The Best Thing Ever?

I have been reading Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's Black Dossier, the third part -- but not the third volume, as that's not due until next year -- of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

I don't really know what to think. I've read it three times now, and I still can't figure out if it's mindbogglingly brilliant or just a self-indulgently clever piece of showmanship. Still, even if it's the latter it's impressive. I'm pretty sure that there are precious few people out there, after all, that could pull together -- and this is just listing the references I got on my first reading, without looking up Jeff Nevin's annotations -- into one coherent world such a list as this:

1984, Coronation Street, James Bond, Dan Dare, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Gulliver’s Travels, The Prisoner, The Great Dictator, Animal Farm, The Third Man, The Man in the White Suit, Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius and Elric novels, Dracula, Fu Manchu, the Lovecraft mythos, Robert E. Howard’s Conan, The Faerie Queen, Dr Faustus, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Orlando, Seven Against Thebes, 'Ozymandias', She and King Solomon’s Mines, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Up Pompeii, The Once and Future King, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Fanny Hill, Dr Syn, The Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick, Blackadder Goes Forth, Jeeves and Wooster, The Great Gatsby, W.E. Johns’s Biggles stories, This Island Earth, Slaughterhouse Five, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Martian Chronicles, The Day of the Triffids, Moll Flanders, Tannhäuser, John le Carré’s George Smiley, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Invisible Man, The Avengers, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Frank Richards's stories of Billy Bunter and the Famous Five, The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Sooty, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, Muffin the Mule, Five Children and It, Ben Hur, The Time Machine, The Water Babies, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes oevre, C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower, The War of the Worlds, Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books, Noddy and Big Ears, Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Colonel Blimp, Sunset Boulevard, Fireball XL5, St Trinians, Thunderbirds, Roy of the Rovers, Billy the Fish, The Little Prince, Pooh Bear, Goofy, Mary Poppins, Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair novels, The King of the Rocketmen, Toad of Toad Hall, Zorro, The Lone Ranger, Captain Marvel, Babar…

It's good going, really. The first four of those you'll get from just the first two pages of the story, if you're paying attention. It's a hell of an achievement, even if it is too clever by half.

I'm not sure it's fair to call it 'too clever by half', though. Sure, I doubt anyone else could have done what the creators of this have done, but that doesn't necessarily mean they just did this because they could. There's a lot to say, so I reckon I'd better make a start.

Moore on this tomorrow, so.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

Or as NMRBoy chastised me for not asking a few weeks ago: 'Who will watch the Watchmen?'

I worry about the coming Watchmen movie. You've probably guessed. Having loved the book since I was fifteen, I've far too much invested in it to do otherwise, and when the film finally comes out I'm bound to be anything but neutral in my criticism of it. I'll try to judge it on its own merits, but there's no way I'll manage that.

I already have doubts about the cast. Looking at them on IMDB, sure, they all look fine, but they also seem rather young for the parts they'll be playing, at least during the central narrative, if not in the book's many flashbacks. That might sound like quibbling, but since Dan Dreiberg's story, for example, has more than a whiff of 'mid-life crisis' about it, it's important that the actor playing him looks his age.

Still, I reckon that the movie's success or otherwise won't depend -- in the main -- upon the cast. This one's going to stand or fall based on storytelling, on the script and how that script is realised.

It probably won't surprise you, then, that I've been more than a little intrigued by the publication on the official Watchmen blog of four shots of the film's New York set. There's no doubt that they're encouraging, especially in how they seem to follow Henry James's observation that 'a good ghost-story [...] must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life'. Watchmen is no ghost story, but the principle holds: if we are unable to accept the ordinary, we shall certainly prove unable to accept the extraordinary.

Alan Moore has said in interviews that Dave Gibbons's training as a building surveyor brilliantly equipped him for making the world of Watchmen seem utterly believable. If you read the book with care you can't help but be struck by the detail, the consistency, and the sheer reality of the world Gibbons depicts -- and that's without getting into the breathtaking symbolism in detail and composition that marks so much of the book's imagery.

Well, it's reassuring then that its director Zack Snyder remarks on the film's blog that one of the things he loves about the book is its 'incredible attention to detail', and to judge by the photos he's posted, he's doing a hell of a job at bringing that level to detail to the screen.

Look at the shot of Bernie's news-stand, located in the book at the junction of 40th Street and 7th Avenue, and apparently shifted here onto 42nd Street, just outside Grand Central Station. This is one of the book's pivotal locations for all sorts of reasons, none of which I'll go into here for reasons of space and not wishing to spoil the book for you.

If you're interested, this guy has done a remarkable job of squinting at the shots and scouring through the book in order to comment on them. He picks up on geographical compression that'll almost certainly make this junction even more central to the film than it is to the book, speculates a little on how the film's climax shall almost certainly differ from that in the book, and observes -- and this is significant -- that the film looks set to disregard or downplay Moore's speculations on how different our world would be if there really were superheroes.

I suppose if you have to leave stuff out, which is inevitable if Watchmen is to be filmed as a movie rather than a mini-series, then the technological advances that underpin the texture of Watchmen's 1985 are an obvious casualty -- they'd demand too much exposition for too little payback. But I can't help wondering at what point such sacrifices should stop.

Terry Gilliam, who wanted for years to film Watchmen, has pointed out just how ordinary it becomes once everything that makes it special is omitted. 'It's really dense,' he says in Dark Knights and Holy Fools, 'and when you try to reduce it down to a couple hours it's just like straight comic book heroes again, and it doesn't have a real meaning. All the characters needed time, and I just felt we weren't able to give them the time.'

I'm hoping that David Hayter and Zack Snyder can find a way.

Snakes and Splinters

As you'll have probably noticed, if you've not just arrived, I'm a huge fan of Alan Moore's work. If you've not heard of the bearded sage of Northampton, you could do worse than watch this fine tribute which begins as follows:

'Alan Moore is a writer and magician from Northampton. He's a stranger to hairdressers, and worships his very own god in his very own way, blurring the lines between religious belief, magic, and the power of the creative imagination. If you film him from strange angles, you can make him look very sinister.'

As NMRBoy confirmed to me the other day, yes, that opening passage is spoken by Stewart Lee, specifically from his 'Don't Get Me Started' episode about religion. While I'm afraid Moore's own beliefs rather baffle me - they have the virtues of creativity and tolerance and the failing of, well, being patently barmy - he makes some good points about others' beliefs, notably about what he refers to as 'nineteen thirties tent-show revivalism'.

The show in general is worth watching, because even if Lee doesn't quite hit the mark with regard to the rightness of religious belief and practice, he's far sharper on how it can go wrong: 'at their worst, religions have been used to excuse the most vicious aspects of human nature, legitimising persecution, genocide, slavery, and war. When religions embody immorality and irrationality they must be open to criticism.'

That's the kind of claim that tends to inspire Pavlovian reactions - nods of assent from militant atheists, snorts of derision from aggrieved believers, and smug shrugs from those all too willing to point the finger at followers of faiths other than their own. It deserves a bit more thought than that.

For starters, Lee isn't claiming that religion poisons everything, or that it's the cause of much of the world's evil, as the likes of Christopher Hitchens maintain; rather, Lee attributes the evil to human nature itself. His point is that religion can provide a pretext or a veneer of legitimacy for how that evil plays out. He never says it's the only thing that does this.

For all that, though, it is painfully true that religion has all too often legitimised all manner of abominations, and it's worth learning exactly what sort of horrors have been committed in the name of God. We shouldn't hide from this. The very earliest Christian document we have exhorts us to test everything, after all, and to hold to what is true. It doesn't ask us to shut our eyes. As I've said before, it's innocence that we're called to, not ignorance.

Of course, we can easily finish our studies with our smugness intact. Genocide? Slavery? Human sacrifice? Holy war? The inquistion? Surely not I, Lord? Hopefully not, but I suspect we treat people like things in more prosaic ways far more often than we realise. As Chesterton's most famous creation observed, the only real spiritual disease consists of 'thinking one is quite well'.

He may well have been thinking of the Gospel reading from just a few weeks ago.

Anyway, rant over. In an ideal world I'd end this post by linking to the YouTube clip I was sent during the week of the latest episode of The Simpsons, which features not merely Alan Moore himself but also Art Spiegelman and Dan Clowes too.

Alas, copyright rules mean that it's no longer online - and indeed shouldn't have been in the first place - so you'll have to find another way to listen to that midlands rumble in 'Husbands and Knives'.

Sorry about that.

Splash Panel

Seeing as the last few posts have been a tad serious, and in the aftermath of having watched Octopussy the other evening, I thought it might be nice if I cheered you up by showing you a picture of a clown.

A clown whose leg is unaccountably snapping in three places, admittedly, but a clown nonetheless. Ed the Happy Clown, to be precise, as written and drawn by Chester Brown.

I'm afraid that I've never read the comic, which sounds a decidedly troubling affair:

For those unfamiliar with Brown’s dark hero, Ed is a cheery fellow with a big head who is forced to endure one blackly humorous indignity after another. The story begins when the children’s hospital he’s bound for burns to the ground — with all the kiddies in it. The plot gets grimmer from there. Reading like a profane version of Voltaire’ s Candide, Ed battles flesh-eating rats, befriends a band of pygmies, is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit and falls in love with a vampire.

Still, odd or not, I adore this panel, which I first saw reproduced in a Comics Journal article years ago. Even taken entirely out of context it's undoubtedly one of my favourite comics panels ever, up there with Brian Bolland's marvellous 'Gaze into the fist of Dredd!' shot from 'Judge Death Lives' and this gem by Bill Sienkiewicz:


Beautiful, isn't it? Devoting an entire page to a picture of a cup of tea with the milk not quite mixed in is pretty daring as comics go, not least because it gives a whole new meaning to the term 'splash page'.

It's from the second issue of Big Numbers, the ode to chaos theory, fractal geometry, and the English midlands that would surely have been Alan Moore's masterpiece had it ever been finished. Sadly, only the first two issues of the projected twelve were ever published: if you're interested in fumbling towards understanding why, you could do a lot worse than reading what Moore has to say about it himself or else get yourself a copy of Eddie Campbell's brilliant Alec: How to be an Artist and read pages 110 to 116.

Actually, you should read the whole blessed thing, but I'll come back to Eddie another day.

For now, just look at this beautiful picture of a cup of tea and ponder what might have been, if The Mandelbrot Set existed anywhere other than the Library of Dream.

Remember

Some years ago, while staying with family near London, I took a trip to the Public Records Office at Kew with a friend of mine; despite being a native, she had never heard of the place, and was perhaps even more enthralled than me as we strolled about looking at such treasures as the Magna Carta and the Domesday Book, Shakespeare's will, the trial record of King Charles I, the Dambusters raid official report, and letters from Edward VII, Sir Francis Drake, Jane Austen, and - perhaps - Jack the Ripper.

One of the most poignant documents on show, certainly rather more significant than the deed poll by which Reginald Dwight became Elton John, was the confession of poor, brave, stupid Guy Fawkes. There's something desperate about that frail, illegible signature - it doesn't bear thinking about what he'd been put through just to give up the names that the authorities already had anyway.

I've always loved the story, told by Alan Moore in 'Behind the Painted Smile', nowadays presented as an afterword to V for Vendetta, of how David Lloyd had been inspired by Guy Fawkes when he first envisaged the character of 'V':

The big breakthrough was all Dave's, much as it sickens me to admit it. More remarkable still, it was all contained in one single letter that he'd dashed off the top of his head and which, like most of Dave's handwriting, needed the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone to actually interpret. I transcribe the relevant portions beneath:

"Re. The script: While I was writing this, I had this idea about the hero, which is a bit redundant now we've got [can't read the next bit] but nonetheless... I was thinking, why don't we portray him as a resurrected Guy Fawkes, complete with one of those papier mâché masks, in a cape and conical hat? he'd look really bizarre and it would Give Guy Fawkes the image he's deserved all these years. We shouldn't burn the chap every Nov. 5th but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!"

The moment I read these words, two things occurred to me. Firstly, Dave was obviously a lot less sane than I'd hitherto believed him to be, and secondly, this was the best idea I'd ever heard in my entire life. All of the various fragments fell into place, united behind the single image of a Guy Fawkes mask.

And thus a legend was born.

For the record, while I think the comic's a true masterpiece, I like the film almost as much as I do the book. Granted, shifting V's stance from pure anarchy to conventional democracy is perhaps a step too far, making the film a less ambivalent and challenging work than the book, but it solves the many narrative challenges with creativity and style, credibly updates the story's political backdrop, is perfectly cast, and looks magnificent.

And it introduces The Count of Monte Cristo into the story too, which is always a good thing.

On balance, the Wachowski brothers and James McTeigue did themselves proud. I fear I'll not be saying anything even close to that about Watchmen, which I'm perhaps unfairly already readying myself to dismiss as a dishonourable failure to rank with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Odd, by the way, that I missed the Irish bonfires and fireworks because I was in England last week, and shall miss the English ones as I'm in Ireland tonight.

So it goes.

Not even in the face of Armageddon

I don't mind telling you, I'm a bit concerned about the prospect of Zack Snyder directing Watchmen, especially since he was apparently brought onboard by Warner Brothers bigwigs who'd been impressed by his work on 300. Had they actually watched 300? Or let's put that another way - had they engaged their brains while they watched it?

I'll concede that 300 is a sensual feast, if you're into high-definition homerotic carnage with lots of shouting, but it's not exactly subtle, is it, let alone smart?

I was massively disappointed by the film, and not - before you start making assumptions - because it was historical nonsense. Leaving aside the fact that pretty much all sword-and-sandle films are at best historically dodgy, I'd read the comic. I was basically ready for the Athenians losing all credit for their crucial part in the Greeks overcoming the Persians, for the Spartans being presented as lovers of liberty rather than a society built on state-slavery, and for dozens of lesser problems. I'd made my peace with these falsehoods.

However, I wasn't prepared for the new absurdities introduced by Mr Snyder. The logical ones.

Take the traitor Ephialtes, for example. In Miller's comic he's a hunchback who betrays the Spartans because they won't allow him to serve with them, for the simple reason that irrespective of his individual combat skills his deformity would preclude him from fighting as part of the phalanx, the standard Spartan formation.

All well and good, I suppose, but in the film the Spartans fight as a phalanx for all of, oh, about ten seconds. It's individual combat all the way for these boys. Leonidas could use a warrior as skilled as Ephialtes in that kind of melee, and his rejection of him - with all its repercussions - makes no sense.

Or think of the scene where the Spartans, en route to their date with destiny at the Hot Gates, come across a nightmarish vision straight out of Goya, of a tree decorated with scores of Greek corpses. Horrified at the what the Persians are doing the Spartans march on to hold them off at Thermopylae.

Yes, you read that right. Fully aware that some Persians - even if only an advance unit - are already marauding about mainland Greece, south of Thermopylae, the Spartans carry on to make a heroic stand, despite the fact that the Persians are behind them!

It makes no sense. Really. Parodies such as the forthcoming Meet the Spartans just aren't needed.

I fear for Watchmen. I realise I have a lot invested in it, but surely it has to be conceded that it's more intelligent, more sophisticated, and more demanding than most books you'll ever read, and I'm not sure which directors out there would do an even serviceable job of bringing it to the screen. But I'm pretty sure Zack Snyder's not the man.

Still, I can only hope. And if it's yet another travesty of Alan Moore's work, well, the book will still be on the shelf, treasured and well-thumbed.

As it should be.

Faith and Moore

One day back in August I was thrilled to read memorable interviews in the Daily Telegraph with Michael Parkinson and the Archbishop of Canterbury ; they're thoughtful and fascinating and well worth reflecting on.

I often read the Telegraph while travelling; people tend to leave it behind, and like a print-crazed magpie I'm always there to swoop. Friends can look at me a tad askance on realising that I'm an occasional Torygraph reader, but aside from its tendency towards dishonesty on all issues European it's generally a pretty good paper.

Today's paper features a great article about the world's greatest living comics creator. Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I keep meaning to read, introduces her subject by raving about Watchmen, arguably Moore's masterpiece, and then goes on to analyse his latest opus, Lost Girls, an attempt sixteen years in the making to see if pornography can be art. Clarke's feeling is that the book is a true thing of beauty, much of which she attributes to the coloured pencils of Melinda Gebbie, Moore's partner, but is ultimately unconvinced:

There's no doubt that Lost Girls is stimulating and erotic and that Gebbie's art matches the sensuality of the material, but it feels as if Moore the writer is firing on fewer than usual cylinders – which may say something about pornography's limitations as a literary form. The shape of a pornographic narrative is easily guessable in advance; the climax of the story must be, well, a climax. [. . .] One of the assumptions of the fantasy world that pornography inhabits is that sex should be consequence-free. Pornography by its very nature has a deadening effect on story.

I'll be looking to read it soon enough, for all that. Even Moore's failures are usually fascinating, and this sounds like no failure - merely a qualified success. Even minor Moore is special; I still treasure those first two issues of the abortive Big Numbers, after all, and suspect that if Moore had finished it that it'd be the benchmark by which all his other work is judged.

Speaking of which, Mr Moore was alluded to a recent issue of the new Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic. Issue six of Joss Whedon's Season Eight has Giles hauling Faith off to England to deal with a slayer who's about to cause a whole world of trouble. Trying to stress just how serious the situation is, Giles informs Faith that:

If the girl in question were merely guilty of the same mistakes you once made -- considerable though they may have been -- I would opt for rehabilitation.

But according to every augur in my employ, including the great bearded wizard of Northampton, unless this young lady is terminated before the fall's end, she will usher in --

Alan Moore gets namedropped and once they get to England our heroes come very close to bumping into a certain Converse-trainered Timelord and his rather minxy companion.

It's a good issue for pop culture.

A Wild Obsession

It seems only fitting, having mentioned on Saturday the magnificent late eighties superhero autopsy that was Watchmen, to today point you to the rather more exuberant brass band funeral that was The Dark Knight Returns.

Back in the false dawn of that 'Wow! Comics aren't just for kids!' craze, these stood along with Maus, Love and Rockets, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, and perhaps Cerebus as pretty much the only comics you could show to an adult and keep a remotely straight face.

Dark Knight is a masterpiece, it has to be said. A messy, chaotic, ideologically questionable masterpiece, but a masterpiece for all that. I don't think Frank Miller's done anything close to it since - in some respects Batman: Year One surpasses it, but Year One is intentionally a more limited work than Dark Knight, being a humble beginning rather than an epic finale. It lacks the scale, the ambition, the sheer hubris of Dark Knight.

Alan Moore, in his fine introduction to Dark Knight notes that Miller's great achievement is to bring time to the Batman, transforming him into a legend. Miller's Superman, Moore notes, is an earthbound god, a child of the stars whose presence is marked only by the destruction left in his wake but who is, for all his unearned greatness, hopelessly compromised in his position as a government agent.

And he knows it. He may damn his old friend for his intransigence, his utter refusal to surrender, but it's clear that he doesn't sneer at him: he's afraid of him. To be blunt, he's in awe of him.

Awe? Yes, because Clark Kent knows he was given amazing gifts, and has failed to even live up to them, settling for being allowed to live what passes for a quiet life when you're faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings with a single bound.

But Bruce Wayne? He's just a man.

A man, yes, but an absolutely terrifying man.

A man who owes as much to Captain Ahab and the Count of Monte Cristo as he does to Zorro and countless other masked avengers...

A man who would strike the sun if it insulted him, a man who would tear fire from heaven, a man who could transform himself into a match for an 'earthbound god' through absolute self-belief, sheer determination, and an burning need to be true to himself.

It's a hell of a reading, which is one of the reasons why this website, juxtaposing shots from the old Adam West Batman TV series with lines from Dark Knight is hilarious.

Wild Obsession indeed.

A Personal Journey in the World of Comics - II

So, as I said, I basically stopped drawing after UKCAC 1995. Not entirely; I did the odd poster or birthday card - sometimes even toying with drawing on the computer - and of course did all the drawings in my book. Not the cover, of course, but everything inside. Aside from that, though, I hardly picked up a pencil save to doodle.

Why? Well, a large part of my stopping was simply due to the fact that my studies were taking more time; I did well in my finals, and carried on into a master's degree, and since into a doctorate, and all the time drawing seemed to become less and less important. Looking back now, this seems very odd; as far as I was concerned back when I left school, I was going to college in order to have something to fall back on if drawing comics didn't work out. What was it that John Lennon said about life being what happens while you're making other plans?

That wasn't all, though. The desire to draw comics shouldn't have dampened in the way; distractions alone wouldn't have achieved that. No, it seemed more that there was no point.

It wasn't the issue of employability that bothered me, even in an industry which was about to undergo a rather tight contraction. It was the fact that something in me found the idea of spending long hours slaving over a drawing board to illustrate somebody else's stories to be, well, insane. That's not to insult any working comic creators; there are plenty of people who tell the sort of stories I'd love to draw, but the odds are that if I was lucky I'd wind up illustrating The Interminable Adventures of Henman! or some such guff.

Some people would love to do that, which is fair enough; hell, if they like that kind of stuff that'd be wonderful. But for me, no.

I think my sensibilities regarding storytelling in general and comics in particular were changing. My cinemagoing and constant viewing of classic films on video and television were accompanied by my ransacking the film section of UCD library, so I'd thought more and more about how stories could and should be told. In doing so, I'd read and seen more and more stories that couldn't be classed as genre fiction; even those that could were usually excellent examples of genre work.

Watchmen is a perfect example of this. It's undoubtedly one of the finest comics ever created, and one of a handful that can credibly be held forth as an example of great 'art'. It's genre fiction, there's no doubt about that, but genre fiction being used to dissect that very genre. Extraordinarily clever, Watchmen analyses almost every convention of the superhero genre whilst demonstrating what comics are capable of; the comic folds in on itself like an origami labyrinth with panels evoking other panels, comics within comics that illuminate the overall tale, and symbolism run riot.

It's a comic that's open to endless interpretation and yet is not merely a comic about comics and a techical masterpiece; it also a damn good piece of genre fiction - several genres, in fact, as it's not merely a superhero story but a thriller, a detective story, and a work of science fiction - which is well told and built around characters who are often far from loveable, yet who we learn to love nevertheless. Nobody, after all, is ugly on the inside.

One of the most graceful features of the comic, which I think could never be achieved so elegantly or effectively in any other medium, is the recurring patterns that punctuate the text. Most panels in the comic are the same size, each page being built around a straightforward nine-panel grid. This allows Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons to design panels that echo previous ones, allowing us to see the patterns that underly the tale they tell.

Rorschach, the least savoury of the comic's heroes, at one point makes a grim observation that might seem to deny this.

'Looked at the sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion, bear children, hellbound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for two long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us.'

Is Rorschach's bleak worldview plausible? Certainly not in the world he lives in. Images and patterns occur and reoccur too frequently to be accidental. Rorschach's world has a God and his name is Alan Moore. The cover of the first issue of Watchmen is an extremely close-up drawing of a small badge; the yellow badge bears a smiley face with a splash of blood across the right eye. The first page of the comic begins with a shot of the same badge but from slightly higher up; the seven panels of that page draw higher and higher until the puddle of blood in which lies the badge is a mere dot viewed from the penthouse suite of a skyscraper.

That image, first seen on the cover of the comic's first issue, recurrs constantly throughout the series, though rarely appears directly; rather the basic iconic pattern is evoked. We cannot help but see the Comedian's badge whenever the elements conspire to evoke it. Just as every child responds naturally to an image of two dots and a line, seeing it as a face, so do we, faced with a curve and two dots, one blemished in some way, see the bloodied badge of the Comedian.

It's not the only such pattern, however. The image, first seen in silhouette, of two bodies pressed against each other, is at least as frequent as the Comedian's badge. First noticed by Rorschach, who comments on a spray painting on an alley wall as being evocative of the charred images at Hirsoshima, the image constantly recurs, whether in dreams, or in memories, or in reality, even ultimately on the ever shifting blots that distinguish Rorschach's mask.

This is something that could hardly be done in another medium - if it were tried at all it would either be imperceptibly subtle or blatantly obvious. In Watchmen, however, it is just subtle enough that on a first reading you might notice some recurring imagery, but each time you reread this astonishing book you'll see more and more. Despite what Rorschach believes, the patterns are there; it's not that we imagine them.

That's one of the real delights of Watchmen; like Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan more than a decade later, it absolutely revels in the fact that it is a comic, and makes a point of demonstrating how good comics can be. No attempt is made to hide the fact that when you read it, you're reading a comic. Almost like Citizen Kane, it's an energetic box of tricks that shows just what comics can do, and it does so while discarding some of the more embarrassing comic conventions - there's not a thought bubble to be found here, and not a Kapow! or Kerrrash! in sight.

It's worth looking at Moore's earlier work to see where his techniques are coming from: V for Vendetta is similarly devoid of soundwords and thought bubbles, while The Killing Joke, written before Watchmen though published later, is a useful primer for Moore's mirroring of images and use of template patterns.

Watchmen dazzled me, and frankly as time went on it troubled me more and more. What would be the point in illustrating American comics after that? The vast majority of American comics, the only ones where there was any money, were superhero books, and Moore and Gibbons had dismantled the genre. As Moore put it, if Frank Miller's exhuberant and epic The Dark Knight Returns had been the brass band funeral for the superhero genre, Watchmen had been the autopsy.

So What Are You Going To Do About It?

Granted, there were some people out there who told the kind of stories I'd like to narrate myself, but with a few honorable exceptions such as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Garth Ennis, they were almost all writer-artists, people who really created their whole comics, writing and drawing them.

I've never believed that art can only be created when it's the vision of just one individual -- after all, medieval cathedrals were effectively built by committee -- but it struck me that most of the best work in the medium of comics had been the brainchild of a single creator... George Herriman, Winsor McKay, Will Eisner, Walt Kelly, Karl Barks, Herge, Osamu Tezuka, Moebius, Gilbert Hernandez, Jamie Hernandez, Hayao Miyazaki, Chris Ware, Jason Lutes, Dave Sim, Scott McCloud, Jack Kirby when working on his Fourth World stuff, Art Speigelman, Eddie Campbell, Daniel Clowes, Lorenzo Mattotti, Frank Miller, Hermann, Joe Sacco, Hal Foster, Hugo Pratt, Dave Mazzuchelli, Seth, Bryan Talbot, Dave McKean, Charles Schulz, Jules Feiffer and so many more...

Well that was all very well, but they obviously had stories to tell. I had nothing to say. So I just kept reading, and thinking, and admiring other people's work. Sometimes I was really stunned by it. There's a sequence in Jason Lutes's Berlin, for instance,  that delighted me. In itself it might be seen as nothing too impressive; a man shouts through a window at a dining couple. But Lutes attempts to capture the difference in volume as the sound travels through the glass, with the pane itself becoming the gutter between panels. Bold print for the shouting outside the window; regular print for what the couples hear within.

You can think about the meaning of that in the context of the comic as much as you like, but what fascinated me was that here was Lutes experimenting all the time in tiny ways, constantly nudging the medium in new directions. Pick up Jar of Fools or Berlin, or even, if you can get a hold of it, The Fall, and watch as he gracefully does things with comics that nobody has dared do before.

The thing was that Lutes and others like him obviously had stories to tell and things to say; it struck me that there really wasn't any point in adding to the pile of crap out there if I didn't have something to say. That's not to say that all good comics left me feeling so impotent, just that they rarely hinted at the kind of stories that I might like to tell.

One that did make a difference, however, was Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's marvellous Violent Cases. The story is a strange one, as a Gaimanesque narrator remembers -- or tries to -- a period in his youth when he broke his arm and had to go to an osteopath who had worked on Al Capone. It's an odd story, made all the more wonderful and evocative by McKean's beautiful artwork and how Gaiman uses the tale as a meditation on memory.

The page above is one of the finest pages I've ever read in any comic, as the narrator stumbles in the middle of his story, and realises that for whatever reason his mental picture of the osteopath has changed radically; where previously he looked like some strange hybrid of Einstein and an Native American chief, now he looks like Sam Spade's partner in the opening scenes of The Maltese Falcon. It's a beautiful page, and something that I doubt would be anywhere near as effective in any medium other than comics.

What does this have to do with me? Well, in Violent Cases Gaiman purports to be telling a story of his youth; it may not actually be factual, but it rings true; it has a genuinely autobiographical tone. What's more, the narrator is unreliable, not in the sense of being dishonest, but purely in the sense that in some respects he is puzzled by his own story; he believes it's true, but has difficulty understanding why.

Take a look at my story of the dam made from lard, or my musings about how we remember our youths. Look at the story I relate about what supposedly happened at Dublin Zoo a couple of years ago, or what apparently happened in Sitia and in Winnipeg some years earlier. Hell, even take a glance at what I say about Herodotus. I like strange stories that are supposedly true. I particularly like strange stories where the narrator isn't sure whether things are true, or why, or how things happened, and where the narrator will digress at the drop of a hat.

I was wrong to think that I have no stories to tell. Until a few years ago I had been convinced that was the case, but in Greece in the summer of 2000 I realised that wasn't true at all. I don't know whether it was the night Andrea, Josh, and myself were lying in our Stymphalian tent and the others were begging me for a new story, or the day I was sitting on a milk crate in front of the tent telling story after story to a group of people who had sat in a circle to listen that I realised that I actually do have a bit of a talent for this.

I have stories to tell. Many are slight things, but that's no shame; much the same thing could be said of the 1001 Nights! And they almost all come from somebody else; either a tale I've heard or an incident I've read about, but then Chaucer would have said exactly the same thing. As Holly has remarked, my anecdotes are endless. But some... some are pretty substantial, and some actually happened to me, rather than to friends, or to friends of friends. The Paris Incident has been on my mind for the last couple of years, and I really think it would make a marvellous comic.

I'll have to get my skates on.

A Personal Journey in the World of Comics - I

Most children like comics; most of those stop reading them. I've never really understood why. After all, people don't grow out of novels or films or television, do they? Why should one medium be so scorned? Is there something intrinsically juvenile about telling stories through a sequence of juxtaposed pictures, or about combining words and pictures?

I don't think there is, and if you read Scott McCloud's marvellous Understanding Comics I'm sure you won't either. If McCloud's attempt to establish what comics are, how they work, and what they can be is intriguing to you, take a look at some decent comics.

You need to be careful here; Sturgeon's Law* is particularly applicable to the comics industry, if not the actual medium. For some hints I'd suggest you peruse the list of 60 Comics I drew up back in July to show what I'd use if I wanted to set up a basic comics library.

The Tale of One Bad Rat, Why I Hate Saturn, Maus, Ghostworld, and Mr Punch would all be excellent starting points.

That'd be my advice for an adult coming to comics with no experience in the medium. I have no real idea what I'd suggest for children, I'm afraid, though I'd be tempted to point them in the direction of Tintin, Asterix, Bone, and The Batman Adventures. Would I be allowed to hint at The Day I Swapped my Dad for two Goldfish?

The first comics I remember reading were old annuals and comics belonging to my older brother and sisters - Bunty and Mandy annuals were rather incongruously read alongside Battle, Action, Valiant, and Warlord. That was definitely an eclectic mix; I'm sure than can be few children who would read tales of female Oliver Twists or aspiring figure-skaters, and then turn to such delights as Charley's War and Johnny Red.

Other, very different, comics were to be read in friends' houses. I became acquainted with Buster through Derek Mealiff, a Canadian lad who lived in the area for a year, and I will never forget reading about 'The Numbskulls' in Diarmait's house - was that in Whizzer and Chips? I really don't know. The Beano and the Dandy were, of course, ubiquitous.

Superhero comics were a rarity. Dave had a reprint of an early X-Men comic -- the one that introduced the Blob -- and I managed to pick up one about Professor Xavier being in a coma, and a comic that reprinted the first part of the legendary 'Days of Future Past'.

Other than that? I remember a friend having a comic with some Marvel heroines in -- most notably She-Hulk and Valkyrie who I guess must have been a sidekick of Thor's and who may well have engendered my lifelong approval of plaits. My sister acquired a small black-and-white tome that reprinted several Silver Surfer tales, and when Spiderman and Zoids was available I was able to read much of the now classic 'Death of Jean DeWolfe' saga, written by Peter David at the start of his comics career. Curiously, the 'Zoids' stories in those comics were written by an inexperienced Scot named Grant Morrison, who has since gone on to much greater things.

There was also a Batman or Superman annual or two. I remember little about such, barring one story where Batman and Robin travelled to an alternative universe to save the parents of that dimension's Bruce Wayne.

Anything else? Well, there was Absalom Daak, Dalek Killer, but I can't even remember whether that stood alone, or was part of another book. It was good though. Early Steve Dillon art; wonderful stuff. And I'd occasionally borrow some issues of Transformers from Ed; 'Target 2006' and stuff like that, set in what seemed a very distant future!

The Galaxy's Greatest

I suppose that I would have drifted away from comics like almost every other child were it not for one thing. When I was about eight, a friend's older brother began buying 2000 AD, which back then was absolutely marvellous.

Strangely, the comic's leading man, Judge Dredd, hardly impressed me at all, but I adored the other stories: the weird, frightening, fantastic, terrifyingly intolerant world of 'Nemesis the Warlock'; the hopeless heroism of Johnny Alpha, a mutant bounty hunter policing the galaxy to keep it safe for people who hated him and all his type; the anarchic ultra-violent comedy of 'D.R. and Quinch', so much else, so much of which is literally in my blood now. John Wagner, Alan Grant, Pat Mills, Gerry Finley Day, and Alan Moore burned their stories and ideas into my mind. 

I wasn't particularly enamoured with 'The Ballad of Halo Jones', which is almost certainly the finest thing ever published in 2000 AD, but things change; it was probably a bit advanced for a boy of nine or ten. Racial prejudice and rampant violence I could comprehend; girls going shopping or working as hostesses, well, that wasn't quite so appealling.

I'm afraid that for four years I simply read the comic in Dave's house, only ever buying it myself two or three times. Just before I turned twelve though, as I was about to leave primary school, I bought prog 520 of the comic, which was the beginning of the comic having high quality colour, and, it must be said, low quality writing and editing, though the decline wasn't to become obvious for a while. I began buying 2000 AD just as it had peaked. Be that as it may, there was still plenty of good stuff being published in the comic.

I'd been buying it but three months when 'Revolution' was run. This was a 'Judge Dredd' story, the sequel to the heartbreaking 'Letter from a Democrat'. That story had dealt with what was effectively a suicide attack on a TV studio by a group of democratic 'extremists', determined to make their case to the people of Mega City One that they ought to be allowed some measure of control over their lives; the democrats' own lives were rapidly cut short by Dredd and his fellow judges who brutally stormed the studio.

What had made that story particularly poignant, rather than just thoughtful, was its format; it had a 'voiceover', a letter carried by one of the dead democrats to her husband, explaining why she had felt compelled to take part in this doomed attack to try to make a better world for her children. 'Revolution' was set a couple of years later, with the dead Hester Hyman as a martyr to the democratic movement and an enormous march being organised to demand democracy from the judges; the march was a catastrophe, owing to it having been sabotaged in numerous ways by Dredd and his fellow judges. This dark and sophisticated theme ran through the Dredd strip for years after this, which is just one more reason why you should try to blank from your memories any trace of the muddled simplistic Sylvester Stallone rendering of Dredd.

Within two months of that the first phase of Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's 'Zenith' drew to a close. Aside from having such wonderful characters as Zenith himself, a 1980s Rick Astley-esque pop brat with superpowers, and Peter St John, a superpowered hippy turned Tory Secretary of Defence, that tale featured the first sequence in any comic that left me gawping at the page.

The sequence where Siadwell Rhys, the Red Dragon, was slain by the villain, astounded me. Have a look:

I had never seen a comic move so fast. The panels appeared to shoot by. To this day I have remained in awe of Steve Yeowell for that feat; this was the first time I ever really thought about comics as narratives, rather than as a sequence of nice pictures, the first time I thought of comic artists as storytellers rather than illustrators.

A year or so later 2000 AD did something else that amazed me. I know plenty of people who've cried when watching films or television, or when reading books, or listening to music. Well, when Johnny Alpha died I shed a tear or two. Johnny had been, along with the Arthurian knights, the real hero of my childhood; one picture of him so impressed me that I must have copied it dozens of times and now have a scanned version of it on my computer's desktop. Johnny died, as his sidekick Wulf had died a few years earlier. And like Wulf, and unlike so many American comic heroes, Johnny stayed dead.

Around that time, 2000 AD branched out and started a sister comic, the ill-fated Crisis. I loved Crisis at the time, though I'm not sure what I'd think of it now. A lot of my early thoughts about politics were formed by Pat Mills's painfully worthy 'Third World War', but if Crisis had any real impact on what I thought of comics, it lay with the fact that Crisis #15 featured the first part of Garth Ennis's 'Troubled Souls'.

'Troubled Souls' was a political thriller set in Northern Ireland; it was fully painted, which was groundbreaking from my limited experience of comics, and had gentle sequences set in the countryside, funny scenes in the pub or in people's houses, a genuine political viewpoint, and of course revolved around terrorism.

For all its faults, and apparently Garth hates to look at it now, it was a hell of an entrance into the world of comics, and what's more, was about the real world. Yes, it was still genre fiction and was set in a world I had no knowledge of, but it was a world without spaceships, robots, laser guns, mutants, time travel, demons, Celtic warriors, superheroes, or women with impossibly large breasts.

The significance of 'Troubled Souls' to me was not limited to its subject matter. I was amazed when I met Garth Ennis at his first signing in Dublin to find that he was really only a few years older than me. So was John McCrea, the artist who had illustrated the strip. And they were both from Belfast. Barely twenty years old, Irish, and making comics for a living. How could this be?

I Have A Dream...

I'd long been interested in how comics were actually created. 2000 AD annuals would usually have sections where they'd interview writers or artists, or would show what a comic script looked like, or how a story would actually be drawn. Ian Gibson once had a fine section in, I think, the 1985 2000 AD annual where he demonstrated step-by-step how he drew that annual's 'Judge Dredd' story, and old interviews with Massimo Belardinelli and Brian Bolland have long stayed with me.

Well, I began to get a bit of an obsession with becoming a comic artist. Small stories for my school magazine, each showing a definite improvement in technique and storytelling, were censored, banned, or rejected outright; nevertheless, my English teacher encouraged me in my dream. I backed down from the idea of doing art for my Leaving Cert, but kept on drawing.

I began a degree in Commerce, and stopped after half a year, and kept drawing, and just before I began studying for my Arts degree, went to London to attend the UK Comic Art Convention, carting along my portfolio. It was utterly scorned (rightly) by one editor, but John Higgins, who had drawn 'Letter from a Democrat' and 'Revolution' all those years before, gave me a lot of useful advice, and I went home happy, all set to learn about the Gracchi, Homer, Socrates, and the Parthenon, and to keep on drawing.

A year later I returned to London, this time knowing well that I wasn't ready, but keen on getting advice. Steve Pugh, who had continued drawing the stories of Johnny Alpha's sidekicks, gave me some vital encouragement and complemented my storytelling, and Bryan Talbot, the astoundingly gifted creator of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and The Tale of One Bad Rat, gave me usefully frank criticism about anatomy and storytelling.

Like the great Will Eisner, who I met once in Dublin, Talbot really pushed the importance of life-drawing as a way of learning about anatomy, and also suggested that I study cinema carefully to see how directors composed their shots. That started another obsession, and I headed back to Dublin, clutching two pages of original artwork from Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, and determined to draw even more and to watch and study all sorts of films.

The following year I headed back to Bedford Way, once more to tout my work, but more to enjoy the convention. I knew I wasn't good enough to be published, but the advice I got was useful, it was nice to meet people whose work I admired, and there were always interesting events; I still have a soft spot for Bryan Talbot's slideshow on how he created The Tale of One Bad Rat and for the talk Scott McCloud gave in Ladbrook Grove on the future of comics. This time the only professional I approached for advice was Steve Pugh, who was particularly taken with a fantasy strip I'd drawn, and how my rendering had come on. I was definitely going to make it, he said. I'd need more practice, but I was definitely going to make it.

And then I returned to Dublin and entered the final year of my degree. I've hardly drawn since.
______________________________________________________________
* 90 per cent of everything is crud.

60 of the Best

Sturgeon's Law states that '90 % of everything is crud'. This rule applies to comics no less than it does to any other medium, which the unfortunate variation that in comics only the crud is easily visbile.

I'd suggest that any bookshop considering having a graphic novel collection should begin with the following. This isn't an exhaustive list, mind. I'm sure I've forgotten some stuff, and other things I'd like to put here have been reluctantly left out. If anyone's interested, I'll explain what, and why...

Kyle Baker: The Cowboy Wally Show, Why I Hate Saturn, You Are Here, and I Die At Midnight. While Cowboy Wally is a rather light comic satire on American entertainment, and Midnight is a hilarious romp through New York on the night of 31 December 1999, Saturn and You Are Here are more substantial fare. Towards the end, Saturn does rather genuflect to the conventions of 1980s comics, but in general it is a sparkling and mature piece of work, a comic which I have always gladly pressed on people who don't read comics - they're usually grateful.

You Are Here is the most complete of Baker's works; it's not great art by any means, but it could comfortably stand with the best of popular entertainment in any other medium nowadays.

Raymond Briggs: When The Wind Blows and Ethel and Ernest. Perhaps best known for The Snowman, adapted for television with Aled Jones singing, Briggs somehow has never been regarded as a comic creator, but how can he really be seen as anything else? He writes and draws beautiful comic strips, all of which are marked by a distinct tenderness, both in Briggs's draughtsmanship and in his approach to the characters.

Ethel and Ernest is a sad, gentle, heartwarming, and funny account of how Briggs's parent met, married, lived, and died; it's a truly beautiful work. When the Wind Blows, written back in the 1980s when Cold War paranoia was at its height, tells the story of a middle-aged English couple, clearly modelled on Briggs's own parents, who attempt to cope with the nightmarish reality of a nuclear attack. It's a warm and funny, yet ultimately heartbreaking and terrifying work. I can't commend it enough.

Eddie Campbell: Alec: How To Be An Artist. Scottish Campbell here uses his fictional alter-ego Alec in a straight piece of autobiography that explores the world of British alternative comics in the 1980s and 1990s. It's not just well told slices of life; rather it is about living, and about living with art. Marvellous stuff.

Daniel Clowes: Ghostworld and Caricature. I'm not very familiar with Clowes's work, but having read these I'm very tempted to explore his stuff in much greater detail. Ghostworld is a graceful and solemn piece of adolecent fiction, a sad yet drily witty study in how friends grow apart. Caricature is a collection of short stories; the title story is one of the most painfully honest works I've ever come across in any medium.

Will Eisner: The Spirit Casebook, A Contract With God, A Life Force, The Dreamer, and To The Heart Of The Storm. Described by some as the 'Eisenstein of comics', Will Eisner is one of the true fathers of the medium. Referring to Eisner's work on The Spirit, Harlan Ellison described Eisner as 'the O. Henry of comic books'. Back in the thirties and fourties, when working on The Spirit in a style heavily inspired by German expressionist cinema and developing the visual language that American comics would rely on, Eisner was convinced that comics had an enormous amount of untapped potential, that they could be a valid artistic medium.

Years later, with A Contract With God, Eisner created what is widely regarded as the first graphic novel; in truth Contract is a collection of short stories, but Eisner was certainly getting there, and with A Life Force he finally struck gold, telling the story, as with Contract, of struggling Jewish families in the New York of his childhood. The Dreamer and To The Heart Of The Storm are more autographical, with The Dreamer telling the story of Eisner's breaking into comics, and Heart Of The Storm looking at his experiences with antisemitism in America on the eve of World War Two.

Though not itself a comic, Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art was the first real attempt by a practicing comic creator to analyse the mechanics of the medium. It's well worth a look.

Neil Gaiman: Violent Cases, Signal to Noise, Mr Punch, and The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish. Gaiman is almost certainly the most well-known comics creator in the English-speaking world nowadays, the author of the multiple-award winning Sandman series, co-author of Good Omens with Terry Pratchett, creator of BBC's Neverwhere series, author of the chilling children's fantasy Coraline and of the New York Times bestseller American Gods, and currently moving into film-making...

These four books are all illustrated by Gaiman's long-time collaborator Dave McKean, whose other projects with Gaiman include the astounding 'Hold Me' issue of Hellblazer, the Black Orchid mini-series, and every Sandman cover. Violent Cases is an intriguing tale about childhood and the tricks that memory can play on us; Signal to Noise considers the last days of a dying film-maker and the film he would have made if he could; and Mr Punch is a thematic sequel to Violent Cases, regarded by Gaiman as his finest work in comics.

Goldfish is a children's book, so perhaps should not be included on this list, but it's clearly a comic, and like the works of Maurice Sendak it is a true gem, a book that can and should be read with delight by anybody.

Larry Gonick: The Cartoon History of the Universe. So far, three volumes of this hilarious yet surprisingly accurate history of the world are available. Gonick's work, while it will hardly become a standard reference-piece, is nevertheless as accessible a global history as is readily available. Perhaps more importantly, it hints the potential of this largely untapped genre of comics...

Hermann Huppen: Rodrigo. Hermann, as he styles himself, is an extraordinarily gifted artist, hailed by his fellows as a master. His work includes two long series, the medieval drama The Towers of Bois Maury and the post-apocalyptic Jeremiah, as well as numerous books which stand alone. Rodrigo is set in Reconquista Spain and is linked with the Bois Maury stories; the book is a true thing of beauty, and is as fine a piece of historical fiction as you could ever come across.

Jason Lutes: Jar of Fools and Berlin 1: City of Stones. Scott McCloud has long hailed Lutes as one of the rising stars of the medium, and has been singing the praises of Jar of Fools to anyone who would listen. Breaking so many of the 'rules' of the medium, Lutes relentlessly experiments in his story of a retired conjurer, a sad meditation on memory and loss. If Jar of Fools showed promise, then the first part of the Berlin trilogy demonstrates just how talented Lutes is. Set in Weimar Berlin, around 1929, Lutes's historical drama may be the most interesting comic being published nowadays.

Dave Mazzuchelli: City of Glass. Paul Auster's City of Glassis a masterwork in its own right, but Mazzuchelli and Paul Karasik have transformed it into an extraordinary expressionist comic. It's rare that anything can be successfully transferred from one medium to another, but Mazzuchelli and Karasik have managed it with style. Mazzuchelli, incidentally, illustrated Miller's Batman: Year One; it's worth comparing the two to see how his artistic sensibilities have transformed over the years.

Lorenzo Mattotti: Fires. Beautifully illustrated with expressionistic chalk drawings, Fires is a dazzling work, tranquil yet mysterious, and one of the most popular European graphic novels.

Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. The author of Zot! and The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, McCloud is the medium's great explainer, and the true heir to Will Eisner. Understanding Comics occasionally gets bogged down in trying to justify the medium's existence, but on balance is an extraordinary analysis of how comics work, and how comics can work; the fact that McCloud uses the comic form in this largely technical analysis proves so many of his points in spectacular fashion. Reinventing Comics is not as strong, but is well worth a look as McCloud considers where comics have been and where they might go...

Dave McKean: Cages. McKean is probably best known for his work with Neil Gaiman, but Cages proved that he is not simply an illustrator of other people's visions. An extraordinary work about creativity and control, Cages tells the story of an artist, a writer, and a musician living in an apartment block and frequenting a nearby club; if ever a comic could be classed as 'magic realism' this is it.

Frank Miller: Ronin, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, Sin City, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, and 300. Everything Miller does is hard-boiled. If you like hard-boiled fiction, you'll like Miller. It's as simple as that. Relentlessly experimental, Ronin takes its cue from the work of Moebius and from Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima's samurai masterwork Lone Wolf and Cub, but in truth really only hints at what was to come.

Dark Knight has probably been the most influential comic, for good or ill, of the last twenty years. So many of today's professionals were inspired to enter the field after reading it; that's understandable, as it's a truly explosive book, which should have dealt a bodyblow to the entire superhero genre. Year One is technically a better work, with genuinely elegant art by Dave Mazzuchelli, and is basically Miller riffing on Raymond Chandler. There's a strong case to me made that it's the single best superhero comic ever, though that case does rather require you to argue that Watchmen isn't really a superhero comic.

The first two Sin City books saw Miller abandoning the trappings of superhero comics to do the kind of comics he clearly wants to do, but in a far darker style than before. Sin City gives new meaning to the word noir. And 300? This is Miller stretching his wings again, attempting historical fiction in his account of the doomed Spartan defence of Thermopylae. Historically, it's not the best, but it's an inventive piece of work, showing how an artist can grow, gloriously coloured by Miller's long-time partner Lynn Varley.

Pete Milligan: Skin and Rogan Gosh. Milligan may be best remembered as writer of 2000 AD's gripping future war epic Bad Company, but his finest work has been with the insanely gifted Brendan McCarthy. Skin was originally commissioned by Fleetway for Crisis but at the last moment declined to publish it. Telling the apparently unlikely story of a Thalidomide skinhead it was a beautifully drawn, brutally honest yet deeply sensitive piece of work. It deserves to be kept in print. Rogan Gosh initially saw the light of day in Fleetway's ill-fated Revolver magazine. Almost defying description, it was a hallucinogenic romp through space, time, and Indian curry houses, and almost certainly one of the finest comics of 1990.

Moebius: Arzach and The Airtight Garage. Moebius was long a popular illustrator of western comics under his real name of Jean Giraud, but in the 1970s he spread his wings a little. Arzach was the result, an elaborately drawn, exotic, near-wordless comic which simply invited the reader to watch and reflect on the strange figure of Arzach flying through an almost Freudian dreamscape. It sent shockwaves through the European comics scene when it was first published. Derived at some level from the works of Michael Moorcock, like Talbot's Luther Arkwright, The Airtight Garage is perhaps a more acquired taste. It's a largely improvised work, careering chaotically through parallel universes, which allows Moebius an unfettered opportunity to spontaneously project his feverish imagination onto the page.

Alan Moore: The Ballad of Halo Jones, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, A Small Killing, and From Hell. Alan Moore is almost certainly the finest writer ever to have worked in comics. These are but a small selection of his works. Halo Jones is to this day widely regarded as the finest strip ever to have graced the pages of Britain's 2000 AD; illustrated by Ian Gibson - picked because 'he draws good women' -- it's a science fiction tale with a difference, telling the story of an ordinary girl who goes shopping, works as a hostess on a cruise ship, and eventually gets drafted. It's an enduring loss to British comics that Moore never wrote more than three acts of Halo's 'Ballad', but in truth we should be glad to have this.

V took Moore years to complete, and would probably be met with editorial censorship today. Set in a fascist future Britain, V tells the story of an anarchist terrorist and his attempt to tear the whole system down; it is in many ways perhaps Moore's most thought provoking work, with Dave Lloyd's chiaroscuro artwork giving the work an unforgettable sense of menace. Spectacularly colourful, the Oscar Zarate-illustrated A Small Killing is a meditation on deception, loss, and how we betray ourselves. It is perhaps Moore's most underrated work.

Watchmen and From Hell vie for the title of Moore's masterwork. If Miller's Dark Knight should have been the brass-band funeral of the superhero genre, Watchmen was the autopsy. Illustrated with compelling realism and detail by Dave Gibbons, Watchmen is a symbol-drenched structuralist masterpiece, using all manner of unusual narrative devices to analyse among other things why superheroes appeal to us, and why, in many ways, they shouldn't. The autopsy analogy is Moore's own, and one he also used for From Hell, which he described as a post-mortem of an historical event, using fiction as the scalpel. If you've seen the film of From Hell, blot it from your memories. Moore picked Eddie Campbell as his artist as he knew that Campbell wouldn't sensationalise the horror of the Jack the Ripper murders, yet the film was deeply melodramatic. The book is a convoluted investigation of the horrific events in the 1880s that in Moore's view effectively gave birth to the Twentieth Century. I think it goes a lot further than Watchmen and may be the medium's supreme achievement to date.

Keiji Nakazawa: Barefoot Gen and Barefoot Gen: The Day After. Nakazawa was one of those who survived the bombing of Hiroshima. In Barefoot Gen he tells the story of the bombing from the viewpoint of the Japanese victims. His crude style serves to aid the storytelling, which is urgent, honest, and devoid of sentimentality. This may be one of the most important stories ever told in this medium.

Alex Ross: Marvels and Kingdom Come. I'm reluctant to include any superhero work in this list, Miller and Moore's work notwithstanding, but the two seminal 1990s comics illustrated by Alex Ross seem to demand inclusion. Kurt Busiek's Marvels sought to retell the history of the rise of Marvel Comics's superheroes from the viewpoint of an ordinary person. The conceit was interesting, and the comic was well-written, but what awed readers was Alex Ross's extraordinary realistic painted artwork, with nearly every picture based on an old Kirby or Ditko drawing but transformed through the use of models. Ross based the appearance of his characters on people he knew or famous actors, with Timothy Dalton as a rather convincing Tony Stark and Patrick Stewart playing Charles Xavier some years before he did so on screen.

Mark Waid's Kingdom Come was a more epic work, following in the footsteps of Miller's Dark Knight by attempting to bring time to Superman, the Batman, Wonder Woman and so many other heroes. Without the Kirby bases the work lacked the energy of Marvels, but it was nevertheless an impressive piece of work, and in truth it is hard to imagine a better middle-aged Batman than Gregory Peck!

P. Craig Russell: Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book Stories, Stormbringer, and The Ring of the Nibelungen. Russell's extraordinarily beautiful artwork is highly stylised and decorative, harking back to the PreRaphaelites. He earns his money from doing commercial work, and then commits his time to doing his real work. A lover of opera, Russell has adapted many, with The Ring being his highpoint. Jungle Book and Stormbringer are flawless demonstrations of how to adapt prose to comics, with Moorcock's Stormbringer being prefaced by an excellent adaptation of Neil Gaiman's poignant and semi-autobiographical tale 'One Life Furnished In Early Moorcock.

Joe Sacco: Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde. Sacco is a journalist who has spent several months in the occupied territories and Gorazde in Yugoslavia during the civil war there. He has recorded his experiences in these two deeply indignant and important books, both of which are horrific, yet profoundly life-affirming.

Erich Shanower: Age of Bronze 1: A Thousand Ships. Shanower has set himself a seemingly impossible task. He's trying to tie together all the legends relating to the Trojan War in a coherent way, yet leaving out the gods as if to make it historically plausible. On the basis of what he's published so far - and in the comic he hasn't quite got to the sacrifice of Iphigenia - he's done a remarkable job. So far only the first book of a projected seven is available, but it's very promising.

Art Spiegelman: Maus and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. Speigelman was for a time the editor of the New Yorker and an avant garde cartoonist. His parents had both survived Auschwitz, and in these books he attempted to tell the story of his parents' experiences in the Holocaust, how this had affected them later in life, and the repercussions of this for his own relations with them. Drawn with a fountain pen in a deceptively simple style, the comic uses to great effect the oddly cartoonish conceit of portraying the Jews as mice and Germans as cats in order to reinforce the bloody tribal nationalism of the twentieth century.

Bryan Talbot: The Tale of One Bad Rat, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, and Heart of Empire. Preston-based Talbot made his name with Luther Arkwright, a dark exploration of imperialism in an alternative 1980s Britain; it was a highly experimental work in which Talbot utilised narrative techniques inspired by such film makers as Nicholas Roeg and Sam Peckinpah. The sequel, Heart of Empire, is more straightforward in execution, but none the weaker for it. One Bad Rat is Talbot's most important work, the tale of a teenage girl, abused by her father and obsessed with the work of Beatrix Potter, who runs away from home. It is almost impossible to imagine a more compelling and accurate represtentation of the effects of sexual abuse, and yet the story is ultimately a hopeful one.

John Wagner: Button Man and Judge Dredd: America. Wagner has long been an underrated author, widely regarded as a mere journeyman professional. Judge Dredd is Wagner's best-known creation, and America is undoubtedly Dredd's finest hour, a dark dystopian tale demonstrating how Wagner's hero is but marginally better than those he wars against. There can be no democracy in Dredd's world, a world where 'Justice has a price. That price is freedom.'

Button Man could comfortably stand with the best of Hollywood's offerings, high-class popular entertainment with a message. It tells the tale of modern day gladiators, former soldiers who take part in 'The Game', a game with their very lives at stake, and where their 'owners' wager phenomenal amounts. It's not high art, but it's a story drenched with the reality of death, well-written by Wagner and beautifully drawn in an almost photorealist style by Arthur Ransom.

Chris Ware: Jimmy Corrigan, or, The Smartest Kid on Earth. I'm only reading it now, but it's already taken my breath away. It won the Guardian First Novel award... surely that should tempt anyone.

And once that core of stand-alone books has been assembled, the next step would be to expand to take in Cerebus, Love and Rockets, Sandman, Preacher, Invisibles, Bones, and other series, as well as newspaper strips such as Krazy Kat, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Peanuts, and Calvin and Hobbes.

But still. Sixty books would be a good start.