Meme: Influential Comics

Jenn at Reappropriate writes:

I tag anyone who reads this blog and has seen even a single episode of Justice League: Unlimited. Ha! That’d better be five people.

Okay, that was over a year ago, but this is the closest I’ve ever come to being “tagged,” so I figure I’d better go for it.

1. One comic book that changed your life.

Amazing Spiderman #229 and #230, “Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut,” written by Roger Stern, pencils by John Romita Jr., back in 1982.

After not being into comics for years, this comic turned me into a comics addict. The story — in which Spiderman’s pluckiness, determination and refusal to quit allows him to beat someone much larger and stronger — was sure to appeal to a wimpy, bullied kid like me.

Roger Stern is no Alan Moore, but as I recall the story was tightly plotted and pretty smart, for consisting of very little but a two-issue fight scene. Plus, one running gag — a psychic associate of Spiderman’s calling him at whatever phone he happened to be near — gave me uncontrollable giggle fits. (For instance, after Juggernaut collapses an office building on Spiderman, a phone rings in the wreckage, and a shellshocked office worker picks it up and says “uh — Mr. Spiderman, it’s for you.”)

Plus John Romita Jr’s art, while not as stylized as his later work, already displayed unusually fluid, graceful figure movement for drawing Spiderman, and a good sense of mass and size when drawing the huge villain. I’m not saying that you should put down Fun Home and read this instead, but if you happen to be a 14 year old superhero fan, this was a pretty good choice of comics to read.

2. One comic book you have read more than once.

There are thousands. But among the most recent is Ganges #1, by Kevin Huizenga, whose understated, calm cartooning thrills me like almost nothing else in comics today. From the above-linked review:

Ganges #1 asks the question, “Is it possible to intelligently examine domesticity in a comic book?” The five all new pieces provide the answer, and the answer is, “Yes.” All five focus on the quotidian reality of Kevin Huizenga’s graphic alter ego, Glenn Ganges… and his wife, Wendy. In each of these pieces, thoughts, concepts and stories are converted to images in Huizenga’s trademarked fashion, and combined with text and dialogue commentaries to create a dialectical rendering of the tension between subjectivity and objectivity and a series of various attempts — characterized by their youthful callowness and longing curiosity — at locating a harmonious balance between the two.

A common thread runs through all these stories and that is the concern with projecting one’s self — or at least one’s sense of self — through time. Glenn and, although to a lesser extent, Wendy are both haunted by time’s irrevocable march and struggle to come to terms with it. A vaguely Hinduistic view of time’s inherent cyclicality seems to be the source of some degree of solace for Glenn, and, on an extratextual level, to offer the reader a hint at the origin of his surname.

All of that is accurate, but there’s one more thing the reviewer should have mentioned, which is that it’s funny.

And I love Huizenga’s graceful cartoony drawings and his brilliant, playful page layouts. You can read a complete short story from Ganges, “Time Travelling,” on Huizenga’s website.

3. One comic book you would want on a desert island.

Jenn chose an Alan Moore comic, and I was initially tempted to choose a Moore comic too. If I had, I would have chosen From Hell. What’s tempting about Moore’s works — especially from his 80s and 90s period — is Moore’s combination of complicated, interlaced plots and his attention to even small details; I imagine I could reread From Hell a lot of times and still make new discoveries. But the truth is, From Hell, like all of Moore’s best works, is rather grim. If I’m stranded on a desert island, I want something that’s funny at least part of the time.

I was also tempted to choose Cerebus, because it’s very long, and because for the first 200 or so issues Dave Sim produced some of the best writing and cartooning I’ve ever seen in comics. (I don’t think any cartoonist has done more exploring of the possibilities of the page as a compositional unit while keeping storytelling as a primary goal.) Plus, he certainly can bring the funny, plus beautiful drawings. Plus, it’s really, really, really loooong, which is obviously important for my lonely decades on the desert island. But in later years Sim not only became a misogynistic nuuuuuutball, he lost his formerly perfect sense of story pacing. It would be depressing to have my one desert island book fizzle into bad writing and sexist bigotry in the final act.

So maybe Palomar, by Gilbert Hernandez? Hugely rereadable, lots of characters, lots of details, long page count, brilliant writing, there are some funny bits. But… Although he’s a great cartoonist, I don’t find Gilbert Hernandez to have a visually rich surface, and another thing I want out of my desert island comic book is something that’s appealing not only as a great comic book but also as a pretty surface to look at.

But then there’s Locas, by Gilbert’s brother Jamie, which I think contains everything I want: long length, lots of characters, excellent writing with funny bits, rereadable, and the surface could not be any prettier. So next time I’m on a plane that’s going down over the Pacific, I’ll try to have a copy of Locas in my carry-on.

4. One comic book that made you laugh

I’m currently reading a Little Dee collection by Chris Baldwin, and it’s been cracking me up pretty regularly. Although I think a lot of people would enjoy this (I’m kind of surprised that it didn’t become a nationwide success), I’d especially look to this as a gift for kids the right age to enjoy Garfield, but whose parents want them reading a strip that’s actually good rather than being utter crap. (Full disclosure: Chris is a friend of mine.)

5. One comic book that made you cry

Notes For A War Story by Gipi. Possibly the best comic I’ve read all year. Despite the title, it’s not what people usually think of as a war story; there are no battles, and the characters aren’t in the army. They’re three young men trying to find a way to get by in a region ripped apart by war. It’s a story more about how war interacts with class, friendship, and the hunger of young men for male role models. Plus, Gipi’s drawings are awesome.

There are very cheap copies available on Amazon.

6. One comic book you wish had been created.

From Wikipedia:

Big Numbers is an unfinished comic book series by Alan Moore (writer) and Bill Sienkiewicz (artist). Two issues, out of a planned 12, were published in 1990 by Moore’s short-lived imprint Mad Love. Moore described this series as a potential magnum opus.

In the two issues which were published the broad story is about the effect of a new US backed shopping centre development on an English town, based on Moore’s home town of Northampton. Moore tells the story from a number of perspectives using a range of disparate characters. Another level of understanding is through fractal geometry, chaos theory and the mathematical ideas of Benoît Mandelbrot. The series intended to show that patterns existing at the large scale (the effect of the town) would have existed at a micro scale (the effect on individual characters lives).

7. One comic book you wish had never been created.

Mothers and Daughters, by Dave Sim, and all the Cerebus volumes that followed it. Instead, I wish that another comic had been created; one by an alternative-universe Dave Sim who hadn’t gone insane and woman-hating and lost his writing abilities.

8. One comic book you are currently reading.

The Squirrel Mother, by Megan Kelso. I’m enjoying it; it’s not mind-blowingly great, but it’s well-done and heartfelt.

9. One comic book you have been meaning to read.

I’ve got at least 30 lined up on my “to be read” shelf. One of the ones I’m looking forward to is Gemma Bovery, by Posy Simmonds. I’m also eager to read the second collection of Walt and Skeezix by Frank King. It took me a while to really get into the first collection, but once I got into it I was utterly charmed.

10. Now tag five people!

Okay, I tag Myca (the other huge comic-book reader blogging on “Alas”) and, umn, I dunno. Whoever feels like being tagged, I guess.