Category Archives: Series

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

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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.

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

__________

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.

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

__________

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.

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