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Miracleman by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, et al.
How does Miracleman end? It is a question that has haunted me for years, ever since I finished the final existing issue of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman's epic collaboration. It's the story of three real-life superheroes, each genetically enhanced by the government during WWII drug experiments. When one uses his powers to single-handedly destroy the world, the other two use theirs to rebuild it into a utopia, with themselves as rulers. The later, Gaiman-penned issues of Miracleman focus on individual lives inside this objectively perfect society. There are seeds of unrest, but only seeds — yet one has the impression that something is about to go horribly wrong. For a perfectionist, this is torture: given a glimpse at the perfect world we all struggle to achieve, knowing something is not quite right and then — what? What? How does it end? I'll probably never know (the Miracleman character has been tied up in a lawsuit for years), but I still love the series — maybe even more so for its non-ending, with all of the tantalizing possibilities frozen in time. — GW
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Zippy the Pinhead by Bill Griffith
Who needs drugs as long as there are Zippy the Pinhead anthologies? The hero
of Bill Griffith's long-running Mad-Libs-esque strip ambles through American
wastelands spouting pop-culture saturated non-sequiturs like "Thank God
miniature golf survives unscathed!" Baffled but game, he winds up in odd
sexual situations that he greets with good humor and surreally appropriate
remarks such as, "My pants just went to high school in the Carlsbad Caverns!" We
could all approach dating with a little more of Zippy's delirious
enthusiasm.
— AC
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Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai
My Japanophilia wasn't born of anime or video games. It started with this comic, a strange meeting of Charles Schultz and Akira Kurosawa that's as much a portrait of early-seventeenth-century Japan as it is high fantasy. Despite the fact that every character in Usagi Yojimbo is an anthropomorphic, Stan Sakai (who's been writing and drawing every issue himself since 1984) does an exhaustive amount of research to guarantee that every single corner of his Japan is an accurate historical representation. When Miyamoto Usagi, Sakai's ronin protagonist, stares across an open valley in the dead of winter, Sakai's penciling transports you to an austere and pure moment of storytelling. It isn't escapism. It's time travel. — JC |
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Fantastic Four Issues #1-#102 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Back in the mid '60s, The Fantastic Four was a monthly guarantee that you could pay ten cents for twenty-some-odd pages and witness the most batshit insane spectacles imaginable. Outside of religious text and Greek epics, Four was the only place where you could see a building-sized, purple-crowned man descending from the sky and threatening to eat the planet, and where the only people who could stop him were invisible or on fire. It was unbridled imagination. Whenever I stop and consider anything that's ever entertained our generation, I can see Lee and Kirby's touch all over it. — JC |
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Planetary by Warren Ellis
Put simply, Planetary is about the weight of our collective history and humanity realizing its potential. And it's about comics. Elijah Snow, like a select number of other unique individuals in Warren Ellis' world of Planetary, was born at midnight on January 1st, 1900. In 1999, he is part of a group that scours the world, documenting the strange and preserving it, an archaeologist of the twentieth century itself. There's a great deal more to say about the book itself, but it's one of the very few on this list that giving away even a hint would ruin the joy of reading it. — JC |
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