Tag Archives: Best Comics Poll Top Ten

#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

#5: Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman

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In 1986, Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns both appeared in serialized form, and Art Spiegelman released the first volume of Maus. The graphic narrative has had many high points over the years—the graceful aesthetics of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland; the modernist playfulness of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat; the rise of the counterculture in Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix—but 1986 was remarkable.

At the time the American comic book scene was dominated by angsty mutant teenagers and anthropomorphic animals: aardvarks, turtles, hamsters. Miller and Moore’s works reinvented the superhero genre, using it to question rather than reify authority. But as serious, dark, and dystopian as those books are, they didn’t change the landscape of graphic narrative the way Maus did. Spiegelman wrote about the Holocaust. In doing so he demonstrated that comics, which always labor under the onus of being dismissed as children’s fare, can grapple with the weightiest topics. Maus made it possible for the Alison Bechdels, the Joe Saccos, the Marjane Satrapis—current authors who address complex political and social issues—to thrive.

What makes Maus a particularly complex and rewarding political narrative is that it conveys both the horror of the Holocaust and the ways in which that horror ripples down through generations. Part of the vastness of the Holocaust is that it didn’t really stop with the end of World War II. Trauma was transmitted through to the children and grandchildren of survivors. Spiegelman relates his father Vladek’s stories about his life in Nazi-occupied Poland and his survival in Auschwitz and Dachau, but this is as much Art’s story as it is Vladek’s. Spiegelman uses two parallel narratives to capture the multi-generational valence of trauma: in one, Vladek’s story, we get a picture of the fear and misery associated with life in the Jewish ghettos and the Nazi concentration camps; in the other, a meta-narrative about Art interviewing Vladek in order to write Maus, we see how the Holocaust continues to affect their lives.

Each of these parts is important. The historical narrative is a powerful account of the Holocaust. There are many reasons why comics proved a perfect medium to capture Vladek’s experiences. Spiegelman’s stark black-and-white images have the unwavering lens of a documentarian; he uses the graphic medium to render the Nazi’s atrocities visible. We see Jews hanging from the gallows, German soldiers bashing children against walls, concentration camp prisoners forced to light other prisoners on fire. Moreover, the striking visual metaphor of representing Jews as mice and Germans as cats adds intriguing iconic layers to the narrative.

The contemporary narrative works as a framing device, but it would be a mistake to see it only as a delivery system for the “main” narrative. Maus is as much a question of how we continue to live after trauma as how we survive it. When Vladek tells his own story, he is heroic. He is not only a survivor but practically a Hollywood star. “People always told me I looked just like Rudolph Valentino,” Vladek tells Art. Vladek in the narrative present, however, is hard to live with. Many of the same qualities that make Vladek the hero of his own story make him something of an antagonist in Art’s story. Thrifty becomes stingy, determined becomes stubborn, cautious becomes paranoid. Vladek has carried those traits with him long after they are needed for survival. Now, they get in the way of his relationships. In a short prologue to the first book, a young Art falls down and is teased by his friends. When he runs crying to his father, Vladek doesn’t console Art. Instead, he says, “Friends? Your friends? … If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week … then you could see what it is, friends!” He hasn’t managed to move out of the concentration camps. But is Art allowed to hold this against him?

And this is ultimately the brilliance of Maus. Had Spiegelman only told the one narrative, his father’s survivor’s tale, it would have been horrifying but sterile. It would have felt like a history lesson. By allowing his characters to be real people—frail and heroic, petty and generous—the Holocaust narrative comes to life.

Jeffrey Chapman is an Assistant Professor of English at Oakland University.

NOTES

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman received 28.125 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top ten are: Edmond Baudoin, Corey Blake, Scott O. Brown, Bruce Canwell, Jeffrey Chapman, Hillary Chute, Barry Corbett, Mike Dawson, Joshua Dysart, Larry Feign, Jason Green, Patrick Grzanka, David Heatley, Jeet Heer, Bill Kartalopoulos, T. J. Kirsch, MariNaomi, Jason Michelitch, Eugenio Nittolo, Jim Ottaviani, Joshua Paddison, Marco Pellitteri, Giorgio Salati, Matthew J. Smith, Nick Sousanis, Matteo Stefanelli, Ty Templeton, Kelly Thompson, and Qiana J. Whitted.

Joshua Dysart specifically voted for RAW, which resulted in a 0.125 vote for Maus.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale has its origins in a three-page story by Spiegelman from 1972. The story, also titled “Maus,” was initially published in the comic-book anthology Funny Animals, edited by future Crumb and Ghost World film director Terry Zwigoff. The “Maus” short has been reprinted a number of times, most recently in Breakdowns/Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, a hardcover collection of various Spiegelman comics shorts published by Pantheon Books.

After the original “Maus” was published, Spiegelman reconceived the material. In 1981, he published the first chapter of the current Maus in the second issue of RAW, a comics anthology he edited with his wife Françoise Mouly. (Mouly is presently an art director for The New Yorker magazine.) All but the final chapter of Maus was serialized in RAW between 1981 and 1991.

In 1986, Pantheon Books published a book collection of the first six chapters subtitled “My Father Bleeds History.” It was a critical and commercial success. It also received a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination in the category of Biography/Autobiography. Maus was the first comics work to receive recognition from this awards program.

In 1992, Pantheon published a book collection of the remaining chapters of Maus, including the heretofore unpublished final chapter. It was subtitled “Part II: And Here My Troubles Began.” This collection was also a critical and commercial success. Spiegelman again received a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination for Biography/Autobiography. He also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.

In 1993, with awards presented for work published in 1992, Spiegelman and the completed Maus received a special Pulitzer Prize. It was the first (and to date only) Pulitzer given to a comics work outside the Editorial Cartooning category.

The book is a mainstay of high-school and college English courses. It can be purchased in either the two paperback collected editions or as a single hardcover that combines the two paperbacks. These editions can be found at virtually any bookstore or online retailer. Prospective customers should note that bookstores frequently stock the book in the Judaica section. One can also find the book in the biography section of virtually any public library.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

#6: Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay

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Winsor McCay spoke the saddest and greatest last words of any cartoonist. (Number two is Osamu Tezuka: “I’m begging you, let me work!”) McCay lived to draw; his greatest fear, he often said, was of losing that ability. On a July evening in 1934, the 65-year-old cartoonist called downstairs to his wife, “It’s gone, Mother! Gone, gone, gone!” He had just suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side. Shortly afterwards, he suffered a second stroke, from which he never recovered.

His first thought when the stroke paralyzed him, the last thought he was able to articulate, was that he had lost his drawing hand.

Many cartoonists, even many great cartoonists, find drawing a chore. But McCay loved to draw. He lived to draw. He built a side career as an animator so he could draw even more. Each Little Nemo strip overflows with more careful, lovely illustration than most of us could produce in a lifetime. McCay crowded his strips with duplicates, clones, and herds of identical figures; he couldn’t think of any pastime more fun than drawing sixty kangaroos or a hundred children in clown suits. Figures stretch and warp and bend; the panels themselves strain to accommodate the artist’s imagination, tipping over and reforming into weird new shapes.

This strip, of all strips, could never fill less than a full Sunday page. It’s wild and robust but strangely delicate, as if a strong breeze, or Mama calling from the kitchen, could dissipate McCay’s fine-lined, Art Nouveau fairyland.

This is what McCay loved so much, this Fabergé egg of a comic strip. He took pen in hand and sent readers tumbling into a shifting universe of princesses, dragons, elephants, hot-air balloons, ornate palaces, darkest wildernesses, walking beds, dreams that enter the waking world, and waking worlds that turn into dreams. At the end of each page Little Nemo wakes up and cries MAMA! And it’s gone.

Shaenon Garrity is an editor at Viz Media and the creator of the webcomic Narbonic. She writes about comics for comiXology, Otaku USA, and other publications.

NOTES

Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay received 25.5 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top tens are: Eric Berlatsky, Noah Berlatsky, Jeffrey Chapman, Hillary Chute, Seymour Chwast, Brian Codagnone, Corey Creekmur, Kathleen Dunley, Joshua Dysart, Jackie Estrada, Shaenon Garrity, Geoff Grogan, Danny Hellman, Kenneth Huey, Jones, one of the Jones Boys, Abhay Khosla, Sean Kleefeld, Chris Mautner, Joshua Paddison, Marco Pelliteri, Hans Rickheit, Matt Seneca, Matteo Stefanelli, Joshua Ray Stephens, Matt Thorn, and Mack White.

Hillary Chute specifically voted for the newspaper comic strips of Winsor McCay, which was counted as a 0.5 vote towards Little Nemo in Slumberland’s total.

Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland was a newspaper strip that was first published on October 15, 1905. The original run continued until April 23, 1911. There were two revivals. The first of these ran from April 30 to July 26, 1914. The final run of the strip was published between 1924 and 1927.

The strip is in the public domain. As such, there have been many competing book collections put out by publishers. The best, least expensive introduction (as well as the collection that does the most justice to the original published page sizes) is Dover Publications’ Little Nemo in the Palace of Ice, which retails for $14.95. Click here to view it on Google Books.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

#7: The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez

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For better or worse, American comics has been an art dominated by its characters. Even the most uninterested of Americans if asked about comics would, no doubt, think of characters rather than artists or titles: Garfield, Superman, Spider-Man, etc. The tradition holds an equal stable of character pairs: Batman and Robin, Archie and Veronica, Charlie Brown and Snoopy. If the pair of Maggie Chascarrillo and Hopey Glass, the protagonists of Jaime Hernandez’s Locas, have not entered this popular pantheon, it is perhaps because of their shorter history or, due to their cursing and having actual sex (sometimes with each other), their lack of an “all ages” audience. Or maybe it’s because, unlike my other examples, Maggie and Hopey are dynamic individuals, rather than static icons.

Almost all of the Maggie and Hopey stories have originally appeared in Love and Rockets, the anthology series Hernandez produces with his brother Gilbert. Over a 30-year period, he has done something quite rare with his famous pair: he has built up their lives as a massive, unfolding narrative. Since their introduction in 1981, Maggie and Hopey have aged and their world has grown. Unlike most other comics, these stories exist in time—not just in the passing time of their reality-based world, but in the passing time of the characters themselves. Like Frank King’s Gasoline Alley (and few others), the characters age over the course of the series (although not quite in real time). Rather than maintaining the status quo in endless repetition, Hernandez makes change a defining element of the series’ trajectory.

First seen as a teenage punk, by the time of the most recent stories (last year’s Love and Rockets: New Stories v.3) Maggie, the character given the most attention, has passed her 40th birthday and her life has changed as much, if not more, as it’s stayed the same. In tracing the lives of his characters, Hernandez does not offer a simple chronology of events; his narrative style in many ways echoes the reality of making friends. We learn about Maggie like we learn about our friends: stories come out over time. We are there for some of the big moments but miss some of them, too. Years later we hear a childhood story or some small anecdote that fills in a missing piece, a missing clue to their actions and personality. Part of Locas’ power is this sense of Maggie, in particular, as a friend or acquaintance. We are not privy to all her thoughts and actions. We see her this week, but then lose touch for a few months, or even a few years of blank times and secrets. It is often as telling what Hernandez leaves out as what he puts in.

The stories Hernandez tells are grounded in a contemporary reality (one that, unlike most comics, acknowledges race, sexuality, and class) but are also willing to touch on a host of modes and genres. The early stories are a little too rooted in science fiction-esque adventure, and a recent story delved too long into nostalgic superhero tripe, but for the most part the shifts into the fantastic feel fully integrated with the real emotional drama (and comedy) of his characters, all of whom live and die, love and lose, work and play, and go about their lives in a way that has clearly provided decades of reading pleasure for more than just this fan.

Throughout the series, Maggie struggles with her sense of self-worth, her ever-changing relationships with family and friends, and more recently her aging and the passage of time (I think it no coincidence that recent stories delve back into her childhood and revisit a number of relationships from her past). With the accumulation of time (and pages), Hernandez is increasingly able to wring emotional weight from small moments and allusive reference in a way less expansive works cannot accomplish. The intertwining threads become more prominent with re-readings as brief mentions early in the series become full-grown stories years or decades later. Hernandez has created a sense of history (albeit fictional) in Locas that is unparalleled in any other comic.

A project like Hernandez’s gains effect from the way its physical manifestation exists in a time similar to the narrative. Rather than experiencing the characters’ lives in a single unified chunk that compresses and smooths over the changes of time (like a novel or film), Locas as a series of publications and Hernandez as an artist have both grown along with the narrative content. The youthful adventures of Maggie and Hopey are the youthful drawings and writings of Hernandez and the youthful expressions of the “alternative” comics scene. As Maggie ages, as Hernandez refines his work, so too have the publications grown along with the changing realities of the comics market to be one of the last serialized “alternative” comics from the era Hernandez (and his Love & Rockets co-creator/brother Gilbert) helped found.

All these narrative pleasures would be lost without Hernandez’s clean visuals, a stripped-down amalgamation of influences from the comics of his youth. Examples include the stark contrast and framing of Alex Toth and the stylized cartooning of Harry Lucey, Bob Bolling, and other Archie artists. His style is never ostentatious, and over the years his line has simplified, tones are rarely used, and only two stories have appeared in color. He is not afraid to make use of many of the tropes of comics for both comedic and serious purposes. Of particular note are the breadth of his character designs and the skill he shows in depicting his characters’ aging faces and bodies. His images not only clearly convey the story, they add to its impact.

For readers unfamiliar with the material, the earliest stories are not the best entry point (as is the case with many long-running series), so I’d recommend The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., the second volume of Fantagraphics’ most recent series of reprints. This volume includes the early masterpiece “The Death of Speedy,” which gives a better feel for Hernandez’s more mature stories.

Derik Badman is a artist, critic, and web developer. His blog and comics can be found at MadInkBeard, and he regularly writes about comics at The Panelists. He did the tech work and theme customization on the current Hooded Utilitarian site design, and he occasionally contributes to the site as well.

NOTES

The Locas Stories by Jaime Hernandez received 24.5 votes.

The poll participants who included it, in whole or in part, in their top ten are: Jessica Abel, Deb Aoki, Michael Arthur, Derik Badman, Eric Berlatsky, Matthew J. Brady, Sean T. Collins, Corey Creekmur, Mike Dawson, Andrew Farago, Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz, Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, Nicolas Labarre, John MacLeod, Matt Madden, Chris Mautner, Ray Mescallado, Jason Michelitch, Andrea Queirolo, Martin Rebas, Charles Reece, James Romberger, Joshua Rosen, Marcel Ruitjers, Noah van Sciver, Betsey Swardlick, Kelly Thompson, Matthias Wivel, and Douglas Wolk.

Derik Badman, Eric Berlatsky, Sean T. Collins, Jeet Heer, Nicolas Labarre, Martin Rebas, Charles Reece, and Matthias Wivel voted for The Locas Stories.

Jessica Abel and Matt Madden voted for the entirety of Jaime Hernandez’s work.

Charles Hatfield and Ray Mescallado voted for the story “Flies on the Ceiling.”

Chris Mautner cast his vote for “Browntown” and the two-part story “The Love Bunglers.”

James Romberger voted for “Spring 1982.”

Marcel Ruitjers voted for “The Death of Speedy.”

Noah van Sciver voted for The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S collection.

Douglas Wolk voted for the Love and Rockets stories of Jaime Hernandez.

Deb Aoki, Michael Arthur, Matthew J. Brady, Corey Creekmur, Andrew Farago, John MacLeod, Jason Michelitch, Andrea Queirolo, Joshua Rosen, Betsey Swardlick, and Kelly Thompson voted for Love and Rockets, the anthology series Jaime Hernandez produces with his brother Gilbert Hernandez, and where almost all of The Locas Stories originally appeared. These votes were counted as a 0.5 vote each towards The Locas Stories’ total.

Mike Dawson voted for Love and Rockets, but he singled out the stories “Flies on the Ceiling” and “The Death of Speedy,” so his vote was counted entirely for The Locas Stories.

Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz voted for Love and Rockets, but she singled out the story “Flies on the Ceiling,” so her vote also went entirely to The Locas Stories’ total.

The Locas Stories began with the story “Mechan-X” in Love and Rockets #1, self-published by Jaime Hernandez and his brothers (also fellow contributors) Gilbert Hernandez and Mario Hernandez in 1981. Fantagraphics Books reprinted the issue with a new cover in 1982. (Fantagraphics’ flagship publication is The Comics Journal, for which Jaime and/or Gilbert had produced work as contributing artists since at least 1980.) The first Fantagraphics issue also started a Love and Rockets periodical series that has continued in various incarnations to this day. The current version is Love and Rockets: New Stories, which appears annually. The fourth issue is currently scheduled for release in September.

Fantagraphics has actively reprinted material from Love and Rockets in book collections since 1984. To best understand their current publishing plan, please go to this page, titled “How to Read Love and Rockets,” on the company’s website. As Derik Badman indicates in his essay above, the best book with which to start reading The Locas Stories is probably The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. This contains the stories “The Death of Speedy,” “Spring 1982,” and “Flies on the Ceiling.” It also includes this writer’s favorite, “Tear It Up, Terry Downe.”

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index