Items22The creator’s order
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The Complete Little Nemo in Slumberland (1989)Published Jan 1, 1989Winsor McCay's full-page weekly strip ran in the New York Herald from October 15, 1905, and each page is a single dream that ends with Nemo waking in or beside his bed. McCay drew Slumberland as architecture: colonnades that recede for what feels like miles, a bed that grows long legs and strides…0 - 2
George Herriman's Krazy Kat: A Celebration of Sundays (2010)Published Jan 1, 2010George Herriman's Sunday pages are where an American newspaper strip started to look like modern art. The plot barely changes: a mouse throws a brick at a lovestruck cat and a dog in a police helmet locks the mouse up. Everything around them changes constantly. The desert of Coconino County, drawn…0 - 3
Prince Valiant (2009)Published Jan 1, 2009Hal Foster's Arthurian saga premiered on February 13, 1937, and it reads like an illustrated history book that happens to move. There are no speech balloons: narration and dialogue sit in short captions near the panel edges, which leaves every image free for castles, longships, crowded battles and…0 - 4
The Incal (2011)Published Jan 1, 2011Moebius drew Alejandro Jodorowsky's space opera for the French magazine Métal Hurlant through the 1980s, and his clean, confident line makes the strangest ideas look solid. The opening, a seedy detective plunging down the shaft of a vast, many-leveled city toward an acid lake, shows his gift for…0 - 5
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (2012)Published Jan 1, 2012Hayao Miyazaki serialized this manga on and off from 1982 to 1994, and it goes far beyond his film of the same name. The pages are dense with fine pencil work: insect swarms that fill a spread, fungal forests drawn spore by spore, airships and armies seen from high above. The pages were printed in…0 - 6
Akira, Vol. 1 (1984)★ 8.5/10 on Open LibraryPublished Jan 1, 1984Start with Volume 1 of six.
Katsuhiro Otomo's Neo-Tokyo is one of the most completely drawn cities in comics. Every street has its signage, wiring, rubble and traffic, and when the city starts to come apart Otomo draws the destruction at the same level of detail, across whole spreads. The…0 - 7
Elektra: Assassin (1986)Published Jan 1, 1986Bill Sienkiewicz painted this eight-issue Epic Comics series, written by Frank Miller, between 1986 and 1987, and it looks like nothing else Marvel was publishing. Sienkiewicz switches style from page to page: loose watercolor, collage, scratchy pen caricature, near-photographic portraits,…0 - 8
Batman: Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1990)Published Jan 1, 1990Dave McKean's art for Grant Morrison's 1989 Batman graphic novel mixes paint, photography, collage and found textures into a haunted-house book where nothing is quite solid. Batman is mostly a silhouette, the Joker barely holds a human shape, and the asylum's rooms dissolve into stains, symbols and…0 - 9
Berserk (2003)Published Jan 1, 2003Berserk in Dark Horse's English edition; the cover shown is the original Japanese first volume.
Kentaro Miura's dark fantasy is the manga to read for crosshatching. As the series went on, his armor, cathedral stonework, demon hordes and stormy seas were built from layer after layer of fine pen…0 - 10
Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (1995)Published Jan 1, 1995Hellboy, starting with Seed of Destruction, the first collection.
Mike Mignola builds pages out of solid black. Faces, ruins and tentacled things emerge from big flat shapes of shadow, with only a few lines picking out a stone gargoyle or a fist, and the restraint makes every panel read instantly.…0
