COMICS YOU SHOULD READ

comics Ah, pop-culture canons, how you’ve grown! In the1970s cinema scholars had the Sight & Sound polls, rock critics had the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll. By the 1980s, it seemed that every periodical had its end-of-year lists for not just film and music but television too; today, you can find a new top-ten list on the internet every hour.

Yet there have hardly been any large-scale efforts to define a foundation for comic-book cultural literacy. Douglas Wolk’s excellent 2007 volume "Reading Comics" even takes great pains to avoid such a burden—“I’m more interested in starting discussions (and arguments) about comics than settling them with any kind of self-appointed authority …I’d rather explain what brings me joy about them than endorse them unequivocally.”

The closest thing we’ve had to an authoritative list is the one put forth by the Comics Journal ten years ago. Though full of great work, this list is wilfully elite: there are no superheroes in the top 30, despite that genre’s longtime stranglehold on the medium. But really, that’s okay. It’s a greater service to tell people about Kim Deitch than to reinforce the idea that Wolverine is high art.

But the Comics Journal list needs a counterweight, and now it has one in "1000 Comics You Must Read", a full-colour survey of sequential art over the past 70 years.The author, Tony Isabella, has worked in the comics industry since the '70s—creating "Tigra" for Marvel and "Black Lightning" for DC—and "1000 Comics" has a definite superhero slant. This only becomes irritating when Isabella chronicles recent years, when the idiosyncratic work from small presses is flourishing both commercially and critically, while the democratic, “for the masses” argument for more mainstream comics fades. (That there are five "Archie" comics flagged for 1994 alone, and no mention of Chris Ware anywhere, is obviously a perverse joke.)

The good news is that the two lists serve as correctives to one another. Isabella even rescues some indie cartoonists, such as Dave Sim and Ivan Brunetti, both of whom the Journal missed. Together they not only set a neophyte on the right track but also put an experienced reader in clover. On that note, we’re off to find a copy of 1957’s "Caught" #5. We might never have heard of it otherwise.

"1,000 Comic Books You Must Read" (Krause Publications), by Tony Isabella, out on November 12th

~ SEAN HOWE