Last week I suggested that my readers go to my section of the Broken Frontier message boards and let me know what comics they felt belonged on an "Essential Reading" list. My goal is to establish a canon of sorts, a group of works in the medium of the graphic narrative that represent the best of the best that we have to offer. Well, the votes have come in, and now that I’ve completely disregarded them, I can tell you my picks for which comics deserve to be called "must-reads."
During the Golden Age, the best of comics seemed to be more associated with newsprint than the comic book industry itself. Siegel and Schuster, for example, were doing their best work on Superman for his daily strip rather than the comic book itself in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Will Eisner similarly was working hard at producing a weekly installment of The Spirit for the Sunday paper all throughout the 1940s. All the while, Walt Kelly was doing phenomenal work on a strip called Pogo that followed the adventures and misadventures of the inhabitants of the Okefenokee swamp from the end of the 1940s up to the time of Kelly’s death in 1973.
Marvel’s emergence as a mainstay among comics publishers spawned a new era in comic history, and many cite their early books as the beginning of the Silver Age. Even those who prefer to denote the passing of one age into the next with the appearance of the Barry Allen Flash in the early 1950s recognize that many of Marvel’s tales stand out as the best stories of the time period. Both the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four and the Lee/Ditko Amazing Spider-man runs in the early 1960s epitomize the new style of story that Marvel escorted in. Stan Lee was at the top of his game in those days, working like mad to create new and interesting characters on what seemed like a daily basis, and Ditko and Kirby both elevated Lee’s stories beyond the cheesy dialogue and goofy situations into a realm that was nothing short of brilliant.
Social relevance entered the realm of comics many years later, ushered in by the fantastic work of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams on Green Lantern/Green Arrow. The book explored racism, environmental issues and, most famously, drug abuse during a time when the content of the books was strictly regulated by the Comics Code. As the two heroes traveled America in search of themselves, Ollie’s fiery liberal attitudes clashed repeatedly with Hal’s staunch conservatism. In the process, O’Neil and Adams gave a voice to many arguments that raised the awareness of a generation of young people to the problems affecting society at the time.
Meanwhile, Will Eisner was reinventing himself by telling stories unlike any other he had told before. Eisner doesn’t have the most prestigious award in comics named after him for nothing, and A Contract with God is a prime example of the talent that earned him such an honor. Largely regarded as the first actual graphic novel, in reality, it does not fit our current standards of the term since it is an anthology containing four short stories. Still, A Contract with God’s publication was a watershed moment, as it marked a shift in Eisner’s work from adventure stories to a documentation of the real-life obstacles Jews in New York must overcome. Such departures from the hero genre were much more rare in 1978 than they are today, but Eisner paved the way for many books that followed in his footsteps.
The one work I will admit to having included solely based on the influence of my readers is the manga series Lone Wolf and Cub by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima. I have read very little of this series and regret not having explored the books more than I have. However, even as ill-informed as I am about the nature of this series, I cannot deny the obvious influences it has had on the face of publishing both in Japan and here. Since it first began being translated into English back in 1987, American audiences have clamored for more of the series, culminating in its recent publication by Dark Horse. Lone Wolf and Cub’s success here arguably had a large hand in the importation of many other manga tales and contributed greatly to the current trend of manga’s domination of American comic markets.
Of course no "best of comics" list would be complete without the magnum opus of the superhero genre, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s masterpiece, Watchmen. Alan Moore himself is often hailed as the godfather of literate comics, with an impressive bibliography to his credit that includes such wonderful books as V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, Miracleman, and From Hell. But it is virtually guaranteed that the work he will be remembered for long after his death is Watchmen, his powerful deconstruction of the superhero genre.
Published at almost the same time as Watchmen, yet still as influential, was Frank Miller’s analysis of the Batman legend in The Dark Knight Returns. Coupled with his work on Batman Year One and Daredevil, Miller set himself up in the mid-1980s as the grandmaster of the grim and gritty comic book tale. Later turning his attention to even darker tales set firmly in the crime genre with his Sin City books, Miller will still never be able to escape the reputation he earned via The Dark Knight Returns as not only one of the greatest creators to ever tackle the character of Batman, but also one of the most preeminent writers of our time.
Perhaps the most important comic of all time, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, broke new ground for comics in exploring its tale of the ordeals of the artist’s father in Auschwitz. Not only a fascinating and moving tale, Maus earns the distinction of being canonical due to the other honors bestowed upon it, which include winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Yet even were it to have never received such accolades, it would still be significant for the depth of emotion Spiegelman has packed into each and every panel of this masterwork.
Then there’s the comic that began our little exercise in this column: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Undeniably appealing to mainstream audiences, Sandman also manages to be an incredibly literate and intelligent comic. Gaiman masterfully blends many genres, weaving the fabric of his tales to create a vibrant world that feels as real as the half-remembered dreams that so often populate the stories themselves. Gaiman also managed to change the face of comics publishing in the process by writing his arcs on the book with collection in mind, thereby influencing the way companies have looked at publishing ever since.
Since the late ‘90s, there have been a few books produced that would seem to be destined for a place in the canon. Daniel Clowes’s examination of adolescence in Ghost World certainly seems worthy of note, and if the buzz is to be believed, it is only a matter of time before Craig Thompson’s Blankets is recognized as a classic. Yet Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware is probably the one book that already deserves a space in the canon, for the innovative page layouts it uses to explore the decades-spanning saga of the Corrigan family’s trials and tribulations.
Now that I’ve finished this exercise, I’m sure there are a number of readers out there who can’t help but argue with some of my choices. Perhaps they think I’ve left something vital off of the list or put something in my canon that has no place amongst the "classics." But rather than try to defend myself, I instead encourage debate on the subject. This whole enterprise began when I pointed out that I didn’t feel people were talking about Sandman: Endless Nights as much as they should be. Therefore, if the only thing that I accomplish with this column is to get people talking about these works, then I feel my job is done.
