Tuesday, 23 August 2011

This Weeks Comics: Top Ten

What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?

In imitation of the poll conducted every ten years by the BFI's Sight and Sound, group comics blog The Hooded Utilitarian recently hosted a similar post for comics. Like many, I didn't contribute. Wouldn’t want the attention to be honest. I can understand some of the antipathy some bloggers and commentators have for the blog. General host Noah Berlatsky often produces trenchant critiques, with little respect for the general canon of comics which has been constructed over the past few decades, and posters on the blog such as Caro and Domingos Isabelinho have their own very specific agendas about comics. But I rather like the confluence of disparate and competing voices the site contains. I think in some ways I might respect a critic more in some respects if they dislike (even aggressively dislike) a work that I like. I don’t have to agree with everything they see, but I can respect them as someone who has their own opinion.

Anyway, here are my ten, in alphabetical order so as to avoid privileging one over the other in a top ten. I love then all equally.

Raymond Briggs - Ethel & Ernest
Eddie Campbell - 'Alec' autobiographical strips
Glenn Dakin - Abe: Wrong for All the Right Reasons
Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean - Violent Cases
Tom Hart - The Sands
George Herriman - 'Krazy Kat'
Jamie & Gilbert Hernandez - Love & Rockets
'Ilya' - The End of the Century Club
Frank King - 'Gasoline Alley'
Alan Moore & Jim Baikie - 'Skizz' (2000AD)

It goes without saying that this could easily be a completely different selection on a different day. It’s a fairly quick selection largely off the top of my head, as I suspect were many of the lists supplied in HU’s poll. And it’s weighted towards things I discovered when I was at school and university (the exceptions would be Frank King and Herriman). I’ve chosen 'Skizz' over any of Alan Moore’s more famous works because it was first comic written by him that I read, collected in a single issue of The best of 2000AD. An issue I’m sorry I no longer possess; it got thrown out along with a good many other in my mid 20s (some of which I’ve since replaced).

A couple of things I notice from this list. Firstly, just like Hooded Utilitarian’s eventual overall top ten, and like many of their contributed lists, all are works created by men. This isn’t a conscious prejudice against comics produced by women on my part. It’s likely as much down to me gravitating towards the comics I first fell in love with. Still, there are no superheroes, which is pleasant. I didn’t consciously exclude anything, and almost included Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol. But given my general feelings about the genre at the moment it still feels pleasing. My list leans much more towards ‘slice of life’, although that’s a term I find rather simplistic. There’s fantasy at the edges of several of my choices, but all are ultimately concerned with the representation of reality. 'Skizz' is obviously science fiction, but even in that there’s attention to the real in its depiction of working class life in the mid-80s in Birmingham.

Besides my unconscious gender bias, there’s also no Manga, and no European comics. Again, that's certainly not a concious prejudice. If we divide my list by nationality then we have 4 from America and 6 from Britain, although perhaps Violent Cases is an anomaly with its lyrically evoked memories of Al Capone. It still feels a very English work however. I actually rather like that bias. Part of the reason I settled on this particular title for my blog was because that was one of the things I wanted to focus on here. ‘Old British Stuff’ for want of a better description! And yet it hasn’t quite happened that way. It isn’t that I don’t love a lot of American culture. It’s almost possible to have grown up in this country since the Second World War and not love plenty of American culture since we’re inevitably so exposed to it. I’ve had a number of partly planned posts in my head since before I started this blog, but these things seem to have a life of their own. I think it’s partly because I’ve written quite a few comics posts focusing on weekly releases. So it feels nice to find that there’s a preponderance of British comics on this list.

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