Elevenses.
The meme is this: Steve Lieber wants you to list eleven comics works that libraries ought to shelve—and what Steve wants, Steve gets. Of course, being late to the party means you have to dig a little deeper: my own belovéd Spouse beat me to three of the choicest plums left untouched on the table, and can I pause for a moment to weep at the state of the world, when no one else has yet bothered to list Zot! and Stuck Rubber Baby and Hicksville?
The which done:
- Pickle. No, I’m not trying to ride the Hicksville bandwagon. You really do need the ten issues that make up Pickle (and most of Hicksville) to get a clear picture of what Hicksville was, and what happened to it on its way to somewhere else. Pickle was a delirious anthology comic that slowly but surely began to collapse on itself, as individual strips encompassed the characters of other strips, as you began to realize the whole thing was the work of one Dylan Horrocks, and as it finally accreted into the best comic about comics ever. Hicksville is a lovely book, and fully deserves its space on any short shelf, but it lost something when it was rendered down to one big story. (Then, it’s finished; Pickle—sadly—just stops. Of course, looming over both of them are the shadows of Island of Venus and Atlas...)
- Wendel All Together. Okay, I am trying to ride the Stuck Rubber Baby bandwagon on this one, but honestly, folks, if you’re going to point to the Great American Graphic Novel, the one that gets in the ring with prose and kicks up some serious dust, Baby is it. (Jim Ottaviani gets half a point for listing it with his also-rans.) Cruse’s ability to layer his narrative, moving deftly through time and memory, is unparalleled, and shows us all a toolbox crammed with goodies comics hasn’t used nearly often enough. So I’ll add Wendel All Together to my list: it’s a light-hearted sitcom, yes, but it’s a damn good one, and a slice of gay history to boot.
- Alec MacGarry, wherever you might find him. Okay, so it’s not a title; still, it can be hard to sort him out. These are the quasi-mostly-autobiographical comics Eddie Campbell has done about his alter-ego, Alec MacGarry, and if I’m unwilling to give up the form I know them in—the Acme and Eclipse “Complete” Alec—I’d better, since it’s a long ways out of print. So start yourself off with The King Canute Crowd, then move on to the gobsmacking brilliance of Grafitti Kitchen (it’s a third of the Three-Piece Suit), and finish up (or not) with How to Be an Artist, Campbell’s graphic novel about the rise and fall of the graphic novel.
- Elektra: Assassin. There’s Dark Knight; there’s Ronin; there’s Watchmen; there’s American Flagg. (Oh, hell, we could add Buck Godot to the list, if we were feeling silly.) You can keep ’em all; for my money, this is kick-ass take-no-prisoners hell-and-back superhero breakout of the mad old, bad old ’80s. Miller’s neo-pulp poetry, before it staggered off and collapsed into self-parody; Sienkiewicz’ eye-popping you-won’t-believe-he-got-away-with-it cartooning—and the astonishing charge of watching them dare each other to giddy new heights on almost every page. (Added timely bonus: the Reaganesque president is eerily similar to our current incumbent, and you won’t watch a Kerry-Edwards commercial the same way again after “Not Wind like a watch, but Wind—like the air…”)
- Flex Mentallo. Grant Morrison’s masterwork. Sad but true: everything he’s done since this four-issue miniseries has come close in one way or another to the mark he made, but none of it has surpassed this astonishing one-two punch of despair and hope that comes as close as anyone can to explaining why it is that superheroes wear their underwear on the outside. (It doesn’t hurt he was working with Frank Quitely, who fits him like a glove.) —The good news, of course, is he’s got plenty of time and opportunities to keep trying. (Newsflash: I’ve just discovered why the trade paperback is so hard to find: it was never published. Charles Atlas threatened to sue for trademark infringement. Jesus fucking wept.)
- Through the Habitrails. Oh, this one will be hard to find. Jeff Nicholson did these creepy short pieces for Taboo back in the day, and though it was clear they were coming together into a larger piece, a surreal horror story about slaving away the best hours of the best days of the best years of your life in a horrid, soulless cubicle farm, Taboo was irregular enough to make following it difficult, and folded before it could ever come to an end. Nicholson gathered the strips together into a single, self-published volume in 1994, and we were lucky enough to stumble over one in somebody’s half-off bin somewhere. (Maybe it was in St. Marks?) —But it’s your lucky day: Top Shelf picked up a batch of them to re-sell, and Nicholson might even have some copies of an earlier printing left.
- Abe: Wrong for All the Right Reasons. The quirkily simple philosophizin’ is going to come off as neohippy if you’re not in the right mood. Stick it out: it’ll slip some knives in when you’ve think you’ve got it sussed. Lovely humane minicomics, where the words and simple, scratchy cartooning blend until you can’t tell the one from the other, and you’re reading melancholic tone poems and silly superhero slacker stories and in the middle a gorgeously lonely travelogue through Finland that all somehow end up being about Abraham Rat, a delightfully poor stand-in for cartoonist Glenn Dakin. I keep coming back to it, so onto the list it goes.
- Same Difference. Derek Kirk Kim is a goddamn supernova rock star, and Same Difference deserves every award it’s won. It’s pretty much that simple.
- Cages. Oh, God, yes. It’s pretentious as all hell. It’s art about art. It’s got a Disaffected, Blocked Young Man, the Love of the Woman who Saves Him, the Cranky Old Man who Must Rediscover the Meaning of Life, a Cat, a Magical Negro, and Dottily Wise Homeless Folk. It’s also got some breathtaking cartooning: real people walk through these pages, and they somehow against all odds ground all these clichés and (yet) launch the whole thing into the air. I wish to high heaven Dave McKean would put away his book covers and his art installations and his computer animation and sit back down at the drafting table and draw—his next big work in comics would be better than this, and that would be something to see.
- Nausicäa of the Valley of Wind. There’s a reason all the kids these days doodle dumpy little Miyazaki critters in the margins of their sketchbooks when they aren’t thinking much of anything else. In Nausicäa, Miyazaki does for comics what he’s been doing for animation: reminds us all why we got into this mess in the first place, with a deceptively simple story full of wonder, set in a gorgeously detailed, lived-in world. The penciled artwork is beautiful, and the more European panel layouts will help those who think they’re allergic to manga. Oh, and the story will snap your heart like a twig.
- Bruno. It’s the best daily strip on the web. It’s one of the best daily strips being done, period. Eight years of Bruno’s life, bound up in eight essential volumes. Chris may get a little wordy at times, but let him; he’s earned it. The crazy-beautiful cross-hatching sets every stage with grace and witty verisimilitude, and the ups and downs of Bruno’s life are things you know in your bones. (Even the time when the circus camped out in the living room.) —Browse through the entire run online for a taste, and bookmark the main page for your future daily hits.
The crueler version of this game, of course, is easier to play: what’s on the short shelf in Kupe’s lighthouse, where the comics that ought to have been but never ended up are kept? Big Numbers, for sure. Starstruck, I’d add. THB, though that’s been rumbling lately. Beanworld, yes; oh, yes. Though much further down this path lies heartache and despair.
So, instead, a question: we’ve got all these Best American® collections that Houghton Mifflin puts out every year, with the Best American® Essays and the Best American® Sports Writing and the Best American® Short Stories and the Best American® Travel Writing and the Best American® Non-Required Reading and the like. Where the fuck are the Best American® Comics collections? I want a nice, classy anthology, where every year the best shorts are gathered together: someplace for Dan Clowes’ “Caricature” to rub shoulders with David Mazzuchelli’s “Discovering America,” say. Somebody get on that, would you?
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Well, there was the Fantagraphics "Best of the Decade" collection from a decade or two ago. And more recently, there's the McSweeney's sampler. If the McSweeney's book continues to do well, I wouldn't be surprised to see it made a regular thing.
Thanks Kip. You've always been such a great support. :)
Did anyone mention Groo, Kelvin Mace, Myth Adventures, or Dear Julia?
Kris Dresen gave the nod to Dear Julia, but no one has mentioned the others. Blogger Tangognat is compiling the lists here.