The List

As mentioned a few weeks ago, I was recently asked to nominate my choices for the hundred greatest comics of the twentieth century by the Festival Internacional de Banda Desenhada in Amadora, Portugal. After much delay, beginning with a detour into some really bad comics, I finished my list today.

The first thing you'll notice is that there are far fewer than a hundred comics. As I'm unqualified to judge comics outside the Anglophone tradition on any sort of historical merit, I felt I couldn't and shouldn't provide a hundred choices supposedly representative of the best comics from around the world. I could have listed a few personal favorites from the non-Anglophone comics, or trotted out all the usual names one hears cited as the greatest, but the former seemed myopic and the latter tautological, if not dishonest. I instead limited the list to the traditions I do know, selecting three dozen or so that I'm confident deserve their place among the world's best.

I have a few other comments, but let's save those until later. First, the list:

Carl Barks, Uncle Scrooge

Milt Caniff, Terry and the Pirates

Eddie Campbell, Alec: How to Be an Artist

Jack Cole, Plastic Man

R. Crumb, et al, Zap Comics

Will Eisner, The Spirit
Will Eisner, To the Heart of the Storm

I wanted to include an Eisner graphic novel, as he's done some terrific work, but the selection was difficult. For all that A Contract With God is called "the first graphic novel," a) it's not the first, and b) it's not really a graphic novel, so much as a collection of short stories. (Graphic novellas?) Rather than choose that on the basis of some spurious primacy or influence, I nominated To the Heart of the Storm, Eisner's fictionalized autobiography and family history. Dropsie Avenue is also good.

Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez, Love and Rockets

Separate this one into its most successful storylines and collected editions ("Duck Feet," The Death of Speedy, "Human Diastrophism," Love and Rockets X, Poison River, Chester Square), or nominate the whole thing? I obviously chose the latter.

George Herriman, Krazy Kat

Jack Jackson, Los Tejanos

Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Doctor Strange
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, The Fantastic Four

Frank King, Gasoline Alley

Jack Kirby, The New Gods, Mister Miracle, and The Forever People

Harvey Kurtzman, et al, Frontline Combat
Harvey Kurtzman, et al, Two-Fisted Tales
Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, et al, MAD

Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, The Birth Caul
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen
Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and John Totleben, Saga of the Swamp Thing
Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta

Grant Morrison and Richard Case, Doom Patrol
Grant Morrison and Chas Truog, Animal Man

Morrison was very nearly represented by a third title, The Invisibles, but as much as I love that series, its later issues were marred by highly inconsistent writing (and occasionally inconsistent art). The first volume and the first half of the second volume would earn a place here, though.

Joe Sacco, Palestine
Joe Sacco, Safe Area Gorazde

Charles Schulz, Peanuts

Art Spiegelman, Maus
Art Spiegelman, Francoise Mouly, et al, RAW

Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library

Bill Waterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Looking back over this list, its most striking feature is that some figures, one figure in particular, seem rather overrepresented. Five Alan Moore comics looks like a lot, although it's only a tiny (and highly selective) fraction of his output. I think this is a function of the creators' relative modes of production. Writers like Moore and writer-editors like Lee or Kurtzman are free to work on more titles and more projects than the many writer/artists here; Frank King spent fifty years on one strip.

The two names most difficult to include were Crumb and Schulz. I'm well aware of the influence both have exerted - and my list was already light (although, I think, not without reason) on the newspapers and the undergrounds - but I care little for their work. Also, in Schulz's case I'm not sure the influence was a positive one, as we owe the newspapers' current gag-a-day drought to the minimalist, shrinkable, interchangeable style Schulz perfected. I caved nonetheless.

Not so with the autobiographists or the crafters of "nongenre" fiction so celebrated over the past decade; I could have named a few on the basis of being the best of their subgenre, but I wasn't going to include anyone just for inclusion's sake (other than Ware, Campbell, and Eisner, each a slightly unusual case and each here entirely on their own merits). Ditto today's minimalist scenesters, many of whom would not have made the twentieth-century cutoff anyway.

The number and quality of recent works suggests that the medium is in good shape, even if its direct market is not. The twenty-first century has already produced at least one work that I would without hesitation place on any "Best of" list: Eddie Campbell's After the Snooter. I wonder if Moore and J. H. Williams III's Promethea might also belong there once its done (just to further unbalance things).

Like all lists, naturally, this is better taken as a gauge of my tastes and my reading than as any absolute indicator of quality. As I've said before, list-making is not a scholarly enterprise, distinct even from the increasingly suspect (but still occasionally useful) business of canon formation. That a conference would solicit such a list of comics, the way the AFI or Random House assembled their lists of films and novels, is a sign of the popularity and respectability that comics enjoy in Europe; if the CNBDI's project might promote such popularity and respectability here in America, then it's worth doing.

Comments

[Greg Morrow]

Marc:

"[T]he implicit argument too often seems to be, 'See, this must be important because it's got political commentary,' an argument that rarely considers the quality of the commentary."

Perhaps. But I would argue in return two things: First, Pogo is by no means all about the political commentary and I'll return to this. Second, it is far more satire than simple commentary and it is indeed, at least in my estimation, high quality.

Attacking Senator McCarthy in 1952 in the funny pages was reasonably brave, to be sure, but more importantly, it was good art. Later in his career, he'd sacrifice narrative for caricature, but the Simple J. Malarkey story stands out as a reflection of the nasty impulses of American society in the 1950s. This interfered with the usual wacky hijinx of the swamp crowd in a way that analogized wacky hijinx to the American Way.

His Pogo-for-President episodes--particularly 1952, 1956, and 1960--stand out as excellent satires of the American political process. In 1960, Kennedy's youthful appeal was parodied first as "boy bug" Fremont's candidacy, followed by Howland Owl's "out-youthenizing" the game by running an egg.

That's good stuff. Pogo addressed politics in much the same way as Bloom County, by folding the politics into the usual absurd goings-on.

Back to my first point, by no means is Pogo's only or even primary virtue its identity as a political strip. I read it and rate it most highly for being utterly silly, purely hilarious farce riddled with an extraordinary facility at playing with words.

There's a sequence that starts with a gag about ptarmigans ptackling like ptiger ptraps that seques through Egyptian myth to the final gag "Memphis don't need no compass--haven't you ever heard of non-compass Memphis?" That's the kind of writing that's the equal of "Who's on First" or any of the other classic vaudeville routines, and Kelly pulls it off on nearly a daily basis.

Put simply, I laugh my ass off reading Pogo.

Tack on, as I said, truly innovative lettering and superb art (especially inking) and the politics really are a small part of the strip's achievement.

[alex]

re: miller's work

i don't think the right claim to make about miller is that his page compositions are the most innovative ever created but simply that he is a master of page composition. his pages are remarkable for the clarity of their exposition and their graphic justification. examples of techniques miller uses well: specific panel arrangements (if not always entirely uniform) connected to specific scenes; in ronin i've noted particularly that the different scenes also have different panel borders, matching the tone, a visual element immediately linking to the perspective of that particular character; awareness of the units of visual consumption--the single page and double page spread and how to use them to best effect. something i noted again in ronin--a three page scene, starting on the right hand page--turn the page and the layout of the left is identical to the page preceding it, the new right-hand page however is the same panel arrangement except mirrored this time--it has an awareness of the page facing it; other simple good rules that he uses well, on the left hand page uses a tall vertical panel on the left to set the scene and two smaller panels on the right, followed by a four panel grid for however many pages the scene goes on for; the panels at the beginning and end of many scenes bleed to the border of the page (to draw readers into and out of the scene, bracketing it); the use of the division of single images into multiple frames (what this effect accomplishes i'm not entirely sure how to articulate...but he does it very well!). certainly he steals tricks wherever he can find them, but almost always for maximum effect and with the highest level of craft. i'm thinking specifically of ronin in this post which i've been reading (and ronin, i think of any of his works, should be included on a greatest comics list, especially for not being most effective as reference to a larger story like the dark knight and batman, and being effective in its own right).

[Marc]

Miller has an Orson Welles-like ability, perhaps not to innovate new compositional techniques, but to synthesize them so effortlessly and to such effect that he seems like the first to have used them.

Identifying Miller's greatest work or works isn't an easy task, though. DKR has the greatest reputation and impact, and an assured mastery of layout, but the writing constantly intrudes; this is a work whose idea of satire is David Endochrine, Ruth Weisenheimer, and, lord help us, Byron Brassballs. His Daredevil work has equally evocative layouts, even better figure work, and occasionally wonky plotting, and might better be classified as exceptional genre storytelling and character work. His writing is best, I think, on "Born Again," but while Mazzuchelli's art is exceptional it lacks the sizzle of Miller's noir experimentation.

Ronin may be the book that best displays Miller's formal virtues at their creative peak, and it's one of his most thematically interesting; I still prefer the plotting in his superhero work, though. I could more easily list three great Miller works than I could boil it down to one.

[alex]

how about elektra lives again? what a gem!

[Kevin J. Maroney]

Just to weigh in briefly again, I consider everything Miller did before Ronin to be apprentice-work and everything after it to be a disappointment. But Ronin I consider a masterpiece.

There's a colony of comics artists living in and around Chapel Hill who thought that Sin City was the most visually exciting comic on the racks when it was first coming out; however, I have still never read it. (I've looked at it, though. Man, it looks great.)