#10. George Perez



In addition to being a favorite artist of mine, Perez has the unique honor of being (so far as I know) the only comic book creator to ever single-handedly define a core American superhero. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Captain America and the like were all the products of creative teams, and even their most iconic iterations were the results of more than one contributor*, but Perez spent half a decade making one of the most iconic heroes in American Mythology entirely his own. Instead of depicting WW as just the girl of the group, or relying on easy tropes like being a strong but simplistic feminist, a femme fatale, or an aggressive and tough Amazon warrior, he gave Diana a rich and endearing complexity that truly stuck, and he reinforced it through both his writing and his artwork.

The image above conveys it perfectly: though she is both strong and attractive, neither are emphasized -- instead what comes across is her idealism, naivete, courage, and joy. She is infinitely complex and real, never reducible to a stereotype, and Perez's writing and art worked together to give us this amazing spirit and personality. I'm not convinced anyone ever captured the character better, before or after. This is the definitive Wonder Woman, and Perez did it all on his own.






* Yes, you could argue Frank Miller did this with Batman too, but he did it for all of four issues, not a full run, and I would argue his interpretation was heavily influenced by the work of creative teams that came before him.

My first dip into the weirded out...

#10...

Fred Hembeck



First came across his small but sweet gag strips in DCs published between 1979-81 in the Daily Planet page. When I don't feel to read an entire comic and just want a quick fix with something goofy and off the wall, guys like Fred work just fine. The first of 2 'quick fix' submissions in my list.

#10 V.T. Hamlin

I’m of a generation that grew up when comic books were at best mocked and at worst vilified for their effects on young people. If they were tolerated at all, it was as a diversion for little kids. You certainly weren’t going to read them beyond the age
of 9 or 10. If you did, parents might punish you and peers would laugh at you. More on that some other time.

I mention this because the same opprobrium did not apply to the Sunday funnies for whatever reasons. A kid like me could lie on the floor with the funnies spread out in all their four-color, broadsheeted splendor and luxuriate in them like a pig in poop. When I look back on the time I spent immersed in the fun and the suspense, the adventure and the silliness, and the many plots and sub-plots in those seemingly endless pages, I might as well have been reading a Dickens novel.



Today’s choice is another one drawn from that well of happy memory, V.T. Hamlin’s “Alley Oop,” a strip that began in the Stone Age and the rivalry between the kingdoms of Moo and Lem (as in Mu and Lemuria), and eventually made its way through many corridors of history, from Imperial Rome and Sherwood Forest to Ancient Egypt and the 20th century. It combined time travel, dinosaurs, romance, satire, and adventure centered around a kind of Paleolithic Everyman who rolled with the flow and used his brawn, his courage and his wits to survive culture shock like you wouldn’t believe.

Like so many of the other comic strips I loved, the language in “Alley” was as charming as the art. Many of the names were elaborate puns: Alley’s name was a play on the French expression, “Allez, hop!” His curvaceous girlfriend, Oola certainly owed the origins of her monicker to the sexy French phrase, “Ooh, la la!” The scientist whose time machine brought Alley to 1939 was Professor Elbert Wonmug. As a kid, I just thought it was funny, but when I got older, I realized it was a play on ein stein, or “one mug.” His assistant (and eventual villain of the strip), Dr. G. Oscar Boom (G.O. Boom), was the lucky man whom Wonmug sent back to the age of dinosaurs to retrieve a specimen or two. Instead, Oscar comes back with Oop. When Wonmug says, “That’s impossible. There were no cave men in the time of the dinosaurs.”



Oscar ‘s reply is succinct, but stirring, and may even serve as a slogan for all comics: “Behold the impossible.”

And with that, Oop’s many exploits as a stranger in strange lands begin.

Hamlin’s art is delightful. His dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals are exquisite, his versions of the many exotic settings for Oop’s unique. His love for history, geology and paleontology are evident. His art is dynamic and detailed, notable for its meticulous cross-hatching, but fun, too, as if Harold Foster and Larry Gonick had a baby. His Stone Age folks are cartoony, with their Popeye-like forearms and calves – Oola being a notable exception! -- but their contemporary dialogue and sensibilities and expressive faces make them just like you and me.

His layouts remind you of Eisner's work on The Spirit,


even the lettering contributes to the narrative, here as Oop disappears into time:


Just a beautiful, clever, fun strip. Its like will never be seen again in newspapers, that's for sure. I envy anyone plunging into them for the first time.


 

Number 10:

Robert Crumb

The first superstar of underground comix. Unapologetically weird, sex-obsessed, and very very talented. I started buying his work as soon as I saw it - which wasn't often in suburban New Jersey.

After decades of writing and drawing everything himself, his last book was a collaboration with a long-dead author - Moses. I saw the original art pages from Crumb's "Genesis" at the Portland Art Museum a couple of years ago and they were amazing.

I sort of have that... As a teen, I collected Grell's Sunday pages and stapled them as an improvised comic-book.

Wish I had done the same with the Gil Kane pages that preceded Grell's run!

On the third day of Christmas, my cartoonist list gave me...

#10... Will Eisner



I don't think many people will argue against Eisner's status as an American comic god. His bold and innovative storytelling, his incorporation of imaginative designs, his great senseof humour and his deep humanity all contribute to make him a towering figure in the field. Heck, he's one of a handful of American cartoonists whose work I introduced my mother to, despite her general dislike of anything resembling an American comic book. 



The Spirit is naturally one of his most famous creations, but I think he truly, truly came into his own with his later graphic novels... Dropsie Avenue, A life force, The building... They often depict a world that Eisner knew, that of a New York that saw the rise of the comic-book as an art form, and they do so with a deep affection for the people who made the place what it was. And in works like The Plot or Fagin the Jew he gave us history books that should be required reading in class. 

Eisner is a rare case of an American cartoonist whose work was seen in the Belgian journal Tintin, usually reserved to European creators. That's where I first came across coloured versions of The Spirit, and I was suitably impressed (despite having been raised on a steady diet of Giraud, Druillet, Mézières, Franquin, Hermann and Co.)

#10, the unique Ted McKeever (one of my top 5 choices for the Halloween ballot).


(A self portrait)

I probably first became aware of McKeever with either his brilliant Eclipso two-parter or the daunting Extremist mini series with Peter Milligan. That was in 1993, and that triggered my first real back-issue hunting quest : I had to get everything I could from this artist!



Beautifully broken, his characters (humans, monsters, objects or places) always convey a sense of transformation, something is going on, nothing is stable, and cities are the greatest accelerator of those mutations! It really was love at first sight. I think that since that, I haven't missed a single published page from the man and saw him grow, question his own art, re-invent himself, find himself again, experiment with colors in diferent fashions, just a true cartoonist fond of experimentations above anything else. With his upcoming Pencil Head series, he seems to have now reach a point where his stories are gonna tackle the industry itself, after he lately pondered on his craft and his position within it (Superannuated Man and META4)...











All together, he has published 17 graphic novels/mini-series (highlights being Transit, Eddy Current, Metropol, Plastic Forks, The Extremist, Faith, Industrial Gothic and all of his recent Image stuff), had a year-long Doom Patrol run, tackled most of the main superheroes (Superman, Bats, WW, Wolverine, Spidey, Dr Strange, Iron Man, Howard The Duck(!)...) with superb results in his Creeper, Batman, Eclipso, Arès stories, and countless other short stories for Vertigo, Marvel, Image and plenty of 80ies indie publishers.
When I think of 80ies comics incarnated, he pops up pretty high on the list.