (and various artists). Fantastic, and perfect for a literature and mythology junkie like myself.

Skip Beat!, by Yoshiki Nakamura. I just adore it so much, I can’t get enough!

Alex Boney
Writer, The Panelists, Back Issue!, and Guttergeek

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware

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Best Comics Poll Lists

Best Comics Poll Index

The HU Lady List

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As a lady who frequently rants about lady issues, I have been selected by the Hooded Utilitarian to write a piece about lady cartoonists that will somehow not make all ladies reading it roll their eyes and groan. This is my punishment for all the ranting. I’ve learned my lesson.

Eleven years ago, when The Comics Journal put out its big Top 100 Comics by English-Speaking White Men of All Time Ever Except Dave Sim Because Seriously, Fuck That Guy, five women made the list: Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet, Carol Tyler, Debbie Dreschler, and Françoise Mouly for her work as co-editor of RAW. When the preliminary votes for the HU list were being counted up, it looked like only four women would make that list. Interestingly, it was four completely different women, which led me to suggest that maybe this stuff has nothing to do with talent or recognition; the comics industry simply has room for only four or five women at a time.

By the time all the votes had rolled in and the final tally was made, the HU 115 included a grand total of nine ladies. Is that better? Worse? Essentially the same? I don’t know. Mining the list for observations on which to pontificate, I notice that most of the artists are fairly recent—or, in the cases of Tove Jansson and Moto Hagio, new to U.S. audiences. There seems to be little love for classic old-timey creators like Nell Brinkley, Grace Drayton, Gladys Parker, or Marge Buell. No women from the underground era made the list either: no Trina Robbins, Lee Marrs, Dori Seda, Carol Lay, or Shary Flenniken, whose Trots and Bonnie is currently poised to take over as the Family Feud #1 answer to “Inexplicably Unavailable in a Sweet Reprint Edition” the moment someone finally does a Barnaby book. Autobio pioneer Carol Tyler, one of the four women on TCJ’s list, didn’t make the HU list, despite recently emerging from semi-retirement with the new graphic novel series You’ll Never Know.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, very recent cartoonists were, understandably, also left out; if my brief skim of the list is accurate, the HU 115 includes no webcomics. I can imagine a future list making room for works by Dylan Meconis, Spike Trotman, Jenn Manley Lee, Jess Fink, Dorothy Gambrell, Kate Beaton (of course), and other webcartoonists.

And Carla Speed McNeil. And Lea Hernandez. And Gail Simone. And Fumi Yoshinaga. And Jill Thompson. And Jessica Abel. And Wendy Pini. And Riyoko Ikeda. And Colleen Doran. And Vera Brosgol and Jen Wang and I am going to have to stop before I get in trouble for everyone I’m leaving off.

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For
Eleven years ago, when TCJ’s 100 Comics of the Century came out, I thought Alison Bechdel’s alt-weekly strip Dykes to Watch Out For, one of my favorite comics, was a glaring omission. But then I checked myself. If it didn’t get voted in, I thought, doubtless there was a good reason. It probably wasn’t as good as I thought it was. I just identified too closely with the cast of neurotic, intellectual, painfully liberal East Coast lesbians. I wasn’t a lesbian, but I was a Vassar student, which was about the same thing. At any rate, I figured the guys making the TCJ list knew what they were talking about, and Dykes to Watch Out For was just okay.

Now that I’m older, I realize this was bullshit, comics fans just have terrible taste, and Alison Bechdel had to write a big fat supergenius graphic novel with layered references to Proust and Joyce to get the comics world to realize what an amazing talent she is.

If the HU list is any indication, the critical success of Fun Home has inspired critics to take a second look at Dykes to Watch Out For, which followed its ever-expanding cast for 25 years of hookups, breakups, marriages, kids, desperate efforts to keep Madwimmin Books running, and eye-popping political freakouts. It’s like a For Better or for Worse that never went all weird at the end, and also ranted at you about the Bush administration. It’s also an inspiring work to read from beginning to end, just to see how good Bechdel’s art eventually gets.

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
First published in France in 2000, then translated into English as the U.S. mired itself in two Mideast wars like a giant sloth lumbering into a tar pit, Marjane Satrapi’s autobiography Persepolis hit the zeitgeist where it hurt. Satrapi’s experiences as a girl growing up in a family of intellectuals in post-revolutionary Iran, then as a drifting expat in Europe, were the perfect surface upon which literary critics and political pundits alike could project their ideas about the Mideast. There was the wildly excited reception Persepolis enjoyed, in the mainstream media as well as the comics press, when it first appeared in English. Then, when the praise tipped over the top, the inevitable anti-Persepolis backlash. Then a second wind of support when the movie adaptation came out, support that lasted long enough to win the film an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. (It lost to Ratatouille.)

Persepolis is above all a story of contrasts: East and West, ancient and modern, religious and secular, girl and woman, its title describing both the ancient seat of learning and culture and the city where uniformed thugs harass women on the street. Even the art shows two faces to the world, suggesting either fine Persian miniatures or children’s scribbles depending on which reviews you read. It’s a cleverly constructed puzzle box of a narrative, saved from pretentiousness by Satrapi’s fiery storytelling and irreverent sense of humor. Satrapi has gone on to draw more comics inspired by her Iranian upbringing — my favorite is the 2005 graphic novella Embroideries — but none has matched the cultural one-two punch of Persepolis.

Julie Doucet, the Dirty Plotte stories, including My New York Diary
Of all the countless autobiographical indie zinesters of the late 1980s and 1990s, Julie Doucet has best survived the test of time. Is it her big, swaggering art style? Her unique French-Canadian-punk-in-New-York perspective? Her willingness to get gruesomely confessional in stories brimming with sex, shit, and menstrual blood? Or is it just that she left her audience wanting more? After her series Dirty Plotte and the collection My New York Diary, Doucet stopped drawing comics. In interviews at the time, she expressed dissatisfaction with the comics world, interest in being taken seriously as a fine artist, and good old-fashioned lack of money.

Since then, Doucet has focused on fine art and on mixed-media projects like Long Time Relationship and 365 Days: A Diary, projects that employ elements of comic art but skirt the standard definition of “comic book.” The Dirty Plotte stories survive as a snapshot of this particular woman, in that particular time, gleefully kicking down the walls of an art form. Dirty Plotte is as perfect an encapsulation of the ’90s as Peter Bagge’s Hate, but coming from a messier, bloodier, hairier place. Yeah, that place.

Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket
By far the most popular shojo manga in the U.S., Fruits Basket almost singlehandedly powered Tokyopop for years, routinely trouncing Viz’s shonen juggernauts Naruto and Bleach on the bestseller lists. And yet it’s such a strange manga. Obviously indebted to Rumiko Takahashi, Natsuki Takaya opens her series with a premise reminiscent of Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2: when members of the cursed Sohma family are hugged by someone of the opposite sex, they transform into animals of the Chinese zodiac. Plucky heroine Tohru learns the Sohmas’ secret and moves in with them, inevitably developing romantic connections with the male members—particularly Kyo, the cat, whose patron animal, according to Chinese folklore, was tricked out of his proper place in the zodiac.

It all sounds like the setup for slapstick romantic comedy, but Fruits Basket develops in an entirely different direction, blossoming into a pensive drama about family battles and emotional scars. The supernatural element moves to the background, becoming less a plot point than a symbol of the unresolved tensions haunting the Sohma household. Takaya’s bright, wide-eyed art is like a ray of sunshine into the surprisingly gloomy corners of the story, reflecting the heroine’s upbeat determination to gather her friends to her breast and squeeze out the darkness.

Rumiko Takahashi, Maison Ikkoku
In Japanese comics, men usually draw boys’ manga and women usually draw girls’ manga, but there are exceptions, and superstar manga-ka Rumiko Takahashi — at one time rumored to be the wealthiest woman in Japan outside the royal family — is the exception that shatters all rules. Takahashi first hit it big by inventing the magical-girlfriend sex comedy with her cheeky 1980s series Urusei Yatsura, sadly out of print in English for over a decade, but she makes the HU list for her second manga, Maison Ikkoku, a gentle romantic comedy that originally ran in the not-so-gentle men’s manga magazine Big Comic Spirits.

Maison Ikkoku is less about love than it is about growing up. Hapless hero Godai begins the series as a student “ronin” whose efforts to cram for his college entrance exams are constantly interrupted by his wacky boarding-house neighbors and his crush on the kindly but distant landlady, Kyoko. As we learn more about Kyoko’s sorrows and Godai’s dreams, we realize that, between the comedy hijinks, we’re watching two young people slowly, awkwardly building the paths that will take them into adulthood. After fifteen volumes of romantic complications, sitcom misunderstandings, soap-opera plot twists, and dogs, it’s disarmingly touching when those two paths merge and continue into the future. If this all sounds too touchy-feely, Takahashi is also one of the world’s best illustrators of cute kids and sexy girls, and her art is at its peak in this series, more confident and polished than Urusei Yatsura but lacking the machine-like, assistant-heavy gloss of recent manga like Inuyasha.

Sure, it’s a formula romance. You know how hard it is to write a good romance? I am not ashamed to admit that I cry at least three times every time I read the final volume: at Godai’s “The woman I love” page, when Godai proposes while carrying Kyoko’s father on his back, and the last page, where life at Maison Ikkoku comes full circle.

Lynda Barry, Ernie Pook’s Comeek & the RAW stories
Remember when the “Masters of American Comics” show came out, and some cranky feminists like me complained that there were no women among the Masters, and other people responded with, “Well, what women would you dare put alongside like likes of Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, and the Hernandez Brothers?”

I’m coming out and saying it here: I’d have dumped one of the modern-day Masters to make room for Lynda Barry. In American comics she comes second only to Charles Schulz, the same way Moto Hagio comes second only to Tezuka. Barry’s simple (but deceptively appealing and well-composed) artwork is the perfect vehicle for her harrowing four-panel reports from the bowels of childhood. Seldom have imagos and logos been so perfectly paired, and never has a cartoonist so perfectly captured the voices of her awkward, bespectacled, scribble-haired characters.

In college I didn’t know there were book collections of Ernie Pook, so I used to photocopy the strips out of back issues of the Village Voice in the campus library and make my own. Some of those strips have never been reprinted, so it turned out to be worth it. And few lines from comics have stuck in my head as persistently as lines from Ernie Pook. A single caption from “The Night We All Got Sick” — My land which was gorgeous and smelled like perfume from France — has haunted my skull for ten years.

Moto Hagio, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories

The short-story collection A Drunken Dream isn’t Moto Hagio’s best work, but it’s the only work currently in print in English, so it’ll have to serve as a placeholder for untranslated series like The Heart of Thomas, Marginal, and Otherworld Barbara. A Drunken Dream does provide a nice overview of Hagio’s career, showcasing her development from a conventional 1960s-style artist of cute little girls and flowers into a creator of experimental, psychological fantasies drawn in a delicate but powerfully assured hand.

Hagio, sometimes called the Osamu Tezuka of shojo manga, is the most celebrated member of the extremely celebrated Year 24 Group, a loose collection of brilliant young women who reshaped girls’ manga in the 1970s. Hagio and her then-roommate Keiko Takemiya (who, together, invented the “Boys’ Love” genre with their respective manga The Heart of Thomas and Song of the Wind and Trees) hosted drawing sessions for shojo artists at their apartment, the “Oizumi Salon.” Was Hagio the most gifted of the group? Probably. Not definitely, but probably.

My own introduction to Hagio was through the sadly out-of-print Viz translation of A,A’, one of the first manga I ever read. I’ve spent the past decade immersed in manga — working as a manga editor, writing manga reviews, accumulating piles of stuff about Gundam — largely in the hopes of finding something as good as A,A’. It doesn’t happen often.

Tove Jansson, Moomin
Tove Jansson is best known as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, particularly the internationally beloved Moomin series, but Drawn & Quarterly’s swanky reprints of the Moomin comic strip, which ran in newspapers through a British syndicate for 20 years, have inspired a reassessment of her work as a cartoonist. And it’s worth reassessing: the most successful Finnish comic strip is also one of the smartest, most inventive, and most charming strips ever drawn.

The Moomin characters move through a world that’s both whimsical and hauntingly melancholy. As depicted in the comic strip, it’s also a visual feast, every panel packed with weird flora and fauna. In a touch I can’t recall seeing in any other four-panel strip, Jansson likes to build panel borders out of symbolically relevant objects: knives and forks for a cooking scene, twigs for the outdoors. The plots have the simple profundity of good children’s literature, often revolving around wistful searches for love or identity, and the sequence in which the Moomintroll family sets up a home in a lonely lighthouse strikes me as one of the most beautiful stories I’ve read in a comic. But I always wanted to be a lighthouse keeper.

Pia Guerra (with Brian K. Vaughan), Y: The Last Man
The first sci-fi stories about all-female societies were men’s fantasies: either dystopias where women turned the world into an oversized ant nest or something equally horrific, or else cheesy setups for one-handed Earthman-teach-us-this-thing-called-kissing scenarios. The next batch, in the 1970s, were women’s fantasies: enlightened and rugged lesbian co-ops bristling with sisterhood, like the settings of Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” and James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (a title that gets name-checked in the first issue of Y: The Last Man).

By the time of Y: The Last Man, arguably the best Vertigo comic of the last ten years, the question of women’s place in society had moved beyond fantasies, beyond ideologies, and into practical concerns. Y is an action story, a story of survival. It’s postfeminism as pulp. And it wouldn’t work without Pia Guerra’s tough, earthy art. Guerra’s work has a classic comic-book action gloss, but with an unusual attention to detail and gift for drawing faces and expressions. She captures both the pulpiness and the human element of Brian K. Vaughan’s story. It’s almost too tidy that the third wave of world-of-women fiction should be represented by the collaboration of a male writer and a female artist, but truth is less subtly written than fiction.

Best Comics Poll Index

The Top 115

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The extended list of top vote-getters, ranked by number of votes received:

The above list of top vote getters should be considered an interpretation of the 211 lists that were sent. It is not definitive. Others, upon examining the individual lists, may reach somewhat different conclusions about the poll consensus. However, I believe the above list is the one that best reflects the lists of the participants in aggregate.

With many of the entries, there wasn’t uniformity among the individual votes. In order to create a coherent list, I chose to accommodate several of the disparate votes by including them under an umbrella entry. Obviously, a vote for a single story in Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD or Stan Lee & Jack Kirby’s The Fantastic Four was counted as a vote for the work as a whole. Some of the umbrella entries were suggested by the lists, such as Jaime Hernandez’s The Locas Stories. Others, like The Counterculture-Era Stories of R. Crumb, were invented whole cloth. No one actually voted for “The Counterculture-Era Stories.” It is an umbrella entry covering votes for Head Comix, Fritz the Cat, “Whiteman Meets Bigfoot,” Crumb’s work in Zap Comix, and other solo Crumb efforts from 1976 and before.

In some instances, participants submitted a vote that covered several works that could have been voted for individually. Examples include anthologies like Love and Rockets, The ACME Novelty Library, and RAW. In these instances, I first counted the votes for the individual works that appeared in the anthologies, and then evenly divided the votes for the anthologies among the individual works that received multiple votes on their own. A vote for Love and Rockets resulted in a 0.5 vote each for The Locas Stories and The Palomar Stories. A vote for The ACME Novelty Library resulted in a 0.25 vote each for “Building Stories,” Jimmy Corrigan, Quimby the Mouse, and Rusty Brown including “Lint.” The one vote received for RAW was divided among eight works: Maus, The Jimbo Stories, The Weirdo-Era stories of R. Crumb, Richard McGuire’s “Here,” The Alack Sinner and Joe’s Bar stories by José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo, Quimby the Mouse, Ernie Pook’s Comeek and The RAW Stories by Lynda Barry, and (although it is not in the above list) The Autobiographical Stories of Aline Kominsky-Crumb.

Some participants voted, in whole or in part, for the body of work of an individual creator. In these instances, the principle described in the above paragraph was applied. A vote for Jaime Hernandez’s body of work was treated as a vote for The Locas Stories. A vote for the EC Comics work of Wallace Wood resulted in a 0.333 vote each for Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD, The EC Comics War Stories, and The EC Comics Science-Fiction Stories. With a number of artists who are deceased, I used “Works” as an umbrella entry. The creators who benefitted from this include Edward Gorey, B. Kliban, and Rodolphe Töpffer.

I note the formula for dividing votes was not used in every applicable instance. Each was a judgment call to a degree. For example, a vote for Bernard Krigstein’s EC work did not benefit Kurtzman’s MAD or the EC Comics Science-Fiction Stories, nor did votes for that material benefit the Krigstein entry. A vote for The Complete Crumb Comics did not benefit American Splendor or Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s autobiographical work. A vote for Crumb’s Zap Comix work in toto did not benefit The Weirdo-Era Stories.

Notes on how the individual votes were applied towards the counting is included with each of the participants’ published lists.

Best Comics Poll Index

#1: Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz

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There are two main paths to liking Peanuts: the Snoopy way and the Charlie Brown way.

The Snoopy way focuses on the strip’s plush centerpiece; the irrepressibly imaginative and adorably ill-proportioned polymorphous people-pleasing juggernaut. Snoopy combines Hobbes’ furry lovableness with Calvin’s mischievous bad-boy allure; he’s cuter than Hello Kitty and more whimsically unpredictable than Opus. His is a face that launched a million lunch boxes and a massive life insurance campaign—he’s the personification of Schulz’s marketing genius. If there were a cute overload of the funny pages, it would have an outsize schnozz and curse at the Red Baron. Snoopy is Peanuts for the masses.

June 16, 1957

The Charlie Brown way focuses on the strip’s doleful centerpiece; the downtrodden, self-pitying loser and the endless variations on his losing. Charlie Brown is existential tragedy in a baseball cap. The numbing, torturous repetition as he tears apart his sandwich while watching the red-haired girl from across the playground, or the agonized howl as he strikes out yet again—this isn’t a charming diversion for the kiddies. This is a bleak vision. Charlie Brown is Peanuts for those with depth.

I actually like both Snoopy and Charlie Brown, separately and together. I find Snoopy irresistible—especially in Schulz’s earlier strips when he looked more dog-like, and when Schulz’s then-fluid line-work gave the character a vivacity that outshone even James Thurber, much less Jim Davis. And Charlie Brown is not only Beckett in miniature; he’s Beckett realizing that miniature tragedies are, through their very trivialness, even more heart-wrenching than grandiose ones. There’s some dignity in waiting for God…but waiting to finally kick the football? Transcendent cuteness and transcendent despair—a strip everyone loves, and which the people who hate what everyone loves can also love.

November 19, 1961

Still, I think that the focus on Snoopy and Charlie Brown can sometimes obscure the other players. Many of these characters, of course, have more than a touch of the stars in their make-up. Schulz drew an awful cute baby in his heyday, and it doesn’t get much more heartwarmingly precious than Linus sighing as he holds his security blanket. On the other hand, Lucy’s pursuit of Schroeder, or Linus’ pursuit of the Great Pumpkin, are as painfully hopeless as any of Charlie Brown’s repetitive failures.

But Linus and Lucy and Schroeder aren’t just a little bit Snoopy and a little bit Charlie Brown. They’re characters in their own right, with their own idiosyncrasies. Schroeder with his Beethoven obsession and his miraculous musical ability; Lucy with her determined crankiness and equally determined confusion; Linus with his contradictory nervousness and spiritual insight — they seem to have stepped out of Dickens, not out of Kafka or a marketing campaign.

Maybe the best example of this is Peppermint Patty. Patty was introduced in the ‘60s as the mercilessly competent leader of the opposition baseball team; a foil for Charlie Brown’s haplessness. Over time, though, she took on added depth, becoming one of the most complicated, and most featured, characters in the strip. Some of Schulz’s most hilariously extended narratives involve Peppermint Patty’s uncanny inability to grasp the obvious—it takes years before she realizes that Snoopy is a dog and not a funny-looking, big-nosed kid, a misapprehension that leads her to take obedience training classes, much to the disgust of her sidekick Marcie.

Schulz doesn’t just use her as the butt of jokes though. Some of his most affecting strips touch gently on Peppermint Patty’s ambivalent relationship to her tomboyishness. It’s always clear that she enjoys her ability at sports…but she also at times seems to wish to be a pretty girly-girl. She grins ear to ear when relating that her father calls her “a rare gem,” or boasts about him giving her roses for her birthday. And there’s a lovely moment when she and Lucy are planning to get their ears pierced when she looks over and declares, “I have no doubts about my femininity, Lucille!” It’s a joke because it’s a kid saying that—but it’s not really a joke on Peppermint Patty. On the contrary, it seems like a quiet affirmation; she can be a tomboy and a girl. Schulz loves her as both.

May 31, 1974

It’s easy to miss, maybe, how much love there is in Peanuts, and how much life. The strip was so long-lived, and so great on so many levels, that some of its achievements get buried. Like, for example, the fact that it arguably introduced the best three or four female characters on the funny pages—not just Peppermint Patty, but Lucy, and Sally and Marcie are surely some of the greatest women, or girls, to ever come out of the brain of a guy, be he novelist or screenwriter or artist or comics creator. If you like charming, Peanuts is charming, and if you like dark, it’s dark, but it isn’t just charming, or just dark, or even just charming and dark. There are countless ways to like Peanuts, which is no doubt why it—deservedly, inevitably—tops this poll.

Noah Berlatsky is the editor of The Hooded Utilitarian.

NOTES

Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz, received 50 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top ten are: Derik Badman, J. T. Barbarese, Eric Berlatsky, Noah Berlatsky, Corey Blake, Alex Boney, Scott Chantler, Jeffrey Chapman, Brian Codagnone, Dave Coverly, Warren Craghead, Tom Crippen, Katherine Dacey, Alan David Doane, Paul Dwyer, Andrew Farago, Bob Fingerman, Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz, Steve Greenberg, Geoff Grogan, Paul Gulacy, Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, Sam Henderson, Abhay Khosla, Molly Kiely, Kinukitty, T.J. Kirsch, Terry LaBan, John MacLeod, Vom Marlowe, Robert Stanley Martin, Chris Mautner, Todd Munson, Mark Newgarden, Jim Ottaviani, Joshua Paddison, Michael Pemberton, Stephanie Piro, Andrea Queirolo, Ted Rall, Joshua Rosen, Giorgio Salati, Kevin Scalzo, Tom Stiglich, Matthew Tauber, Jason Thompson, Mark Tonra, Matthias Wivel, and Jason Yadao.

Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts was a daily newspaper strip that began publishing on October 2, 1950. The final original daily was published on January 3, 2000. The final original Sunday strip was published February 13, 2000. In an eerie coincidence, Schulz passed away the night of February 12.

Reprints of the strips are published in newspapers to this day under the title Classic Peanuts.

There have been innumerable book collections of the strip published over the years. A complete, chronological 25-volume hardcover collection, titled The Complete Peanuts, is currently in progress, with 15 volumes published to date.

For those looking for an inexpensive, one-volume introduction to the series, the best choice is probably Peanuts Treasury. It is published by MetroBooks, and available for sale in the discounted book section of most Barnes & Nobles. A nicely printed hardcover collection, it retails for $9.98. The book reprints over 700 strips (over 100 of them Sundays) from between 1959 and 1967, the time considered by many to be the strip’s peak period. Click here to go to its product page on the Barnes & Noble website.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

#2: Krazy Kat, George Herriman

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George Herriman’s Krazy Kat has been, from the time I first encountered it as a teenager, among my favourite comics and remains so today. The pleasures of Krazy Kat—Herriman’s antic doodles, his constant innovations in background and layout, the exuberance of his dialogue, and the surpassing (arguably illimitable) richness of his characters—have been much celebrated by an array of fine writers ranging from Gilbert Seldes to e.e. cummings to Bill Watterson, but a few fresh points might be worth making.

Firstly, if Herriman is, as he’s often called, the poet laureate of comics, then like the best poetry his work needs to be read slowly and in small doses. This is especially true of the full-page strips. Don’t race through a Krazy Kat collection as you would a graphic novel. Rather, take the time to savour the words and art. After you get to the bottom of the page, return to the top and start reading again. This process can be repeated many times with renewed pleasure.

Secondly, it is worth tracking Herriman’s changes: the earliest full-page strips from 1916 to the mid-1920s are dense reads, each one a little short story. During this period, the daily strips are quick jokes. Then there is a slow transition as the Sunday pages become quicker, while Herriman’s narrative interest shifts to the daily strip. This shift is quite evident by the mid-1930s when Herriman is allowed to have color on the full page. Each one becomes like a painting, while the dailies start featuring longer narratives, notably the famous “Tiger Tea” saga of the mid-1930s.

Thirdly and finally, Herriman was one of the very few cartoonists to express spiritual interest in his work. In many ways, the complexity of the love triangle is a critique of any easy use of terms like sin. And the repetition of the plot, day in and day out, is not unrelated to Herriman’s interest in reincarnation. To be fully tuned to Herriman’s special frequency we must have our spiritual receptivity open, as we do with a very few other cartoonists (such as Charles Schulz and Jim Woodring).

This article is a revised version of an essay that was originally published in the benefit anthology Favorites.

Jeet Heer is a Toronto-based editor and journalist. He is the co-editor, with Kent Worcester, of A Comics Studies Reader and Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium. With Chris Ware and Chris Oliveros, he is co-editing the Walt & Skeezix reprint collections of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley newspaper strip. Four volumes have been published to date. His articles on the arts and culture have appeared in the Toronto Globe & Mail, the Boston Globe, and many other publications. He has previously written on Krazy Kat in his introductions to the Krazy & Ignatz reprint collections for the years 1935-1936 and 1939-1940.

NOTES

Krazy Kat, by George Herriman, received 46 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top-ten lists are: Max Andersson, Derik Badman, Alex Buchet, Jeffrey Chapman, Brian Codagnone, Dave Coverly, Warren Craghead, Corey Creekmur, Francis DiMenno, Paul Dwyer, Austin English, Jackie Estrada, Andrew Farago, Larry Feign, Richard Gehr, Larry Gonick, Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz, Geoff Grogan, Jeet Heer, Sam Henderson, Illogical Volume, Bill Kartalopoulos, Molly Kiely, T. J. Kirsch, Carol Lay, Matt Madden, Chris Mautner, Joe McCulloch, Jason Michelitch, Gary Spencer Millidge, Pedro Moura, Mark Newgarden, Jason Overby, John Porcellino, Oliver Ristau, Matt Seneca, Mahendra Singh, Kenneth Smith, Matteo Stefanelli, Tom Stiglich, Tucker Stone, Mark Tonra, Mack White, Karl Wills, Matthias Wivel, and Douglas Wolk.

Matt Madden specifically voted for the works of George Herriman.

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat was a daily newspaper strip that began publishing October 28, 1913. The final strip was published June 25, 1944, two months after Herriman’s death on April 25.

As the strip is in the public domain, there have been many book collections published over the years. A complete, chronological 13-volume collection, titled Krazy & Ignatz, is currently in print.

For those looking for a reasonably priced one-volume introduction to the strip, the best choice is probably Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, by Patrick McDonnell, Georgia Riley de Havenon, and Karen O’Connell. A hardcover edition retails for $18.00 on the Barnes & Noble website. Click here to go to its product page. One can also find it in many public libraries.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

#3: Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson

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Those two-seconds-late realizations when Calvin’s mom realized what his last absurdist claim meant. The jarring reminders when Hobbes was drawn as a stuffed tiger. That quaint moment when you first figured out that Suzie would always be his one true love. Trying to figure out which of the Calvins was the one who actually went to school after he created all those cardboard clones. Getting jealous of his tree forts and the friendships contained within them. The lettering that Bill Watterson used for Moe’s threats, and the way Moe’s physical prowess was never bested. Knowing that, since she was a Mrs. Wormwood, that meant there was a Mr. Wormwood hiding somewhere else who only knew about our hellion secondhand. The first time you tried to make snowmen the way Calvin did. When Calvin’s dad broke down and taught you that your dad could be as confused and scared as you always were. The majestic, experimental Sunday strips where you saw all the other styles that Watterson had at his beck and call, and the moment when he brought you home with the one you knew best. Learning what the word sabbatical meant. Learning that artists could stand up for themselves, and that they should stand up for themselves, and always holding up the moment when this one did as the bar that all other artists had to clear. A hippopotamus with wings. Calvin’s face. Calvin’s ambition. Calvin’s imagination. Calvin’s hair. How hard he tried, how often he failed.

The way he loved Hobbes. The way we loved them.

Tucker Stone is an actor who most recently appeared in the film Quiet City and a whole mess of plays in New York City. He writes about comics for comiXology and The Comics Journal, and he blogs about all kinds of trash culture at The Factual Opinion.

NOTES

Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson, received 45 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top tens are: Michael Arthur, Robert Beerbohm, Piet Beerends, Eric Berlatsky, Corey Blake, Scott O. Brown, Bruce Canwell, Scott Chantler, Brian Codagnone, Roberto Corona, Jamie Cosley, Dave Coverly, Martin de la Iglesia, Randy Duncan, Jason Green, Steve Greenberg, Greg Hatcher, Alex Hoffman, Abhay Khosla, Kinukitty, T. J. Kirsch, Sean Kleefeld, Nicolas Labarre, Sonny Liew, Alec Longstreth, John MacLeod, Vom Marlowe, Gary Spencer Millidge, Pat Moriarity, Eugenio Nittolo, Rick Norwood, José-Luis Olivares, Jim Ottaviani, Michael Pemberton, Andrea Queirolo, Martin Rebas, Giorgio Salati, Val Semeiks, Joe Sharpnack, Kenneth Smith, Tom Stiglich, Tucker Stone, Kelly Thompson, Sean Witzke, and Yidi Yu.

Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes was a newspaper strip published between November 18, 1985 and December 31, 1995.

There have been 18 book collections of Calvin and Hobbes published. The most comprehensive is The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, a three-volume hardcover set that reprints every strip along with all supplementary and promotional art produced for the feature.

Those looking for a single, introductory collection are probably best served by Calvin and Hobbes: The Tenth Anniversary Book, which features a selection of strips chosen by Bill Watterson. The book can be found at most bookstores and online retailers, as well as in many public libraries.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

#4: Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

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Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is certainly no stranger to “best of” lists. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly looked across the entire landscape of book publishing—fiction and non-fiction, prose efforts and comics works—and put together a ranked list of the “100 Best Reads from 1983 to 2008.” (Click here.) Watchmen was listed at #13, which included it among the top ten works of fiction of the period. And a few years earlier, in 2005, Time magazine included Watchmen in its list of the 100 best English-language novels between 1923 and 2005. (Click here.) Time is an establishment publication, and it is certainly not prone to any radical pronouncement. The magazine put Watchmen in the company of such classics as The Great Gatsby, To the Lighthouse, and The Sound and the Fury. The book’s more contemporary peers included Beloved, American Pastoral, and Never Let Me Go. No other comics work was given this distinction.

When one reads Watchmen, whatever skepticism one has about such acclaim quickly falls away. It is a superb work that triumphs on multiple levels. Watchmen is simultaneously a first-rate adventure story, an incisive analysis of the superhero genre, and a brilliant meditation on how one’s sense of reality is defined by one’s perspective—knowledge and ignorance, hopes and fears, predispositions and agendas.

The book’s starting point is a mystery plot. The Comedian, a former costumed hero and now a covert government operative, is brutally murdered. It gradually becomes clear his murder is part of a larger conspiracy. Dr. Manhattan, the only one of the heroes with superpowers—and he is nearly omnipotent—is driven away from society by an elaborate smear. Rorschach, the last of the heroes to operate without government sanction, is framed for murder, captured, and imprisoned. Ozymandias, who retired from adventuring years earlier, foils a gunman’s attempt on his life. Someone is out to eliminate the heroes, but who, and why?

The answer turns out to be horribly ironic, with the reasons a black joke on the puny, naively idealistic desire to make a better world by putting on a costume and beating up criminals. The conspiracy to eliminate the costumed heroes is revealed as a tangent in a greater plot that changes the world. Along the way, Moore and Gibbons treat the reader to one terrific suspense setpiece after another. And in marked contrast to Zack Snyder, the director of the horrid film adaptation, they understand that violence is made all the more effective by restraint.

One of the most common observations about Watchmen is that it is both a superhero adventure story and a critique of the genre. In the appreciation of the book he sent with his top-ten list, Francis DiMenno identifies this with critic Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence.” In DiMenno’s view, Alan Moore, the book’s scriptwriter and acknowledged mastermind, has such a relationship with the superhero genre. One can see his point, but I’m more inclined to identify Watchmen’s anxiety of influence with Harvey Kurtzman’s “Superduperman” and other superhero parodies in MAD. The theory argues that a younger artist feels belated relative to older ones whose work is admired. The only way to compete with the older work—and assert one’s own artistic identity—is to beat the earlier artist at his or her own game, which is accomplished by changing the rules. In works like “Superduperman,” Harvey Kurtzman exposed the fallacies of the genre with derision and exaggeration. In contrast, Moore, who acknowledges a large debt to Kurtzman, examines his own superhero characters with the acute eye of a first-rate prose novelist. He doesn’t mock them; he plays things entirely straight, and he presents the fanciful characters in as ruthlessly realistic a manner as possible. He reveals the grotesquely maladjusted attitudes that motivate the various superheroes, turning them into figures of pathos and horror. Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, and the others are among the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction.

Watchmen is an extraordinarily compelling read, but what makes it an extraordinarily compelling reread is its meditation on perspective and how it shapes one’s understanding. On its most profound level, the book is about interpretation and the act of reading itself. The work’s defining metaphor is the Rorschach blot—a psychiatric tool for teasing out a person’s attitudes and preoccupations. One is asked to look at a blob of ink and elaborate the associations and thoughts one projects onto it. One sees permutations of this throughout the book, such as when Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias, and a third hero, Nite Owl, attend the Comedian’s funeral. They think back on him during the service, and it’s clear none had any significant relationship with him; they only see him as a metonymy for their own anxieties. Moore and Gibbons also dramatize the most extreme perspectives; in one chapter we are shown experience through the eyes of a psychopath, and in other we see things through the eyes of eternity, and understand what it can mean to be aware of all times at once. The book almost always presents knowledge as incomplete. And when it is complete, it is skewed by other factors, so people fail to reach the correct conclusions. In one of the book’s subplots, the main female character knows everything necessary to recognize a certain man is her real father, but her dysfunctional relationship with her mother so distorts her view that she can’t see it. And misunderstandings not only affect one’s personal life, they direct the tide of history. At the end of the book, the world has changed because everyone misinterprets a catastrophe. Will they accept the truth once they are told it? The book ends on that question, and one is inclined to answer no.

Moore and Gibbons extend their treatment of interpretation and misinterpretation to the reader’s experience of the book. If one has read Watchmen before, go back and reread the first chapter. Details that seemed extraneous the first time around jump out at one. Others, such as the recurring image of the spattered smiley face, recede into the background. Dialogues take on a different meaning, such as the conversation between the two detectives in the opening scene. Is one sincere when he says a certain crime was probably random and not worth much investigation? Or consider this panel:

How was this image interpreted—i.e. what meaning was projected onto it—the first time around? Was the emotional resonance from an earlier scene with the Nite Owl character brought over to it? Did one see it as a pensive moment of doubt on Ozymandias’ part about how he has spent his life? Were the dolls in the foreground seen as a trope for this doubt? And how is it interpreted on the second reading, with knowledge of the entire book? Does one now see Ozymandias contemplating an unexpected problem, with the toys a trope for his distraction? This panel, like all of them, is a Rorschach blot for the reader; one sees what one projects onto it. The differing interpretations also bring to mind a quote Alan Moore was fond of in a later work, “Everything must be considered with its context, words, or facts.”

Illustrator Dave Gibbons does a magnificent job of realizing his collaborator’s vision. Moore may be the mind behind Watchmen, but Gibbons is its extraordinarily deft hands. He was a seasoned adventure cartoonist when he began the project, and one sees his assurance in every panel. He handles the quiet scenes as effectively as the violent ones. There’s also an understated, almost laconic quality to his dramatization of the characters. He shows the reader what is happening; one is never told what to think about it. And the remarkable literalness of his style—clear compositions, fully realized deep-space perspectives, copious detail—is perfect for a work that at its core is about the unreliability of perception. Gibbons shows the reader everything, and it remains ambiguous anyway.

I could go on and on about the book. It does what the most impressive ones do; it makes you want to talk about its achievements forever. That’s why it deserves to be considered one of the finest novels of our era. Not to mention one of the best comics.

Robert Stanley Martin is the organizer and editor of the International Best Comics Poll. He writes for his own website, Pol Culture, and is a contributing writer to The Hooded Utilitarian. He has previously written on comics for the Detroit Metro Times and The Comics Journal.

NOTES

Watchmen, by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, received 31 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top ten are: J.T. Barbarese, Piet Beerends, Eric Berlatsky, Noah Berlatsky, Alex Boney, Scott Chantler, Tom Crippen, Marco D’Angelo, Francis DiMenno, Anja Flower, Jason Green, Patrick Grzanka, Paul Gulacy, Alex Hoffman, Mike Hunter, John MacLeod, Scott Marshall, Robert Stanley Martin, Todd Munson, Jim Ottaviani, Marco Pellitteri, Michael Pemberton, Charles Reece, Giorgio Salati, M. Sauter, Matthew J. Smith, Nick Sousanis, Joshua Ray Stephens, Ty Templeton, Matt Thorn, and Qiana J. Whitted.

Watchmen was originally published as a 12-issue serial in comic-book pamphlet form in 1986 and 1987. The serial was collected and published as a graphic novel in 1987, and has been a mainstay of book retailers ever since. It should also be available at most public libraries.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index