Yes I know :/ I looked so much for any reference of him ploting but couldn't find any, even if I would be surprised if he actualy didn't...

BTW, with all the love Xamie and Beto are getting, I can't believe no one as yet mentioned Mario... Love and Rockets wouldn't even exist if not for him. Sure he didn't produce that many strips, but those he did were quite their own as well, and his recent Citizen Rex with Beto was great

#3 Chester Gould

Others have discussed Gould already and they did so with great aplomb. I can’t add too much more except my own justification for putting him on my list.

Back when I was about 19 or so, my (eventual) wife gave me The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy as a Christmas gift. I was lost in its depths for weeks. Despite some perplexing edits -- missing days and premature endings – this compilation of daily strips was a mother lode of Expressionistic, hard-boiled, gruesomely violent melodrama that I savored bit by bit

Now, I had been a Tracy fan for as long as I could read the funny papers; Tracy had dibs on the front page of the New York News’s tabloid color section. (Don’t know if this has changed, but it was as certain as death and taxes.)

Gould brought violence and crime to the comics. His poutlook was relentlessly fatalistic, Puritanical, conservative. But I never cared. Tracy’s adventures flew at a headlong pace, with everything a good story should have: romance, suspense, coincidence, mystery, cliffhangers, outlandish characters -- the works.

Gould was like a mix of Dickens and Warner Brothers movies (much like Eisner in that respect). The names alone are priceless: Bathless Groggins, Sam Catchem, Pruneface, Vitamin Flintheart, Ribs Mocco, Little Face Finney, and of course, the Joker to Tracy’s Batman, Flattop.

“Grotesque,” in its noun form, is the descriptor constantly applied to Gould’s rogues, but it is perfectly appropriate. They were the most hideously misshapen, distorted-looking, monstrously configured bunch of villains in the comics. You have to see The Pouch, who used the wattled, saggy skin hanging from his chin to his upper chest that followed enormous weight loss as a repository for stolen swag, among other items.


And Gould was an equal opportunity proprietor of his four-color Grand Guignol: As bad as Pruneface looked, you shoulda seen Mrs. Pruneface. She gives Deathman in Batman comics a run for his money as creepiest skeletal criminal in comics. (And she was the diabolical brains behind what may have been the most fiendish of the hundreds of deathtraps Tracy faced, involving two chairs, a block of ice, and a railroad spike (IIRC).



Gould’s stories involved just enough police work and made Tracy vulnerable enough to injury to give his antics verisimilitude, and the brutal murders, horrific villains, and upright Tracy’s daring and courage kept it form being just another detective strip.

Great stories vividly told by a sophisticated storyteller who used seemingly crude artwork to deliver an emotional punch. Gould gave no quarter and expected none in his hard-bitten, funhouse-mirror, nightmarish version of life in Tracy’s big city.

And that’s what keeps them fresh today.

Day 10...

John Byrne



After Crisis, DC Comics decided to bring Superman back to basics, and John Byrne's reboot does a great job of it with a nifty 6-part mini. Even though I read it completely out of sequence and along with campy Superman stories from the 60s

What can I say that hasn't already been said about # 3 ?

He's a world builder, a master of suspense, plotting and emotion. The scale of his stories can be to far away exotic lands that compel you to peek and learn more.

Carl Barks, "The Duck Man" and "The Good Duck Artist" was the creative force behind hundreds of classic Donald Duck stories. He joined Disney studios as an apprentice animator (an "inbetweener") after briefly illustrating and having his first work published for a Canadian men's magazine and learning that Walt Disney had put the call out for more staff. Working on several Donald animated shorts, he also worked on an animated movie that Disney eventually abandoned, that he and fellow animator Jack Hannah took to Dell and published as the famous "Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold." It was the first original Duck material published in comic form.

Dell quickly snapped him up when Barks inquired if Dell could use more material. Barks had serious allergies and relocated to Hemet in the Inland Empire and could work away from the studio. It was the start of an epic run that ran from 1942 to 1966. He contributed hundreds of Duck stories to Walt Disney's Comics & Stories and created Duckburg and the characters of Uncle Scrooge, Gyro Gearloose, Gladstone Gander, and the Beagle Boys. He bowed out of comics in 1968 and started painting for pleasure. A fan asked if he would do a picture of the Duck Family for him. Barks contacted Disney and they allowed him to do it royalty free, until unauthorized copies were discovered. His fans were thrilled with his beautiful paintings and Disney graciously allowed him to do so.

Since all his work was signed with the Walt Disney signature, no one knew who did those hundreds of great stories until the 70's. Over the next decade Barks momentum built and Bruce Hamilton and Russ Cochran were selling his paintings and reprinting his work in hardcover slipcase editions as the 10 set, 30 volume Carl Barks Library.

Barks fan Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz and screenwriter Edward Summer convinced Disney to allow Barks to do a new oil painting for a book they were putting together "Uncle Scrooge McDuck : His Life and Times" which featured 11 classic stories re-colored and printed as a limited edition book. It was turned down by every major NY publishing house. Kurtz bought into Celestial Arts, partly to be able to print the book, which went on to wild acclaim and the template for books like it to follow. The book was the first of its kind to be reviewed in Time Magazine (with large color photos - a first as well), and later Newsweek.

The first ever Carl Barks solo exhibit debuted in Austria and went on tour through 10 different countries between 1994-1998, with over 400,000 attendees.

In 1994, a similar exhibit toured Europe this time starring Barks as well as Disney great Al Taliaferro and Floyd Gottfredson and had over 500,000 attendees.

It's pretty common knowledge that both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg acknowledge Barks' Uncle Scrooge adventure "The Seven Cities of Cibola" as the inspiration for the famous rolling boulder booby trap in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They have called his stories "cinematic" and "a priceless part of our literary heritage."

Barks died at his home in Grants Pass, Oregon, on a home he had built next to his childhood home. He passed a few months shy of 100 from leukemia, and a few years after his third wife had passed.

Will Eisner once called Barks the Hans Christian Andersen of comic books.

#3: Bill Watterson

really nothing I can say that hasn't been said by others who likely have nominated him. . but this man spoke to everything I believed in, experienced, and thought about.

these two strips have been on my wall at work for over a dozen years now, moving with me from place to place: