Killing with the Edge of the Moon: (A Graphic Novel without Illustrations)

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That said, we study what will be transformed in the adaption, what will be visual and not verbal, and those decisions are the most creative part of our work, because images can substitute descriptions of places, people and actions, but they also can add more layers to the story, more details, more narrative interpretations.

How would you explain this academic-critical resistance to this genre? What would the integration of graphic novel in the literary context imply a more interdisciplinary critical system, in which the critic would have a more interdisciplinary education? For many years, comics authors followed various and more popular genres, like terror or humor, always with the intention of entertaining, of criticizing something we inherited from cultural production during and after the military dictatorship.

Only very recently are Brazilian authors looking for longer, more serious, and deeper narratives, which can be called graphic novels. The union of the literary world and the world of comics in Brazil is a little less than ten years old—where we can see interaction among authors and the presence of one in an event for another and vice-versa. Before that, both worlds were totally different, separated, with no connection at all.

Our biggest interest is human existence, human relationships and the beauty we can find in small things. When you think about this, everything changes and gains a new value. When we work on an adaptation, the story is already there, and our role is to choose the best way of telling it by using the specific language of comics. But when we tell an original story, the story was already imagined visually, in the space of the page, in the movement of turning it.

Comics is a visual and a spatial language, where you control the space which the narrative will be occupying, the velocity with which the narrative crosses pages, the quantity of information which goes in each page. Daytripper is a story which was built to work through chapters because, to begin with, we published it as a series in the United States. Each chapter should work by itself, independent from the others, but making sense when read side by side with others.

The separate chapters have an individual force, but collectively they become stronger as the story progresses and the experience of reading intensifies when you read the complete story.

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We had readers who followed the publication each month, for ten entire months, but the majority of our readers read the collected story and can read it in a sitting, commuting, during a break, in bed before going to sleep. How would you describe Brazilian graphic novel nowadays for instance, what other authors would you recommend? Generally, the Brazilian comics author is a reflection of what is published in Brazil. Taking that into consideration, today we have a much more diverse market, with several publishing houses printing an enormous variety of works and genres, which results in a new generation of comics authors with a lot of diverse projects.

There is no longer a homogenous style. There are many narratives of daily routine, autobiographical reflections, and many experimental comics. This discovery process and linguistic experimentation is necessary before authors opt for longer narratives. However, new authors are trying to explore longer narratives. She publishes poetry and works as a visual artist with other authors. She has organized various projects, including colloquia, academic meetings, and sessions of poetry and film, and she has been invited to present and direct literary sessions and illustration workshops in cultural, social, and educational institutions in many parts of the world.

Now, they tell stories doing comic books and graphic novels which are essentially the same thing. They have an English-language blog and they write introductions about themselves in the third person. We highlight chronicles by Colombian journalist Alberto Salcedo Ramos, speculative fiction in a dossier curated by Mexican writer Alberto Chimal, and Yucatec Maya poetry and prose in our ongoing Indigenous Literature series. Skip to main content. Two Brazilian Graphic Novelists: A Conversation with Martin Ward. Editor's Note Editor's Note: A Conversation with Radmila Stefkova. We look at one corner of a room.

No — not merely look at — we truly see it, because Richard McGuire shows us that same tiny patch of real estate over thousands of years, from the distant past to the far future, overlaid — literally — with selected mundane moments of the life that happen in and around that space in the meantime: That narrow focus produces a work that is both hugely expansive and quietly, thoroughly mind-blowing.

When a very recent work is nominated in the popular vote, the judges feel it incumbent upon them to really interrogate it — to ensure that it justified its presence on the final list. That said, Eleanor Davis' collection of comics short stories sailed through that process with unanimous, enthusiastic consent. Davis writes and draws surreal, deeply funky comics about people who find themselves in a funk. She also avails herself of widely different styles, using color — or the lack of it — perfectly matched to the narrative mood.

One thing to admire about Simon Hanselmann's Megahex is its utter, unambiguous, blank-faced commitment to its stoner aesthetic. Megahex collects several years' worth of Hanselmann's Megg and Mogg Web comics and follows the adventures — well, the determined lack of adventures, anyway — of a layabout witch and her friends, which include a black cat, an owl and a werewolf. Together, they do drugs, watch TV, make ruthless often downright cruel fun of one another and struggle with depression.

Think your sophomore year in college. But with a werewolf. Given the series' intentional dearth of forward narrative momentum — that is the whole point, really — Hanselmann's gorgeously funky, low-fi, slyly psychedelic art pulls a lot of this weirdly charming strip's weight. Comics nerds are a nitpicky, combative lot, so whenever Will Eisner's collection of comics short stories gets called "the first graphic novel," the "um, actually"s descend like so many neck-bearded locusts to remind everyone about Rodolphe Topffer and Lynd Ward and to point out that it's not a novel, it's a collection of stories.

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So let's put it this way: Eisner's A Contract With God is widely regarded as the first modern graphic novel. But it's not on this list because it was first, it's on this list because it remains one of the most beloved. Eisner sets his stories in and around a Lower East Side tenement building very like the one he grew up in, and it shows. He imbues each story with an elegiac quality reminiscent of the fables of Sholom Alecheim, replete with a fabulist's gift for distilling the world's morass into tidy morality plays.

Moody, moving and darkly beautiful, this work helped the wider world accept the notion that comics can tell stories of any kind, the only limit being the vision of their creators. Dong Hwa Kim's beautiful and elegant historical trilogy including The Color of Water and The Color of Heaven follows young Ehwa as she grows up amid the exquisitely rendered countryside of pastoral Korea. Together, the three books form an extended coming-of-age tale. Ehwa experiences the flush of first love, and no small amount of heartbreak, but the real triumph of the book lies in its depiction of Ehwa's relationship with her single mother, which informs how the young girl sees her place in the world.

Their bond is rich, and satisfyingly complicated, and it deepens over the course of the trilogy in ways that will feel familiar Panel judge Glen Weldon is on record as loving this book. It was one of his favorite books of , and when he reviewed it for NPR , he called it "a compendium of funny, sad and surprisingly moving fables from the pre-history of a world that exists only in [Isabel] Greenberg's febrile imagination — one that bristles with capricious gods, feckless shamans, daring quests and, of course, doomed love.

It's fitting that a book that concerns itself so centrally with the act of storytelling makes for such a richly satisfying and accomplished story. How to summarize, in a blurb, one of the singular accomplishments in serialized comics? Maybe start by assuring anyone who has never had occasion to pick up this series — which has been published, off and on, over the last 35 years — that its humor, pathos and rich characterizations are only continuing to deepen and grow. Brothers Gilbert, Jaime and, originally at least, Mario Hernandez tend to focus on two parallel narratives — one set in a fictional Central American village, the other set among punk musicians living in southern California.

Though the series has happily spanned several genres in its time, its focus on its characters' relationships, which have grown increasingly complicated and layered over the years, remains paramount. Beloved as one of the first breakout series of the indie comics movement, Love and Rockets has inspired many imitators, but its charms are idiosyncratic and unmistakably its own.

Three other works that appeared in Eightball — David Boring, Ice Haven and Death Ray — have been collected separately, but this book grants you a ringside seat in Clowes' fevered, fractious and pugnacious young brain. Monstress is the grandest of Guignol, a blood-spattered epic set in a matriarchal society torn by war between sorceresses and magical creatures.

Sana Takeda's art blends art nouveau, manga, steampunk, Egyptian influences, you-name-it, to build a lush world where even the atrocities these women commit against on another look somehow gorgeous. And Marjorie Liu's morally ambiguous, complex characters are hard to figure out and even harder to forget.

Within two years, they'll all be dead. But until then, they can enchant crowds, perform miracles and save lives. Gillen has described it as "a superhero comic for anyone who loves Bowie as much as Batman," which is pretty perfect, in our opinion. The women in prison movie to end all women in prison movies.

Well, okay, it's a comic book, but you know what I mean. Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro take a campy '70s trope and run with it, all the way to outer space, creating a misogynist dystopia where "noncompliant" women are penned up on a brutal prison planet. But rebellion is brewing underneath those bland prison-orange overalls. Bitch Planet mixes solid world building, action and emotional hooks with an unapologetic wallop of feminist philosophy.

If you've been seeing women with "NC" tattoos recently, this is why. Writer Joe Hill is Stephen King's son, and his horror pedigree shows in this atmospheric saga about the Keyhouse, an old mansion in a New England coastal town called Lovecraft, natch and the family called Locke, of course who live there. As the Locke kids discover the magic keys the house keeps hidden, their family past comes back to haunt them — literally.

And Gabriel Rodriguez's art brings limpid-eyed moppets and shadowy monsters alike to creepily glowing life. Transmet is Warren Ellis' extended, profane and surreal love letter to Hunter S. Thompson so, it's exactly the kind of thing Thompson would have loved. Set in a far-future metropolis that could be anywhere in America, it's an almost joyous dystopia, a world where anything you can imagine is probably already happening.

Right in the middle of it all is crusading journalist Spider Jerusalem — and his filthy assistants — ready to break news — and heads — in the service of truth. And once you've read the books, go back and spend a happy few hours trying to pick out every reference in Darick Robertson's over-the-top artwork. Warren Ellis shows up on this list a lot, but trust us, he's worth it.

Planetary is on the more cheerful end of the Ellis spectrum — it's about an interdimensional peacekeeping force called Planetary, dedicated to preserving weirdness and wonder in the world. It still is, of course, though the plotlines of the comic and the TV show have diverged in ways that invite heated debate. There is an urgent, elemental power to Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore's bleak and battered vision of a zombie apocalypse and the survivors who attempt to hold onto their humanity, against impossible odds. Both creators clearly love the genre, and know how to toy with reader expectations.

But in a very real sense, The Walking Dead has never been about the gore-splattered "Walkers. Reading The Walking Dead can be a punishing experience don't fall in love with any character , but thousands of readers, and millions of viewers, are gluttons for exactly the kind of punishment it serves up with dispassion. Stan Sakai's comic about a rabbit samurai in 17th-century Japan has been running for more than 30 years and is jampacked with references to Japanese history, movies and culture — particularly Akira Kurosawa's film Yojimbo.

But you don't have to be a Kurosawa buff to enjoy Sakai's clean, expressive art and his expansive, sometimes novel-length storylines — after all, this is a comic based on a simple visual gag: A bunny with his ears tied up in a topknot looks kind of like a samurai. Try "Grasscutter," the Eisner Award-winning arc about a magic sword, or just dive right in at the beginning.

Writer Grant Morrison and artist Richard Case took over the DC Comics series Doom Patrol in and, over the next four years, proceeded to infuse that fitfully published, perennially oddball title starring a small team of freakish, outcast superheroes created in with pure, uncut, pharmaceutical-grade craziness. Borrowing heavily from surrealist influences, they swapped out traditional villains for creations like the Brotherhood of Dada and the sinister, extradimensional Scissormen. They introduced new characters like Crazy Jane, a woman who evinced 64 discrete personalities, each one with its own superpower, and Danny the Street, a sentient, magically transporting city block As a feat of soaring imagination, there's nothing like it in all of superhero storytelling, yet its every flight of nitro-injected fantasy is grounded by Case's thick line work, which imposes a satisfying heft and structure to the proceedings.

David Petersen's Mouse Guard series boasts a rich mythology gorgeous, warmly colored depictions of the natural world vibrantly realized characters and spectacular set pieces featuring bold adventures and narrow escapes. Plus, it stars fuzzy-wuzzy mice with itty-bitty swords and teeny-tiny capes. But it's Petersen's meticulous commitment to world building and his determination to fully realize his fanciful conceit — an elite cadre of mice that defend mousedom from threats foreign and domestic — that transport Mouse Guard out of the realm of "funny animal" comics.

His characters may have dots for eyes and cute ears, but he invests them with a sense of purpose and nobility. These are rodents with gravitas. The venerable MAD is a humor magazine, yes, but it's also a comic book through and through and has always been so. This book collects its first six issues, from to '53, and reflects the no-gag-too-goofy, grab-the-reader-by-the-throat aesthetic of editor Harvey Kurtzman. It includes several pop-culture parodies, which would swiftly become MAD 's bread-and-butter: But it's Issue 4's Superman riff "Superduperman! In , writer Greg Rucka and artist Steve Lieber produced this taut little murder mystery set at the McMurdo research station in Antarctica.

That setting is a perfect setup, of course — the station's one big locked-room mystery where isolation breeds paranoia and escape is impossible because to step outside even briefly invites death. Marshal Carrie Stetko — a fantastic, and fantastically tough, creation — is on the case. There are several stretches where Lieber's black-and-white art becomes A propulsive, satisfyingly pulpy read. Suzie and Jon seem like a regular couple — she is an earnest librarian, he is an overgrown man-child who hates his job.

But both of them have a secret power: They can stop time when they orgasm and walk around alone in a frozen world. So naturally, they decide to use that power to go on a crime spree — and it's all fun and games until the Sex Police show up. Carla Speed McNeil has a mind as big as several universes, and you can visit at least one of them in the Eisner Award-winning Finder. Finder covers so many genres it's almost impossible to sum up, so we'll just say, come for the hot-outsider-in-a-strange-future action, stay for the insanely extensive world-building footnotes that will tell you exactly what is going on in every corner of every panel, from random lizard things to genetically engineered TV screen vines.

Fans of Japanese cinema will find a lot to like in Lone Wolf and Cub , the epic story of a falsely disgraced warrior who hits the road with his toddler son in a quest to find and kill the powerful clan that framed him and killed his wife. And in fact, these darkly cinematic comics have been adapted as movies in Japan. The judging panel was struck, and a bit dismayed, by the relative dearth of manga titles in the raw vote, but the strong showing for Hayao Miyazaki's groundbreaking Nausicaa series, about a headstrong young girl who becomes a military leader in a post-apocalyptic world, was heartening.

Daytripper

There is no denying its popularity or its enduring influence, and its theme of humanity's corrupting influence on the pure power of the natural world is an essential Miyazaki touchstone. The series was turned into a hugely popular anime feature by what would later become Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli, which has produced many of the most beloved and renowned animes — work that has inspired generations of filmmakers and storytellers around the world.

In America at least, it was the anime based on this Katsuhiro Otomo manga series that wormed its way into a generation's consciousness. But that animated film, while widely credited as finding a new worldwide audience for the form, greatly simplified the satisfyingly byzantine plot of Otomo's original comics series. Oh, it kept the basics — kid in a post-World War III Tokyo biker gang gets psionic powers, only to be drawn into a mushrooming conflict involving rival gangs, shadowy government operatives, motorcycles and lots and lots of psychic explosions — but it cut out great swaths of the characters and subplots that made the manga so singularly immersive and unforgettable.

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Many Americans who loved the film dutifully sought out the comic, whetting their appetite for a lifelong love of manga. Urasawa recast one of that manga's most famous story arcs from the villain's point of view. In manga, of course, robots are thick on the ground, but this series examined the question of what it means to be human with a surprising emotional depth and served it all up under the guise of an addictively compelling murder mystery.

This is the best-selling manga series of all time, launched in and still going strong. Luffy, leader of a gang of pirates on a world dominated by two vast oceans. Luffy and his crew seek the One Piece, the grand treasure that confers the title of King of All Pirates. Oda fuses fantasy, science fiction and old-fashioned pirate adventure — together with a deep mythology all his own there are three kinds of Devil Fruit, see, which grant different powers to the person who eats them, but those powers get canceled if the person is ever submerged in water, because Many manga series get freely adapted into other media, but Hiromu Arakawa's Fullmetal Alchemist is the one to beat, having to date launched films, television series, novels, video games, audio dramas and It's easy to see why: Set in a world that runs on rigidly structured rules of alchemy, two brothers who've attempted to resurrect their mother — an unforgivable overstepping of those immutable laws — must seek the philosopher's stone to undo the ensuing damage, which cost one brother an arm and the other brother His soul gets bound to an armored chest plate; he's good.

Dense, soaringly imaginative and — fitting for a tale that features the philosopher's stone — weirdly philosophical, Fullmetal Alchemist has a lot to say about the costs of war and human greed and the central importance of family. You might think your life stinks but give thanks that you're not Punpun, the kid at the center of Inio Asano's surreal, cinematic manga.

Well, we say kid, but Punpun and his abusive parents are actually crudely drawn, wordless cartoon birds, in contrast to the realistic world around him. The comic follows Punpun from childhood to early 20s, from quotidian silliness to dark, cynical violence — and while you could, if you had to, sum it up as a coming-of-age story, Goodnight Punpun is unlike pretty much anything else out there. Marjane Satrapi's curvaceous but spare black-and-white artwork is the perfect complement to this lyrical, mournful tale of growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution of Ten-year-old Marji struggles with wearing the veil, yet wants to be a prophet when she grows up.

But as revolution and war turn her world upside down, she becomes increasingly rebellious a chapter about new high-tops and a contraband Kim Wilde tape is a particular standout. Satrapi uses her own story as a backbone to tell the larger story of her family and of Iran itself, its rich culture and oppressive politics.

Alison Bechdel's painfully funny — and frequently just painful — memoir of growing up with her closeted father has been made into a hit musical. But no stage show can capture the intricate, non-linear nature of Fun Home , which loops in and out of Bechdel's childhood, incorporating pop culture references, literary references, family photos and letters all rendered in her dense, textured line work.

Like all great graphic novels, Fun Home 's art demands to be read with as much care as its text. Lewis is the last person alive to have spoken at the March on Washington, and he offers a ground-level view of the civil rights struggle, packed with sympathetic but unsparing portraits of the movement's movers and shakers. Modeled on a comic that inspired Lewis himself — 's Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story — this is required reading for everyone who has only seen those years in old news footage.

And everyone else, too. Ben Passmore's slim, page mini-comic is an open letter, written in the second person, consisting of a litany of gentle admonitions for well-meaning but racially tone-deaf white people: He feels like you're mocking him, but knows that you are totally unaware of this Your black friend wishes you would play more than Beyonce. There are more black performers than Beyonce and he's worried you don't know that.

Your Black Friend is by far the shortest comic to make this list, but there is nothing slight about it. Beneath its sardonic tone lies a truth that is urgent, sincere and deeply affecting. Scott McCloud's masterpiece is perhaps the nerdiest, most joyous, most enthusiastic treatise ever written. McCloud wants you to understand that the medium of comics is wholly unique, and it deserves respect. So McCloud's cartoony avatar walks the reader through the sundry techniques and theories, the craft of comics — or in his words, sequential art.

There are moments of excess here — McCloud's passion for defining systems causes him to make the occasional distinction without a difference — but it is a worthy passion and produces a book that remains a comprehensive, authoritative and hugely useful tool for getting newbies to give comics a shot. Ed Piskor's multivolume history of hip hop is rigorously researched, but lovingly so, and his devotion to the music radiates from every page.

Let's Get Graphic: 100 Favorite Comics And Graphic Novels

When panel judge Etelka Lehoczky reviewed Volume 3 for NPR in , she praised Piskor's exuberant and narratively innovative art in particular: He varies figures' sizes, adds and subtracts different gradations of color and moves from realism to cartoony exaggeration. KRS-One's graffiti bounces off the page. The Fat Boys alternately lumber, loom and swell.

Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' sci-fi-fantasy-romance-war-adventure epic has taken the comics world by storm, and for good reason. Our heroes — she has wings, he has horns — are star-crossed lovers from opposing sides of an endless war, on the run across the galaxy with their infant daughter. There is magic, profanity, television-headed robots, intergalactic bounty hunters, ghostly baby-sitters and spaceship trees, all beautifully realized in Staples' distinctive digitally painted style.

Saga will punch you right in the feels, and you will love every minute of it. Writer Peter Milligan and artist Chris Bachalo hauled an old Steve Ditko character out of mothballs to lend him a defiantly weird, transgressive edge. Milligan set visiting alien Rac Shade on a cross-country quest to defeat the American Scream, a creature of raw, elemental chaos that manifested as the decaying corpse of Uncle Sam.

Neither was the violence a serial killer figured largely — welcome to the '90s nor Bachalo's trippy, swirling psychedelic images, in retina-sizzling colors. But then, the whole point of the series was to shake things up, to challenge and interrogate the rapidly calcifying tropes of superhero storytelling. It probably won't come as any surprise to fans of filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky that he would write a soaring space opera set in a dystopian future filled with birdlike aliens, bounty hunters, flying cars, powerful crystals and "technopriests.

You might expect Jodorowsky's world of techno-tyranny to resemble the dank gloom of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. You would be wrong — Moebius' line work is crisp and clean and often comical, and Yves Chaland's bright, bold colors so many yellows! It's a combination of writer and artist that works in surprising, revelatory ways, opening up this world and inviting us to stay. Elfquest is kind of a legend in the comics industry — it is one of the first creator-owned comics, and it has been running in one form or another since Also, the adventures of Cutter, Skywise and the Wolfriders and their amazing hairdos are absurdly addictive; Wendy Pini's Tom of Finland-meets-Margaret Keane art and the fervid, earnest scripts she wrote with her husband, Richard, will keep you pinned to the page, far into the night.

Neil Gaiman is America's favorite nerd these days, but back in the late '80s, he was mostly known for fringe titles like Black Orchid and, well, writing a quickie biography of Duran Duran. And then he pitched DC Comics the idea of reviving an old character, the Sandman, and making him something completely new: A pale, tormented, goth-tacular Lord of the Dreaming who is rebuilding his kingdom after 70 years of occult captivity. Soapy, dramatic, mythic, gorgeous and sometimes terrifying, Sandman is the comic that fluttered the hearts of a million baby fans. Plus, Death is adorable.

Frank Miller's magnum opus, the gold standard against which all Batman stories will forever be judged, for better or worse. Miller's tale of an aged Caped Crusader coming out of retirement to fight a new breed of criminal was deliberately set outside DC's continuity, which gave Miller lots of room to play. The result is big and operatic think Rambo meets Wagner's Ring Cycle.

But it's also grim and gritty and helped usher in an era of dark, brooding heroes that remains the default superhero mode. It became such a hit both in and outside comics circles that readers of in-continuity Batman hungered to bring the book's dark vision of future Batman an in-canon reality, voting by phone to kill off Robin in The announcement that Marvel contracted Ta-Nehisi Coates to write a Black Panther series was cause for excitement in and out of comics circles.

The fact that he was to be paired with veteran artist Brian Stelfreeze didn't hurt — although that excitement may not have spread beyond comics nerds. The task Coates set for himself was a tough one: He had to pick up the pieces following Marvel's latest Secret Wars crossover event, establish a new status quo and then go on to tell a compelling story. Coates is a longtime comics fan, but this was his debut effort in the medium. The result is dense — prose writers who come to comics tend to load up their word balloons to the bursting point — but offers a fresh take: He explores Black Panther the king, not the hero, forced to make a series of unpopular choices that turn his people against him.

Obviously, our judge G. Willow Wilson recused herself from this part of the debate. But there's no question about it: Readers and the rest of the judges love Wilson's version of Ms. Kamala Khan was an ordinary Muslim teenager in Jersey City — and a Captain Marvel fangirl — when an alien mist turned her into a shape-shifting superhero. Now, she has to balance school, friends and her loving-but-overprotective family, while saving the world. And like any kid, she doesn't always get it right.

Marvel is a marvel — sensitively written, gorgeously drawn and, for a part-alien superhero, always achingly real. Writer Tom King carved himself an out-of-the-way patch of Marvel Universe real estate — a seemingly bucolic DC suburb — and deposited everyone's favorite android-created-for-evil-who-turned-out-to-be-a-good-guy, The Vision, squarely inside it.

King also doubled down on Vision's long-established hunger to be human by having him create a domestic life for himself — robowife, robokids, robodog, robo-white picket fence. And then, beset by the forces of intolerance lurking in the community, everything proceeds to go to hell.

Gabriel Hernandez Walta's art creates a golden-hued, Eisenhower-era suburban paradise poisoned by fear and hate, and King's command of this tight, issue story is masterful. It's a sad and haunting read that will stay with you. Wonder Woman's much-buzzed-about movie may have granted her a bit of a popular-vote groundswell, but there wasn't much agreement on which run of comics from her long and storied life should make the final cut.

Arguments were made for her debut comics, which remain bracingly weird; George Perez's mid-'80s reboot; Greg Rucka's tenure, when he turned her into a kind of superpowered diplomat; and Brian Azzarello's recent turn, in which he recast the Olympian gods as rival crime families. Ultimately, it was Gail Simone's run on the character especially her four-issue launch tale, The Circle , with art by Terry and Rachel Dodson that best managed to nail Diana's iconography by depicting her as powerful as we know her to be and as compassionate as we need her to be.

At once a sprawling adventure anthology and a witty metariff on the long, whimsical history of the superhero genre, Astro City offers a bracingly bright rejoinder to "grim-and-gritty" superhero storytelling. Writer Kurt Busiek and artist Brent Anderson — with Alex Ross supplying character designs and painted covers — don't merely people their fictional metropolis with analogues of notable heroes, though there are plenty of those on hand. The universe they've created pays loving homage to familiar characters and storylines even as it digs deep to continually invent new stories and feature new perspectives.

Astro City is a hopeful place that dares to believe in heroes, sincerely and unabashedly; reading it, you will too. Bissette and John Totleben. But Alan Moore's tenure on the character, beginning in , redefined the character in a fundamental and groundbreaking way, turning him into arguably the most powerful hero in the DC Universe, albeit one shot through with the darkest elements of gothic horror. Penciler Stephen Bissette and inker John Totleben's images seemed to float in that darkness, imbuing Moore's literally epic tale Swampy visits both Hell and outer space with a sense of dread and foreboding, even when that tale involved Swamp Thing communing with Evil itself Yeah, look, you really have to read it.

This sadly short-lived cult hit should have been a mainstream one. Gotham Central's ingenious conceit: What is life like for the men and women of Gotham City's police force — and the citizens they protect? Writer Greg Rucka told tales of the day shift, Ed Brubaker the night, and both were penciled originally, anyway by Michael Lark, whose hatchy line work imbued America's most dangerous municipality with a grubby, lived-in feel.

Batman and his rogues gallery showed up around the edges — the GCPD dealt with the sometimes horrific aftermath of their clashes — but this was a gripping, character-oriented police procedural, a nuanced look at life beyond the cape. Given the enduring power of writer Chris Claremont's long and hugely influential run on the X-Men series, it was inevitable that some of that work would end up on this list. But frankly, the judging panel expected people to nominate one of his go-to X-Men story arcs — Days of Future Past, say, or The Dark Phoenix Saga, which is what most people think of when they think "X-Men.

This is a story, after all, in which much of the X-Men's subtext becomes text. Xavier teams up with Magneto to defeat not a supervillain, but a preacher who is whipping up a hate campaign against mutants. It became the basis, albeit a freely adapted one, for Bryan Singer's second X-Men film. But with lots more punching! But with lots more crushing!

This is Warren Ellis at his silliest and most joyful, complemented by Stuart Immonen's gorgeously angular line work. It's an over-the-top parody of the Marvel universe, the antidote to grim 'n' gritty and the perfect book to press into the hands of anyone who says they hate superheroes. The late Darwyn Cooke's bright, gorgeous love letter to DC Comics' superheroes is a marvel of raw logistics as much as storytelling.

Cooke crams just about every DC character, including some real deep-benchers The Challengers of the Unknown, anyone?

Every page bristles with color and action — and crisp midcentury design — but there's more to it than crew cuts and car fins. Amid all this shiny, Silver Age hopefulness, Cooke finds time to linger over the less-than-glossy elements of the time: He also plumbs new emotional depths in characters who have never gotten their time in the spotlight, like J'onn J'onzz, the haunted, sensitive Manhunter from Mars.

Plus, there are dinosaurs. Ryan North and Erica Henderson's revival of an obscure '90s Marvel comic relief character is pure joy on paper. Computer science student Doreen Green has a secret superpower: She can talk to squirrels. Also, she has a tail. With college roommate Nancy and sidekicks Koi Boi and Chipmunk Hunk, Doreen uses a combination of tail tricks, computer savvy and irrepressible cheer to beat up pretty much every baddie who comes her way. Also, you'll have to squint, but North's jokey footnotes are not to be missed.

There is no one like Mike Mignola — his thick, angular, shadowy lines are instantly recognizable, almost like a silent movie in comic form. And Hellboy is a singular creation, a good-natured demon who smells like roasted peanuts brought to Earth as a baby by Nazi occultists during World War II and then raised as a normal boy by a kindly professor.

So, just an everyday kid, then. Mignola's dry humor plays beautifully against Hellboy's fantastical adventures, and there is a LOT to explore in the universe he has created over decades of writing and drawing. On the book's much-admired opening page, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely distill Superman's origin into four images and eight words: Quitely's Superman doesn't look like any you've seen before which is a neat trick, given Supes' longevity. He is a towering, barrel-chested galoot who manages to radiate kindness and compassion, exactly the way he should. Quitely's super-suit wrinkles at the armpits and bags a bit at the knees, which turns this familiar object of pop culture iconography back into what it originally was: Matt Fraction and David Aja's run on Hawkeye turned a Marvel also-ran into a real superstar okay, the Avengers movie probably helped, but still.

This version of Clint Barton has no secret identity — Fraction's idea was to make him just an everyday dude, dealing with aging and divorce and everything that happens while he is not being an Avenger. Aja's artwork is dramatic but unglamorous, and Matt Hollingsworth's muted, retro colors drive home Hawkeye 's workaday charm. Plus Kate Bishop and Pizza Dog. Need we say more? Krazy Kat was never popular the way some of its contemporaries were.

It was too weird, too aimless, too surreal and, frankly, too utterly fabulous. Luckily, it had one very important fan: Herriman's gender-fluid cat, his brick-hurling mouse, his looping, unique vernacular and his graphic imagination make Krazy Kat one of the greatest comic strips of all time. A kat, a mouse, a brick — a timeless love story. Sometimes called "the last great newspaper comic," Calvin and Hobbes barely needs an introduction.

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