1. Jack Kirby



Im like 12 or 13, reading every comic I can get my hands on, and see Captain america 193, the first MadBomb issue, so the story is confusing as all hell to me then, and Cap and Falc dont seem real, but that cover, holy crap, that cover.




Im also a huge Planet of the Apes fan, and keep coming across odd issues of this book thats so like POTA, I'm rabid trying to find them, so desperate to read more about this kid Kamandi, and destined to never win this fight, impossible to find but god I wanted them. They may well have been the first books I actively hunted.




At this time I would also come across the occasional issue of another guy who fascinated my young teen self, the art would blow me away in every one I found, and the premise of an escape artist seemed so damned cool i was hooked.




As I started collecting seriously, I slowly accumulated more and more of Jacks books, whether reprints of his Fantastic Four and Thor work, or Cap, Panther, 2001, and Eternals from his great return. Honestly my younger self loved his art but was never too impressed with the dramatic writing style on the Marvel books. As I was getting a little older, and a little more discerning in taste, starting to see Darkseid mentioned more and more at DC and coming to appreciate the genius of the man. The sheer creativity in any Kirby book, whether he wrote it or not, is beyond a years worth of most other comics.




Simply he astounds me, his creations speak to me like no others, and the energy and power of his art inspires my own like no other.


Other creators are here for that 1 special book/story we love, others draw real purty, or have taken the comic book to another height, but how many others have an entire comic book universe on their shoulders, how many have created work that 30 or 40 years later others are still mining from the great depths of his imagination.
The King, simple as that.

Very, very very true about The King !

Biro should've definitely been on my list. I couldn't love his stuff more.

1) Jack Kirby you say...

Well, of course my #1 is Kirby. It was a set-up from the beginning and I happily walked into it. Thank you Kurt. Seriously, thanks for another great year of CCC goodness!

So why Kirby? The answer might be stupefyingly obvious to some. But to others, it's no way... the man can't write. Kirby shouldn't be on a list of the greatest comic book auteurs.


Needless to say the holders of such an opinion have every right to it, but let's not mistaken opinion for gospel truth. Contrary thoughts abound. Some will suggest that Kirby was in fact a better writer than in his old partner in crime Stan Lee. I don't know if that's true. Neither man can be said to be overly natural in their dialoguing.

But I love Kirby's dialogue. His writing. I'm not even going to display a single picture of Jack's legendarily powerful art. I'm putting Kirby here because his words have earned him a place (the place in fact) as much as have his pictures on this my list of life long laudables.

Kirby's admittedly baroque writing, is an angular adventure that reaches toward the extravagances of opera,the compression of a poetry and the Delphic strains of myth.

Kirby's writing even looks as cabalistic as the more abstract iconography of his art. All those peculiar places of emphasis, recondite positioning of comas or imperatives... they can vex. Or they be as intonations of the unconscious or the argot and the energy of creativity itself in motion.

For all that Kirby was such phenomenal force in comics, an agent of such revolutionary change, a historical figure of such inestimable magnitude he tended in the end toward the status of outsider, even of eccentricity.

For Kirby it was never about the Marvel Universe or the DC universe, both of which he helped to incarnate, but about forces he drew both out of himself and those around him. It was an infinite vista that he looked upon.

But let's be clear, it was not even the Kirbyverse he was intent upon; however much it might have seemed so native, and indeed innate, to his most private sphere. No in the end the The Fourth World, the Kirbyverse, any of those costumed continuities we are so familiar with, after all is said and done, whatever you choose to call these many spendoured tales in four colour, it's all about ourselves.

And that will always be the key to great storytelling.

So no doubt about it. Kirby could draw. He could write. He could tell a hell of a great story. I think there is much truth in that.

Brilliant Prince Hal. Convinced I am.

"While you live, tell truth, and shame the devil."

Nothing for it then... it's upon a course for me to read Kelly again. Truth in art, my friend.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, Comics, my true love gave to me...

The grandmaster of the comic book form and cartoonist extraordinaire...



for everything!



What can you say about Will Eisner. Simply put he elevated comics into an art form. He deconstructed the mixing of words and pictures to understand the guts of it, and then recreated it into something more. In many ways he is the demiurge of cartooning. If there is a rulebook for cartooning, he wrote it and then codified it in his three volumes about comics-Comics & Sequential Art, Graphic Storytelling and Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative. McCloud may have preached the gospel as a disciple and brought it to a wider audience, but the message was the teachings of Will Eisner.

Eisner told stories that ran the gamut, from the pseudo-heroics of the crimefighter The Spirit in the era of the Depression and World War II to the Last Days in Vietnam, from the tenements of New York in stories like A Contract with God, The Building, and Dropsie Avenue, to the plains of Africa with his adaptation of the Sundiata to the high seas with Hawks of the Seas.



The list of Eisner's disciples reads like a who's who list of the comics industry. His peers were the giants whose shoulders the industry stands on and may have been a first among equals, and Eisner had a way of getting those giants to speak forth the fires of creation that burned within them...



But at the heart, the core of Eisner, he was a storyteller and damn fine one. He could inspire and entertain, he could lift your heart or make it ache with his tales. He made you laugh, he made you cry, reading Eisner reminds you of what it means to be alive, to live life no matter the circumstances and to remember the essential humanity we are all capable of. All through the use of words and pictures.

A spirited life indeed.

-M

So, my #1 pick in the 2015 Classic Comics Christmas is Hergé for his Tintin strip...




As some of you may know, I absolutely adore the Tintin books. Back on the old CBR forum I even had a Tintin review thread, which was unfortunately lost in the reboot, but which I'm hoping to resurrect here at the CCF in the not too distant future. Yes, I know that Hergé had various assistants helping him out with drawing, doing backgrounds, inking and sometimes more, but the artistic "heavy lifting" on the strip was definitely by Hergé himself.

There's just so much to love about Tintin and his world. These books are so close to my heart that it's kind of hard to know where to start in singing their praises. I'll begin by noting that once the series hits it's stride with the fifth volume, The Blue Lotus, Hergé's writing is absolutely marvelous and his stories are always brilliantly constructed, well paced, suspenseful and, at times, laugh out loud funny. The central pairing of Tintin, the boy reporter, and his dog snowy is one of the best double acts in fiction, as far as I'm concerned, and as the series continues on, the supporting cast swells to include such wonderful and iconic characters as Captain Haddock, the Thompson Twins and Professor Calculus. God, how I love reading those characters!

The Tintin books are, without hyperbole, some of the very highest quality detective-adventure-mystery stories that you're ever likely to read and the highly detailed ligne claire ("clear line") artwork that Hergé pioneered in the series is, at once, immediately recognisable and never less than breathtaking. The best of the Tintin stories are a masterclass in comic book story-telling and come highly recommended by me.