This is the 39th entry in this weekly series. (For an index of the series’ other published posts, click here.) The purpose is to provide a detailed chronology of the history of North American comic-book publishing. The comics will be presented in order of publication.

While in some instances I will only include key issues of significant titles, I will for the most part be presenting the entirety of the major bodies of work. For example, every comic book with an original Carl Barks Donald Duck story will be featured in the posts. One will get to see something of the context in which the comics were published. With the original Barks duck comics, they will, depending on the year, appear alongside the Walt Kelly Pogo books, the EC “New Trend” titles, and the 1960s Marvel superhero line. This should reflect the books’ presence on newsstands when they were originally on sale.

The publication dates are by and large the on-sale dates the publishers reported to the U. S. Copyright Office. Exceptions will be noted.

Only magazines and books will be featured. Newspaper material will be included only when it has been published in these formats.

If the comic appears to be in the public domain, and a copy is available online for reading at the Digital Comic Museum [www.digitalcomicmuseum.com] or elsewhere, a link will be included in the listing. There may also be a link if an online scan is available for copyrighted material, but only if that material is out of print.

The series will give perhaps as good an idea as one can have as to the worthwhile comics a reader would have found at a retailer at a given point in time. If nothing else, the posts should prove a fun exercise in nostalgia.

This 38th post covers May 1952 to June 1952.

Captain Marvel Adventures #134.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on May 2, 1952. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Al Jetter, and Will Lieberson. The comic includes the story “Mr. Tawny’s Bouncing Shoes,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: July 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 12, No. 9 [#141].

Published on May 2, 1952. Edited by Alice Nielsen Cobb. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “The Think Box Bollix,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: June 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Frontline Combat #8.

To read the story illustrated by Alex Toth, click here.

Published on May 8, 1952. Edited by Harvey Kurtzman. The comic includes these stories: “Thunderjet!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Alex Toth; “Caesar!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Wallace Wood; “Chickamauga!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis; and “Night Patrol!” by Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin, with Bill [Will] Elder. Cover illustration by Harvey Kurtzman. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Tiny Tot [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: September-October 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Dick Tracy Comics Monthly #53.

Published on May 10, 1952. Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features material originally published in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Chester Gould. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: July 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Marge’s Little Lulu #48.

Published on May 13, 1952. Edited by Helen Meyer. The comic includes the stories “Mr. McNabbem,” “I’ll Have a Little Time to Spare,” “That Awful Witch, Hazel,” and “…Now I’ll Mix a Couple of Drops,” all by John Stanley & Irving Tripp. Cover illustration by Irving Tripp. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: June 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Donald Duck and the Golden Helmet.

Published on May 20, 1952. Edited by Alice Nielsen Cobb. The comic includes the story “The Golden Helmet,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: 1952. Cover price: 10¢. Note: Also known as Four Color #408.

Tales from the Crypt #31.

Published on May 22, 1952. Edited by William M. Gaines. The comic includes these stories: “Survival… or Death!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis; “The Thing in the ‘Glades!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson; “Kamen’s Kalamity!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen, with Graham Ingels, Johnny Craig, and Jack Davis; and “Buried Treasure!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels. Cover illustration by Jack Davis. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: I. C. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: August-September 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Weird Fantasy #14.

Published on May 28, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “The Exile!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Wallace Wood; “The Expert!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando; “The Ad!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando; “Close Call!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “Mad Journey!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson, with Frank Frazetta and Roy G. Krenkel. Cover illustration by Albert B. Feldstein. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: I. C. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: July-August 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Intimate Love #19.

To read the story illustrated by Alex Toth, click here.

Published on June 3, 1952. The comic includes the story “I Married in Haste,” illustrated by Alex Toth, with Mike Peppe. The cover photographer and actors are unknown. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Meridien, CT: Standard. Cover/indicia date: August 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

The Spirit #2.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on June 3, 1952. Edited by J. F. Byrne. The comic features stories originally published in Will Eisner’s The Spirit Sunday-newspaper comic-book insert. The stories include: “The Amazing Affair of the First Man on Mars,” by Jules Feiffer & Jim Dixon, first published on January 27, 1952; “Contraband Wueen” [also known as “The 7th Husband”], by Will Eisner & Jules Feiffer, first published on May 20, 1951; “The Case of the Baleful Buddah,” by Jules Feiffer & Jim Dixon, first published on November 18, 1951; and “The $50,000 Flim-Flam” [also known as “Time Bomb”], illustrated by Klaus Nordling, first published on April 15, 1951. The cover illustrator is unknown. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Real Adventures [Fiction House]. Cover/indicia date: 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

The Vault of Horror #26.

Published on June 3, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Two of a Kind!” by Johnny Craig; “Graft in Concrete!” illustrated by Jack Davis; “Half-Way Horrible!” illustrated by Sid Check; and “Hook, Line, and Stinker!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines. Cover illustration by Johnny Craig. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: L. L. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: August-September 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 12, No. 10 [#142].

Published on June 3, 1952. Edited by Alice Nielsen Cobb. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “The Think Box Bollix,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: July 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Dick Tracy Comics Monthly #54.

Published on June 10, 1952. Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features material originally published in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Chester Gould. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: August 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Marge’s Little Lulu #49.

Published on June 10, 1952. Edited by Helen Meyer. The comic includes the stories “The Case of the Pilfered Popcorn,” “The Working Girls,” “Hi, Alvin! What Are Looking So Sad About?” “Twenty Thousand Leaks Under the Sea,” and “The Evil Owl,” all by John Stanley & Irving Tripp, with Al Owens and Gordon Rose. Cover illustration by John Stanley. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: July 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Pogo Possum #10.

Published on June 10, 1952. Edited by Chase Craig. The comic includes the stories “Lulu Red Ridey Hoops,” “Down with the Sea in Ships,” “The Epic Cure,” “Beared Fangs,” and “Mother’s Gooseberry Rinds,” all by Walt Kelly. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 52 pages. New York: Dell. Cover-indicia date: July-August 1952. Cover price: 15¢.

Shock SuspenStories #4.

Published on June 12, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Split Second!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen, with William M. Gaines; “Confession,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Wallace Wood, with William M. Gaines; “Strictly Business!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando, with William M. Gaines; and “Uppercut!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis, with William M. Gaines. Cover illustration by Wallace Wood. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Tiny Tot [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: August-September 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Two-Fisted Tales #29.

Published on June 13, 1952. Edited by Harvey Kurtzman. The comic includes these stories: “Korea!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis; “Red Knight!” by Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin; “Washington!” by Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin, with Bill [Will] Elder; and “Fire Mission!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Davy [Dave] Berg. Cover illustration by Harvey Kurtzman. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Fables [E. C.] Cover/indicia date: September-October 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

The Haunt of Fear #14.

Published on June 19, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “A Little Stranger!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines; “Take Your Pick!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; “Ship-Shape!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Sid Check; and “This Little Piggy…” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis. Cover illustration by Graham Ingels. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Fables [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: May-June 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Al Capp’s Li’l Abner #89.

Published on June 20, 1952. Edited by Mell Lazarus. The comic features material originally published in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Al Capp. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Toby. Cover/indicia date: July 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

The Marvel Family #74.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on June 20, 1952. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Al Jetter, and Will Lieberson. The comic features the story “The Marvel Family Battles the Hissing Horror,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck, with Pete Costanza. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: August 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Weird Science #15.

Published on June 20, 1952. Edited by William M. Gaines. The comic includes these stories: “The Martians!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Wallace Wood; “Captivity,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson; “Miscalculation!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “Bum Steer!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando. Cover illustration by Wallace Wood. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Fables [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: September-October 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Crime SuspenStories #13.

Published on June 25, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Hear No Evil!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen, with Johnny Craig; “First Impulse!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Sid Check; “Second Chance?” by Albert B. Feldstein & Sid Check; “A Question of Time!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson, with Angelo Torres; and “Forty Whacks!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen. Cover illustration by Johnny Craig. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: L. L. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: October-November 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Frontline Combat #9.

Published on June 26, 1952. Edited by Harvey Kurtzman. The comic includes these stories: “Abe Lincoln!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis; “First Shot!” by Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin, with Bill [Will] Elder; “Choose Sides!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Wallace Wood; and “Bull Run!” by Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin. Cover illustration by Harvey Kurtzman. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Tiny Tot [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: November-December 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Next: July 1952 to August 1952.

This is the 40th entry in this weekly series. (For an index of the series’ other published posts, click here.) The purpose is to provide a detailed chronology of the history of North American comic-book publishing. The comics will be presented in order of publication.

While in some instances I will only include key issues of significant titles, I will for the most part be presenting the entirety of the major bodies of work. For example, every comic book with an original Carl Barks Donald Duck story will be featured in the posts. One will get to see something of the context in which the comics were published. With the original Barks duck comics, they will, depending on the year, appear alongside the Walt Kelly Pogo books, the EC “New Trend” titles, and the 1960s Marvel superhero line. This should reflect the books’ presence on newsstands when they were originally on sale.

The publication dates are by and large the on-sale dates the publishers reported to the U. S. Copyright Office. Exceptions will be noted.

Only magazines and books will be featured. Newspaper material will be included only when it has been published in these formats.

If the comic appears to be in the public domain, and a copy is available online for reading at the Digital Comic Museum [www.digitalcomicmuseum.com] or elsewhere, a link will be included in the listing. There may also be a link if an online scan is available for copyrighted material, but only if that material is out of print.

The series will give perhaps as good an idea as one can have as to the worthwhile comics a reader would have found at a retailer at a given point in time. If nothing else, the posts should prove a fun exercise in nostalgia.

This 40th post covers July 1952 to August 1952.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 12, No. 11 [#143].

Published on July 1, 1952. Edited by Alice Nielsen Cobb. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Gemstone Hunters,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 52 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: August 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #136.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on July 2, 1952. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Al Jetter, and Will Lieberson. The comic includes the stories “Captain Marvel Battles Hallucination,” “Television Trickery,” and “The Witch of Haven Street,” all by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: September 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Tales from the Crypt #32.

Published on July 3, 1952. Edited by William M. Gaines. The comic includes these stories: “’Taint the Meat… It’s the Humanity!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis; “Roped In!” by Albert B. Feldstein & George Evans; “Cutting Cards!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Fred Peters; and “Squash… Anyone?” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines. Cover illustration by Jack Davis. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: I. C. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: October-November 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Weird Fantasy #15.

Published on July 7, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Revulsion!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando; “The Quick Trip!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson; “The Long Trip!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson; “He Who Waits!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “By George!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson, with Jack Hearne. Cover illustration by Albert B. Feldstein. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: I. C. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: September-October 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Dick Tracy Comics Monthly #55.

Published on July 10, 1952. Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features material originally published in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Chester Gould. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: September 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Mad #1.

Published on July 10, 1952. Edited by Harvey Kurtzman. The comic includes these stories: “Hoohah!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis; “Blobs!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Wallace Wood; “Ganefs!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Bill [Will] Elder; and “Varmint!” by Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin. Cover illustration by Harvey Kurtzman. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Educational [E. C.] Cover/indicia date: October-November 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Donald Duck and the Gilded Man.

Published on July 15, 1952. Edited by Alice Nielsen Cobb. The comic includes the story “The Gilded Man,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Note

Also known as Four Color #422.

The Vault of Horror #27.

Published on July 15, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Silver Threads Among the Mold!” by Johnny Craig; “People Who Live in Brass Hearses…” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis, with William M. Gaines; “Strictly from Hunger!” illustrated by George Evans; and “A Grim Fairy Tale!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines. Cover illustration by Johnny Craig. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: L. L. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: October-November 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Shock SuspenStories #5.

Published on July 17, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Well Traveled!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen, with William M. Gaines; “Hate!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Wallace Wood; “What Fur?” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando; and “Cold Cuts!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis. Cover illustration by Wallace Wood. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Tiny Tot [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: October-November 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Two-Fisted Tales #30.

Published on July 21, 1952. Edited by Harvey Kurtzman. The comic includes these stories: “Bunker!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Ric Estrada; “Knights!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Wallace Wood; “Wake!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Gene Colan; and “Fledgeling!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis. Cover illustration by Jack Davis. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Fables [E. C.] Cover/indicia date: November-December 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

The Haunt of Fear #15.

Published on July 31, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Chatter-Boxed!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines; “All Washed Up!” by Albert B. Feldstein & George Evans; “Marriage Vows!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “Death of Some Salesmen!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis. Cover illustration by Graham Ingels. standard format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Fables [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: September-October 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz.

Published on July 31, 1952. The book collects material from Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Charles M. Schulz. Mass-market paperback book. Black-and-white interiors. 128 pages. New York: Rinehart. Cover/indicia date: 1952. Cover price: $1.00.

Note

This is the first book collection of Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts newspaper strip.

Captain Marvel Adventures #137.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on August 1, 1952. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Al Jetter, and Will Lieberson. The comic includes the stories “King Kull and the Seven Sins,” “Mr. Tawny’s Culture Craze,” and “The Royal Riddle,” all by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: October 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 12, No. 12 [#144].

Published on August 5, 1952. Edited by Alice Nielsen Cobb. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Spending Money,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 52 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: September 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Dick Tracy Comics Monthly #56.

Published on August 10, 1952. Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features material originally published in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Chester Gould. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: October 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Marge’s Little Lulu #51.

Published on August 12, 1952. Edited by Helen Meyer. The comic includes the stories “The Ghost in the Bottle,” “The Peacemaker,” “A Dog’s Lifesaver,” “Guessing Game,” “The Stone Age Kid,” and “The Avengers,” all by John Stanley, with Irving Tripp. Cover illustration by John Stanley, with Irving Tripp. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 52 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: September 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Weird Science #16.

Published on August 14, 1952. Edited by William M. Gaines. The comic includes these stories: “Down to Earth,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Wallace Wood; “Space-Borne!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson; “Given the Heir!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “The People’s Choice!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando. Cover illustration by Wallace Wood. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Fables [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: November-December 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Al Capp’s Li’l Abner #90.

Published on August 19, 1952. Edited by Mell Lazarus. The comic features material originally published in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Al Capp. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Toby. Cover/indicia date: September 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Crime SuspenStories #14.

Published on August 21, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Sweet Dreams!” by Johnny Craig; “The Perfect Place!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; “The Electric Chair,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Fred Peters; “The Hangman’s Noose,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Fred Peters; “The Guillotine!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Fred Peters; and “Private Performance!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines. Cover illustration by Johnny Craig. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: L. L. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: December 1952-January 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Frontline Combat #10.

Published on August 22, 1952. Edited by Harvey Kurtzman. The comic includes these stories: “A Baby!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Wallace Wood; “Geronimo!” by Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin, with Bill [Will] Elder; “Napoleon!” by Harvey Kurtzman & George Evans; and “Anzio!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis. Cover illustration by John Severin, with Bill [Will] Elder. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Tiny Tot [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: January-February 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Tales from the Crypt #33.

Published on August 28, 1952. Edited by William M. Gaines. The comic includes these stories: “Lower Berth!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis; “This Trick’ll Kill You!” by Albert B. Feldstein & George Evans, with Jack Kamen; “The Funeral” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “None But the Lonely Heart!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines. Cover illustration by Jack Davis. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: I. C. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: December 1952-January 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Next: September 1952 to October 1952.

This is the 41st entry in this weekly series. (For an index of the series’ other published posts, click here.) The purpose is to provide a detailed chronology of the history of North American comic-book publishing. The comics will be presented in order of publication.

While in some instances I will only include key issues of significant titles, I will for the most part be presenting the entirety of the major bodies of work. For example, every comic book with an original Carl Barks Donald Duck story will be featured in the posts. One will get to see something of the context in which the comics were published. With the original Barks duck comics, they will, depending on the year, appear alongside the Walt Kelly Pogo books, the EC “New Trend” titles, and the 1960s Marvel superhero line. This should reflect the books’ presence on newsstands when they were originally on sale.

The publication dates are by and large the on-sale dates the publishers reported to the U. S. Copyright Office. Exceptions will be noted.

Only magazines and books will be featured. Newspaper material will be included only when it has been published in these formats.

If the comic appears to be in the public domain, and a copy is available online for reading at the Digital Comic Museum [www.digitalcomicmuseum.com] or elsewhere, a link will be included in the listing. There may also be a link if an online scan is available for copyrighted material, but only if that material is out of print.

The series will give perhaps as good an idea as one can have as to the worthwhile comics a reader would have found at a retailer at a given point in time. If nothing else, the posts should prove a fun exercise in nostalgia.

This 41st post covers September 1952 to October 1952.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 13, No. 1 [#145].

Published on September 2, 1952. Edited by Alice Nielsen Cobb. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “The Hypno-Gun,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 52 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: October 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #138.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on September 3, 1952. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Al Jetter, and Will Lieberson. The comic includes these stories: “The Flying Disk Danger” and “The World’s Maddest Ghost,” both by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder; and “The Horrible Haunted Armor,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, with Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: November 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Dennis the Menace, Hank Ketcham.

Published on September 8, 1952. This book collects material from Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Hank Ketcham. Hardcover book. Black-and-white interiors. 112 pages. New York: Henry Holt. Cover/indicia date: 1952. Cover price: $1.00.

Note

This is the first book collection of Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace newspaper strip.

Weird Fantasy #16.

Published on September 9, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Mass Meeting!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando; “Skeleton Key!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson; “What He Saw!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “The Green Thing!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando. Cover illustration by Albert B. Feldstein. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: I. C. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: November-December 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Dick Tracy Comics Monthly #57.

Published on September 10, 1952. Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features material originally published in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Chester Gould. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: November 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

I Go Pogo, Walt Kelly.

Published on September 15, 1952. The book collects select material from Walt Kelly’s Pogo daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. Trade-paperback book. Black-and-white interiors. 190 pages. New York: Simon & Schuster. Cover/indicia date: 1952. Cover price: $1.00.

The Spirit #3.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on September 15, 1952. Edited by J. F. Byrne. The comic features select stories originally published in Will Eisner’s The Spirit Sunday-newspaper comic-book insert. The stories include: “The Walking Corpse [also known as “The Big Job”], by Jules Feiffer & Jim Dixon, first published on March 9, 1952; “It Kills by Dark,” by Jules Feiffer & Jim Dixon, first published on February 24, 1952; “The League of Liars,” by Jules Feiffer & Jim Dixon, first published on November 25, 1951; and “A Man Called Nero,” illustrated by Al Wenzel, first published on February 3, 1952. The cover illustrator is unknown. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Stamford, CT: Real Adventures [Fiction House]. Cover/indicia date: 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Donald Duck #26.

Published on September 16, 1952. Edited by Alice Nielsen Cobb. The comic includes the stories “Trick or Treat” and “Hobblin’ Goblins,” both by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: November 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Note

This is the first issue of Dell’s bimonthly Donald Duck series. The numbering ostensibly treats the previous Four Color one-shots as the series’ previous issues.

Mad #2.

Published on September 17, 1952. Edited by Harvey Kurtzman. The comic includes these stories: “Hex!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis; “Melvin!” by Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin; “Gookum!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Wallace Wood; and “Mole!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Bill [Will] Elder. Cover illustration by Jack Davis. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Educational [E. C.] Cover/indicia date: December 1952-January 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

The Vault of Horror #28.

Published on September 18, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Till Death…,” by Johnny Craig; “The Chips Are Down!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis; “For How the Bell Tolls!” by Albert B. Feldstein & George Evans; and “We Ain’t Got No Body!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines. Cover illustration by Johnny Craig. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: L. L. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: December 1952-January 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Shock SuspenStories #6.

Published on September 25, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Dead Right!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; “Under Cover!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Wallace Wood; “Not So Tough!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando; and “Sugar ‘N Spice ‘N…” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines. Cover illustration by Wallace Wood. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Tiny Tot [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: December 1952-January 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #139.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on October 3, 1952. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Al Jetter, and Will Lieberson. The comic includes the stories “The Red Crusher,” “Spider’s Doom,” and “Captain Marvel Fights Niatpac Levram!” all by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck, with Pete Costanza. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: December 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 13, No. 2 [#146].

Published on October 3, 1952. Edited by Alice Nielsen Cobb. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Omelet,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 52 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: November 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Al Capp’s Li’l Abner #91.

Published on October 10, 1952. Edited by Mell Lazarus. The comic features material originally published in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Al Capp. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Toby. Cover/indicia date: November 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Dick Tracy Comics Monthly #58.

Published on October 10, 1952. Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features material originally published in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Chester Gould. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: December 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

The Haunt of Fear #16.

Published on October 10, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Nobody There!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines; “A Creep in the Deep!” by Albert B. Feldstein & George Evans; “…From Hunger!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “The Coffin!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis, adapted from the Ray Bradbury short story. Cover illustration by Graham Ingels. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Fables [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: November-December 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Two-Fisted Tales #31.

Published on October 10, 1952. Edited by Harvey Kurtzman. The comic includes these stories: “Blockade!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Wallace Wood; “Campaign!” by Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin, with Bill [Will] Elder; “Donelson!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis; and “Grant!” by Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin, with Jerry DeFuccio. Cover illustration by Harvey Kurtzman. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Fables [E. C.] Cover/indicia date: January-February 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Crime SuspenStories #15.

Published on October 21, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “When the Cat’s Away…,” by Johnny Craig; “The Screaming Woman!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen, adapted from the Ray Bradbury short story; “Water, Water, Everywhere…,” by Albert B. Feldstein & George Evans; “…And Not a Drop to Drink,” by Albert B. Feldstein & George Evans; “Hail and Heart-y,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines. Cover illustration by Johnny Craig. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: L. L. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: February-March 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Weird Science #17.

Published on October 24, 1952. Edited by William M. Gaines. The comic includes these stories: “Plucked!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Wallace Wood; “The Island Monster,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson, with Larry Woromay; “Off Day!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “The Long Years,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando, adapted from the Ray Bradbury short story. Cover illustration by Wallace Wood. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Fables [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: January-February 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Tales from the Crypt #34.

Published on October 29, 1952. Edited by William M. Gaines. The comic includes these stories: “Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis; “Oil’s Well That Ends Well!” by Albert B. Feldstein & George Evans; “Attacks of Horror!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “There Was an Old Woman,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, adapted from the Ray Bradbury short story. Cover illustration by Jack Davis. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: I. C. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: February-March 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Next: November 1952 to December 1952.

This is the 42nd entry in this weekly series. (For an index of the series’ other published posts, click here.) The purpose is to provide a detailed chronology of the history of North American comic-book publishing. The comics will be presented in order of publication.

While in some instances I will only include key issues of significant titles, I will for the most part be presenting the entirety of the major bodies of work. For example, every comic book with an original Carl Barks Donald Duck story will be featured in the posts. One will get to see something of the context in which the comics were published. With the original Barks duck comics, they will, depending on the year, appear alongside the Walt Kelly Pogo books, the EC “New Trend” titles, and the 1960s Marvel superhero line. This should reflect the books’ presence on newsstands when they were originally on sale.

The publication dates are by and large the on-sale dates the publishers reported to the U. S. Copyright Office. Exceptions will be noted.

Only magazines and books will be featured. Newspaper material will be included only when it has been published in these formats.

If the comic appears to be in the public domain, and a copy is available online for reading at the Digital Comic Museum [www.digitalcomicmuseum.com] or elsewhere, a link will be included in the listing. There may also be a link if an online scan is available for copyrighted material, but only if that material is out of print.

The series will give perhaps as good an idea as one can have as to the worthwhile comics a reader would have found at a retailer at a given point in time. If nothing else, the posts should prove a fun exercise in nostalgia.

This 42nd post covers November 1952 to December 1952.

Frontline Combat #11.

Published on November 3, 1952. Edited by Harvey Kurtzman. The comic includes these stories: “Bird-Dogs!” by Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin, with Bill [Will] Elder; “Rough Riders!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Ric Estrada; “Lufbery!” by Harvey Kurtzman & George Evans; and “Sailor!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis. Cover illustration by Jack Davis. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Tiny Tot [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: March-April 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 13, No. 3 [#147].

Published on November 3, 1952. Edited by Alice Nielsen Cobb. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “A Charitable Chore,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 52 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: December 1952. Cover price: 10¢.

Popular Romance #22.

To read the story illustrated by Alex Toth, click here.

Published on November 4, 1952. The comic includes the story “Blinded by Love,” illustrated by Alex Toth, with Mike Peppe. The cover photographer and actors are unknown. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Meridien, CT: Better [Standard]. Cover/indicia date: January 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Note

There is no credited editor for the issue.

Captain Marvel Adventures #140.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on November 5, 1952. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Al Jetter, and Will Lieberson. The comic includes the stories “Hand of Horror” and “Captain Marvel Fights the Mongol Blood-Drinkers,” by Otto Binder & C. C. Beck, with Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: January 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Note

To those who click to read the online scan, be aware the comic contains racist caricatures.

Dick Tracy Comics Monthly #59.

Published on November 10, 1952. Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features material originally published in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Chester Gould. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: January 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Mad #3.

Published on November 14, 1952. Edited by Harvey Kurtzman. The comic includes these stories: “Dragged Net!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Bill [Will] Elder; “Sheik of Araby!” by Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin; “V-Vampires!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Wallace Wood; and “Lone Stranger!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis. Cover illustration by Harvey Kurtzman. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Educational [E. C.] Cover/indicia date: February-March 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Weird Fantasy #17.

Published on November 17, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “In the Beginning…,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando; “Ahead of the Game!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Bill [Will] Elder; “The Aliens,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson, with Roy G. Krenkel; and “There Will Come Soft Rains…,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Wallace Wood, adapted from the Ray Bradbury short story. Cover illustration by Albert B. Feldstein. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: I. C. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: January-February 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

The Marvel Family #79.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on November 21, 1952. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Al Jetter, and Will Lieberson. The comic includes the story “The Marvel Family Battles the Dynasty of Horror,” by C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, with Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by C. C. Beck, with Pete Costanza. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: January 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

The Vault of Horror #29.

Published on November 24, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “The Mausoleum!” by Johnny Craig; “Let’s Play Poison,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis, adapted from the Ray Bradbury short story; “A Sock for Christmas,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen, with William M. Gaines; and “Pickled Pints!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines. Cover illustration by Johnny Craig. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: L. L. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: February-March 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Shock SuspenStories #7.

Published on November 25, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Beauty and the Beach!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; “The Bribe!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Wallace Wood; “Infiltration,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando; and “The Small Assassin,” by Albert B. Feldstein & George Evans, adapted from the Ray Bradbury short story. Cover illustration by Albert B. Feldstein. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Tiny Tot [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: February-March 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 13, No. 4 [#148].

Published on December 2, 1952. Edited by Alice Nielsen Cobb. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Turkey with All the Schemings,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 52 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: January 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Captain Marvel Adventures #141.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on December 5, 1952. Edited by Wendell Crowley, Al Jetter, and Will Lieberson. The comic includes these stories: “The Man without a World,” by Otto Binder & C. C. Beck; and “The Hideous Head Hunter” and “The Island Wrecker,” by Otto Binder & C. C. Beck, with Pete Costanza. Cover illustration by Kurt Schaffenberger. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett. Cover/indicia date: February 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

The Haunt of Fear #17.

Published on December 9, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes these stories: “Horror We? How’s Bayou?” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines; “Gorilla My Dreams!” by Albert B. Feldstein & George Evans; “A Likely Story!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “Garden Party,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis. Cover illustration by Graham Ingels. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Fables [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: January-February 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Pogo Possum #11.

Published on December 9, 1952. The comic includes these stories: “Old Muddle Hupboard,” “Hearts of Oak and Heads to Match,” “Dog Daze,” “Well Done, Rare Old Medium,” “The Worm’s Turn,” and “The Dragon Tale,” all by Walt Kelly. Cover illustration by Walt Kelly. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 52 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: January-March 1953. Cover price: 15¢.

Dick Tracy Comics Monthly #60.

Published on December 10, 1952. Edited by Leon Harvey. The comic features material originally published in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Chester Gould. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Harvey. Cover/indicia date: February 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Crime SuspenStories #16.

Published on December 12, 1952. Edited by Albert B. Feldstein. The comic includes thse stories: “Rendezvous!” by Johnny Craig; “Fission Bait!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; “Come Clean!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson; and “Who’s Next?” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando. Cover illustration by Johnny Craig. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: L. L. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: April-May 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Intimate Love #21.

To read the story illustrated by Alex Toth, click here.

Published on December 12, 1952. Edited by Joseph Archibald. The comic includes the story “Undecided Heart,” illustrated by Alex Toth, with Mike Peppe. The cover photographer and actors are unknown. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Meridien, CT: Standard. Cover/indicia date: February 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Two-Fisted Tales #32.

Published on December 12, 1952. Edited by Harvey Kurtzman. The comic includes these stories: “Silent Service!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis; “Lost Battalion!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Johnny Craig; “Hannibal!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Wallace Wood; and “Tide!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Joe Kubert. Cover illustration by Wallace Wood. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Fables [E. C.] Cover/indicia date: March-April 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Weird Science #18.

Published on December 23, 1952. Edited by William M. Gaines. The comic includes these stories: “Mars Is Heaven,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Wallace Wood, adapted from the Ray Bradbury short story; “Snap Ending!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Al Williamson, with Roy G. Krenkel; “The Parallel!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “Disassembled!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Cover illustration by Wallace Wood. New York: Fables [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: March-April 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Tales from the Crypt #35.

Published on December 24, 1952. Edited by William M. Gaines. The comic includes these stories: “By the Fright of the Silvery Moon!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Davis; “Midnight Mess!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Joe Orlando; “Busted Marriage!” by Albert B. Feldstein & Jack Kamen; and “This Wraps It Up,” by Albert B. Feldstein & Graham Ingels, with William M. Gaines. Cover illustration by Jack Davis. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: I. C. [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: April-May 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Frontline Combat #12.

To read the story illustrated by Alex Toth, click here.

Published on December 26, 1952. Edited by Harvey Kurtzman. The comic includes these stories: “F-94!” by Harvey Kurtzman & George Evans; “F-86 Sabre-Jet!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Alex Toth; “B-26 Invader!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis; and “H-5!” by Harvey Kurtzman & Wallace Wood. Cover illustration by Jack Davis. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Tiny Tot [E. C.]. Cover/indicia date: May-June 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Al Capp’s Li’l Abner #92.

Published on December 29, 1952. The comic features material originally published in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner daily newspaper strip. Cover illustration by Al Capp. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. New York: Toby. Cover/indicia date: January 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

The Spirit #4.

To read the issue online, click here.

Published on December 30, 1952. Edited by J. F. Byrne. The comic features select stories originally published in Will Eisner’s The Spirit Sunday-newspaper comic-book insert. The stories include: “The Last Prowl of Mephisto,” by Will Eisner, first published on April 1, 1951; “Design for Doomsday,” scripted by Jules Feiffer, first published on January 13, 1952; “The Sword of the Savage” [also known as “Dance of the Bullfighter”], by Jules Feiffer & Jim Dixon, first published on September 2, 1951; and “The Great Galactic Mystery,” illustrated by Al Wenzel, first published on April 20, 1952. The cover illustrator is unknown. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 36 pages. Stamford, CT: Real Adventures [Fiction House]. Cover/indicia date: 1954. Cover price: 10¢.

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, Vol. 13, No. 5 [#149].

Published on December 30, 1952. Edited by Alice Nielsen Cobb. The comic includes the Donald Duck story “Flip Decision,” by Carl Barks. Cover illustration by Carl Barks. Standard-format comic book. Color interiors. 52 pages. New York: Dell. Cover/indicia date: February 1953. Cover price: 10¢.

Next: January 1953 to February 1953.

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

• Elektra: Assassin, Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz
• The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• Groo the Wanderer, Sergio Aragonés, with Mark Evanier, Tom Luth, and Stan Sakai
• Hi no Tori [Phoenix], Osamu Tezuka
• Kozure Ôkami [Lone Wolf and Cub], Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima
• Love and Rockets, Gilbert Hernandez & Jaime Hernandez
  Counted as a 0.5 vote each for The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez, and The Palomar Stories, Gilbert Hernandez.
• Monster, Naoki Urasawa
• 100 Bullets, Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso
• Promethea, Alan Moore & J. H. Williams III, with Mick Gray, et al.
• Seven Soldiers of Victory, Grant Morrison, et al.

Caroline Bren
Cartoonist, Young Youth; Writer,!!!!!!h4cked!!!!!!

The Autobiographical Stories, Aline Kominsky-Crumb

• The Autobiographical Stories, Aline Kominsky-Crumb
• Department of Art & Habitat, Dunja Jankovic
• Gensenkan Shujin [The Master of the Gensenkan Inn], Yoshiharu Tsuge
• Hôpital Brut, Caroline Sury & Pakito Bolino, editors
• The Kakuh stories, Hironori Kikuchi
• Koshihikari no Mita Yume [Dream of Koshihikari], Taneo Saito
• Maria no Komon [Mary’s Asshole], Hanako Yamada
• The Narrative Corpse, Art Spiegelman & R. Sikoryak, editors
• Nekojiru Udon, Nekojiru
• Weird Science #21, William M. Gaines, Al Feldstein, Ray Bradbury, Wallace Wood, Joe Orlando, Al Williamson, Frank Frazetta, and Jack Kamen
  Counted as a vote for The EC Comics Science-Fiction Stories, Al Feldstein & Wallace Wood, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando, et al.

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

• Hanazakari no Niwa [Blooming Garden], Sakai Kunie

Scott O. Brown
Scriptwriter, Nightfall and Atlantis Rising

Black Hole, Charles Burns

• Black Hole, Charles Burns
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• New X-Men, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely, et al.
• Nijusseiki Shônen [20th Century Boys], Naoki Urasawa
• The Sandman, Neil Gaiman, et al.
• Under a Slowly Spinning Sun, Marcel Guldemond
• Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud

Alex Buchet
Contributing writer, The Hooded Utilitarian

Fuochi [Fires], Lorenzo Mattotti

• Aruku Hito [The Walking Man], Jiro Taniguchi
• The Cartoons, Saul Steinberg
• Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, Winsor McCay
• The EC Comics War Stories, Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis, John Severin, Wallace Wood, et al.
• Fuochi [Fires], Lorenzo Mattotti
• Journal, Fabrice Neaud
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Lieutenant Blueberry, Jean-Michel Charlier & Jean “Moebius” Giraud
• MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• Prince Valiant, Hal Foster

Kurt Busiek
Co-creator & scriptwriter, Astro City; scriptwriter, Marvels

Fables, Bill Willingham & Mark Buckingham, et al.

• 1. Steve Canyon (1946-1960 strips), Milton Caniff
• 2. Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff
• 3. Kamandi, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer
• 4. Mary Perkins On Stage, Leonard Starr
• 5. Pogo, Walt Kelly
• 6. Fables, Bill Willingham & Mark Buckingham, et al.
• 7. Bravo for Adventure, Alex Toth
• 8. She’s Josie, Frank Doyle & Dan DeCarlo
• 9. Maison Ikkoku, Rumiko Takahashi
• 10. The Sandman: Dream Country, Neil Gaiman, et al.

Sean Campbell
Writer, Don’t Cross the Streams

All-Star Superman, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely

• All-Star Superman, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
• Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, with Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley
• Batman: Year One, Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli, with Richmond Lewis
• Bone, Jeff Smith
• Kingdom Come, Mark Waid & Alex Ross
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume I, Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill
• Preacher, Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon
• The Sandman, Neil Gaiman, et al.
• The X-Men stories, Chris Claremont & John Byrne, with Terry Austin
• Y: The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughan & Pia Guerra, with José Marzán, Jr., et al.

Bruce Canwell
Associate Editor, Library of American Comics; scriptwriter, Batman: The Gauntlet

Tintin in Tibet, Hergé

• “Back to the Klondike,” starring Uncle $crooge, Carl Barks
• Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, with Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• The Dreamer, Will Eisner
• From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• Hadashi no Gen [Barefoot Gen], Keiji Nakazawa
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• The New Yorker cartoons, Charles Addams
• Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff
• 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

• Five Fists of Science, Matt Fraction & Steven Sanders
• Hopeless Savages, Jen Van Meter, et al.
• Kabuki, David Mack
• Nana, Ai Yazawa
• Nodame Kantâbire [Nodame Cantabile], Tomoko Ninomiya
• Paradigm Shift, Dirk Tiede
• Phonogram, Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie
• Red String, Gina Biggs
• Strangers in Paradise, Terry Moore

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

• Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, with Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley
• Belladone [Belladonna], Ange & Pierre Alary
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, Will Eisner
• From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• The Spirit, Will Eisner
• Tintin, Hergé
• Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

Jeffrey Chapman
Assistant Professor of English, Oakland University

The City, Frans Masereel

• 1. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• 2. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• 3. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• 4. The ACME Novelty Library #20 (“Lint”) Chris Ware
  Counted as a vote for Rusty Brown, including “Lint,” Chris Ware
• 5. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• 6. Tintin, Hergé
• 7. Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• 8. Buddha, Osamu Tezuka
• 9. The City, Frans Masereel
• 10. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli

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

• Black Hole, Charles Burns
• The ACME Novelty Library #18 (“Building Stories”), Chris Ware
• A Child’s Life and Other Stories, Phoebe Gloeckner
• The Fixer, Joe Sacco
• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• Ghost World, Daniel Clowes
• Love That Bunch, Aline Kominsky-Crumb
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• The Newspaper Strips, Winsor McCay
  Counted as a 0.5 vote each for Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland
• ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS!, Lynda Barry

Seymour Chwast
Illustrator & graphic designer extraordinaire; cartoonist, Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Graphic Adaptation

Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay

• Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay

Michael Clarke
Contributing writer, Communication, Culture & Critique and Television & New Media

Cerebus: Jaka’s Story, Dave Sim & Gerhard

• American Flagg!, Howard Chaykin
• Cerebus: High Society, Dave Sim & Cerebus: Jaka’s Story, Dave Sim & Gerhard
• David Boring, Daniel Clowes
• Elektra: Assassin, Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz
• Le Garage hermétique [The Airtight Garage], Jean “Moebius” Giraud
• Hyôryû Kyôshitsu [The Drifting Classroom], Kazuo Umezu
• The Palomar Stories, Gilbert Hernandez
• Seven Soldiers of Victory, Grant Morrison, et al.
• X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, Chris Claremont & Brent Anderson

Robert Clough
Writer, High-Low; contributing writer, The Comics Journal

Hicksville, Dylan Horrocks

• Approximativement [Approximate Continuum Comics], Lewis Trondheim
• Cecil & Jordan in New York, Gabrielle Bell
• Hate!, Peter Bagge
  Counted as a vote for The Bradleys and The Buddy Bradley Stories, Peter Bagge
• Hicksville, Dylan Horrocks
• Ice Haven, Daniel Clowes
• Life of the Party, Mary Fleener
• Recidivist #3, Zak Sally
• Safe Area Goradze, Joe Sacco
• Schizo, Ivan Brunetti
• Snake ‘n’ Bacon’s Cartoon Cabaret, Michael Kupperman

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

• 1. Pogo, Walt Kelly
• 2. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• 3. Li’l Abner, Al Capp
• 4. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• 5. Steve Canyon, Milton Caniff
• 6. Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• 7. Bloom County, Berkeley Breathed
• 8. The Far Side, Gary Larson
• 9. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• 10. Private Breger Abroad and Mister Breger, Dave Breger

Sean T. Collins
Writer, AttentionDeficitDisorderly; contributing writer, Robot 6 and The Comics Journal

Rusty Brown, Chris Ware

• 1. The ACME Novelty Library #20 (“Lint”) and #19 (Rusty Brown), Chris Ware
• 2. Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
• 3. The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Phoebe Gloeckner
• 4. The Palomar, Luba, and Fritz Stories, Gilbert Hernandez
• 5. Black Hole, Charles Burns
• 6. The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez
• 7. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, with Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley
• 8. The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• 9. “The Sunset,” Or Else #4, Kevin Huizenga
• 10. Big Questions, Anders Nilsen

Barry Corbett
Cartoonist, Ginger & Shadow and Embrace the Pun

Bizarro, Dan Piraro

• 1. Bizarro, Dan Piraro
• 2. Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Michael Kupperman
• 3. Ultimate Spider-Man, Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Bagley, and Stuart Immonen
• 4. Kingdom Come, Mark Waid & Alex Ross
• 5. Batman: The Cult, Jim Starlin & Bernie Wrightson, with Bill Wray
• 6. Li’l Abner, Al Capp
• 7. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• 8. Magnus, Robot Fighter, Russ Manning
• 9. Ghost World, Daniel Clowes
• 10. The MAD Stories, Mort Drucker

Roberto Corona
Cartoonist, Welcome to Heck; penciler, Egypt

Daredevil: Born Again, Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli

• 1. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• 2. Nexus, Mike Baron & Steve Rude, with Gary Martin, et al.
• 3. Daredevil: Born Again, Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli
• 4. Hellboy, Mike Mignola
• 5. Hicksville, Dylan Horrocks
• 6. Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
• 7. Bone, Jeff Smith
• 8. Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard
• 9. Astérix le gaulois [Astérix the Gaul], René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo
• 10. Tank Girl, Jamie Hewlett & Alan Martin

Jamie Cosley
Cartoonist, Animal Office Funnies; illustrator, Priscilla

Groo the Wanderer, Sergio Aragonés, et al.

• Beanworld, Larry Marder
• Bone, Jeff Smith
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• Groo the Wanderer, Sergio Aragonés, with Mark Evanier, Tom Luth, and Stan Sakai
• Hägar the Horrible, Dik Browne
• King Aroo, Jack Kent
• Land of Nod, Jay Stephens
• Tumbleweeds, T. K. Ryan
• The Uncle $crooge Stories, Don Rosa
• Usagi Yojimbo, Stan Sakai

Dave Coverly
Cartoonist, Speed Bump

The Spirit, Will Eisner

• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• The Editorial Cartoons, Jim Borgman
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• The MAD Cartoons, Sergio Aragonés
• The New Yorker Cartoons, George Booth
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• Pogo, Walt Kelly
• The Single-Panel Cartoons, B. Kliban
• The Single-Panel Cartoons, Quino
• The Spirit, Will Eisner

Warren Craghead
Cartoonist, How to Be Everywhere

The Codex Nutall

• 1. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• 2. The Moon Fell on Me, Franklin Einspruch
• 3. The Yellow Kid, Richard F. Outcault
• 4. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• 5. The Flash Stories, Cary Bates & Irving Novick
• 6. Works, Saul Steinberg
• 7. Frag, Ilan Manouach
• 8. The Codex Nuttall
• 9. “Yam Seal Land,” Andrei Molotiu
• 10. Jimbo’s Inferno, Gary Panter

Corey Creekmur
Associate Professor of English, The University of Iowa

Gasoline Alley, Frank King

• 1. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• 2. Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• 3. Gasoline Alley, Frank King
• 4. Frontline Combat, Harvey Kurtzman, editor
  Counted as a vote for The EC Comics War Stories, Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• 5. Love & Rockets, Gilbert Hernandez & Jaime Hernandez
  Counted as a 0.5 vote each for The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez, and The Palomar Stories, Gilbert Hernandez
• 6. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
• 7. Zap Comix #1, R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb
• 8. Flex Mentallo, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
• 9. Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel
• 10. Promethea, Alan Moore & J. H. Williams III, with Mick Gray, et al.

Tom Crippen
Contributing writer, The Comics Journal, The Hooded Utilitarian

Buddy Bradley, Peter Bagge

• Box Office Poison, Alex Robinson
• The Bradleys, Peter Bagge
• Daredevil: Born Again, Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli
• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• The Sandman, Neil Gaiman, et al.
• Sick, Sick, Sick, Jules Feiffer
• Spider-Man, Stan Lee & Steve Ditko
• The Superman Stories, Mort Weisinger & Curt Swan, Wayne Boring, et al.
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

__________

Best Comics Poll Lists

Best Comics Poll Index

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

• The Arrival, Shaun Tan
• Emma, Kaoru Mori
• The Far Side, Gary Larson
• Hi no Tori [Phoenix], Osamu Tezuka
• Kaze no Tani no Naushika [Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind], Hayao Miyazaki
• The New Yorker cartoons, Charles Addams
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
• Satsuma Gishiden, Hiroshi Hirata
• Swan, Kyoko Ariyoshi

______________________________________________
Marco D’Angelo
Writer, Sono Storie

X-Men, Chris Claremont & John Byrne

• Astérix le gaulois [Astérix the Gaul], René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo
• Corto Maltese: Una balata del mare salato [The Ballad of the Salt Sea], Hugo Pratt
• Daredevil: Born Again, Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli
• El Eternauta, Héctor Germán Oesterheld & Francisco Solano Lopéz
• Flash Gordon, Alex Raymond
• Ken Parker: Lily e il cacciatore [Lily and the Hunter], Giancarlo Berardi & Ivo Milazzo
• Paperino e il vento del sud [Donald Duck and the Southern Wind], Giovan Battista Carpi
• Tex Willer: Il figlio di Mephisto [Mephisto’s Son], Gianluigi Bonelli & Aurelio “Galep” Galleppini
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
• X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga, Chris Claremont & John Byrne, with Terry Austin

______________________________________________
Alexander Danner

The Rabbi’s Cat, Joann Sfar

Instructor, Emerson College; contributing writer, ComixTalk

• Buddha, Osamu Tezuka
• Castle Waiting, Linda Medley
• Le Chat du rabbin [The Rabbi’s Cat], Joann Sfar
• Dicebox, Jenn Manley Lee
• Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel
• Family Man, Dylan Meconis
• Finder, Carla Speed McNeil
• Hereville, Barry Deutsch
• Pluto, Naoki Urasawa
• Three Shadows, Cyril Pedrosa

______________________________________________
Mike Dawson
Cartoonist, Gabagool!, Freddie & Me, and Ace-Face: The Mod with the Metal Arms

My New York Diary, Julie Doucet

• The ACME Novelty Library, Chris Ware, especially issues #17, 18, and 19
  Counted as a 0.5 vote each for “Building Stories” and Rusty Brown, including “Lint”.
• Hicksville, Dylan Horrocks
• It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Seth
• Love and Rockets, Gilbert Hernandez & Jaime Hernandez, especially “Flies on the Ceiling” and The Death of Speedy
  Counted as a vote for The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• My New York Diary, Julie Doucet
• The Playboy and I Never Liked You, Chester Brown
  Counted as a 0.5 vote for each work
• The Poor Bastard, Joe Matt
• Skyscrapers of the Midwest, Joshua Cotter
• Spaniel Rage, Vanessa Davis

______________________________________________
Kim Deitch
Cartoonist, The Search for Smilin’ Ed, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Alias the Cat

Dick Tracy, Chester Gould

• 1. The Book of Genesis Illustrated, R. Crumb
• 2. Palestine, Joe Sacco
• 3. Wimbledon Green, Seth
• 4. Little Orphan Annie, Harold Gray
• 5. The Donald Duck Stories, Carl Barks
• 6. Dick Tracy, Chester Gould
• 7. Supermen!, Greg Sadowski, editor
• 8. The Marvel Universe as drawn by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Bill Everett
  Counted as a 0.333 vote each for The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al., Spider-Man, Stan Lee & Steve Ditko, and Thor, including “Tales of Asgard,” by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Vince Colletta, et al.
• 9. The Wolverton Bible, Basil Wolverton
• 10. Cleveland, Harvey Pekar & Joseph Remnant
  Counted as a vote for American Splendor, Harvey Pekar, with R. Crumb, et al.

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.
______________________________________________
Martin de la Iglesia
Contributing Writer, International Journal of Comic Art

The Walking Man, Jiro Taniguchi

• Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo
• Aruku Hito [The Walking Man], Jiro Taniguchi
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• Dungeon [Donjon], Joann Sfar & Lewis Trondheim
• Garfield, Jim Davis
• Gaston Lagaffe, André Franquin
• Die seltsamen Abenteuer der Ente Alfred Jodocus Kwak [The Extraordinary Adventures of the Duck Alfred Jodocus Kwak], Hermann van Veen, Harald Siepermann, and Hans Bacher
• Subnormality, Winston Rowntree
• Tintin, Hergé
• Wir können ja Freunde bleiben [We Can Still Be Friends], Mawil

______________________________________________
Camilla d’Errico
Cartoonist, Tanpopo, Helmetgirls

Bakuman, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

• Bakuman., Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata
• Blatta [Cockroach], Alberto Ponicelli
• Hôrô Musuko [Wandering Son], Takako Shimura
• Kobato., CLAMP
• Natsume Yûjinchô [Natsume’s Book of Friends], Yuki Midorikawa
• Sky Doll, Barbara Canepa & Alessandro Barbucci
• Unknown Soldier, Joshua Dysart, et al.
• The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman & Tony Moore and Charles Adlard

______________________________________________
Francis DiMenno
Director, Emily Williston Memorial Library and Museum; contributing writer, The Lemon Basket

Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

• Abbie an’ Slats, Al Capp & Raeburn Van Buren, with Elliot Caplin
• The Complete Crumb Comics, Volumes 1-17, R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb [see comments].
• Dick Tracy, Chester Gould
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Little Orphan Annie, Harold Gray
• MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• The Original Nexus, Mike Baron & Steve Rude
• Pogo, Walt Kelly
• Spider-Man, Stan Lee & Steve Ditko
• 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…
______________________________________________
Alan David Doane
Publisher/editor, Comic Book Galaxy; writer, Trouble with Comics, The ADD Blog

Ice Haven, Daniel Clowes

• American Elf, James Kolchalka
• American Splendor, Harvey Pekar, et al.
• Daredevil: Born Again, Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli
• Diary of a Teenage Girl, Phoebe Gloeckner
• From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• Ice Haven, Daniel Clowes
• “Master Race,” Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
• The New Gods, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
  Counted as a vote for The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• Spider-Man, Stan Lee & Steve Ditko

______________________________________________
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

• 1. Mort Cinder, Héctor Germán Oesterheld & Alberto Breccia
• 2. Il collezionista [The Collector], Sergio Toppi
• 3. Nova-2, Louis Garcia Mozos
• 4. The Spirit, Will Eisner
• 5. Chandler: Red Tide, Jim Steranko
• 6. Master of Kung Fu, Doug Moench & Paul Gulacy
• 7. Elektra: Assassin, Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz
• 8. Swamp Thing, Len Wein & Bernie Wrightson
• 9. The Swamp Thing Stories, Alan Moore & Stephen R. Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, et al.
• 10. Thriller, Robert Loren Fleming & Trevor von Eeden

______________________________________________
Randy Duncan
Professor of Communication & Theatre Arts, Henderson State University

Concrete, Paul Chadwick

• 1. The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• 2. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• 3. New York: The Big City, Will Eisner
• 4. The Daredevil Stories, Frank Miller & Klaus Janson
• 5. Blankets, Craig Thompson
• 6. The Spider-Man Stories, Stan Lee & John Romita, with Jim Mooney, et al.
• 7. The Conan the Barbarian Stories, Roy Thomas & John Buscema, with Ernie Chan (né Chua), et al.
• 8. Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard
• 9. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli
• 10. 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).
_____________________________
Kathleen Dunley
Faculty Chair, English, ESL, Reading & Creative Writing, Rio Salado College

It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Seth

• 1. It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Seth
• 2. The ACME Novelty Library, Chris Ware
  Counted as a vote for “Building Stories”, Chris Ware [see comments]
• 3. Paying For It, Chester Brown
• 4. “Here,” Richard McGuire
• 5. Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• 6. Gasoline Alley, Frank King
• 7. Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel
• 8. Paper Rodeo, Fort Thunder Collective
• 9. Promethea, Alan Moore & J. H. Williams III, with Mick Gray, et al.
• 10. Bodyworlds, Dash Shaw

COMMENTS

[About the vote for The ACME Novelty Library] If I have to narrow it, I’d say Volume 18 [“Building Stories”].
______________________________________________
Paul Dwyer
Cartoonist, I Shot Roy!

Cages, Dave McKean

• Banks/Eubanks, Tom Hart
• Cages, Dave McKean
• Feiffer, Jules Feiffer
• “Here,”, Richard McGuire
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• Real Dreams: Photostories, Duane Michals
• Une Semaine de bonté [A Week of Kindness], Max Ernst
• What Am I Doing Here?, Abner Dean
• Zippy the Pinhead, Bill Griffith

______________________________________________
Joshua Dysart
Scriptwriter, Violent Messiahs, Unknown Soldier, Neil Young’s Greendale

Wee Willie Winkie’s World, Lyonel Feininger

• 1. From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• 2. Wee Willie Winkie’s World, Lyonel Feininger
• 3. Swamp Thing, Len Wein & Bernie Wrightson
• 4. Zap Comix, R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton, Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin
  Counted as a vote for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb
• 5. Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• 6. Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard
• 7. Dark Horse Presents, Randy Stradley, ed.
• 8. The Silver Surfer Stories, Stan Lee & John Buscema, with Jack Kirby, et al., and The Silver Surfer Graphic Novel, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby
• 9. RAW, Art Spiegelman & Françoise Mouly, eds.
  Counted as a 0.125 vote each for: The Alack Sinner and Le Bar à Joe [Joe’s Bar] Stories, José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo; The Autobiographical Stories, Aline Kominsky-Crumb; Ernie Pook’s Comeek and The RAW Stories, Lynda Barry; “Here,” Richard McGuire; The Jimbo Stories, Gary Panter; Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman; Quimby the Mouse, Chris Ware; The Weirdo-Era Stories, R. Crumb
• 10. Concrete, Paul Chadwick

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.
______________________________________________
Joe Eisma
Illustrator, Existence 2.0/3.0, Morning Glories

The Invisibles, Grant Morrison, et al.

• Carnet de Voyage, Craig Thompson
• The Death of Captain Marvel, Jim Starlin
• The Invisibles, Grant Morrison & Phil Jiminez
• Local, Brian Wood & Ryan Kelly
• Nijusseiki Shônen [20th Century Boys], Naoki Urasawa
• Pluto, Naoki Urasawa
• Stray Bullets, David Lapham
• X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, Chris Claremont & Brent Anderson
• The X-Men Stories, Chris Claremont & Paul Smith, with Bob Wiacek

______________________________________________
Austin English
Cartoonist, Christina and Charles

The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey

• Aruku Hito [The Walking Man], Jiro Taniguchi
• The Autobiographical Comics, Luc Leplae
• Chimera, Lorenzo Mattotti
• Vie et mort du héros triomphante [The Hero’s Life and Death Triumphant], Frédéric Coché
• The Kin-der-Kids, Lyonel Feininger
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singespiel [Life? Or Theater?: A Singspiel], Charlotte Salomon
• Der Palast [The Palace], Anke Feuchtenberger
• White Boy, Garrett Price
• Works, 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.
______________________________________________
Jackie Estrada
Co-publisher, Exhibit A Press; administrator, The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards

Little Lulu, John Stanley

• The Donald Duck and Uncle $crooge Stories, Carl Barks
• Ernie Pook’s Comeek, Lynda Barry
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• The Little Lulu Stories, John Stanley, et al.
• Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• Pogo, Walt Kelly
• The Rocketeer, Dave Stevens
• Sin City, Frank Miller
• The Spirit, Will Eisner

______________________________________________
Al Ewing
Scriptwriter, Zombo, 2000 AD

The New Gods, Jack Kirby

• All-Star Superman, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
• Bad Company, Peter Milligan & Brett Ewins, et al.
• The Death Ray, Daniel Clowes
• Flex Mentallo, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
• Hark! A Vagrant, Kate Beaton
• How to Be an Artist, Eddie Campbell
  Counted as a vote for The Alec Stories, including The Fate of the Artist, Eddie Campbell
• Judge Dredd, John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra
• A Life Force, Will Eisner
• Nemesis the Warlock, Pat Mills & Kevin O’Neill
• The New Gods, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
  Counted as a vote for The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.

__________

Best Comics Poll Lists

Best Comics Poll Index

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.

Duncan Falconer
Contributing writer, Mindless Ones

Rogan Gosh, Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy

• Devlin Waugh: “Chasing Herod,” “Reign of Frogs,” and “Sirius Rising”, John Smith & Steve Yeowell (one story)
• Domu, Katsuhiro Otomo
• Elektra: Assassin, Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz
• Enigma, Peter Milligan & Duncan Fegredo
• Flex Mentallo, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
• The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• Human Diastrophism [Blood of Palomar], Gilbert Hernandez
  Counted as a vote for The Palomar Stories, Gilbert Hernandez
• The Invisibles & The Filth, Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell, et al.
• Rogan Gosh, Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy
• V for Vendetta, Alan Moore & David Lloyd

______________________________________________
Andrew Farago
Curator, Comic Art Museum; co-author, The Looney Tunes Treasury

Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye, E. C. Segar

• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Love and Rockets, Gilbert Hernandez & Jaime Hernandez
  Counted as a 0.5 vote each for The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez, and The Palomar Stories, Gilbert Hernandez
• MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• Pogo, Walt Kelly
• Spider-Man, Stan Lee & Steve Ditko
• The Spirit, Will Eisner
• Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye, E. C. Segar

COMMENTS

Given twenty spots, I think I’d veer farther away from the classics, but this is my take on it as of right this minute.
______________________________________________
Matt Feazell
Cartoonist, The Amazing Cynicalman

Conan the Barbarian, Roy Thomas & Barry Windsor-Smith

• The ACME Novelty Library, Chris Ware
  Counted a 0.25 vote each for “Building Stories,”, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Quimby the Mouse, and Rusty Brown, including “Lint,”
• Bat Comics, Rodney Schroeter
• Buddha on the Road, Colin Upton
• “The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin,” Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer
  Counted as a vote for The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• Dennis the Menace, Hank Ketcham
• “How I Quit Collecting Records and Put Out a Comic Book with the Money I Saved,” Harvey Pekar & R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for American Splendor, Harvey Pekar, with R. Crumb, et al.
• King-Cat Comics and Stories, John Porcellino
• “Rogues in the House,” Roy Thomas & Barry Windsor-Smith, with Sal Buscema
  Counted as a vote for The Conan the Barbarian Stories, Roy Thomas & Barry Windsor-Smith, with Sal Buscema, et al.
• “22 Panels That Always Work!!,” Wallace Wood
• “Whiteman Meets Bigfoot,” R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb

______________________________________________
Larry Feign
Cartoonist, The World of Lily Wong

Nancy, Ernie Bushmiller

• 1. Pogo, Walt Kelly
• 2. Li’l Abner, Al Capp
• 3. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• 4. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Gilbert Shelton, with Paul Mavrides, et al.
• 5. Astérix le gaulois [Astérix the Gaul], René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo
• 6. “Superduperman,” Harvey Kurtzman & Wallace Wood
  Counted as a vote for MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• 7. Dr. Slump, Akira Toriyama
• 8. Nancy, Ernie Bushmiller
• 9. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• 10. Lâo Fû Zi [Old Master Q], Alfonso Wong

COMMENTS

Some comics I would consider “great,” but not my favorites, such as Peanuts. I have confined my list to my favorites and greatest influences.
______________________________________________
Bob Fingerman
Cartoonist, Beg the Question, From the Ashes

Le Garage hermétique, Jean “Moebius” Giraud

• 1. Le Garage hermétique [The Airtight Garage], Jean “Moebius” Giraud
• 2. Den, Richard Corben
• 3. The Aesop Brothers, Charles Rodrigues
• 4. Nuts!, Gahan Wilson
• 5. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• 6. Pogo, Walt Kelly
• 7. Pussey!, Daniel Clowes
• 8. Fritz the Cat, R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb
• 9. Le Bibendum Celeste, Nicolas de Crécy
• 10. Tintin, Hergé

______________________________________________
Craig Fischer
Associate Professor of English, Appalachian State University; contributing writer, The Panelists, The International Journal of Cartoon Art, The Comics Journal

Blueberry, Jean-Michel Charlier & Jean “Moebius” Giraud

• The ACME Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders, Chris Ware
• After the Snooter, Eddie Campbell
  Counted as a vote for The Alec Stories, including The Fate of the Artist, Eddie Campbell
• “…And One Shall Save Him!”, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott
  Counted as a vote for The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• Ballad for a Coffin, Jean-Michel Charlier & Jean “Moebius” Giraud
  Counted as a vote for Blueberry, Jean-Michel Charlier & Jean “Moebius” Giraud
• “Captain Rightful,” Jay Stephens
• Forty Years with Mr. Oswald, Russell Johnson
• Jean qui rit et Jean qui pleure [Jean Who Laughs and Jean Who Cries], François Ayroles
• Pluto, Naoki Urasawa
• The 7/9/39 Terry and the Pirates Sunday page, Milton Caniff
• Vent litt… [Hey, Wait], Jason

COMMENTS

This was a real horror to put together, and I’m sure that tomorrow my choices would be 90-percent different. But c’est la vie!

Below is a list of favorites, without any claims to being an “objective” canon…

The ACME Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Rainy Day Saturday Afternoon Fun Book, Chris Ware (Pantheon, 2005). I prefer this big red book to Jimmy Corrigan and Ware’s other extended continuities. I find Shareholders more mordantly funny and more stylishly designed, and I’m nuts for Ware’s microscopic, hilarious prose and faux advertising. Comics as sublime, heartfelt graphic design.

After the Snooter, Eddie Campbell (Eddie Campbell Comics, 2002). My favorite autobiographical comic, in a field of formidable achievements (Binky Brown, American Splendor, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Fun Home, etc.). I love the way Campbell’s Snooter vignettes build a network of motifs and themes that playfully capture the rhythms of domestic life. Snooter works pretty well as part of the Alec: The Years Have Pants omnibus, too.

Ballad for a Coffin, Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean “Moebius” Giraud (Dargaud, 1972). Moebius was lukewarm about this Blueberry volume, but the trajectory of the plot—from Leone-style hijinks to chilling scenes of dead, water-logged corpses to a dead-end for Mike Blueberry—feels as barren, absurd, and frightening as a Beckett play. And you can see the avant-garde Moebius style sluicing under the “Gir” visuals.

The Fantastic Four #62, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott (Marvel, May 1967). This comic includes much of what I value about Silver-Age Marvel: melodramatic, passionate overwriting (thanks, Stan!), densely detailed panel backgrounds, and a double-page collage of Reed Richards careening through the Negative Zone that remains one of the coolest images I’ve ever seen. (Thanks, Jack!)

Forty Years with Mr. Oswald, Russell Johnson (Self-published, 1968). Johnson wrote and drew the Mr. Oswald strip for over 60 years (!), and gradually built a self-contained world out of bigfoot characters, the details of hardware retailing, and middle-class anxieties over bankruptcy and crumbling social status. Can we really call our era the Golden Age of Comic Strip Reprints as long as Forty Years remains out of print?

Hey, Wait, Jason (Fantagraphics, 2001). When we’re kids, the world seems full of endless possibilities, but Hey, Wait artfully depicts how a tragic event can bring that optimism to an end. Jason’s elegant minimalism is deceptively simple—-I’ve used Hey, Wait as the central text in a graphic novel class for six weeks without exhausting its depths—and there’s no comics artist alive who modulates pace better.

Jean qui rit et Jean qui pleure, François Ayroles (L’Association, 1995). A 24-page mini-comig big enough to capture a profound theme (the unfairness of life), Jean is also a study in the uniqueness of the comics medium: it’s dependent on the proximity of two panels in a single space to achieve its effects. Viva L’Asso, a mighty current in contemporary comics!

The Land of Nod #2, Jay Stephens (Black Eye, July 1966). The premise of this comic is simple: a nameless character, little more than a stick figure, tumbles into an escalating series of mishaps, and cries out for a superhero named “Captain Rightful” to save him. This is maybe the funniest comic I’ve ever read, the cartoon equivalent of an improvisation by a prodigiously gifted stand-up comedian.

Pluto, Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki (Viz, 2009-10). My favorite comic of the 21st century so far is unabashedly sentimental—more characters weep in its eight volumes than in twice as many pages of any other comic—but it’s also a postmodern essay on originality, copying, and the elastic definition of what it means to be “human.” (That latter theme is, of course, borrowed from Tezuka the trailblazer.)

Terry and the Pirates 7/9/39 Sunday page, Milton Caniff (1939). Sure, there are more famous Terry Sundays (Flip Corkin’s patriotic speech, Caniff’s “Ring out the Old” farewell), but in the 7/9/39 strip Caniff wrings an entire page’s worth of drama out of Pat Ryan just talking on the phone. The relentless shifts in framing and angles mount an implicit argument for the connections between comics and cinema.
______________________________________________
Anja Flower
Illustrator

Une Semaine de bonté, Max Ernst

• Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo
• Appleseed, Masamune Shirow
• Bara-Iro no Kaibutsu [Rose-Colored Monster], Suehiro Maruo
• Black Hole, Charles Burns
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
• The Osbick Bird, Edward Gorey
  Counted as a vote for Works, Edward Gorey
• Une Semaine de bonté [A Week of Kindness], Max Ernst
• Tengoku Kyo [Crazy Heaven], Takaya Miou
• Travel, Yuichi Yokoyama
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

______________________________________________
Erica Friedman
Writer, Okazu; president, Yuricon & ALC Publishing

Kirihito Sanka, Osamu Tezuka

• Birds of Prey, Gail Simone & Ed Benes
• A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, Moto Hagio
• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• Gunjo, Ching Nakamura
• Kirihito Sanka [Ode to Kirihito], Osamu Tezuka
• One Piece, Eiichiro Oda
• Thermae Romae, Mari Yamazaki
• Thor, including The “Tales of Asgard” Stories, Jack Kirby & Stan Lee, with Larry Lieber, et al.
• The Wonder Woman Stories, George Pérez & Len Wein, et al.
• Yokohama Kaidashi Kikô [Yokohama Shopping Log], Hitoshi Ashinano

COMMENTS

The Mighty Thor – Stan Lee/Larry Lieber/Jack Kirby
Some of the finest classic Marvel work I’ve ever read. Not bound by laws of physics or sense, but fun stories—this is what got me into comics in the first place.

Wonder Woman – George Pérez/Len Wein/Greg Potter
Towards my last few years of collecting American comics, this series kept me going. The reboot was handled just as I would have hoped—art and story flowed beautifully. Powerful stuff every issue. When Pérez left this title, I left American comics.

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories – Moto Hagio
There are no words to describe this book. These are “classic” stories in every way. Even when we’re reading something that has been done a dozen times before or since, there is an emotional commitment in these renderings that drags you in whole. Art and stories combine for one-two sucker punches to your own weak points.

Ode to Kirihito – Osamu Tezuka
This is quite possibly the most horrible book I have ever enjoyed. By the time I finished it, I realized I was in the presence of genius.

Thermae Romae – Mari Yamazaki
It would be very easy to dismiss this as a silly story, but aside from the amount of research that goes into it, and how ultimately goofy it is, Thermae Romae is a tale about humanity…and about how some things never change, nor should they.

Fun Home – Alison Bechdel?
Another moment with genius. This autobiographical tale is neither raw, nor emotional. It’s coldly executed, with intellectual honesty, and then more intellect heaped up over it to re-clothe the pain in creative finery. This book hooked me over and over as I read it.

Gunjo – Ching Nakamura.
One more “genius” title. This is the raw emotion and brutality we will never see from Bechdel. Because it is so brutal, those moments of tenderness that leak through the cracks are profound and painfully gentle.

Yokohama Shopping Log – Hitoshi Ashinano
Nothing happens in this series. Humanity dies away quietly and gently in the world’s twilight, and we watch it through the eyes of an android who celebrates the lives and rituals and hobbies and small happinesses of human life day after day.

Birds of Prey – Gail Simone/Ed Benes
I’m not sure what to say about this except that, if this series had been running when I was collecting American comics, I might have stuck with it.

One Piece – Eiichiro Oda
Can 62 million people be wrong? Not in this case. I’ve been reading One Piece for a really long time now, and I’m still reading it. I could be reading it 10 years from now. That thought makes me kind of happy. It’s a story about a rubber pirate. What’s not to like?
______________________________________________
Shaenon Garrity
Cartoonist, Narbonic; contributing writer, Comixology.com, Otaku USA

Ernie Pook’s Comeek, Lynda Barry

• 1. Ernie Pook’s Comeek, Lynda Barry
• 2. Hi no Tori [Phoenix], Osamu Tezuka
• 3. Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye, E. C. Segar
• 4. Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• 5. Barnaby, Crockett Johnson
• 6. The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• 7. MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• 8. The Cartoon History of the Universe, Larry Gonick
• 9. Maison Ikkoku, Rumiko Takahashi
• 10. Kaze no Tani no Naushika [Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind], Hayao Miyazaki

COMMENTS

If there was an eleventh slot, I’d go with Sheldon Mayer’s Scribbly.
______________________________________________
Richard Gehr
Contributing writer, The Village Voice, The Comics Journal

Doonesbury, Garry B. Trudeau

• Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard
• The Complete Crumb Comics, R. Crumb
  Counted as a 0.5 vote each for The Counterculture-Era Stories, and The Weirdo-Era Stories
• Doctor Strange, Steve Ditko & Stan Lee, with Roy Thomas, et al.
• Doonesbury, Garry B. Trudeau
• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• The Invisibles, Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell, et al.
• Jimbo’s Inferno, Gary Panter
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• The MAD Stories, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder
  Counted as a vote for MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• The Swamp Thing Stories, Alan Moore & Stephen R. Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, et al.

______________________________________________
Larry Gonick
Cartoonist, The Cartoon History of the Universe

Uncle $crooge, Carl Barks

• Cuba for Beginners, Rius
• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• Head Comix, R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb
• Kampung Boy & Town Boy, Lat
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• The MAD Stories, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Eider
  Counted as a vote for MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• Malfada, Quino
• Pogo, Walt Kelly (the early years, say, before 1954)
• Uncle $crooge, Carl Barks
• Up Front, Bill Mauldin

COMMENTS

Man, this was hard! There were so many others that just missed the list…
______________________________________________
Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz
Cartoonist, Too Negative

Krazy Kat, George Herriman

• Beg the Question, Bob Fingerman
• A Child’s Life and Other Stories and Diary of a Teenage Girl, Phoebe Gloeckner
  Counted as a 0.5 vote for each work.
• The Comics, Dori Seda (as they appeared in Weirdo, etc.)
• Flood!, Eric Drooker
• Hate!, Peter Bagge
  Counted as a vote for The Bradleys and Buddy Bradley Stories, Peter Bagge
• The Horror Comics, Hideshi Hino
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Love and Rockets, Gilbert Hernandez & Jaime Hernandez (especially “Flies on the Ceiling”)
  Counted as a vote for The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez
• Shôjo Tsubaki [Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freakshow], Suehiro Maruo
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz

______________________________________________
Diana Green
Cartoonist, Tranny Towers

Promethea, Alan Moore & J. H. Williams III

• Astro City, Kurt Busiek & Brent Anderson, with Alex Ross, et al.
• Casey Ruggles, Warren Tufts
• The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Gilbert Shelton, with Paul Mavrides, et al.
• Herbie, Shane O’Shea & Ogden Whitney
• Hi no Tori [Phoenix], Osamu Tezuka
• The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Don Rosa
  Counted as a vote for The Uncle $crooge Stories, Don Rosa
• Magnus, Robot Fighter, Russ Manning & Herb Castle
• Pogo, Walt Kelly
• Promethea, Alan Moore & J. H. Williams III, with Mick Gray, et al.
• The Tale of One Bad Rat, Bryan Talbot

______________________________________________
Jason Green
Comics Editor, PLAYBACK: stl; contributing writer, Shots in the Dark

Blankets, Craig Thompson

• Blankets, Craig Thompson
• Bloom County, Berkeley Breathed
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• Maison Ikkoku, Rumiko Takahashi
• Marvels, Kurt Busiek & Alex Ross
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• The Maxx, Sam Kieth & William Messner-Loebs
• Savage Dragon, Erik Larsen
• The Spider-Man Stories, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and John Romita
  Counted as a 0.5 vote each for Spider-Man, Stan Lee & Steve Ditko, and The Spider-Man Stories, Stan Lee & John Romita, with Jim Mooney, et al.
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

COMMENTS

I tried to not overthink this too much, so I put it together based solely on what came to mind right away, which means I surely missed something. If you asked me tomorrow, this list would probably be quite different. I tried to concentrate on books that were “significant” in the way they made me think about how comics work, and what comics are capable of.

And a quick list of honorable mentions that came to mind but I decided didn’t quite make my top 10:

Strangers in Paradise, Terry Moore; I Kill Giants, Joe Kelly & J. M. Ken Niimura; Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard; Howard the Duck, Steve Gerber & Gene Colan, et al.; Moon Knight, Doug Moench & Bill Sienkiewicz; Scud: The Disposable Assassin, Rob Schrab; The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.; Superman: The Man of Steel, John Byrne, with Dick Giordano; Sin City, Frank Miller; V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird; Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi; Dominion C1 Konfurikuto [Dominion Conflict 1: No More Noise], Masamune Shirow; Gansumisu Kyattsu [Gunsmith Cats], Kenichi Sonoda; Astro City, Kurt Busiek & Brent Anderson, with Alex Ross, et al.; Hellboy, Mike Mignola
______________________________________________
Steve Greenberg
Editorial cartoonist, Ventura County Reporter, L.A. Observed, Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

“The Supremos,” from MAD, Mort Drucker

• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• The Caricatures, Al Hirschfeld
• Doonesbury, Garry B. Trudeau
• The Editorial Cartoons, Paul Conrad
• The Editorial Cartoons, Pat Oliphant
• The Far Side, Gary Larson
• The Green Lantern Stories, Julius Schwartz & Gil Kane, et al.
• The Mad Stories, Jack Davis
  Counted as a vote for MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• The Mad Stories, Mort Drucker
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz

COMMENTS

Other favorites:

9 Chickweed Lane, Brooke McEldowney; Bizarro, Dan Piraro; The Editorial Cartoons, Tony Auth; The Editorial Cartoons, Clay Bennett; The MAD Stories, Sergio Aragonés
______________________________________________
Geoff Grogan
Cartoonist, Fandancer, Look Out!! Monsters

Prince Valiant, Hal Foster

• 1. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• 2. Prince Valiant, Hal Foster
• 3. Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, Roy Crane
• 4. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• 5. Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• 6. Maximum Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby; edited by Walter Mosley
  [Note: Due to the subsequent listing, this entry was not considered in the voting.]
• 7. The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• 8. The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• 9. The Complete Crumb Comics, Volumes #4-17, R. Crumb
  Counted as a 0.5 vote each for The Counterculture-Era Stories and The Weirdo-Era Stories
• 10. The Warlock Stories, Jim Starlin, with Steve Leialoha, et al.

COMMENTS

And there are many, many more.

These lists are always a fun—if a bit silly. The best stuff is the stuff you keep returning to year after year across a lifetime—and for an artist, the stuff you keep learning from.
______________________________________________
Patrick Grzanka
Honors Faculty Fellow, Barrett, The Honors College, Arizona State University

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

• Astonishing X-Men, Joss Whedon & John Cassaday
• Death: The High Cost of Living, Neil Gaiman & Chris Bachalo, with Mark Buckingham
  Counted as a vote for The Sandman, including The Death Stories, Neil Gaiman, et al.
• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• Incognegro, Mat Johnson & Warren Pleece
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• New X-Men, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely, et al.
• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
• Pride of Baghdad, Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon
• V for Vendetta, Alan Moore & David Lloyd
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

______________________________________________
Paul Gulacy
Illustrator, Master of Kung Fu; co-creator & illustrator, Sabre

Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz

• Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, with Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley
• Chandler: Red Tide, Jim Steranko
• The Conan the Barbarian Stories, Roy Thomas & Barry Windsor-Smith, with Sal Buscema, et al.
• Dick Tracy, Chester Gould
• The Editorial Cartoons, Tom Toles
• Master of Kung Fu, Doug Moench & Paul Gulacy
• The Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D Stories, Jim Steranko, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• 300, Frank Miller, with Lynn Varley
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

__________

Best Comics Poll Lists

Best Comics Poll Index

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.

Flint Hasbudak
Cartoonist, Totuk

Ken Parker, Giancarlo Berardi & Ivo Milazzo

• Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo
• Batman, Bob Kane & Bill Finger, with Jerry Robinson
• Brooklyn Dreams, J. M. DeMatteis & Glenn Barr
• Corto Maltese, Hugo Pratt
• The Creech, Greg Capullo
• Ken Parker, Giancarlo Berardi & Ivo Milazzo

COMMENTS

Tough question! But to put a few in mind, I’ve always admired these.

A list can be very long. And obviously there are many I haven’t read yet.
______________________________________________
Greg Hatcher
Contributing Writer, Comic Book Resources

Detective Comics, Archie Goodwin, et al.

• The Batman Stories, Denny O’Neil & Neal Adams
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• Daredevil: Born Again, Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli
• The Defenders Stories, Steve Gerber & Sal Buscema, with Vince Colletta, et al.
• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• Fax from Sarajevo, Joe Kubert
• From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• Manhunter, Archie Goodwin & Walter Simonson, and The Batman Stories in Detective Comics #437-443, Archie Goodwin, Steve Englehart, et al.
• The Marvelman [Miracleman] Stories, Alan Moore & Garry Leach, Alan Davis, John Totleben, et al.
• Smile, Raina Telgemaier

COMMENTS

The best comics run of all time? If you mean just character and story, I’d go with the Archie Goodwin-Walt Simonson Manhunter. That was just brilliant. Modern creators are still going back to the stuff, there—ninjas, clones, superheroic anti-heroes that are willing to use lethal force. Not to mention an approach to the art itself that was 20 years ahead of its time. Look at the original Manhunter today, and Simonson’s layout and lettering doesn’t look dated at all.

But really, I’d take it a step further. I’d add that the comics in which those seven Manhunter installments appeared, Detective Comics #437-443, were themselves great comics. Goodwin was writing the Batman lead feature as well, and he kept luring guys like Alex Toth and a young Howard Chaykin to illustrate them, along with stalwarts like Jim Aparo and Dick Giordano. It’s also where you found the original “Night of the Stalker” by Steve Englehart, one of the greatest Batman short stories ever.

[On The Defenders Stories] Social commentary and satire masquerading as Marvel soap opera and amazingly successful today.

[On The Marvelman [Miracleman] Stories] I think Miracleman is a better superhero deconstruction than Watchmen, which (heresy!) hasn’t aged well, and also I’ve gotten so sick of superhero writers cribbing from it that Watchmen is tainted for me. But this is mostly because if you have to choose between Watchmen and Miracleman, Miracleman is better.

[On Smile] This is kind of an upstart entry, but the craft involved just knocks me out, and the entire project serves as a primer of the kind of thing mainstream comics ought to be doing and just…don’t do.
______________________________________________
Charles Hatfield
Associate Professor of English, University of California at Northridge; author, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature; contributing writer, The Panelists, The Comics Journal

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green

• L’Ascension du haut-mal [Epileptic], David B.
• Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green
• The Book of Jim, Jim Woodring
• “Flies on the Ceiling,” Jaime Hernandez
  Counted as a vote for The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez
• Graffiti Kitchen, Eddie Campbell
  Counted as a vote for The Alec Stories, including The Fate of the Artist, Eddie Campbell
• “The Hannah Story,” Carol Tyler
• Human Diastrophism [Blood of Palomar], Gilbert Hernandez
  Counted as a vote for The Palomar Stories, Gilbert Hernandez
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz (especially circa 1955-1965)
• “Spawn,”, “The Glory Boat!”, “The Pact!”, and “The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin!”, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer
  Counted as a vote for The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye, E. C. Segar

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David Heatley
Cartoonist, Deadpan, My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down; contributing artist, The New Yorker, The New York Times

“The Hannah Story,” Carol Tyler

• 1. “The Hannah Story,” Carol Tyler
• 2. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• 3. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• 4. Quimby the Mouse, Chris Ware
• 5. Twentieth-Century Eightball, Daniel Clowes
• 6. Black Hole, Charles Burns
• 7. Collected Works, Volumes 1-5, Shigeru Seguira
• 8. My Trouble with Women, R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Weirdo-Era Stories, R. Crumb
• 9. Jimbo in Paradise, Gary Panter
• 10. I Never Liked You, Chester Brown

COMMENTS

I hate having to actually rank these because this kind of thing changes all the time in my head. Here’s a stab at it though.

Runners-up: Peanuts (1950s era), Charles M. Schulz; Perfect Example, John Porcellino; The ACME Novelty Library, Chris Ware; Affiches—film posters by Albert Dubout; Wilson, Daniel Clowes; My New York Diary, Julie Doucet; Norakuro, Suiho Tagawa; Dirtbag (mini zines), Dave Kiersh; Annual Illustrated Calendars, Leif Goldberg; Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green; It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Seth; “Bomb Scare”, Adrian Tomine; Schizo, Ivan Brunetti; Nowhere, Debbie Drechsler
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Jeet Heer
Co-editor, A Comics Studies Reader, Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium; contributing writer, Comics Comics, The Comics Journal

ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS!, Lynda Barry

• 1. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• 2. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• 3. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• 4. Bob ‘n’ Harv’s Comics, Harvey Pekar & R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for American Splendor, Harvey Pekar, with R. Crumb, et al.
• 5. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
• 6. ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS!, Lynda Barry
• 7. The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez
• 8. The Palomar Stories, Gilbert Hernandez
• 9. I Never Liked You, Chester Brown
• 10. My New York Diary, Julie Doucet

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Danny Hellman
Contributing illustrator, The Village Voice, Guitar World

Alack Sinner, José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo

• Alack Sinner, José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo
• Captain Marvel, C. C. Beck & Otto Binder, et al.
• Chandler: Red Tide, Jim Steranko
• A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, Will Eisner
• The EC Comics Stories, Wallace Wood, et al.
  Counted as a 0.33 vote each for The EC Comics Science-Fiction Stories, Al Feldstein & Wallace Wood, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando, et al., The EC Comics War Stories, Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis, John Severin, Wallace Wood, et al., and MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• Le Garage hermétique [The Airtight Garage], Jean “Moebius” Giraud
• Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• The MAD Stories, Mort Drucker
• The Zap Comix stories, R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb

COMMENTS
This list is all about the art; screw the writers. [Note: Danny Hellman only included the names of the cartoonists/pencilers in his lists above and below. The editor added the names of separate scriptwriters and inkers. This was done for the sake of completeness and editorial consistency.]

And some highly honorable mentions: Abandoned Cars, Tim Lane; The Arcade Stories, Spain Rodriguez; Batman: The Killing Joke, Alan Moore & Brian Bolland; The Captain Marvel, Jr. Stories, Mac Raboy, et al.; Cheech Wizard, Vaughn Bodé; Cochlea and Eustachia, Hans Rickheit; Coochy Cooty, Robert Williams; Ed the Happy Clown, Chester Brown; El Borbah, Charles Burns; The Howard the Duck Stories, Steve Gerber & Gene Colan, with Steve Leialoha, et al.; Idyl, Jeffrey Catherine Jones; The Incal, Alexandro Jodorowsky & Jean “Moebius” Giraud; Maakies, Tony Millionaire; The MAD Stories, Bob Clarke; The MAD Stories, Paul Coker, Jr.; The MAD Stories, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder; The Metamorpho Stories, Bob Haney & Ramona Fradon; The Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Stories, Jim Steranko; The Spirit, Will Eisner; Snappy Sammy Snoot, Skip Williamson; Trashman, Spain Rodriguez; Trots and Bonnie, Shary Flenniken
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Sam Henderson
Cartoonist, Magic Whistle

MAD, Harvey Kurtzman, et al.

• Books, B. Kliban
• The Complete Crumb Comics, R. Crumb
  Counted a 0.5 vote each for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb, and The Weirdo-Era Stories, R. Crumb
• The Dell Comics Stories, John Stanley, et al.
  Counted as a vote for The Little Lulu Stories, John Stanley, with Irving Tripp
• The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• Nancy, Ernie Bushmiller
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• Pogo, Walt Kelly
• Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye, E. C. Segar

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Alex Hoffman
Cartoonist, Libertarian Rabbits from Outer Space; Editorial cartoonist, When Falls the Coliseum

Life in Hell, Matt Groening

• Angora Napkin, Troy Little
• The Book of Grickle, Graham Annable
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• The Editorial Cartoons, Eric Allie
• The Editorial Cartoons, David Horsey
• The Editorial Cartoons, Michael Ramirez
• Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me and Other Astute Observations, Peter Bagge
• Life in Hell, Matt Groening
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Zach Weiner
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

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Ben Horak
Cartoonist, Grump Toast

The Arrival, Shaun Tan

• The Arrival, Shaun Tan
• Berlin, Jason Lutes
• The Blot, Tom Neely
• Brat Pack, Rick Veitch
• Ed the Happy Clown, Chester Brown
• The Frank Stories, Jim Woodring
• The Left Bank Gang, Jason
• Panorama of Hell, Hideshi Hino
• Percy Gloom, Cathy Malkasian
• Six Hundred Seventy-Six Apparitions of Killoffer, Patrice Killoffer

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Kenneth Huey
Contributing cartoonist, Commies from Mars; Illustrator; “Humanoid,” Church of the Subgenius

Head Comix, R. Crumb

• The Conan the Barbarian Stories, Roy Thomas & Barry Windsor-Smith, with Sal Buscema, et al.
• Le Garage hermétique [The Airtight Garage], Jean “Moebius” Giraud
• Head Comix, R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb
• Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• The Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D Stories, Jim Steranko, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• Pogo, Walt Kelly
• The Sandman, Jack Kirby & Joe Simon, with Michael Fleisher, et al.
• Tarzan of the Apes (graphic novel), Burne Hogarth
• Torpedo 1936, Enrique Sánchez Abulí & Jordi Bernet
• The X-Men Stories, Roy Thomas & Neal Adams, with Tom Palmer, et al.

COMMENTS

Any “best of” list naturally invites a vigorous “sez who?” After all, who among us is truly qualified to judge the comparative importance of, say Lyonel Feininger’s The Kin-der-Kids vs. John Byrne’s run on The Fantastic Four? So, I’ll do something a bit more modest. Off the top of my head, these are ten features that have meant a lot to me over the years.
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Jelle Hugaerts
Contributing writer, Forbidden Planet International

Conte démoniaque, Aristophane

• Bar Miki, Michelangelo Setola
• Conte démoniaque [Demonic Tale], Aristophane
• Cowboy Henk, Kamagurka & Herr Seele
• Eläkeläinen muistelee [Memoirs of a Pensioner], Kalervo Palsa
• “Gynecology,” Daniel Clowes
  Counted as a vote for Caricature: Nine Stories, Daniel Clowes
• I Never Liked You, Chester Brown
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
• Kraut, Peter Pontiac
• Le Monde d’Edena [The World of Edena], Jean “Moebius” Giraud
• Teratoid Heights, Mat Brinkman

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Mike Hunter
Contributing writer, The Hooded Utilitarian

“Here,” Richard McGuire

• From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• “Here,”, Richard McGuire
• “Hypothetical Quandary,” Harvey Pekar & R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for American Splendor, Harvey Pekar, with R. Crumb, et al.
• “L,” Eric Drooker
• “Patton” and “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick,” R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Weirdo-Era Stories, R. Crumb
• “Secret Lords of the DNA,” Del Close, John Ostrander, and David Lloyd
• “Ten Minutes”, Will Eisner, with Jules Feiffer
  Counted as a vote for The Spirit, Will Eisner
• “Those Who Change,”, Stan Lee & Steve Ditko
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
• “What the Left Hand Did,” Jim Woodring
  Counted as a vote for The Book of Jim, Jim Woodring

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“Illogical Volume”
Contributing writer, Mindless Ones

“Lint,” Chris Ware

• The Alec Stories, including/especially The Fate of the Artist, Eddie Campbell
• Birdland, Gilbert Hernandez
• The Fourth World Stories, including/especially The Hunger Dogs, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• The Invisibles and The Filth, Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell, et al.
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• “Lint,” Chris Ware
• Pluto, Naoki Urasawa
• Solo #12, Brendan McCarthy, et al.
• Transformers: Time Wars, Simon Furman, et al.
• The X-Force Stories, Peter Milligan & Mike Allred, with Laura Allred

______________________________________________
Domingos Isabelinho
Contributing writer, The Hooded Utilitarian

The Cage, Martin Vaughn-James

• Amapola Negra [Black Poppy], Héctor Germán Oesterheld & Francisco Solano López
• The Cage, Martin Vaughn-James
• Conte démoniaque, Aristophane
• Die Hure H [W the Whore], Katrin de Vries & Anke Feuchtenberger
• Journal (3), Fabrice Neaud
• Le Journal de Jules Renard lu par Fred [The Diary of Jules Renard as Read by Fred], Jules Renard & Fred
• Mûno no Hito [The Talentless Man], Yoshiharu Tsuge
• La orilla [The Shore], Elisa Galvez & Federico del Barrio
• Sa-Lo-Món, Santiago “Chago” Armada
• Zil Zelub, Guido Buzzelli

COMMENTS

Here’s my top ten (restrict comics field). If my top ten included things from the expanded field it would look quite diffrent with things like: Jacques Callot (Les Misères et malheurs de la guerre [The Miseries and Misfortunes of War]); Francisco de Goya (Los Desastres de la Guerra [The Disasters of War]), Los Caprichos [The Caprices]); Katsushika Hokusai (Fugaku Sanjûrokkei [Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji], Fugaku Hyakkei [One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji]); Charlotte Salomon (Leben? oder Theater? [Life? Or Theater?]); Francis Bacon (Triptych May-June 1973); William Hogarth (A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress); Pablo Picasso (Songe et mensonge de Franco [Dream and Lie of Franco]).
______________________________________________
Cole Johnson
Cartoonist, Sleepover Comics

Tricky Cad, Jess

• The Bungle Family, H. J. Tuthill
• Buzzbomb, Kaz
• Cowboy Henk, Herr Seele and Kamagurka
• Maria no Komon [Mary’s Asshole], Hanako Yamada
• Nancy, Ernie Bushmiller
• Nekojiru Udon, Nekojiru
• Remue Ménage, Anna Sommer
• Rthym Mastr, Kerry James Marshall
• Tricky Cad, Jess

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“Jones, One of the Jones Boys”
Writer, Let’s You and Him Fight

Thor, Jack Kirby & Stan Lee

• The ACME Novelty Library, Chris Ware
  Counted as a 0.25 vote each for “Building Stories,” Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Quimby the Mouse, and Rusty Brown, including “Lint”
• Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard
• Donjon [Dungeon], Joann Sfar & Lewis Trondheim, et al.
• The Frank Stories, Jim Woodring
• Fungus the Bogeyman, Raymond Briggs
• The Little Lulu Stories, John Stanley & Irving Tripp
• Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• Seven Soldiers of Victory, Grant Morrison, et al.
• Thor, including “Tales of Asgard”, Jack Kirby & Stan Lee, with Larry Lieber, et al.
• Various manga, Shintaro Kago

COMMENTS

MASSIVE DISCLAIMER: You’ve asked for “the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant,” and this is a list of my favourite comics as of 29 June 2011. It sure as hell isn’t the ten “best” comics!
______________________________________________
Bill Kartalopoulos
Instructor, Parsons The New School for Design; programming coordinator, Small Press Expo; contributing editor, Print magazine

Histoire d’Albert, Rodolphe Töpffer

• Alias the Cat, Kim Deitch
• Caricature: Nine Stories, Daniel Clowes
• The EC Comics War Stories, Harvey Kurtzman (the stories Kurtzman drew himself)
• “Here,” Richard McGuire
• Histoire d’Albert [The Story of Albert], Rodolphe Töpffer
  Counted as a vote for Works, Rodolphe Töpffer
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli
• Rusty Brown, Chris Ware
• Travel, Yuichi Yokoyama

______________________________________________
Megan Kelso
Cartoonist, Artichoke Tales, Queen of the Black Black

Goodbye, Chunky Rice, Craig Thompson

• 1. ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS!, Lynda Barry
• 2. Dirty Plotte, Julie Doucet
• 3. Ghost World, Daniel Clowes
• 4. I Never Liked You, Chester Brown
• 5. Perfect Example, John Porcellino
• 6. Skibber Bee Bye, Ron Regé, Jr.
• 7. Cave-In, Brian Ralph
• 8. Shrimpy and Paul, Marc Bell
• 9. Goodbye, Chunky Rice, Craig Thompson
• 10. Palestine, Joe Sacco

______________________________________________
Abhay Khosla
Contributing writer, The Savage Critics

“Master Race,” Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein

• The ACME Novelty Library, Chris Ware
  Counted as a 0.25 vote each for “Building Stories,” Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Quimby the Mouse, and Rusty Brown, including “Lint”
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• Go Go Monster, Taiyo Matsumoto
• Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• “Master Race,” Bernard Krigstein & Al Feldstein
• The New Yorker Cartoons, Charles Addams
• The Palomar Stories, Gilbert Hernandez
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz

COMMENTS

I don’t want to overthink this because otherwise this’ll turn into a thing with me… Also: I question that lists like these are a good idea. But whatever, who cares. Thanks for asking. Oh: if I have to pick just one, for The Fourth World, let’s go with The New Gods. But that would be the incorrect way of looking at that work, and not how I understand they’re being published currently, so I’m going with The Fourth World.
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Molly Kiely
Cartoonist, Tecopa Jane, Saucy Tart

La Perdida, Jessica Abel

• The American State Maps, Ruth Taylor White
• The Biologic Show, Al Columbia
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Li’l Abner, Al Capp
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• La Perdida, Jessica Abel
• Shôjo Tsubaki [Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freakshow], Suehiro Maruo
• Steven, Doug Allen
• THB, Paul Pope
• Viaggio a Tulum [Trip to Tulum], Milo Manara & Federico Fellini

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Kinukitty
Contributing writer, The Hooded Utilitarian

Seiyô Kottô Yôgashiten, Fumi Yoshinaga

• Seiyô Kottô Yôgashiten [Antique Bakery], Fumi Yoshinaga
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• The Doom Patrol Stories, Grant Morrison & Richard Case, with Scott Hanna, et al.
• Gashlycrumb Tinies (and everything else), Edward Gorey
  Counted as a vote for Works, Edward Gorey
• Let Dai, Sooyeon Won
• Li’l Abner, Al Capp
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• Le Petit vampire [Little Vampire], Joann Sfar
• Oroka-mono wa Aka o Kirau [Red Blinds the Foolish], est em
• Scary Godmother, Jill Thompson

______________________________________________
T. J. Kirsch
Co-creator & illustrator, Uncle Slam Fights Back; illustrator, She Died in Terrebonne

David Boring, Daniel Clowes

• Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• David Boring, Daniel Clowes
• Ghost World, Daniel Clowes
• Hicksville, Dylan Horrocks
• I Never Liked You, Chester Brown
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• The Playboy, Chester Brown

______________________________________________
Sean Kleefeld
Writer, Kleefeld on Comics

Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud

• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• Complete Works, Joe Sacco
  Counted as a vote for Palestine, Joe Sacco
• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• The Fantastic Four Stories, John Byrne
• The Green Lantern/Green Arrow Stories, Denny O’Neil & Neal Adams, with Dick Giordano, et al.
• Judge Dredd, John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra
• Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• Kozure Ôkami [Lone Wolf and Cub], Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima
• Tozo the Public Servant, David O’Connell
• Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud

__________

Best Comics Poll Lists

Best Comics Poll Index

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.

Terry LaBan
Cartoonist, Edge City, Cud

The Editorial Cartoons, Pat Oliphant

• 1. Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye, E. C. Segar
• 2. The Zap Comix Stories and “Whiteman Meets Bigfoot,” R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb
• 3. Works, Osamu Tezuka
  Counted as a 0.25 vote each for Black Jack, Buddha, Hi no Tori [Phoenix], and Kirihito Sanka [Ode to Kirihito]
• 4. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green
• 5. Bloom County, Berkeley Breathed
• 6. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz (between 1955-1970)
• 7. The Donald Duck and Uncle $crooge Stories, Carl Barks
• 8. The Editorial Cartoons, Pat Oliphant (1960s-1980s)
• 9. Two-Fisted Tales, Harvey Kurtzman, et al.
  Counted as a vote for The EC Comics War Stories, Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis et al.

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Nicolas Labarre
Writer, A grands traits

Gaston LaGaffe, André Franquin

• The Authority, Warren Ellis & Bryan Hitch
• Black Hole, Charles Burns
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard
• Chichi no Koyomi [The Almanac of My Father], Jiro Taniguchi
• Gasoline Alley, Frank King
• Gaston LaGaffe, André Franquin
• The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez
• The Long Tomorrow, Dan O’Bannon & Jean “Moebius” Giraud
• Les Phalanges de l’ordre noir [The Black Order Brigade], Pierre Christin & Enki Bilal

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Blaise Larmee
Cartoonist, Young Lions

Young Lions, Blaise Larmee

• Christina and Charles, Austin English
• Exploding Head Man, Jason Overby
• Jessica, Jason Overby
• KE7, Hall Hassi
• 1981, White Shasta
• Obligatory Artifact, Jason Overby
• 2001, Blaise Larmee
• 2101, Jason Overby
• The Whale, Aidan Koch
• Young Lions, Blaise Larmee

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Carol Lay
Cartoonist, Way Lay

Alias the Cat, Kim Deitch

• Alias the Cat, Kim Deitch
• The Donald Duck and Uncle $crooge Stories, Carl Barks
• Doonesbury, Garry B. Trudeau
• The EC Comics edited by Harvey Kurtzman
  Counted as a 0.5 vote each for The EC Comics War Stories and MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman, et al.
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Li’l Abner, Al Capp (through the 1950s)
• The New Yorker Cartoons, Charles Addams
• The Political Cartoons and Sculptures, Paul Conrad
• Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye, E. C. Segar
• The Zap Comix Stories, R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb

COMMENTS

Here are some faves, not necessarily in order of preference…just a list.
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Jeff Lemire
Cartoonist, Essex County

Swamp Thing, Alan Moore, Stephen R. Bissette, and John Totleben

• The Alec Stories, Eddie Campbell
• All-Star Superman, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
• Cages, Dave McKean
• The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• George Sprott, Seth
• Hicksville, Dylan Horrocks
• Ice Haven, Daniel Clowes
• The Swamp Thing Stories, Alan Moore & Stephen R. Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, et al.

COMMENTS

Honorable Mentions: Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli; Black Hole, Charles Burns; Clumsy and Unlikely, Jeffrey Brown; A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, Will Eisner; DC: The New Frontier, Darwyn Cooke; Scalped, Jason Aaron & R. M. Guéra; Skim, Jillian Tamaki & Mariko Tamaki; 3 Story, Matt Kindt; Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons.
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Sonny Liew
Illustrator, My Faith in Frankie; cartoonist, Malinky Robot

Yotsuba&!, Kiyohiko Azuma

• 1. The ACME Novelty Library, Chris Ware
  Counted as a 0.25 vote each for “Building Stories,” Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Quimby the Mouse, and Rusty Brown, including “Lint”
• 2. I Never Liked You, Chester Brown
• 3. “Here,” Richard McGuire
• 4. Neji-Shiki [Screw Style], Yoshiharu Tsuge
• 5. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• 6. Yotsuba&!, Kiyohiko Azuma
• 7. Town Boy, Lat
• 8. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, with Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley
• 9. Eightball, Daniel Clowes
  Counted as a 0.2 vote each for Caricature: Nine Stories, David Boring, The Death Ray, Ghost World, and Ice Haven
• 10. When the Wind Blows, Raymond Briggs

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Alec Longstreth
Cartoonist, Phase 7

Mickey Mouse, Floyd Gottfredson

• 1. The Donald Duck and Uncle $crooge Stories, Carl Barks
• 2. The Life and Times of $crooge McDuck, Don Rosa
• 3. Bone, Jeff Smith
• 4. Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
• 5. King-Cat Comics and Stories, John Porcellino
• 6. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• 7. Tintin, Hergé
• 8. The ACME Novelty Library, Chris Ware
  Counted as a 0.25 vote each for “Building Stories,” Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Quimby the Mouse, and Rusty Brown, including “Lint”
• 9. The Mickey Mouse Newspaper Strips, Floyd Gottfredson
• 10. Spiral-Bound, Aaron Renier

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Jay Lynch
Cartoonist, Bijou Funnies

Humbug, Harvey Kurtzman, et al.

• Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green
• Humbug, Harvey Kurtzman, et al.
• MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• The Zap Comix Stories, R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb

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John MacLeod
Cartoonist, Dishman

Rip Kirby, Alex Raymond

• BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad, Harold Sakuishi
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• Love and Rockets, Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez
  Counted as a 0.5 vote each for The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez, and The Palomar Stories, Gilbert Hernandez
• Nijusseiki Shônen [20th Century Boys], Naoki Urasawa
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• Pogo, Walt Kelly
• Rip Kirby, Alex Raymond
• Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

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Matt Madden
Cartoonist, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style; co-editor, The Best American Comics series; instructor, School of Visual Arts

From the works of Saul Steinberg

• The Collaborative Works, José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo
  Counted as a vote for The Alack Sinner and Le Bar à Joe [Joe’s Bar] Stories, José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo
• The Comics and Sketchbook Works, Gary Panter
  Counted as a vote for The Jimbo Stories, Gary Panter
• Corto Maltese, Hugo Pratt
• Ice Haven, Daniel Clowes
• “Gloriana,”, Kevin Huizenga
• Works, Edmond Baudoin
• Works, R. Crumb
  Counted as a 0.333 vote each for The Book of Genesis Illustrated, The Counterculture-Era Stories, and The Weirdo-Era Stories
• Works, Hergé
  Counted as a vote for Tintin, Hergé
• Works, Jaime Hernandez
  Counted as a vote for The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez
• Works, George Herriman
  Counted as a vote for Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Works, Saul Steinberg

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Larry Marder
Cartoonist, Beanworld; erstwhile Executive Director, Image Comics

“Grieving Lincoln,” Bill Mauldin

• Bone, Jeff Smith
• The Conan the Barbarian Stories, Roy Thomas & Barry Windsor-Smith, with Sal Buscema, et al.
• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• “Grieving Lincoln”, Bill Mauldin
• The Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Stories, Jim Steranko, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• “Superman Red and Superman Blue”, Mort Weisinger, Leo Dorfman, and Curt Swan, with George Klein
  Counted as a vote for The Superman Stories, Mort Weisinger & Curt Swan, Wayne Boring, et al.
• Thor, including “Tales of Asgard,” Jack Kirby & Stan Lee, with Larry Lieber, et al.
• Up Front, Bill Mauldin
• The Zap Comix Stories, R. Crumb
  Counted as a vote for The Counterculture-Era Stories, R. Crumb

COMMENTS

This is my list today.

It might have been a different list if I compiled it yesterday or tomorrow.

Do I think this is the list of the best comics ever?

Not really.

But this is the list of some of the things that stuck with me, influenced me, and made me whatever sort of cartoonist I am today.

Thanks for asking.
______________________________________________
MariNaomi
Cartoonist, Kiss & Tell

Slutburger, Mary Fleener

• Bottomless Belly Button, Dash Shaw
• I Never Liked You, Chester Brown
• The Insect God, Edward Gorey
  Counted as a vote for Works, Edward Gorey
• Jizz, Scott Russo
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• Paying For It, Chester Brown
• Peepshow, Joe Matt
• Real Stuff, Dennis P. Eichhorn, et al.
• Slutburger, Mary Fleener
• You’ll Never Know, C. Tyler

COMMENTS

Here are the top-ten comics that blew me away… This was really, really difficult, and does not include mini comics. Nor does it include any of my friends, many of whom produce amazing comics, but because I know them I feel like I’m biased.
______________________________________________
Vom Marlowe
Contributing writer, The Hooded Utilitarian

Junjo Romantica, Shungiku Nakamura

• 1. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• 2. The Sandman, Neil Gaiman, et al.
• 3. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• 4. Raburesu [Loveless], Yun Kouga
• 5. Furûtsu Basaketto [Fruits Basket], Natsuki Takaya
• 6. Gensômaden Saiyûki [Saiyuki], Kazuya Minekura
• 7. Life in Hell, Matt Groening
• 8. Junjo Romantica, Shungiku Nakamura
• 9. Sono Yubi Dake ga Shitte Iru [Only the Ring Finger Knows], Satoru Kannagi & Hotaru Odagiri
• 10. Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston & Harry G. Peter

COMMENTS

This is a mix of my favorites, what consider most significant, and what I think are the best. A bit of all of them, really.
______________________________________________
Benjamin Marra
Cartoonist, The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd

American Flagg!, Howard Chaykin

• American Century, Howard Chaykin, David Tischman, and Marc Laming, with John Stokes
• American Flagg!, Howard Chaykin
• The EC Comics Line, Maxwell Gaines, Founder
  Counted as a 0.25 vote each for The EC Comics Science-Fiction Stories, Al Feldstein & Wallace Wood, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando, et al., The EC Comics War Stories, Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al., MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al., and “Master Race” and Other EC Comics Stories, Bernard Krigstein, et al.
• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• Lobo’s Paramilitary Christmas Special, Keith Giffen, Alan Grant, and Simon Bisley
• Marvelman [Miracleman], Alan Moore & Garry Leach
• The Spirit, Will Eisner
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird
• Tintin, Hergé

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Scott Marshall
Cartoonist, The DIY Comic, Dregs

Lone Wolf and Cub, Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

• The Cage, Martin Vaughn-James
• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• Human Diastrophism [Blood of Palomar], Gilbert Hernandez
• Kozure Ôkami [Lone Wolf and Cub], Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima
• MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• The Micronauts, Bill Mantlo & Michael Golden
• Scary Go Round, John Allison
• The Spirit, Will Eisner
• Tintin, Hergé
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

COMMENTS

God, so many more I could name; hopefully somebody else will do so…?
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Robert Stanley Martin
Writer, Pol Culture; contributing writer, The Hooded Utilitarian

Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Katsushika Hokusai

• The Alec Stories, Eddie Campbell (especially Graffiti Kitchen and The Fate of the Artist)
• Black Hole, Charles Burns
• Blueberry, Jean-Michel Charlier & Jean “Moebius” Giraud
• Breakdowns and “Two-Fisted Painters”, Art Spiegelman
• Feiffer and Sick, Sick, Sick, Jules Feiffer
• From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• Fugaku Sanjûrokkei [Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji], Katsushika Hokusai
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
• “Yanagi no Ki [The Willow Tree],” Moto Hagio
  Counted as a vote for A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, Moto Hagio

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Chris Mautner
Contributing Writer, Robot 6, The Comics Journal

Quimby the Mouse, Chris Ware

• 1. Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye, E. C. Segar
• 2. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• 3. The Weirdo Stories, R. Crumb
• 4. Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• 5. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• 6. Dick Tracy, Chester Gould
• 7. Quimby the Mouse, Chris Ware
• 8. Hi no Tori: Uchû-Hen [Phoenix: Karma], Osamu Tezuka
• 9. “Browntown” and “The Love Bunglers,” Jaime Hernandez
  Counted as a vote for The Locas Stories
• 10. Poison River, Gilbert Hernandez
  Counted as a vote for The Palomar Stories

COMMENTS

In no particular order and with the understanding that this list fluctuates on an almost daily basis, here’s my personal top ten.
______________________________________________
Joe McCulloch (Jog Mack)
Writer, Jog the Blog; contributing writer, The Savage Critics, comiXology, The Comics Journal

Screw Style, Yoshiharu Tsuge

• La Comète de Carthage [The Comet of Carthage], Yves Chaland & Yann Lepennetier
• Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise, Gary Panter
• “The Last of the Summer Wine,” Eddie Campbell
• “Minnie’s 3rd Love or: ‘Nightmare on Polk Street’,” Phoebe Gloeckner
  Counted as a vote for A Child’s Life and Other Stories, Phoebe Gloeckner
• Rogan Gosh, Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy
• Neji-Shiki [Screw Style], Yoshiharu Tsuge
• “I Guess (Thrilling Adventure Stories)”, Chris Ware
• Untitled [“The New Adventures of Measles” short from Measles #2], Gilbert Hernandez
• “What Makes a Hero?”, Steve Ditko, with D.C. Glanzman

COMMENTS
Please delete all other entries you have received, as these are the correct selections.
______________________________________________
Sheena McNeil
Contributing Writer, Sequential Tart

Garfield, Jim Davis

• Black Bird, Kanoko Sakurakoji
• Doragon Kishidan [Dragon Knights], Mineko Ohkami
• Ekkusu [X/1999], CLAMP
• Garfield, Jim Davis
• Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Jhonen Vasquez
• Kizuna: Koi no Kara Sawagi [Kizuna: Bonds of Love], Kazuma Kodaka
• The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle, Peter B. Gillis, Renea DeLiz, and Ray Dillon
• Poison Elves, Drew Hayes
• Rôdosu-tô Senki [Record of Lodoss War], Ryo Mizuno, et al.
• Tank Girl, Jamie Hewlett & Alan Martin

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Best Comics Poll Lists

Best Comics Poll Index

We’re going to be taking it easy at The Hooded Utilitarian this week. Apart from this post, we’re just going to be publishing the remainder of the lists. We’ll be back with more to engage, enlighten, and outrage next Monday.

My original goal with this post was to discuss the poll results and the comics canon. However, it seems a rather odd undertaking, largely because the notion that the results are indicative of the canon is a conceit. The top ten and Top 115 lists we compiled are indicative of nothing more than the consensus views of the 211 people who submitted lists, and even that is somewhat filtered (i.e., skewed) at points through the perspective of the poll’s editor (myself). Another thing to remember is that those who submitted lists prepared them with different motives. The question they responded to is, “What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?” A list of “the best” is different than “the most significant,” and both are distinct from “favorites.” Perhaps the best way to proceed is to acknowledge that most of what follows is presumptuous, and if readers want to reject it on that basis, my feeling is they are right to do so. However, I hope they consider the thoughts put forth at least worth considering to a degree.

A few observations about our list:

This project is in some ways a continuation of, and in others a response to, The Comics Journal’s ranked 1999 list of the 100 Best Comics. The Journal list was restricted to English-language material, and relied on opinions from the magazine’s editors and columnists (eight people altogether) rather than on a broader poll. You can see the Journal list here, and a discussion of the thinking behind it here. I’ll talk about some differences between the Journal’s list and ours in the points that follow.

The major newspaper strips are still seen as the most important comics works. We’re supposedly in the graphic-novel era. However, the top three vote getters–Peanuts, Krazy Kat, and Calvin and Hobbes–outpaced the number-four work (and by extension, the rest of the list) by the quite large margin of 14 votes. As far as the poll participants appear concerned, these three strips are the crown jewels of the comics medium. The importance of the great newspaper strips was further reinforced by Little Nemo in Slumberland’s sixth-place ranking, as well as by Pogo coming in eighth. When half the top ten is from a particular mode of comics, I think it’s safe to say the field considers that mode where the most important work has been done.

The two most highly regarded graphic novels are Watchmen and Maus. I haven’t come across anyone questioning Maus’s placement yet, but I’m incredulous that some would be surprised—even shocked—at Watchmen’s high ranking in the poll. When it comes to graphic novels, these two works have by far the largest readership constituency outside of the comics community. Maus has sold at least in the high hundred thousands, andWatchmen has sold in the millions. There is no reason for readers to feel they are slumming with Watchmen; the book’s inclusion in Time’s 100 Best Novels and Entertainment Weekly‘s 100 Best Reads lists are reasonable signs that it enjoys the broader culture’s respect. If the larger world holds the book in high regard, it makes sense that this view would be reflected in the comics world as well. Those taken aback by its placement generally strike me as those who have a prejudice against superhero material, or at least the work done in the genre over the last 40 years. I suppose they are like those who turn their noses up at Ian McEwan’s Atonement because of its similarities to category romance fiction, or at Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go because it is a science-fiction novel. Saying a certain work or genre isn’t to one’s taste is one thing; we all do it, and we’re all entitled to that opinion. Treating a work as inherently inferior because it comes from a particular genre is quite another. Watchmen is not just one of the most important graphic novels; it’s one of the most important contemporary novels, period. To act as though the situation is otherwise is at best myopic. I’m not for a moment saying anyone has to like Watchmen, but it should be acknowledged that the book is far bigger than any one person or group’s opinion of it.

The Fourth World will soon eclipse the reputation of Jack Kirby’s Marvel work, at least in comics circles. This is more of a prediction than an observation, but it has its foundation in the poll results. The Fantastic Four’s better showing in the poll was due to all of one-third of a vote. If just one more participant had voted for The Fourth World, it would have been the Kirby work that made the top ten. The Fourth World’s reputation has been increasing over the years, and I doubt it has peaked now. No slight intended against Andrew Farago, but posting The Fantastic Four piece so soon after the Kirby family’s loss in their lawsuit against Marvel was painful. A list in which The Fourth World outranked The Fantastic Four might have been a consolation of sorts. Well, maybe next time.

R. Crumb’s counterculture material is his most important contribution to comics. Noah Berlatsky has wondered if Crumb’s star is falling given the placements of his work in the poll. Noah has pointed to the fact that while Crumb’s Weirdo work made the top ten in The Comics Journal’s Best 100 a dozen years ago, nothing by him made the top ten this time out. I don’t agree with Noah’s speculation. When the Journal’s editors put together the magazine’s Best 100, it apparently didn’t occur to them to create a counterculture-era umbrella entry to cover his works of that period. If they had, I think it would have made their top ten. (And given the material’s ubiquity in the six of the eight contributor lists that were published, it should have.) Judging from those contributor lists and the Journal’s traditional idolatry of Crumb, the Weirdo material’s high placement didn’t reflect the work’s consensus status so much as it did the desire to get something—anything—by Crumb into the top ten. When it comes to Crumb, our poll results likely reflect two things. The first is that the consensus view of Crumb, while one of high esteem, is more measured than the Journal’s. The second is that we did a much better job of giving the counterculture material its due when interpreting the votes. The counterculture work is where Crumb had by far his biggest impact and influence, and I believe this poll’s rankings reflect that it is asserting its proper place in estimations of his career.

Dave Sim is indeed one of the best cartoonists North America has produced. I’m not a fan, and his gender and religious blarney sets my teeth on edge, but there’s no denying his achievements in Cerebus. He is one of the most technically accomplished cartoonists to ever work in the field, and few have managed, much less surpassed, his expansions of the form’s language. Sim did not make the Journal’s Best 100 list. This was despite the fact he and selections from Cerebus were mentioned on at least three and possibly four of the eight voters’ lists. It is hard not to see Sim’s exclusion from the final one as a deliberate snub. I’m glad to see him get a fairly high level of acknowledgement in this poll.

Yes, good English-language adventure comics have been published since 1970. The Journal’s Top 100 list reflected publisher Gary Groth’s view that virtually all adventure comics of the last 40 years (i.e., every one published since he turned 16) are beneath notice. Watchmen, The Fourth World, and V for Vendetta were the only contemporary adventure works acknowledged, and they were kicked to the bottom of the list. (A look at Groth’s personal Top 100 shows he didn’t vote for any of them. Click here.) I’ve already discussed the first two works, and I note that V for Vendetta made our list as well. However, there’s also Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, The Sandman, Bone, Daredevil: Born Again, The Invisibles, and over a dozen others that received listings in our Top 115. Ignoring these efforts while lionizing similar (and to many eyes less accomplished) material from before 1970 was an injustice, and I’m happy we were able to redress it.

The consensus view of The Hooded Utilitarian’s regular contributors both converges and diverges with the consensus of the field. Here are the top 13 vote-getters among this website’s contributing writers:

• 1. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz [8 votes]
• 2. Krazy Kat, George Herriman [5 votes]
• (tie) Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons [5 votes]
• 4. The Alec Stories, including The Fate of the Artist, Eddie Campbell [4 votes]
• (tie) From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell [4 votes]
• 6. The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez [3.5 votes]
• 7. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson [3 votes]
• (tie) A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, Moto Hagio [3 votes]
• (tie) The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al. [3 votes]
• (tie) Hi no Tori [Phoenix], Osamu Tezuka [3 votes]
• (tie) Die Hure H [W the Whore], Katrin de Vries & Anke Feuchtenberger [3 votes]
• (tie) Journal, Fabrice Neaud [3 votes]
• (tie) The Sandman, Neil Gaiman, et al. [3 votes]

On the basis of this, I’d say we agree with the rest of the field at least half the time.

There’s a lot more to be said about this poll, and a lot more to be said about the comics canon in the future. The canon is a synopsis at a given time of a never-ending dialogue, and lists like the one produced by our poll provide an enjoyable snapshot of where that dialogue stands. They also allow us an opportunity to sit back and take stock. I think Sight and Sound magazine is right to do this just once a decade with movies. The time between polls is neither too great nor too little. It allows people to see the shifts in the consensus view without the overall picture getting too expansive or narrow. And by reserving a special time for judgments, it implicitly puts the emphasis on criticism where it belongs, which is with discussion. Criticism isn’t about being right or wrong; it’s about helping people see work in new and more insightful ways. That can and should go on forever.

Best Comics Poll Index

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.

Ray Mescallado
Writer, Pleasure Principled; erstwhile columnist, The Comics Journal

Feiffer, Jules Feiffer

• The Donald Duck and Uncle $crooge Stories, Carl Barks
• Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel
• Feiffer, Jules Feiffer
• “Flies on the Ceiling,” Jaime Hernandez
  Counted as a vote for The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez
• From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• The Jughead Stories, Samm Schwartz
• 100 Bullets, Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso
• Partie de chasse [The Hunting Party], Pierre Christin & Enki Bilal
• “Short Story,” Roger Langridge & Andrew Langridge
• WRAB: Pirate Television, Matt Howarth

COMMENTS

My list hasn’t changed all that much from my TCJ Top 100 list many years ago. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.
______________________________________________
Jason Michelitch
Contributing Writer, Comics Alliance, The Hooded Utilitarian

Hark! A Vagrant, Kate Beaton

• The Alec Stories, Eddie Campbell
• Bone, Jeff Smith
• A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, Will Eisner
• The Fourth World Stories, Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer, et al.
• From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• Hark! A Vagrant, Kate Beaton (the webcomics, not the to-be-published collection)
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Love and Rockets, Gilbert Hernandez & Jaime Hernandez
  Counted as a 0.5 vote each for The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez, and The Palomar Stories, Gilbert Hernandez
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• Spider-Man, Stan Lee & Steve Ditko

COMMENTS

ON PICKING TEN: You’re bastards, the lot of you. Ten comics? I could pick ten movies. I could pick ten albums. I could even pick ten people to kill, somewhere in the world, just by pressing a button in this here box, and in return I’ll receive ten million dollars and a subscription to The New Yorker, and I’ll magically be imbued with the ability to find the cartoons funny. I could do all that. But ten comics? You might as well ask me to pick ten fingers and cut off the rest.

I don’t know what it is about comics—that they’re such a strangely personal and direct form of popular narrative entertainment, that the medium has developed in the most scattershot and confounding ways, that there’s such a diverse array of expression that I find it maddening to try and compare an issue of Batman to a Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strip to Evan Dorkin’s “Merv Griffin” single-pager to Frank Santoro’s Incanto mini-comic to Kyle Baker’s Why I Hate Saturn. Maybe it’s because, of all the art forms I love, I understand comics the least (which only makes me love them more).

Whatever it is, picking ten comics has been awfully hard. I think I botched the job. I ended up with what looks like an awfully safe, middlebrow list. But what am I to do? It feels right. It’s the closest I can get the weird alchemical mixture of personal enjoyment, historical importance, and artistic significance (all filtered through my own subjective point of view, of course). I had to kill a lot of darlings. I really, really wanted to include at least one totally stupid pick, ideally the 1992 64-page DC self-mocking Ambush Bug Nothing Special by Giffen, Fleming, and Gordon, which is full of nothing but deliberately dumb jokes about ’90s comics. But I just couldn’t fit it in. I also would have really liked to have a more diverse list—more women, more creators of color, some European comics, some manga—but apparently I’m a sexist, racist, nationalist thug when it comes to taste in comics. Who knew? But I feel okay enough about my list. I can at least come up with a decent defense of each entry.

Krazy Kat—An ur-text for so much of what makes comics great. Simple iconography against lavish backdrops, slammed together over and over in deranged conflict, at once completely personal and effortlessly universal.

Amazing Spider-Man—The best super-hero character, a neurotic adolescent dumped unceremoniously into a science-fiction adulthood, in which he has to learn how to balance his family, his passions, his job, and his conscience. Sweaty, twisted, frustrated muscles and awkward, terrified, bugged-out eyes. It stayed good after Ditko left, but what it gained in Romita’s ability to draw pretty girls, it lost in Ditko’s pure feverish tension.

The Fourth World Saga—For a certain type of reader, and I confess I’m one of them, you can’t have comics without Kirby. And this is Kirby’s apex: His most successful, uninhibited exploration of his relationship to heroics, gods, myths, and war. One of the attendants at the sprawling, awkward birth of super-hero comics three decades previous, Kirby in 1970 delivers the ultimate expression of the original super-hero form. Historical artistic markers almost never line up perfectly with actual chronology, and Kirby is no exception, but The Fourth World is in many ways the last burst of original creation in a genre already dedicating itself to nostalgia, self-reference, and self-reverence. Stan Lee may have been a smoother crafter of dialogue, but Kirby reveals himself to be the better writer, in that his dedication is to exploring ideas and feelings, rather than cleverly re-packaging adventure tropes. The haphazard and unfinished production of the saga serves as much to its benefit as its detriment—Kirby’s concerns were not with conclusions or structure, but rather with firing off his idea-cannons with frenetic speed, and exorcising his deep passion and rage in crackling, frighteningly powerful lines. The best range of Kirby’s art is on display here—the first parts inked by Vince Colletta, who, though he unforgivably deletes portions of Kirby’s layouts, provides a smooth, humanizing touch to faces and a fine, feathery line reminiscent of antiquity to those drawings he deemed worthy of inking; the second parts inked by Mike Royer, providing what most would say is the rawest, most “pure” embellishment of Kirby’s pencils ever printed. Kirby is a seismic psychological event, and the ripples of his impact can be seen throughout the history and geography of comics. The Fourth World is the epicenter.

A Contract with God—I’m a sucker for ambition, and for shots fired across the bow. Will Eisner consciously forced Western comics to change the way they look at themselves. I’m also a sucker for the drowning sumptuousness of Will Eisner’s rain, one page of which alone would be worth a spot on this list.

Maus—Maybe the biggest target of cries of “overrated,” I keep returning to Maus. Its core creative choice, the central visual metaphor, is deceptively simple, often slandered as “easy,” but the effects it achieves are monumental—the cartoon animals are instantly empathetic, but the non-human anonymity drains the work of the melodrama that chokes most other holocaust-based narratives, and the self-referential “comic bookiness” creates a dialogue among the reader, the work, and the medium, as well as a self-interrogating dialogue between the artist and the qualities of realism, honesty, and iconography that permeate the book.

Love and Rockets—Hands down, the best modern American comic. Innovative, energetic, beautiful, influential, complex, human, funny, moving—all the adjectives you normally throw at stuff nowhere near as transcendent as the work of Los Bros.

Alec—A relentless thinker about the form trying just as consciously as Eisner to muscle comics into new territory, wielding sketchy, “unfinished” panels in a dense and super-functional 9-panel grid, mining the raw viscera of his own life for romantic, half-drunk, observational fiction. Comics’ own On the Road, except the rambling hero eventually matures, settles, and becomes more bemused than besotted. I don’t love anyone’s comics more than I love Eddie Campbell’s.

Bone—I don’t know where Bone currently stands with critics—not sure if this is a safe pick or an odd one. But is there anything more perfect than the first chapter of Jeff Smith’s all-ages fantasy adventure? From the first panel of the three Bones lost in the desert, the rhythm never misses a beat. The pinging dialogue, the falling layer of snow, and of course, the stupid, stupid rat creatures. Maybe this is a sentimental choice, but it’s also the very first book I thought to put on this list, and I never even considered taking it off.

From Hell—Coming at comics, as I do, from the background of your typical American comics fan, Alan Moore is tremendously important to me. I think that his talent holds up when looking from outside that particular community, but there’s no way for me to be sure. So I trudge on, wowed by his genius, of which From Hell is the most focused, sustained, and successful example. Eddie Campbell often wished he was working on Moore’s other great graphic novel at the time, Big Numbers (still and likely forever unfinished), but his sooty, ink-stained touch is so perfectly suited for the setting and subject matter, and his realistic, homely characters so necessarily defusing of titillating spectacle, that I can’t imagine anyone imagining the book existing any other way.

Hark! A Vagrant—One important aspect of comics is the varied and scattered ways in which different audiences interact with them. Mini-comics traded at convention booths, newspaper comics, spot illustrations in magazines, Jack Chick tracts left in bathrooms, webcomics posted to someone’s LiveJournal…comics to me are so often not discrete works of art to approach one at a time, but a sea of snippets and glances of pages and panels. A single daily dose of a great comic strip can be as deeply rewarding as a thousand-page graphic novel. A photocopied handmade mini-comic can run circles around a professionally printed, digitally colored commercial comic book. Comics are everywhere, comics are huge, but comics are still very small and personal when they need to be. They’re an incredibly direct delivery system of individual expression. This entry could have been any one of a number of different comics that I have primarily interacted with in short and infrequent doses through non-traditional means, but I chose the one I did because no one makes me laugh harder than Kate Beaton.
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Eden Miller
Writer, Comicsgirl, Ignatz Awards coordinator, Small Press Expo

Why I Hate Saturn, Kyle Baker

• American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang
• Bone, Jeff Smith
• Cages, Dave McKean
• Elfquest, Wendy Pini & Richard Pini
• Nana, Ai Yazawa
• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
• Skim, Mariko Tamaki & Jillian Tamaki
• The Tick, Ben Edlund
• Why I Hate Saturn, Kyle Baker
• Zot!, Scott McCloud

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Gary Spencer Millidge
Cartoonist, Strangehaven

La Femme du magicien, Jerome Charyn & François Boucq

• Cages, Dave McKean
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard
• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• La Femme du magicien [The Magician’s Wife], Jerome Charyn & François Boucq
• From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• The Palomar Stories, Gilbert Hernandez
• The Spirit, Will Eisner

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Evan Minto
Editor-in-Chief, Ani-Gamers

Buddha, Osamu Tezuka

• Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo
• Black Jack, Osamu Tezuka
• Buddha, Osamu Tezuka
• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
• Pluto, Naoki Urasawa
• Solanin, Inio Asano
• One Piece, Eiichiro Oda
• Yûnagi no Machi, Sakura no Kuni [Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms], Fumiyo Kouno

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Wolfen Moondaughter
Contributing writer, Sequential Tart

Paradise Kiss, Ai Yazawa

• Courtney Crumrin, Ted Naifeh
• Deadpool, Joe Kelly & Ed McGuinness
• Elfquest, Wendy Pini and Richard Pini
• Journey Into Mystery, Kieren Gillen, Doug Braithwaite, and Ulises Arreola
• Mars, Fuyumi Soryo
• Paradise Kiss, Ai Yazawa
• Ranma ½, Rumiko Takahashi
• Real, Takehiko Inoue
• The X-Men Stories, Chris Claremont & Jim Lee
• The X-Men Stories, Scott Lobdell & Joe Madureira

______________________________________________
Pat Moriarity
Cartoonist, Big Mouth

Frank, Jim Woodring

• American Splendor, Harvey Pekar, et al.
• The Book of Genesis Illustrated, R. Crumb
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• The Caricatures, Basil Wolverton
• The EC Comics Stories, Wallace Wood
  Counted as a 0.333 vote each for The EC Comics Science-Fiction Stories, Al Feldstein & Wallace Wood, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando, et al., The EC Comics War Stories, Harvey Kurtzman & John Severin, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al., and MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
• The Editorial Cartoons, Edward Sorel
• The Far Side, Gary Larson
• The Frank Stories, Jim Woodring
• Hate!, Peter Bagge
  Counted as a vote for The Bradleys and the Buddy Bradley Stories
• Trots and Bonnie, Shary Flenniken

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Pedro Moura
Writer, Ler BD

Le Portrait, Edmond Baudoin

• The Alec Stories, Eddie Campbell
• O diário de K. [The Diary of K.], Filipe Abranches
• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• La Guerre d’ Alan [Alan’s War], Emmanuel Guibert
• “Here,”, Richard McGuire
• L’histoire de M. Vieux-Bois [The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck], Rodolphe Töpffer
  Counted as a vote for Works, Rodolphe Töpffer
• Krazy Kat, George Herriman
• Mort Cinder, Héctor Germán Oesterheld & Alberto Breccia
• Mûno no Hito [The Talentless Man], Yoshiharu Tsuge
• Le Portrait, Edmond Baudoin

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Todd Munson
Associate Professor of Asian Studies, Randolph-Macon College

American Splendor, Harvey Pekar, et al.

• American Splendor, Harvey Pekar, with R. Crumb, et al.
• Astro City, Kurt Busiek & Brent Anderson, with Alex Ross, et al.
• Doonesbury, Garry B. Trudeau
• Fables, Bill Willingham & Mark Buckingham, et al.
• Hi no Tori [Phoenix], Osamu Tezuka
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
• The Little Lulu Stories, John Stanley, with Irving Tripp
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• The Uncle $crooge Stories, Carl Barks
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

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Rachel Nabors
Cartoonist, Rachel the Great

Sailor Moon, Naoko Takeuchi

• Bishôjo Senshi Sêrâ Mûn [Sailor Moon], Naoko Takeuchi
• Bizenghast, M. Alice LeGrow
• Bleach, Tite Kubo
• The Boondocks, Aaron McGruder
• The Catwoman Stories, all creative personnel
• Gen 13, J. Scott Campbell, et al.
• Rachel the Great, Rachel Nabors
• Sky Doll, Alessandro Barbucci & Barbara Canepa
• W.I.T.C.H., Elisabetta Gonne & Alessandro Barbucci

COMMENTS

Sky Doll, Barbucci.

W.I.T.C.H, also Barbucci, but through Disney. This series showed that you can successfully sell graphic novels to girls. They are quite popular in Europe and all over the world. Why? Because Disney knows how to sell to this demographic, preteens without credit cards but with $5 allowances.

Rachel the Great, because I made it and I still get heartwarming “your comics changed my life” emails.

Bizengast, by M. Alice LeGrow, because I enjoyed reading it.

Bleach, by Tite Kubo, because he’s so damn good at drawing hot guys. Rawr. If only there were more Ulquiorra!

Gen 13, the parts done by J. Scott Campbell. The series went meh when he moved on, but it was my favorite comic as a pre-teen. My favorite character was Fairchild, the Amazonian redhead with smarts. (I wonder why?)

Catwoman, any incarnation. She’s just rawr no matter how you look at her or who is drawing her. She’s an anti-hero, and I loved every minute of her escapades growing up.

Sailor Moon, by Naoko Takeuchi introduced myself and a whole generation of girls to the idea that women could be heroines and that there were comics out there, in Japan, where women were as prolific authors and artists as men. Changed the face of comics.

The Boondocks.
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Mark Newgarden
Cartoonist, We All Die Alone; co-creator, Garbage Pail Kids

Hey, Look!, Harvey Kurtzman

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Eugenio Nittolo
Writer, La Carotte

Astérix the Gaul, René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo

• Astérix le gaulois [Astérix the Gaul], René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• Corto Maltese, Hugo Pratt
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
• La Peur du rouge [The Red Scare], Fred Neidhardt
• Pogo, Walt Kelly
• Polly and Her Pals, Cliff Sterrett
• Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, Guy Delisle
• Works, Ralf König

COMMENTS

Your idea—it’s very funny.

For Ralf König, I don’t know the English edition but I very much love Wie die Karnickel [Like Rabbits].
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Rick Norwood
Editor, Comics Revue

V for Vendetta, Alan Moore & David Lloyd

• 1. Prince Valiant, Hal Foster
• 2. The Donald Duck Stories, Carl Barks
• 3. The Uncle $crooge Stories, Don Rosa
• 4. Pogo, Walt Kelly
• 5. The Tarzan Newspaper Strips, Russ Manning
• 6. The Sandman, Neil Gaiman, et al.
• 7. The Cartoon History of the Universe, Larry Gonick
• 8. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• 9. Casey Ruggles, Warren Tufts
• 10. V for Vendetta, Alan Moore & David Lloyd

COMMENTS
It is hard, really hard, to limit my list to 10.

How are you going to count the votes? For example, suppose you have one vote for Watchmen and one vote for “comic books written by Alan Moore.” If you combine them, you give prolific creators an advantage. If you don’t, then prolific creators have an extreme disadvantage, because their vote is split among so many different titles. It might be best to list the ten best comic creators of all time instead of the top ten comics.

Another way to go would be this. Combine the votes of each creator to get a list of the top 100 creators, then next to each creator list just the title that got the most votes, and have a second round of voting.
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José-Luis Olivares
Cartoonist, End of Eros, The Cannibal

Uzumaki, Junji Ito

• Buddha, Osamu Tezuka
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• The Far Side, Gary Larson
• Gasoline Alley, Frank King
• Goodbye, Chunky Rice, Craig Thompson
• Hicksville, Dylan Horrocks
• It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Seth
• Skibber Bee Bye and Other Works, Ron Regé, Jr.
• Uzumaki, Junji Ito
• Works, Frans Masereel

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Tim O’Neil
Writer, The Hurting; contributing writer, PopMatters, The Comics Journal

Louis Riel, Chester Brown

• Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green
• Cerebus, Dave Sim & Gerhard
• The Donald Duck Stories, Carl Barks
• The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• Louis Riel, Chester Brown
• Love and Rockets, Gilbert Hernandez & Jaime Hernandez
  Counted as a 0.5 vote each for The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez, and The Palomar Stories, Gilbert Hernandez
• Maggots, Brian Chippendale
• Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff
• Thimble Theatre, starring Popeye, E. C. Segar
• The Weirdo Stories, R. Crumb

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Jim Ottaviani
Scriptwriter, Feynman, T-Minus: Race to the Moon

Spider-Man, Stan Lee & Steve Ditko

• American Flagg!, Howard Chaykin
• Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• Doonesbury, Garry B. Trudeau
• It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Seth
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• Prince Valiant, Hal Foster
• Spider-Man, Stan Lee & Steve Ditko
• Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

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Jason Overby
Cartoonist, Jessica, Exploding Head Man

Supermonster #7, Kevin Huizenga

• The American Splendor Stories, Harvey Pekar & R. Crumb
• David Boring, Daniel Clowes
• The Disgusting Room, Austin English
• “Helder” and “Showing Helder”, Chester Brown
• I Never Liked You, Chester Brown
• Jimbo in Paradise, Gary Panter
• King-Cat Comics and Stories, John Porcellino
• The Krazy Kat Sunday Color Strips, George Herriman
• “Sneaking Out”, Lynda Barry
  Counted as a vote for Ernie Pook’s Comeek and The RAW Stories, Lynda Barry
• Supermonster #7, Kevin Huizenga

COMMENTS

[About Supermonster #7] This was such a big one for me. It hit me pretty strongly at a time when I was really disillusioned with comics (what else is new). It was probably my introduction to mini-comics, crummy on the surface but secretly amazing. It’s a perfect Zen monologue where a guy is just walking around his neighborhood, taking in the random bits of data with all his senses. I bought the original art for the first page from Kevin years ago, and it’s the only piece of original art I own.
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Joshua Paddison
Assistant Professor of American Studies, Indiana University

L’Ascension du haut-mal [Epileptic], David B.

• L’Ascension du haut-mal [Epileptic], David B.
• Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green
• A Child’s Life and Other Stories, Phoebe Gloeckner
• I Never Liked You, Chester Brown
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
• Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• Nancy, Ernie Bushmiller
• Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• The Sketchbooks, R. Crumb

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Nick Patten
Cartoonist, Unreachable Beasts

Hellboy, Mike Mignola

• Black Jack, Osamu Tezuka
• Le Combat ordinaire [Ordinary Victories], Manu Larcenet
• Ed the Happy Clown, Chester Brown
• Fatal Faux-Pas, Samuel C. Gaskin
• Hellboy, Mike Mignola
• Isaac le pirate [Isaac the Pirate], Christophe Blain
• Moomin, Tove Jansson
• The Mourning Star, Kazimir Strzepek
• Poor Sailor, Sammy Harkham
• Tiempos Finales [End Times], Samuel Hiti

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Marco Pellitteri
Author, The Dragon and the Dazzle; contributing writer, The Comics Journal

El Eternauta, Héctor Germán Oesterheld & Francisco Solano López

• Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, with Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley
• Buddha, Osamu Tezuka
• Corto Maltese, Hugo Pratt
• El Eternauta, Héctor Germán Oesterheld & Francisco Solano López
• Fuochi [Fires], Lorenzo Mattotti
• Hadashi no Gen [Barefoot Gen], Keiji Nakazawa
• L’Incal, Alexandro Jodorowsky & Jean “Moebius” Giraud
• Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
• Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
• Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

COMMENTS

Here are my titles. I focused on general works (series, etc.) or specific books, not specific story arcs or particular stories of long series. I have followed these criteria: 1) content relevance; 2) aesthetic relevance; 3) linguistic relevance; 4) historical relevance; 5) popularity relevance; 6) geographical distribution—and tried to ponder over in my mind.
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Michael Pemberton
Professor of Writing and Linguistics, Georgia Southern University

The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby

• 1. The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.
• 2. Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
• 3. The Spirit, Will Eisner
• 4. The Uncle $crooge Stories, Carl Barks
• 5. Doonesbury, Garry B. Trudeau
• 6. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller, with Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley
• 7. Astérix le gaulois [Astérix the Gaul], René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo
• 8. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
• 9. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
• 10. Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud

COMMENTS

Thanks for the opportunity to participate in your survey (I think). You have caused me to do some teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling, and head-banging in trying to limit my selections to a mere 10. I’ve managed to narrow down my list by deciding to include comics work that I felt was (a) brilliantly written, (b) skillfully drawn, and (c) either culturally significant or that had a dramatic impact on the comics field.
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Kai Pfeiffer
Instructor, Kassel Art Academy; cartoonist, Realm; editor, Plaque

From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell

• L’Ascension du haut-mal [Epileptic], David B.
• Le Bar à Joe [Joe’s Bar], José Muñoz & Carlos Sampayo
• Bleu transparent [Clear Blue], Oji Suzuki
• Chance in Hell, Gilbert Hernandez
• Faire semblant, c’est mentir [Pretending Is Lying], Dominique Goblet
• From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• Le Garage hermétique [The Airtight Garage], Jean “Moebius” Giraud
• Jimbo, Gary Panter
• Lettres au maire de V. [Letters to the Mayor of V.], Alex Barbier
• Valentina, Guido Crepax