Since this was a skip week, it’s a good time to do a “Top Ten Books of the Decade” list, eh? One complication has to do with changes that the ’00s saw in comics production: if the ’80s and ’90s were the decades of the comic store, when fans couldn’t find the magazines in general outlets any more, and had to go to the specialty shops that sprang up across the country like so many mushrooms (and, mushroom-like, in the late ’90s disappeared just as quickly), the ’00s were the decade when comics reappeared in “regular” bookstores; trades, hardcovers and manga-sized paperbacks, both reprints and new material, exposed mainstream audiences to comics in numbers not seen since the ’60s. I, like most of you reading this, still feel the thrill of New Comic Book Day every Wednesday, and have a deeply-engrained habit of getting most of my stories in the 22-pages-every-month pamphlet format, but for increasing masses of readers, that’s no longer the standard; to them, comic books are books, and are bought at irregular intervals as one-shot purchases, just like any book.
Thus, let’s split our Top Ten into two Top Fives: tomorrow, we’ll look at the top five traditional comics from the last ten years, but today, we’ll look at the top comic books of that same period. Here they are, in alphabetical order:
Blankets, by Craig Thompson (2003)/
Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel (2006)
These are the creative children of Harvey Pekar, writers of autobiographical books (although, in Thompson’s case, it’s labeled a “novel”) who find the extraordinary in ordinary lives. Both offer seamless integration of art and story, both offer protagonists who are stand-ins for the author, and struggle through a common adolescent crisis (for Blankets, sex vs. religion; for Fun Home, sex vs. sexual identity), and, most importantly, both were breakthrough books into mainstream culture, seen as decent literary works first and comics second (Fun Home was named by Time magazine as one of the ten best books of the year for 2006, of any type). Neither was serialized as a pamphlet first, either; both were published as stand-alone graphic novels (even more amazing in the case of Blankets, since it’s 600 pages long). A tie here, since no list would be complete without both of these.
Girl Genius, by Phil and Kaja Foglio (2001 – present)
Girl Genius offers a capsule evolution of comics over the last ten years, and a glimpse at what may become the major business model for the next ten: it started in 2001 as a regularly-published comic, producing 13 issues through 2004; the story, a steampunk mad-scientist alternate-history romp with art that’s a masterpiece both of drama and of comic timing and reaction, was critically acclaimed but never had particularly good sales. Then, in 2005, the Foglios announced a change: since they were losing money on the story when it was published as a regular comic, but making money on the trade collections, they’d decided to stop the pamphlet production altogether, and convert to a webcomic. Three times a week, they’d produce a new page of the ongoing story on their website, and every 120-plus pages or so they’d collect and publish them as both a deluxe hardcover and a trade volume. This turned out to be a canny move, both artistically and financially: making the story available for free actually increased sales of the collections, and eliminating the headaches of regular comic-magazine distribution saved both time and money that could be better devoted to maintaining the website and concentrating on the ongoing story. Now, five years later, Girl Genius is available in eight volumes, with a ninth completed and awaiting publication; not counting the original comics material, that’s over 700 pages of web-produced art that’s available both online and in print form, and has won awards in both media (it’s frequently in the running for best webcomic at a number of voting sites, and the eighth collected volume won a Hugo Award for best graphic novel in 2009). As with most addictive drugs, the first hits are free: go to www.girlgenius.com and see what the fuss is about.
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware (2000)
Hard to believe it’s been almost ten years since the collected edition of this was published, but there you are: it belongs on this list because it’s the Maus of the ’00s: the much-praised literary work that grapples with big questions (like existentialist despair) and gets name-checked by mainstream critics and academics (interestingly, Ware, like Spiegelman, has ended up appearing frequently in that bastion of literate fiction and non-fiction, the New Yorker), and only incidentally happens to be a comic. And yet, only a comic could create the effects that it does: Ware’s obsessive design work, deceptively-simple drawing and hours and hours of careful research and craft create a dense, understated and wise look at a nebbish. JC:TSKOE often gets criticized as depressing, and it’s true that much of it is quietly heartbreaking (which is why all of us neurotic academics like it so much), but Ware is careful not to make it completely bleak; Jimmy’s hopeful little head, peering over the cubicle near the end, is a tiny, subtle ray of hope that helps to anchor the whole book.
Manga (2000 – present)
This is a bit of a cheat (well, OK, it’s a big cheat), but it’s impossible to overstate the influence of this genre during the ’00s, and picking out one title would be insane. It’s most important for its enormous influence on young readers, both male (Naruto) and female (Fruits Basket): thousands of adolescents who wouldn’t know a Marvel from a DC are comics readers because of those odd-shaped, reverse-read paperbacks from the Land of the Rising Sun. Manga sections were the one growth area in bookstores for most of the ’00s, and the wedge that got graphic novels into libraries, all because kids find them so fascinating and exotic. Those readers, made literate in the visual vocabulary of graphic storytelling, are now ripe for other fare: they might not take to superheroes (and why should they?), but they’ve had access to horror (Parasyte, The Drifting Classroom), autobiography (A Drifting Life), medical drama (Black Jack), little-kid comedy (Yotsuba&!), science fiction/pastiche (Pluto), religious history (Buddha) and… well, any story that can be told with imagination; given that background, they now love comics just as much of those of us raised as Marvel zombies, and can approach any of the works on this list with practiced ease.
Scott Pilgrim, by Bryan Lee O’Malley (2004 – present)
Scott Pilgrim‘s been the grand buffet of the decade, a gleeful mixture of video game, manga, punk and superhero influences that’s impossible to ignore or dislike. It’s the first book that’s uniquely of its twenty-something generation, and O’Malley’s ability to bridge manga and American comics influences and create his own genre is casually awe-inspiring. It’s addictive, too; the buzz around the fifth volume of the series, Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe, and its release early in 2009 reached Harry Potter-like proportions, at least within the comics community, and the now-in-production movie has inspired similar anticipation. If you want to see the pop-culture future of comics for the next ten years, here’s your template.
Phil Mateer
