Happy New Year! Recently, after compiling a list of my favourite superhero comics some people asked for a list of great comics of a non-superhero variety. It's a new year. What better time to immerse yourselves in some great comic books. So here they are:
Peter Bagge
If you have a tolerance for, or in my case, memory of, living in urban, faux-cool squalor in the 1990s you’ll enjoy Bagge’s
Hate
books, the adventures of the amoral, libertarian, semi-hip Buddy Bradley and his scuzzy friends. Bagge’s style is expressionistic and blackly hilarious.
Alison Bechdel
Bechdel’s long-running newspaper strip
Dykes to Watch out For
is a bit like a warmer, kinder version of
Hate
featuring nice people (specifically, a group of LGBT friends). Her award-winning graphic memoir
Fun Home
about her relationship with her closeted father is a touching meditation on identity, family dynamics and grief.
Rutu Modan
Israeli artist Rutu Modan specialises in evocative, human stories about ordinary people in strange situations.
Exit Wounds
follows a young woman trying to track down her missing lover with the help of his son, in bomb-threatened Tel Aviv. In
The Property
a woman and her granddaughter go to Warsaw to reclaim an apartment taken from her family during the war.
Art Spiegelman
In
Maus
, Spiegelman makes his father’s account of surviving the concentration camps all the more visceral by depicting the Jews as mice and Germans as cats and frequently stepping beyond the frame to argue with his father and muse about the nature of memory. It’s incredibly powerful.
Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra and Fiona Staples
Vaughan and Guerra’s 10-book series
Y the Last Man
is a post-apocalyptic epic in which every mammal with a Y-chromosome has died – except for one man and his monkey. It’s thought-provoking, feminist and often funny. Vaughan is also the co-creator, with Fiona Staples, of the perfectly realised space opera/romance,
Saga
.
Daniel Clowes
Until plagiarised by troubled starling Shia La Beouf, Clowes worked beneath the radar, drawing darkly kitsch, troubling comics for his anthology comic,
Eightball
. His best recurring topic is the Lynchian oddity of reality and his best collections are
Ghost World
, about two bored teenage girls,
David Boring
, about a man with “boring” in his name and
Wilson
, about a self-obsessed bore. Ironically these comics are not at all boring.
Chris Ware
Stylistically, Ware ignores 50 years of comic book history in order to take up from where the beautifully rendered, early 20th-century newspaper strips of Winsor McKay and Frank King left off. Amid the stylistic innovations, his characters wallow in ennui, isolation and black humour. His best funny/sad comics include
Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid on Earth
and
Building Stories
, which rather novelly came in the form of a box filled with comics of different sizes and formats. Marjane Satrapi Chris Ware once said that because, he believed, memory is made up of still images (this sounds right to me) reading good comics is like being immersed in someone else’s memories. So memoirs work really well in the medium. Satrapi’s
Persepolis
matter- of- factly and movingly tells the story of revolutionary Iran from the perspective of her childhood self.
Harvey Pekar and various artists
Might you enjoy the autobiographical ramblings of a well-read grouch? Of course you might. Who doesn’t love the late Pekar’s
American Splendour
.
Jaime Hernandez
Co-creator of the
Love and Rockets
comic with his brother Gilbert, Hernandez has spent more than 30 years chronicling the lives of a group of LA-based young women/punks/rocket- ship-mechanics. Hernandez is a master at movingly depicting emotidonal energy and the passage of time in thoughtfully arranged comic-book panels. His most recent collection,
The Love Bunglers
, about long-separated lovers Maggie and Ray is devastating.
Joe Sacco
Comics are also a great medium for journalism. Sacco’s Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, The Fixer and Safe Area Gorazde or his impressive Great War tableau are all filled with beautifully observed, painstakingly researched detail.
Charles Burn
Burn’s stark body-horror/ coming of age story Black Hole will re-immerse you in the fear, isolation and tragedy of adolescence . . . if that’s something you might be into.
