The Book of Jim by Jim Woodring (No. 71)

The Book of Jim (1993)

by Jim Woodring

REVIEW BY GIL ROTH:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

A distillation of Woodring's quixotic magazine series Jim (a self-described "autojournal" neglected at the time of its original four-issue run), The Book of Jim melds dream comics, automatic writing, and surreal illustrations into one unsettling package. The book is fascinating, both for its constituent parts and for the suggestiveness of their interrelationships. Indeed, The Book of Jim is one of those volumes which can be reread from a hundred different points of entry, in dizzying recursions - a real tail-swallowing experience. The comics, such as the harrowing What the Left Hand Did (with its unforgettable scene of torture as spiritual epiphany) and the cryptic Invisible Hinge (which hints at, yet defers, some profound revelation), join to form one hallucinatory dream-diary, punctuated by intervals of uncanny, lucid-dreamy prose, such as When the Lobster Whistles on the Hill. It all fits together like one of those blurred, unreconstructed dreams you try to grasp just after waking.

The Book of Jim lives up to its author's contention that true horror is "not only fun, but sacred". Woodring fearlessly plumbs his own unpredictable dream-life for material, without manicuring what he finds; the result weds beauty to terror. His drawings boast a hypnotically wavy-line and an unfailing graphic brilliance; dig those garden plots, those critters, those alarming, kaleidoscopic transformations. His line is matched by the fearlessness of his prose, eccentric, and precisely descriptive, which can transform an insect's dead shell into a "fuselage" or wring sheer terror out of an empty playground swing. Art and writing run together to give The Book of Jim the matter-of-factness and disarming spiritual heft of a really good nightmare. With this work, Woodring opened up new horizons in first-person cartooning, creating work at once frightening and profoundly affirmative.

ALAN MOORE:
Jim Woodring's stories manage, by some occult means, to be at once unsettlingly alien and intimately familiar. The effect is not unlike opening a new book to find the illustrated account of a dream you had when you were five and told no one about. Cryptic and haunting, Woodring's work evokes a sense of something important and forgotten. Easily the most hypnotic talent to enter the field in years.

FURTHER READING:

Jim Woodring Official Site

Jim Woodring at Fantagraphics Books

The Sketchbooks of Robert Crumb (No. 19)

The Sketchbooks of Robert Crumb 

(1964 to present)

REVIEW BY GARY GROTH:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Robert Crumb has maintained sketchbooks, which he has written and drawn continually, from the early '60s to present. Seven large, hardcover volumes have appeared from the German publisher 2001 printing sketches datings from 1967, with the most recent one (published November 1998) running up to 1996, representing 29 years and nearly 3,000 pages of facsimile reproduction. Fantagraphics Books (conflict of interest alert!) has published six R. Crumb Sketchbooks to date, which begin three years earlier than [publisher] 2001's (1964) and include more pages from the artist's sketchbooks in the years that 2001 has published. The US editions of the sketchbooks from 1964 to 2000 will comprise over 4,000 pages.

The very conception of a single, unified, organic (and ongoing) life's work, as this is, like Crumb's individual stories and his work generally, sui generis: it is not merely inconceivable that no other artist has felt the inner need to consistently draw in a sketchbook for over 35 years (and counting), but an immutable fact. Not only has no cartoonist done so but I am aware of no artist who ever has (Frida Kahlo's drawn diaries come the closest, but not very); in fact, these sketchbooks are, as a body of work, incomparable in their magnitude, scope and intensity, and there in lies their uniqueness and, in part, their value. (We may assume that other, invariably lesser, artists will follow Crumb's example in the future, of course).

Crumb then, has created an entirely new "genre", but how does one describe it? It is not autobiography in any recognisable or understood sense; it is not a systematic or linear iteration of important professional and personal details, there is none of the "objectivity" we associate with biography such as the customary citation of names, dates, places and so forth. It is, therefore, not so much a chronicle of a life than a chronicle of a life of perceptions, which is of considerably greater aesthetic interest.

What differentiates the sketchbooks from Crumb's finished comics work is that the wedding of perception and technique achieves a degree of purity that the considered and necessarily cohering choices of tonality, style, structure, etc, tend to dilute. It is, among other things, a raw insight into process: how are ideas formed, how are connections made, how is technique and craft honed, how is the ability to truly see cultivated? Art is always mediated by artifice and every artist, no matter how self-revealing or self-lacerating, wears a mask that separates himself from his work. The cumulative effect of these sketchbooks is to narrow the gap between the artist and his art, or, put another way, to create such an intimacy as to render the profound connection between art and humanity palpable.

It also stands as a monumental existential document. Crumb repeatedly expresses, through a variety of penetrating and coruscating visual metaphor, the central existential struggle: to live in the full light of consciousness with all the risk, pain, and suffering that entails.

One can practically become lost in the onrush of caricatures, impeccably rendered portraits, formal practice (such as when Crumb was learning to use a brush in the early '80s), intense self-scrutiny, excerpts from various authors, screeds, comic strips, roughs for strips that never appeared, a visual playfulness that one rarely sees in his comics after 1970, stunning displays of virtuoso draftsmanship, the occasional abstract or surreal vista, diary-like entries (such as one agonising over his relationship with his son Jessie), heart-breaking depictions of his daughter Sophie, worshipful drawings of his wife Aline, his sensual supple line and mastery of form, humour, seriousness, empathy, misanthropy, goofing off and self-flagellating anguish - in short, the full panoply of a life of perceptions rendered with consulate artistry.

ALAN MOORE:

(from an article in The Life & Times Of Robert Crumb)

Crumb's earliest work shows a youthful sense of delight and exuberance, a sense of glee to be working in the comic medium with access to all its varied icons and delights. The characters in the early pieces, however weird or macabre or ridiculous, seem to be purposefully two-dimensional comic characters... His grotesque pranks are told in the same way that any animated character's more innocuous japes would be presented, right down to the sense of a winking camaraderie with the reader in the final panels. In Crumb's piece, though, turning it into something dark and different, raising all sorts of new and unsettling questions about the nature of the form itself... But there was a gradual sense, at least as I saw it, of Crumb becoming impatient or weary with simply subverting the cartoon icons of his youth. It looked as if he felt the need to grow and was looking around for territory to grow into... In his work for Arcade, we see Crumb confidently striking out for new pastures with an assurance that shows in every line... I'd scarcely recovered from the hard, no-nonsense pessimism of Crumb's look at life in This Here Modern America when along came his powerful and affecting portrait of an early backwoods man, That's Life. This piece, which manages to chart the rise and fall of a whole section of the music industry while telling a powerful human story is, I think, one of the best things that Crumb has ever done. A sad and bitter indictment, it is nevertheless accomplished with a real human warmth... Take a look at his sketchbooks and see just how much he's capable of caring about a stack of firewood or the light on his wife's forehead or a corner of his backyard, and if that doesn't make you feel better about the world we live in, then get a friend to try holding a mirror under your nose.

FURTHER READING:

Fantagraphics Books: Crumb Sketchbooks 1964 to 1977

Taschen: Crumb Sketchbooks 1964 to 1982
Taschen: Crumb Sketchbooks 1983 to 2011

American Splendor #1-10 by Harvey Pekar & Others (No. 61)

American Splendor #1-10

by Harvey Pekar & Others

REVIEW BY JIM OTTAVIANI:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

There are almost no comics from the mid-1970s worth reading again out of any motivation other than nostalgia... and mighty few of those. In fact, many consider this period one of the medium's nadirs. Mainstream (ie superhero) comics were as bland a corporate hash as you can imagine. House styles dominated the art, and the stories were even more stale than the storytelling. By this time underground comics had passed their peak as well, and were as formulaic as the men-in-tights books. For the most part, they simply replaced obligatory fight scenes with obligatory sex and dope gags. As Lee Mars put it in Comic Book Rebels: "What a lot of the mainstream talent did when they were 'unleashed' was to do the same stories they had done before - only the girls didn't have clothes on. Wow - what a breakthrough!"

Enter Harvey Pekar with a real breakthrough. In 1976, his American Splendor brought unflinching realism into comics. He billed his book as coming "from off the streets of Cleveland" and that's the kind of stories readers got - no bombast in either tagline or narrative, no romancing of either sex or violence. Pekar combined the underground's do-it-yourself ethic with a slightly more mainstream approach in that he acknowledged he couldn't do it all. His strength is in dialogue and observation, not in art. So he employed some of comics' best talent (most notably R. Crumb) and led a move towards realism in comics storytelling that continues today.

His narrative range is broad; from the introspective and static in "The Harvey Pekar Name Story", "An Everyday Horror Story" and "I'll Be Forty-Three on Friday (How I'm Living Now)" to aggressive and manic in "American Splendor Assaults The Media" and "Violence". These stories typify the early issues of American Splendor and still ring true. Reading them once and then returning to them after a long absence, you'll realise how many small details have remained etched in memory and continue to resonate. Pekar's first ten issues are exceptional comics, and for good reason. They're honest, well rendered (both in words and pictures), and seminal.

ALAN MOORE:

(from the Fast Company Interview, 2011)

I’ve always considered Harvey a dear man and a great friend, as well as an amazing influence on me, and a whole generation of autobiographical graphic artists. He’s a pillar of the comics medium. Without him, the comics landscape would be an impoverished field... What I really admired about Harvey was, he was a resolutely blue collar artist, and one of only working class voices that I’d come across in comics with a level of political commitment, especially a left-wing one. I mean, this man had a spectacular meltdown on the Letterman show about a strike going on at the network that it was not publicizing. He never tried to rise above that class.

ROBERT CRUMB:

(from the introduction to American Splendor: Bob & Harv's Comics)

Hardly anything actually happens... Mostly it's just people talking, or Harvey by himself, panel after panel, haranguing the hapless reader. There's not much in the way of heroic struggle, the triumph of good over evil, resolution of conflict, people over coming great odds, stuff like that. It's kinda sorta more like real life... real life in late twentieth century Cleveland as it lurches along from one day to the next... And Harvey Pekar is their witness. He is one of them. He reports the truth of life in Cleveland as he sees it, hears it, feels it in his manic-depressive nervous system.

FURTHER READING:
TCJ Interview: Previously Unpublished Interview With Harvey Pekar (2019)
TCJ Blood & Thunder: Pekar vs Fiore (1990)
TCJ Review: Harvey Pekar's Cleveland (2012)

Covering The New Yorker: Adrian Tomine

Between the ages of 17 and 20, Adrian Tomine self-published 7 issues of his mini-comic Optic Nerve, which comprised of short stories displaying the first hints of the distinctive, realist style that he would go on to perfect. In 1994 Optic Nerve was subsequently published for 14 issues by Drawn & Quarterly and would be where his acclaimed graphic novels (Sleepwalk & Other Stories, Summer Blonde, Shortcomings and Killing & Dying) would be first serialised.

His Eisner Award winning book, The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Cartoonist, was published in 2020, which Alan Moore described as:

"In this heartfelt and beautifully crafted work, Adrian Tomine presents the most honest and insightful portrait you will ever see of an industry that I can no longer bear to be associated with."

Love Life

The New Yorker (30 November 2020)

by Adrian Tomine

The New Yorker:

Your work tends toward concision, yet a big part of the pleasure in this cover is the accumulation of details. Was that difficult to achieve?

Adrian Tomine:

For better or worse, I’ve developed a fairly specific, detailed illustration style, and there’s no real shorthand for a messy room. Once I realized that I would actually have to draw all the things that would telegraph that messiness, I got a little obsessive about cataloguing artifacts from daily pandemic life. I have a feeling that, years from now, I might look back at this cover and have a kind of P.T.S.D. reaction to something as insignificant as a bottle of hand sanitizer.

You have a distinctive palette of muted, neutral tones, yet you’ve still managed to highlight your subject against the background. How important is light in your compositions?

I’ve wasted an insane amount of time thinking about lighting in Zoom meetings, so it seemed fitting that it would be central to this image. I’d love to be one of those effortlessly beautiful people who can just open their laptop in a dark room and look terrific, but, instead, I’m often rearranging entire rooms, running extension cords to various lighting sources, and scheduling meetings based on when I can get natural window light. Also, I was looking at Edward Hopper as I was working on this, and light was probably the most consistent thread that ran through his work.

You recently published a book, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist,” which makes a cameo on this cover. The book was very well received. Did the praise help you with the next project, or paralyze you?

Everything paralyzes me, whether it’s praise or criticism. Somehow I always find a way to carry on and to keep making things, but there’s literally no reaction to my work that I can’t twist into something to obsess over.

In your book, and in your New Yorker covers, you seem to home in on painful moments to find the humor in them. Do you experience a eureka moment when you locate that contradiction?

I think that’s a good way of putting it. To be honest, I don’t know how someone could get through life without being able to bask in that contradiction. In my personal life, I’ve often felt very moved by that act of finding humor in pain. If someone can authentically pull that off and be really funny, that’s worth more than a hundred words of earnest consolation to me.

I know you and your wife have been confined at home with two young children—but what’s with the cat? Is that from life or from your imagination?

That’s my tribute to our cats, Dolly and Pepper. Dolly passed away, unfortunately, but it felt nice to immortalize her in this way. I’ve drawn every other member of our household on the cover at some point, so it seemed only fair. (For the record, we keep the litter box in a much more socially distanced location.)

Fourth Wall

The New Yorker (24 September 2018)

by Adrian Tomine

Sometimes a cover image will just appear in my mind, fully formed. In other cases, I’ll have the vaguest semblance of an idea but no sense of how to turn it into a cover. Those movie-set trailers are a good example of this. I’d drawn them in my sketchbook a long time ago, and I knew they were an ubiquitous, specific part of New York life, but I didn't have a story beyond that. Then, a few years ago, I decided to try my hand at screenwriting, and in a particular moment of frustration and despair this image popped into my mind. The apron on the back of the chair was a spur-of-the-moment addition while I was sketching, and I think that was the last piece I was looking for.

I think New York is one of those cities where, whatever your ambition is, you can look around and instantly see someone achieving that dream, often at a level that you never even knew was possible. That experience can be dispiriting, but also extremely inspiring, and that’s part of what I was trying to capture.

Upstate

The New Yorker (21 August 2017)

by Adrian Tomine

Spending time in nature is something I do solely for the happiness of my children, like going to puppet shows or listening to Katy Perry. I can wander around the city with my kids, potentially surrounded by psychopaths, and I’m completely at ease. But put us in some tall grass, and all my neurotic, protective instincts come out.

Recognition

The New Yorker (19 October 2015)

by Adrian Tomine

Where I live in Brooklyn, there’re always a lot of books being set out on the sidewalk, and there’re also a lot of authors walking around the neighborhood. Lifelong New Yorkers may take for granted the sight of people setting stuff on their steps to give away, but I still notice it. I’ve had the experience of seeing stacks of New Yorkers with my cover out on the street, though I haven’t seen my books put out - but then, I also don’t have a giant photo of myself on the back cover.

Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn

The New Yorker (31 August 2015)

by Adrian Tomine

I think it's kind of beautiful and hilarious to see people eating their organic kale and quinoa salads while gazing across the opaque, fetid water. It’s strange to see the recent proliferation of health-conscious and environmentally conscious restaurants and grocery stores, right next to the piles of scrap and rubble. I guess it proves that there's no part of the city that can't be revitalized, recontextualized, or ruined - depending on your point of view.

Memorial Plaza

The New Yorker (7-14 July 2014)

by Adrian Tomine

When I heard that the 9/11 memorial and museum were going to be the top tourist attractions in New York this summer, I first sketched only tourists going about their usual happy activities, with the memorial in the background. But when I got to the site, I instantly realized that there was a lot more to be captured - specifically, a much, much wider range of emotions and reactions, all unfolding in shockingly close proximity. I guess that’s the nature of any public space, but when you add in an element of such extreme grief and horror, the parameters shift.

From Hell by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell (No. 41)

From Hell (1989-1998)

by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell

REVIEW BY RAY MESCALLADO:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Never mind who Jack the Ripper really was, Alan Moore tells us: he's just a "super-position", a marker of possibilities. What Moore wants us to think about is this: how did the Whitechapel murders from a century ago define the course of the 20th Century? In From Hell, the fin-de-siecle that the Ripper terrorised extends to the fin-de-millenium we now inhabit. Revealing the McGuffin for what it is, Moore carefully chose the identity of his Ripper and the conspiracy that surrounds his actions. From there, the details of the actual murders are meticulously recreated and elaborated upon, illustrated in a compellingly researched and subtly dramatic style by Eddie Campbell.

From this fictionalised history blooms the dark historiography, as a Pynchonesque style of connectedness is drawn out from the murders to the major events and attitudes of the Twentieth Century. Specific sequences stand out for the potent narrative mastery of this vision. There's Chapter Four's tour of London, mapping a history of archetypal conflicts (patriarchy versus matriarchy, the Dionysian virus the Appollonian) on the monuments, cathedrals and obelisks of the city. Chapter Five's striking conception (literally) of Adolf Hitler, followed by a parallel narration of London life, high and low. Chapter Ten's hallucinatory dissection of both Marie Kelly and 20th Century anomie, followed by a similarly hypnotic hallucination marking the Ripper's death in Chapter Fourteen. These make plain that From Hell is a masterpiece because it's an audacious polemic, not despite it.

The text appendix accompanying each chapter established Moore's sources and intentions, often in as fascinating a manner as he does in the actual story. The second appendix, the comics-format Dance Of The Gull-Catchers, closed off the saga with a history of Ripperologists and Moore's own implication in a process which he claims "has never been about the murders, not the killer nor his victims. It's about us. About our minds and how they dance." Moore sums up his most accomplished, most ambitious work, in this confession. What he doesn't talk about - what's best left for readers to discover - is the passion and empathy he brings to his own dance, the elements that make From Hell his most accomplished work to date.

ALAN MOORE:
(from Correspondence From Hell with Dave Sim, 1997)
With From Hell, the seed idea was simply that of murder, any murder. It had occurred to me that murder is a human event at the absolute extreme of the human experience. It struck me that an in-depth exploration of the dynamics of a murder might therefore yield a more extreme and unprecedented kind of information. All that needed to be decided upon was which murder. Perhaps predictably, I never even considered the Whitechapel murders initially, simply because I figured they were worn out, drained of any real vitality or meaning by the century of investigation and publicity attached to them... It was only towards the end of 1988, with so much Ripper material surrounding me in the media on account of it being the centenary of the murders, that I began to understand that, firstly, there were still ways to approach the Whitechapel murders that might expose previously unexplored seams of meaning, and secondly that the Ripper story had all the elements that I was looking for. Set during fascinating and explosive times in a city rich with legend, history, and association, the case touched peripherally upon so many interesting people and institutions that it provided the precise kind of narrative landscape that I required. You see, to some extent the peripheries of murder, the myth, rumour, and folklore attached to a given case had always seemed more potentially fruitful and rewarding than a redundant study of the hard forensic facts at a murder's hub. This traditional approach to murder might tell us Whodunit (which is admittedly the most immediate of practical considerations), but it does not tell us what happened on any more than the most obvious and mechanical level. To find out anything truly significant, we must take the plunge into myth and meaning, and to me a case with the rich mythopoeic backwaters of the Whitechapel murders suddenly seemed like the perfect spot to go fishing...

FURTHER READING:

Alan Moore World

Eddie Campbell Dammit!

Top Shelf Publishing

Cartoonist Kayfabe: From Hell 1-4, From Hell 5-8, From Hell 9-14, From Hell Companion

MAD #1-24 edited by Harvey Kurtzman (No. 8)

MAD #1-24 (1952-1956)

edited by Harvey Kurtzman, with Wally Wood, Bill Elder, Jack Davis and others

REVIEW BY DARCY SULLIVAN:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Despite their very name, comics have contributed very little to America's comic legacy. Comic strips have introduced many of the most famous persona of American humour, from Charlie Brown to Zippy to Ziggy. But strip away the obscurities (including all alternative comics), the borrowings from other media and the juvenilia, and only one comic book emerges as a true influence on the country's comic consciousness: MAD.

MAD has been an American institution for more than 40 years. Even kids who skipped the Superman and Spider-Man phase snuck MAD to school, memorised the zany names given to characters from films (even films they'd never seen), compete to see who could most adeptly manipulate the back cover fold-in.

The MAD honoured here, however, prospered for just four years, from the comic's birth in 1952 until 1956, when its father, Harvey Kurtzman, left its publisher, William Gaines' EC Comics, in one of the classic creator's rights disputes in comics history. (Shades of Image: Kurtzman not only left MAD, he took his top artists with him and started his own humour magazines.)

Kurtzman possessed a fluid, rhythmic drawing style suited to physical humour. He was also a detail obsessed writer, who had rewritten the rule book on war comics on EC's Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. As Kurtzman saw it, he was a seeker of Truth.

Of course, a few bucks wouldn't hurt. Kurtzman wanted a book he could crank out faster than his heavily researched war comics. He proposed a humour magazine to Gaines. In its first incarnation MAD was a comic book about comic books (postmodernist alert!) - largely poking fun at the kinds of comics that kept EC afloat.

MAD quickly ran out of comic books to lampoon and began taking on other media, particularly film and advertising. And in a stroke that still seems revolutionary, Kurtzman persuaded Gaines to publish MAD in magazine format - thus sidestepping the then raging furor over comic books and giving Kurtzman the "status" book he sought (he'd been wooed by a major magazine of the day, Pageant).

Notoriously strict about artists following his breakdowns, Kurtzman is clearly MAD auteur. But the artists who drew it - especially Wally Wood, Bill Elder and Jack Davis - rose to the occasion, introducing a new freneticism to comic art. They squirted panels full of sight gags and non sequiturs, creating a dense style described as "chicken fat". That manic energy, along with Kurtzman's rapid-fire verbal riffing, made MAD's pages absolutely electric and immediate.

Critics have praised MAD so fulsomely that the magazines true historical impact has been distorted. Neither Kurtzman or MAD created American satire - but they did bring it to a younger audience. Kurtzman and company used humour as a crowbar to pry apart what things were and what they pretended to be. "Just as there was a treatment of reality in the war books," Kurtzman wrote in his comics history From Aargh! to Zap!, "there was a treatment of reality running through MAD; the satirist/parodist tries not just to entertain his audience but to remind it of what the real world is like."

Ultimately, though, Kurtzman and MAD's subsequent writers were part-time satirists and full-time funnymen. Like children, they would make fun of anything - left or right, young or old, good or bad - simply because it was there. Gaines would later argue that MAD had no morality, no statement beyond "Watch out - everybody is trying to screw you!" Satire was important to MAD, but its real metier was iconoclasm. It was a pie chucked at the nearest face visible.

And like the pie in the face, it was both anarchic and quaintly traditional. Kurtzman brought the Jewish inflections of Catskills comedy to comic books - what are MAD coinages like "potrzebie" and "veedlefetzer" if not put-on Yiddish? Kurtzman's joke constructions drew frequently and expertly from vaudeville comics. The balance between deconstructive cliche-busting and well-structured routines, between Swiftian wit and pure spitball silliness, helps account for Mad's sustained and wide-ranging popularity. For all its buzzing surface quality and apparent rudeness, MAD wasn't nasty - it had charm.

MAD's historical importance grew in the 1960s and 1970s, when it offered the pre-protest set their own connect-the-dots guide to social criticism. And many of MAD's most famous conventions - the movie parodies with Mort Drucker's deadly caricatures, the gonzo visual slapstick of Don Martin, the witty wordless rim-shots by Sergio Aragones and Antonio Prohias - post-date Kurtzman's reign as well. But these and other riches simply wouldn't exist without Kurtzman and his original collaborators, who created MAD's skewed, sarcastic, staccato style. Godfather of the undergrounds, influencer of modern film humour, infiltrator of virtually all media, Kurtzman's little "quickie book" stands not just as one of the greatest comic books ever, but as a true cultural phenomenon.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:

(from a tribute to Harvey Kurtzman in The Comics Journal #157, 1993)

The first time I encountered Harvey Kurtzman, I was around ten years old. The encounter took place between the covers of The Bedside MAD, a paperback collection; strange, American, the cover painting possibly by Kelly Freas, the edges of the pages dyed a bright, almost fluorescent yellow. To this day, it burns inside my head. The stories in that volume and the Kurtzman stories I discovered later brandished satire like a monkey-wrench: a wrench to throw against pop-culture's gears or else employed to wrench our perceptions just a quarter-twist towards the left, no icon left unturned. 

REVIEW BY DAN CLOWES:
Had he not existed, I'd be a dull, humorless lout working in a muffler shop somewhere, and so would practically everyone I know. I shudder to think how horrible the world would be today without that which Harvey Kurtzman begat!

REVIEW BY BILL GRIFFITH (ZIPPY THE PINHEAD)
MAD was a life raft in a place like Levittown, where all around you were the things that MAD was skewering and making fun of. MAD wasn't just a magazine to me. It was more like a way to escape. Like a sign, This Way Out. That had a tremendous effect on me.

FURTHER READING:

Harvey Kurtzman at Fantagraphics Books

TCJ: The Man Who Created MAD & Revolutionised Humour in America

The Atlantic: The Man Who Changed Humour In America Forever

V For Vendetta by Alan Moore & David Lloyd (No. 83)

V For Vendetta (1982-1983, 1988-1989)

by Alan Moore & David Lloyd

REVIEW BY RAY MESCALLADO:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

While best known for their elaborate structures and narrative gimmicks, what made Alan Moore's '80s work truly distinctive was the passion he brought to his stories. At his best, Moore wanted to give his readers a message that would matter in their own lives, something that would makes comics a transcendent experience. The gimmicks and motifs not only helped him carry across his message, it also provided a surface or irony and mastery meant to distract us from the earnestness of this ambition. So while Watchmen won all the attention for its fearful symmetries, I would argue that V For Vendetta is Moore's best mainstream work to date. Started in Warrior magazine in the early 1980s and completed for DC Comics at the end of the decade, V For Vendetta was the warning to his homeland about the cost of creeping fascism. By wrapping this message in a romantic notion of the masked adventurer, Moore set forth a re-evaluation of the superhero that was as relevant as it was bleakly realistic.

Set in a Britain turned fascist by a global nuclear war, the story focuses on V, a mysterious swashbuckling figure in a Guy Fawkes mask who performs unbelievable feats in the name of anarchy. Beyond the title character, the V motif takes on many forms throughout the story (including all the chapter titles), but is most memorable as a Zorro-like Anarchy symbol turned upside-down. Despite this gimmick and the strong genre trappings, V For Vendetta is more a series of character studies than anything else. V's acts of terrorism aren't as horrifying as the future Moore envisions, and artist David Lloyd provides the perfect visuals for a nation living in constant fear of the jackboot. The strong chiaroscuro of Lloyd's style creates a world shrouded in darkness, where figures could be sweepingly dramatic, matter-of-fact predatory, or mundanely desperate. And, as often he does in his best work, Moore goes to great lengths to explore the inner lives of secondary characters, to create as a whole a milieu as possible. Readers feel the desperation of life under fascism, even among the elite. And as with all great adventures, there's a seduction: not of V and Eve, the young woman he takes on as his protege, but Eve and anarchy itself, as we witness her heard earned freedom from self-induced tyranny.

Chapters range from the archly experimental ("Video" uses dialogue taken strictly from television) to the universally resonant (the heartfelt bravery of "Valerie") and there were missteps such as "This Vicious Cabaret" (which attempted comics as sheet music). What mattered, though, was the way Moore and Lloyd played upon the romance of the outlaw (especially one opposing a corrupt state) while being fully aware of the consequences such romanticism can have. In that manner, the infused the seductive nature of anarchy with an implicit warning of its own. The ending is both elegiac in its hope and realistic in its expectations: it concedes an important distinction between destroyers and creators and allows the resulting price to be paid nobly. And in that complex honesty, Moore's passions and abilities shine most vividly.

ALAN MOORE:
(from the introduction to the collected V For Vendetta)
I began V For Vendetta in the summer of 1981, during a working holiday upon the Isle of Wight.

My youngest daughter, Amber, was a few months old. I finished it in the late winter of 1988, after a gap in publishing of nearly five years from discontinuation of England’s Warrior magazine, its initial home. Amber is now seven. I don’t know why I mentioned that. It’s just one of those unremarkable facts that strike you suddenly, with unexpected force, so that you have to go and sit down.

Along with Marvelman (now Miracleman), V For Vendetta represents my first attempt at a continuing series, begun at the outset of my career. For this reason, amongst others, there are things that ring oddly in earlier episodes when judged in the light of the strip’s later development. I trust you’ll bear with us during any initial clumsiness, and share our opinion that it was for the best to show the early episodes unrevised, warts and all, rather than go back and eradicate all trace of youthful creative inexperience.

There is also a certain amount of political inexperience upon my part evident in these early episodes. Back in 1981 the term “nuclear winter” had not passed into common currency, and although my guess about climatic upheaval came pretty close to the eventual truth of the situation, the fact remains that the story to hand suggests that a nuclear war, even a limited one, might be survivable. To the best of my current knowledge, this is not the case. 

Naivete can also be detected in my supposition that it would take something as melodramatic as a near-miss nuclear conflict to nudge England toward fascism. Although in fairness to myself and David, there were no better or more accurate predictions of our country’s future available in comic form at that time. The simple fact that much of the historical background of the story proceeds from a predicted Conservative defeat in the 1982 General Election should tell you how reliable we were in our role as Cassandras.

It’s 1988 now. Margaret Thatcher is entering her third term of office and talking confidently of an unbroken Conservative leadership well into the next century. My youngest daughter is seven and the tabloid press are circulating the idea of concentration camps for persons with AIDS. The new riot police wear black visors, as do their horses, and their vans have rotating video cameras mounted on top. The government has expressed a desire to eradicate homosexuality, even as an abstract concept, and one can only speculate as to which minority will be the next legislated against. I’m thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It’s cold and it’s mean-spirited and I don’t like it here anymore. 

Goodnight England. Goodnight Home Services and V for Victory.

Hello the voice of Fate (London) and V For Vendetta.

~ Alan Moore, Northampton, March 1988

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (No.49)

Understanding Comics (1993)

by Scott McCloud

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

When the venerable Will Eisner (see entries #15 and #57) offered his insightful Comics & Sequential Art (1985), he addressed the student and the academic with a hard-won how-to of explanations and examples that focused on the mechanics of the vehicle. Eight years later, Scott McCloud used comics to explain comics and, in effect, slipped the reader behind the wheel of the powerful and stylish medium. He congenially chatted about the wholly unique properties and wonderful accessories possible even while continually revealing the dazzling scenery that panel-by-panel narrative provides.

Using the vernacular to explicate the vernacular was an audacious, yet ultimately self-validating technique. For matters both philosophically ambitious and precisely concrete, McCloud not only pointed but effectively demonstrated comics' ability to convey and captivate. His topic may have attracted the attention of the cartoon cognoscenti, but it was the comics format that provided the hook for the casual reader. In deference to both audiences, McCloud made his treatise incisive, inclusive, democratic, and accessible, opening up the investigation of mysteries to common sense, common speech and masterful comics. Even as he exposed the tricks of the magical medium, he magnified the artistry involved. As the discussion progressed, McCloud proved congenially yet intellectually rigorous, a cartooning cross between Will Rogers and Umberto Eco. 

While the book may turn down some roads there was no great need to travel, the real disappointment is that McCloud's ruminations have yet to be met - at least in print - with the analysis and vigour they deserve. Perhaps that's why he's self-propelled and pulling away: his next book projected Reinventing Comics, rethinking the "Invisible Art" he'd so freshly fleshed out and animated.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:

With Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics the dialogue on and about what comics are and, more importantly, what comics can be has begun. If you read, write, teach or draw comics; if you want to; or if you simply want to watch a master explainer at work, you must read this book.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:

Understanding Comics is quite simply the best analysis of the medium that I have ever encountered. With this book Scott McCloud has taken breathtaking leaps towards establishing a critical language that the comic art form can work with and build upon in the future. Lucid and accessible, it is an astonishing feat of perception. Highly recommended.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:

Cleverly disguised as an easy-to-read comic book, Scott McCloud’s simple looking tome deconstructs the secret language of comics while casually revealing secrets of Time, Space, Art and the Cosmos! The most intelligent comics I’ve seen in a long time. Bravo.

REVIEW BY WILL EISNER:

Bravo!! Understanding Comics is a landmark dissection and intellectual consideration of comics as a valid medium. Its employment of comic art as its vehicle is brilliant. Everyone... anyone interested in this literary form must read it. Every school teacher should have one.

FURTHER READING:

Scott McCloud Official Site

Cartoonist Kayfabe Review: Understanding Comics (2020)
Cartoonist Kayfabe Interview: Scott McCloud (2021)

The Spirit by Will Eisner (No. 15)

The Spirit (1940-1951)

by Will Eisner

REVIEW BY GREG CWIKLIK:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century!, The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

The Spirit was the seven-page lead-off in a syndicated comic book section which was distributed along with newspaper's regular Sunday funnies. It premiered in June 19940, and was written and drawn by Will Eisner who, at 22, was already a successful comics creator and entrepreneur. although the comic book section was dreamed up to capitalise on the runaway success of Superman, Eisner resisted pressure to make his character into a superhero. The Spirit had no special powers and his "costume" consisted of a blue suit with matching gloves and a mask so tiny it could be hidden by dark glasses. The Spirit was a private eye supposedly killed in a tussle with a mad scientist, but who survived to fight crime incognito, a la the Lone Ranger. The early strips are a bit primitive, and such gimmickry as the Spirit's flying car smacks of Eisner's previous comic book work, but they are imaginative and display Eisner's characteristic lightness of touch. Eisner was drafted in 1942 and when he returned after the war, it was with a new degree of maturity.

The backbone of The Spirit is its urban setting - the big city by day and night. Because of Eisner's penchant for odd perspectives, his city never seems static or grid-like: buildings, elevated train tracks, bridges, stairways, all sway and tilt at animated angles. Wether it's a lonely clock tower or a bustling neighbourhood teeming with life; a dank, smoke-filled hideout lit by a dangling light or a tenement hung with fire escapes and laundry, an unrivaled sense of mood emanates from The Spirit. Eisner was a master of lighting and atmospheric effects; characters are often obscured by shadow or mist; lit eerily from below or suddenly by a bolt of lightening. Much of the strips visual allure is owed to Eisner's pyrotechnics with a brush. Eisner's line work is clean, subtle, strongly nuanced and very lively. The shadows that help give form to his figures are liquid pools of black sharply edged by slivers of backlighting. Eisner was never a master of anatomy, but he certainly knew enough of it to make his figures believable, his slinky femmes fatales are some of the sexiest to grace the pages of any comic strip.

The individual plot lines are interesting, but rarely extraordinary in themselves. The real pleasure in reading The Spirit comes from its colourful characters and the way in which Eisner tells a story in visual terms. His sense of timing - whether for dramatic or comedic effect - is impeccable. The size and style of the lettering, balloons, and panels vary to suit the action. Even The Spirit's opening logo, which could be found spelled out on a billboard, on scraps of paper blowing in the wind, or most uniquely, by blocks of buildings, shows Eisner's inventiveness. The Spirit's relationship with crusty Commissioner Dolan and Ellen, the ever-hopeful love interest, may be the oldest of cliches, but Eisner pulls it off with such good humour that it seems, if not exactly fresh, at least amusing. Some of Eisner's best tales are often hung on the most whimsical framework Lorelei Rox hijacks trucks with her weird siren-song. Another story opens with an explosion at a bank and ends with a beautiful agent from Mars. Eisner's sense of style can be seen in the later tale: sandwiched between a dizzy aerial view of a dark alleyway and a dramatic shot of waves crashing against waterfront pilings is a panel of a stoic Spirit being swarmed over by bratty kids who pulled down his hat brim and tug at his pockets.

Eisner abandoned the strip in 1951. But its enduring appeal derives from Eisner's graphic sophistication and his mix of humour and drama, realism and fantasy.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:
(from the introduction to The Spirit Archives Vol 1, DC Comics)
I find it difficult to argue that Eisner is not the single person most responsible for giving comics their brains. I can think of no one who has explored the possibilities of this infant medium so tirelessly and rewardingly, nor anyone who has so successfully managed to evolve a working vocabulary for the parts and functions of the comic strip and the fascinating way in which it can all be fitted together... There is no one quite like Will Eisner. There never has been, and on my more pessimistic days I doubt there ever will be.

REVIEW BY SCOTT McCLOUD:
(from the introduction to the 2017 edition of Will Eisner's A Contract With God)
Even as a kid in high school nearly forty years after its original publication, I could tell how ridiculously far ahead of its time The Spirit had been. Parallel narratives, full-page compositions, noir shadow play, giant logos integrated into physical scenes, long pantomime sequences - the strip was a textbook demonstration of nearly everything comics could do, answering questions about the art form most cartoonists hadn’t even thought to ask yet. And the more I studied those pages, the more I came to understand that Eisner’s approach to comics storytelling had been the foundation upon which multiple generations of cartoonists had constructed their own dreams of adventure in the years and decades that followed.

READ THIS COMIC:
The Spirit has been reprinted in several formats from various publishers over the years. Kitchen Sink Press reprinted a complete run of the post-World War II Spirit stories in a standard comic-book format, which ran for 87 issues between October 1983 and January 1992, and are well worth tracking down.

FURTHER READING:

Will Eisner
The Eisner Awards

Palestine by Joe Sacco (No. 27)

Palestine (1993-1995)

by Joe Sacco

REVIEW BY CHRIS BRAYSHAW:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century!, The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Joe Sacco began Palestine following his first trips to the Middle East in the early 1990s, but his series' real success lies in how seamlessly it extends a long tradition of pictorial journalism rooted in the work of graphic artists like William Hogarth (Beer Street and Gin Lane) and Francisco Goya (The Disasters of War). In these works, like Sacco's own, a blackly satirical exegesis of history is inescapable from the artist's own position as a witness. Consequently, Palestine is not only journalism, but autobiography as well, and some of the series finer moments come courtesy of Sacco's cartoon persona, whose journalistic project almost inevitably distances him from the Palestinians and Israelis he meets. Still, for all his (grossly exaggerated) cowardice, bad faith, and lusting after European hostel girls, you wind up liking Sacco, and the single-mindedness with which he pursues his project, even when it exposes him to the withering contempt of his hosts.

Sacco draws like a dream, and Palestine's other great strength is the way its narrative flow smoothly shifts gears with Sacco's storyline. Straight forward six panel grids abruptly flower into double-page spreads of rundown townships, or collapse into hundreds of tiny panels chronicling a brutal interrogation in a solitary cell. Sacco's a great caricaturist, and Palestine's accomplished figure drawing recalls the expressionistic excess of artists like Otto Dix, George Grosz and Ralph Steadman.

Sacco's literary and artistic talents are, perhaps, most perfectly realised in the Zero Zero short, Christmas With Karadzic, but compared to anything else in the current marketplace, Palestine sets a standard for comics journalism almost impossible to supersede. 

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:
In Joe Sacco's Palestine, the autobiographical comic book reaches beyond everyday trivia to embrace the travel documentary. Utilizing a masterful array of visual devices and employing consummate draftsmanship, Sacco details life in the Occupied Territories with sensitivity, insight, and a fine eye for moral ambiguities. Highly recommended.

REVIEW BY EDDIE CAMPBELL:
The trouble with first hand personal-account comics is that the authors generally do not go to much trouble to make their lives interesting enough. Enter Joe Sacco, to whom the above does not apply. Some mighty serious journalism going on here.

READ THIS COMIC:

Palestine is available from Fantagraphics Books and finer comic shops near you.

FURTHER READING:
Eye Witness in Gaza (The Guardian, 2003)

Alec by Eddie Campbell (No. 51)

Alec (1981-2010)

by Eddie Campbell

REVIEW BY ROBERT BOYD:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Eddie Campbell started his curious autobiographical stories about Alec McGarry in 1981 and they continue to the present. He may have been the first cartoonist to illustrate the slacker lifestyle - Alec is an over-educated character working in a dead-end job and spending all his time drinking in pubs. But don't hold that against Campbell. These are great stories, majestic documents of small events. Campbell's unlabored approach to storytelling draws you in. Even when he writes about misery and despair, as in Graffiti Kitchen, there is always a deceptively diary-like feel to the work.

I say deceptive, because the stories have a structure. They exist in service to their characters - Alec, Danny Grey, Penny, Jane, Georgette etc - and these characters are given flesh the same way an oil painter uses glazes. Each new appearance or vignette adds a little more detail to the character until finally a full-fledged personality - complex and irreducible - emerges. The stories, such as they are, are almost invisible in this process. They inevitably describe the arc of a relationship - the rise and fall of Alec's friendships and love affairs with Danny, Penny, Jane and Georgette. But the means of describing these cycles is so discursive that one might not even see the big picture at first.

Campbell's drawing likewise seems exceedingly casual. The early Alec stories have zip-a-tone, so at least the reader knows Campbell went over them twice. But there is probably no artist who has ever used zip-a-tone in such an impressionistic way as Campbell. In Graffiti Kitchen he drops the zip and the work becomes pure handwriting. Each panel reads as if it were dashed off on a notepad as the events described were unfolding. The drawing has an expressive urgency (even though the story has a typically stately pace) that perfectly matches the heightened emotions depicted.

Alec continues to pop up - in the lighthearted Dance of Lifey Death and most recently in a story being serialised in Dee Dee. This is strong work, and will no doubt comfortably sit with the brilliant work Campbell has done before.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:
I like Eddie's stuff because it's Masculist fiction and it demonstrates that you don't have to be published by Virago books in order to have any heart, understanding or human sensitivity. Men feel things too. It just takes them longer. I like it because it doesn't confuse being realistic with being depressing and because it is written by someone who obviously finds being alive an endless source of novelty and conundrum. I like it because it fills me in on what would have happened to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady if they'd traded in the Lincoln for a Ford Transit and moved to Southend-On-Sea. On The Pier as opposed to On The Road.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:
Do you need me to tell you how good Eddie Campbell is? Or that Alec is probably the best book-length comic about art and wine and midlife crises and families and friends and wine and love and art and saying goodbye and terror there is?

READ THIS BOOK:

The collected Alec stories were finally published in one big book in 2010 by Top Shelf Publishing and available from a quality comic shop near you!

FURTHER READING:

Official Site: Eddie Campbell Dammit!

Interview: The Comics Journal #273 (January 2006)
Interview: The Comics Journal #145 (October 1991)

Maus by Art Spiegelman (No. 4)

Maus (Book I, 1986; Book II, 1991)

by Art Spiegelman

REVIEW BY GENE KANNENBURG:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century!, The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

It's almost too easy pick Art Spiegelman's Maus for this list - almost. After all, it won a Pulitzer Prize (1992) and received probably more journalistic and academic attention than any other comics work, or any cartoonist's oeuvre, for that matter. To speak of Maus' importance in American Comics has become cliche. The book's themes - the Holocaust, the generation gap, the more general burdens of the past - brought the book attention, in part, because it so little looked "like a comic book" that reviewers were caught off-guard. It's central metaphor - representing Jews as mice and Nazis as cats - was equally striking; was this an unforgivable breach of decorum or a skilfully wielded narrative and thematic device? Observations such as these prefaced most of the book's initial reviews, and they continue to inform analysis of the book today. In this case, believe the hype: Maus fully deserves the attention and praise it has received.

One of Maus' strengths lies in how (deceptively) easy it is to read. The narrative (or narratives - more on that in a second) comes across almost effortlessly. The stylistically spare but highly expressive drawings accompany text which drives the narrative; there are few wordless panels to be found. Indeed, many people who are intimidated by the comics form itself find remarkably little difficulty in following the story, owing to the book's clear, carefully presented storytelling - a seemingly radical departure from Spiegelman's large body of experimental  "comics about comics". The important observation here, however, is that Spiegelman wields his bag of formal narrative tricks as much as ever, although here in a far more sophisticated, less flashy fashion. It's only with concerted effort that you begin to notice just how Spiegelman has permeated almost every page with innovative layouts, sophisticated temporal transition, and artful panel compositions. In other words, the first time you read Maus, you get caught up in the book's story; on subsequent readings, however, you can get equally caught up in exploring the book's storytelling.

Narratively, the book is structured in a series of temporal layers. At the core lies the story of how Art's parents (his mother, Anja and, particularly, his father, Vladek) survive the Holocaust. Actually, as the book often stresses, it's not really a story of how they survived; pinning blame or reason on a story such as this is almost impossible. Rather, it's a story which explains that they survived and how these experiences continued to affect not only their own lives but the lives of everyone around them, especially their son Art. The second story-layer functions as the "present" in Book 1; in this story, Art reacquaints himself with Vladek (and Vladek's second wife Male, herself a survivor) almost solely for the purposes off recording his father's story in order to create Maus. An in-between state is presented by the inclusion of Spiegelman's Prisoner on the Hell Planet (1973), his memoir of Anja's suicide, rendered in a highly expressionistic style. Maus II's chapter entitled Auschwitz (Time Flies) adds an additional layer, which takes place after the publication of Maus I and presents Spiegelman attempting to deal with the fame which that book has brought him - and the problems such fame presents, both personally and artistically.

It is this combination of times and stories which lends Maus much of its richness and reward. By presenting so many juxtapositions of past and present, Spiegelman can explore questions of witness, guilt, dependance and obligation both verbally and visually. Conversations between Vladek and Artie segue to narrated history and back again, often on the same page; we can see the influence of the past on the present. In Maus II especially, we witness Spiegelman's ambivalence about the book's (and his own) success, from the page layout in Auschwitz (Time Flies) which creates the impression that Art's pipe smoke doubles as exhaust from a crematorium to the back cover illustration, which melds the stripes of Vladek's camp uniform with the book's UPC code. These temporal and thematic balances come about naturally, almost organically as the overall story progresses - a testament to the power of the comics form to present narrative nuance and depth.

Of course, the cat-and-mouse metaphor itself presents abundant food for thought - while it does effectively convey the impression of Nazis as hunters and Jews as prey, might it not also condone the idea that there are indeed separate races of people? But throughout the book Spiegelman acknowledges this tension, exploring his metaphor both through language and visual representations in ways far too numerous to delineate in this brief essay; suffice to say that this animal conceit serves, paradoxically, as a powerful, ever-constant reminder in the book about difficulties of inter-personal relationships.

One of the marks of good literature (in comics or prose or what-have-you) is that work demands and rewards careful re-reading. Maus deserves its acclaim as one of the most significant comics of the century and as an important literary work of distinction.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:

(from a review in Escape #10, 1986)

Since discovering his work in the mid 70's, I have been convinced that Art Spiegelman is perhaps the single most important comic creator working within the field and in my opinion Maus represents his most accomplished work to date... Intensely subjective, it manages to encompass subjects as sensitive and diverse as the holocaust on one hand and the yawning emotional gulf between parents and children on the other, all in a fashion that is at once revealing, moving and innovatory. Maus surely marks one of the high points of the comic medium to date. It is perhaps the first genuine graphic novel in recent times, and as such its significance cannot be overstated. Please read it.

READ THIS BOOK:

Maus is available from all good book stores and your local comics shop. 

FURTHER READING:

Meta Maus by Art Spiegelman (2011)

Art Spiegelman: Conversations (2007)

Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons (No. 91)

Watchmen (1986-1987)

by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

REVIEW BY RICH KREINER:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
In narrowed circles, Watchmen will be dismissed for merely being the fare-the-well vision of superheroes. True, the 1986 tale is indebted to genre conventions, but it additionally refurbishes devices from science fiction and the mystery novel, specifically the "murder at the club" sub-species. Here, however, the cast of indelibly delineated members just happen to wear masks. With this, the psychological implications of dressed-up heroism are acknowledged, examined, and then folded into richer, more complex patterns of human behaviour than covered in any crime fighter's handbook.

In fact, Watchmen as a whole represented a richer, more complex, and more ambitious narrative infrastructure than serial comics had seen before. Writer Alan Moore consciously fabricated a fastidious, densely layered, and unfailingly smart dramatic milieu. A chilling realism, but one step removed from normalcy, shapes integrated innovations from the momentous (Nixon's fourth term) to the incidental (the necessitated collateral drugs for same). Arch dialogue, aphorism, witticisms, and good jokes pepper a prose that spoke in tongues to multiple purposes and sustained a level of daunting and unprecedented word-smithing.

Dave Gibbons gave the absorbing clash of familiar and alien a reassuring coherence even while embedding the graphic tie-rods and visual lief motifs. Consciously operating within a strict comics grid, his painstaking and efficacious renderings exemplified the S&M adage that with discipline comes freedom. The series' distinctive presentation - of covers, titles, quotes, text addenda - made a strong, unified thematic statement that stood apart from commercial product.

Watchmen remains dazzling, even glaringly brilliant, so much so that it is impossible to gather it all in one reading. (Follow the sugar cubes! Construct the urban intersection at the cross-hairs! How early can you deduce, with absolute certainty, Rorschach's identity? Watch for visual conceits like the blood-splattered smiley-face that broaden into suggestive geometries the circle slashed by line segment, the circle within circles.) Repeated readings reveal how uniquely it shines.

ALAN MOORE:
(from Prisoners Of Gravity, 1991)
I think that I'd have to echo what David Bowie said about his influence, y'know, this is the face that launched a thousand pretensions. At the time I hoped that Watchmen might show up a lot of the essential silliness and redundancy of the superhero genre. It wasn't meant as a revitalization of the superhero, it was meant as a tombstone for the superhero, at least in my terms. I couldn't see any point in doing superheroes, from my point of view, after Watchmen. Unfortunately everybody else could, and there have been an awful lot of bad Watchmen clones, or not just specifically Watchmen clones, but this would extend to Dark Knight as well, people who were looking at those faintly grim and post-modern superhero comics of the mid '80s, and instead of moving on from there, have just recycled them again and again and again for the last six years. It's almost like, you know, post-modernism by numbers. You make a few references to William Burroughs, you make a few references to some currently popular band like R.E.M. that'll impress your young readers with how hip you are, um, you throw in some garbled sort of psych-, sub-psychedelic philosophy, um, and you've got a modern comic. It doesn't matter whether it has any substance, it doesn't matter whether it has any direction, but it hits enough of the right buttons so that people will recognise this as something modern and experimental and daring, and of course it is not in the least bit experimental or daring. To me, the people who have taken chances are not in the mainstream... The people who've taken the chances are the people like Chester Brown, the Hernandez Brothers, Peter Bagge, Julie Doucet, all of those people. They are not getting big royalties for this summer's giant Batman crossover, but they are doing the work that is dangerously dangerous and radical and innovative. They're the ones who deserve the credit.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:
Moore's writing is remarkable. He catches the rhythms of speech so naturally, presents his world so seamlessly, that the whole seems effortless… Gibbon's art has never been better. Each panel a semiotician's heaven… undoubtedly the most ambitious work of science fiction since Gene Wolfe's Book Of The Sun, and the most ambitious and, in my opinion, most successful graphic novel ever.

REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #180, 1995)
For better and for worse, Alan Moore is very interested in structures, and that kind of structuring is what made Watchmen stand apart from other books. It's not the dystopic vision, it's not the Twilight Zone ending, it's the fact that there's something formally at work there that you're only peripherally aware of, as you're reading through this thing, that gives weight and authority to what's being told.

FURTHER READING:
Alan Moore World
Watchmen at Wikipedia