Below you will find further responses to the question “What would you consider the pinnacle of the comics medium?” as answered by a few of my favourite bloggers. Please see yesterday’s post for further explanation.

Johnny Bacardi

I liked Watchmen the comic quite a lot, but I’m not even sure if I’d consider it Moore’s best, let alone a pinnacle of anything! It certainly has been influential, though, for good or ill.

If I had to name something which would serve as a better example, I’d probably say Eisner’s Spirit stories from the late 40’s, with their cinematic techniques and good storytelling, just for me personally. I’d also perhaps mention Chaykin’s American: Flagg, or some of the great stories that came from EC via Kurtzman, Elder, and others.

As always, I’ll probably think of something better just as soon as I send this!

Steven – I Was Ben

I suppose it was inevitable that after asking such a tough question I would be coerced by numerous respondents into facing the horror myself. Fair’s fair.

When I asked the question, I left the parameters intentionally broad. I didn’t care whether the participant chose a 50-year run on a newspaper strip or one panel from a mini-comic, and I also hoped that the responses would inadvertently point to what people find most important in the work they read. Using myself as an example, the older I get the more I’m drawn to work in all forms of art that make their point in the simplest, most direct way possible, where before clever construction or a decent high concept would be enough to turn my head.

Like most everyone else who answered my question, I had a number of candidates that could be number one given how I feel on any given day, from Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe to Jules Feiffer’s Sick, Sick, Sick, but I have to go with my gut and choose Peanuts by Charles Schulz. Attempting to explain the voodoo that Schulz uses on me is beyond my meagre capabilities. Suffice it to say that if my life as an amateur cartoonist and professional animator can be considered an education in visual literacy, Peanuts would be the grammar lessons, those baseline rules that all others depend upon.

Brian – Comics Should Be Good

Geez, Steven, I’d love to help, but I honestly do not know if I can think of one comic that I would choose as the pinnacle of the medium, except to note that I would likely agree that whatever the pinnacle is, it is not Watchmen (while noting that Watchmen is, of course, really, really good).

But that’s not a fun answer, now is it? How about I try to think of a work that I think is better than Watchmen? That sort of satisfies the “showing the variety of great works out there” aspect of the question, right?

Of course, I might not be showing very much variety, because the work that instantly comes to mind when I think of a comic work better than Watchmen is the similarly hyped Maus. In Maus, I feel art Spiegelman tells a more powerful story than the one that Moore tells in the Watchmen, and not only is it more powerful, but I think it is more universal of a story, as well, which is an impressive combination.

The visceral connection that Spiegelman gets across in his re-telling of his father’s World War II experiences is stunning, especially as the work goes on and the reader sees the story become more and more about the telling of the story from father to son than simply the story itself (as fascinating as that story may be). Once you get to the second part of Maus and add in Spiegelman’s additional feelings about how the first part of Maus has been received so far, and suddenly you have a work that is about a man reacting to other people’s reading of his story about how he and his father to his father telling him the story about his father’s life during the war. How strikingly multi-layered can you get?

Add in some evocative artwork (which maintains humanity while drawing people as anthropomorphic animals), and you have one of the greatest works in comic book history, and well deserving of the special Pulitzer Prize created to recognize its quality in 1992.

Steve again. Thanks to today’s respondents, Johnny and Brian, for pitching in with such astute responses. If you could, please consider checking out their respective blogs. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. If you’d like to add your own choice for the absolute best comics work ever, please let us know in the comments below. Thanks!

Illustration from Maus; A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Tough Questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.