Canadian indie band Immaculate Machine has another cute comic up, this time detailing the time-honoured practice of border hopping.

The most recent Power Rangers season will be the last.

Are the kids just not into Herriman these days? That’s a shame.

From Don Marquis’ the lives and times of archy and mehitabel.

I’ve been hip-deep in movie news this past week, so I apologize if this has already been covered extensively elsewhere, but I’m filled with glee that Marvel has begun posting the Japanese Spider-Man television series for free on their site. I don’t know exactly why, but something like this almost makes me believe that Marvel is capable of embracing an online delivery system sometime in my lifetime.

Illustration by Ryoichi Ikegami from the Spider-Man manga.

I love finding random things slipped between the pages of library books.

Happy birthday to my twin brother from an American mother, Mighty Mike Sterling!

This won’t end well.

In this snappy five-pager Archie miscalculates Veronica’s capacity for jokes, though, in her defense, if Archie is telling the truth Sylvia is probably the only woman’s name he doesn’t have jotted down in his Little Black Book. Satisfied with Archie’s litany of acquaintances, Veronica wanders off and immediately bumps into a girl named Sylvia who is looking for Archie. Only in Riverdale.

There’s something satisfying about a comic that takes the simplicity of a typical Archie story and breaks it down to a level even more minimalist, with unadorned skies coloured pink and yellow, and Veronica domineering Archie with just one word and the threat of violence. Add to that a predilection for archaic references to world leaders, and you’ve got Archie digest gold.

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

The release of the movie adaptation of Watchmen seems to have brought with it more comics discussion with my non-comic reading friends than any other movie released before it. I imagine this has to do Watchmen being practically unknown by many of those outside of comics, unlike Batman, Spider-Man and other properties who have already had mass media exposure.

One recurring theme in these discussions is the idea that Watchmen is the end all, be all of comics among regular comic readers, and those who disagree are in a very slim minority. I imagine the marketing campaign for the movie is at least partially responsible for this. I argued that I didn’t believe this to be true, and that opinion on what would be considered the best in comics would be incredibly varied. Still, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I was wrong, and with a little prodding from my friends I asked a few of my favourite bloggers what they would consider the pinnacle of the medium. I had no plans to do anything with the answers I received, other than rub my friends’ faces in it, but at least a few participants in my informal survey were curious as to what the responses were, so here they are.

Just to be clear, this isn’t meant to be some sort of knock on Watchmen. Most of the respondents admitted to being admirers of that book, and I can appreciate why many people believe that it truly is the best of the medium. This also isn’t some sort of scientific poll or alchemical ritual where we divine the Greatest Comic Of All Time. I just think it’s interesting to see just how varied comics, and our views on them, can be.

The Fortress Keeper – Fortress of Fortitude

That’s a tough one. Watchmen is a very good piece of work to be sure, but I’m not sure I’d even consider it the pinnacle of Alan Moore’s oeuvre.

My answer could change depending upon my mood and the genre of comics I’m talking about. (The first 20-25 issues of Lee/Ditko Spider-Man could well take the cake for super-heroes, but one EC short-story story entitled “The Master Race” may well out-do just about everything ever produced by the Big Two. And what about Tezuka?)

For my money, though, i’ll say it’s Will Eisner’s The Spirit, which began life as a cool, noir-ish adventure strip and later became a rather neat encapsulation of post-World War 2 urban America through its use of short, character driven tales. When I first encountered The Spirit in the b&w Warren magazine from the 1970s, it provided my first realization that “mature” comics could be about more than just super-heroes with angst. The art of course, was also eye-opening. Eisner’s use of shadow and faux 3-D (those wonderful logos) convinced me that pictures could literally “move” even if they were static.

Teresa – In Sequence

My answer is: “Eiland,” Issue #3, by Stefan J.H. Van Dinther & Tobias Tycho Schalken. “Watchmen” is often cited as a comic that is untranslatable to film because its storytelling is so particular to the medium of comics. I do think “Watchmen” stretches the medium, but its still firmly planted within a certain well understood storytelling tradition. “Eiland” Issue #3 is a beautiful example of the medium showing how much further the concept of sequential art can be taken.

Maxo – Great Caesar’s Post

Man, that’s kind of a tough question, ain’t it? My first reaction to a question like, “What is the best comic ever?” is to ask, “What kind of comic do you mean?”

There are so many different genres of comics — superhero, “real life,” historical, autobiographical, comedic, horror and on and on — that it’s hard to nail down what I would consider the pinnacle of the medium. I hate to even point to a single creator; choosing, say, Eisner, shouldn’t take away from others such as Kirby, Steranko and even Miller. Even if you were to narrow down the criteria, it would be a tussle to come up with a definitive answer.

OK, OK — that should be a sufficient amount of ass-covering.

I’ll be honest; I made a list of some of my favorite books, many of which are generally agreed on as being “important” and some that are just books I love. I was going to subject you to that list, but I’m just going to bite the bullet and say — at the moment — the pinnacle of the comics medium is “Y: The Last Man.”

Alan Moore’s “Watchmen,” without a doubt, is one of the greatest comics ever created and like all great literature will be considered a classic by history. But one thing “Y” has that “Watchmen” doesn’t is accessibility. ANYONE can pick up “Y” and almost instantly relate. The title is stylistically and thematically consistent throughout, and deceptively complex, but draws a reader in so subtly that before you even realize it, you’re in deep. It’s ambitious and epic in scope, but the core cast of characters and sure-handed scripting by Brian K. Vaughn also makes the whole thing extremely intimate.

For some readers, especially those who are not regular comic readers, “Watchmen” can be surprisingly dense, and I’ve known people who refuse to read it just because they flipped through and saw a superhero book (no matter how much I told them that the tights were really just the vehicle carrying the real story). “Watchmen” is undoubtedly important, and I’d be the first to agree it’s certainly more ambitious, but I’d argue that in some ways “Y” reaches readers that “Watchmen” does not.

I feel I should make a point here; I’m not picking out “Y: The Last Man” because it’s popular or because it’s “easy.” It is, however, a good example of what comics can be, especially for new comics readers. And in the end, the title offers nearly everything — a love story, an adventure, a mystery, a road story and a buddy movie, all ending with a conclusion as magical as the escape artist-title character himself.

So, there it is. I know as soon as I hit “Send” I’m going to be second-guessing myself, and by tomorrow I may even change my mind completely, but for now I keep coming back to “Y: The Last Man.” Whenever someone asks me, “What comic book should I read?” it is always at the top of my list.

And just for the sake of my own peace of mind, here are the other books that floated to the top:

Watchmen
Maus
Transmetropolitan
Sandman
Swamp Thing (Alan Moore)
Lone Wolf & Cub
The Spirit (Will Eisner)
Persepolis
Jack Kirby’s Fourth World

I could go on and on about “Y: The Last Man,” “Watchmen” and the slippery nature of what constitutes “the best,” but I think I’ll end it here and go tackle an easier question, like how to bring peace to the Middle East or end world hunger.

Steve, here. I just wanted to thank The Fortress Keeper, Teresa and Maxo for taking time away from their own blogging and providing such thoughtful answers. Please consider visiting their sites. All three are miles better than I Was Ben, and I can think of no better way to escape this blog than by following a link to one of theirs.

Illustration from Eiland #3 by Dinther and Schalken.