Astro

Someday I'm gonna have to email Nils Hamm and find out why he's not doing more comics (and I should also ask him exactly what European country he is from). Astro is his only work I know of, a wonderful tale of getting lost then finding your true self in a strange place, all disguised in a sci-fi garment. Painted, drawn and using mixed media, the story is simply a space boy falling from the sky to a new world (which looks curiously like our own), and trying to figure out how he can fit in. It's completely wordless, a gem, and if the impressionistic images don't make you nuts for more of Hamm's mind-blowing work, then get thee back to art class.

www.raketula.de

The End

There's a rift in taste that happens sometimes between me and my fellow comic-book aficionados. When a book is sometimes considered too smart for its own good, many will turn up their noses, call it pretentious, and leave it there. For me, when this type of stuff really works, its cream of the crop. Anders Nilsen's deceptively ordinary drawings are used here at first to depict the common theme of isolation, loneliness, dejection and alienation - all in a seemingly unremarkable set of light pencil drawings and straightforward narrative device. But as those feelings deepen in the protagonist, the book stops talking with words, and shows in pure graphic simplicity the degradation of a human soul. The people turn into odd uncomfortable shapes, turned, twisted, burned and ultimately reduced to nothing but dots. All the torments of the grimmest Dostoyevsky character here are expressed in a progression of grotesque images which convey the impossible maze of our own minds. Pick this one up if you're ready for a challenge.

www.fantagraphics.com

A Superman For All Seasons

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale are one of the best known and highly-regarded teams working in superhero comics today. In this perennial character study, Jeph spins a simple tale presenting the quintessential traits that make Superman who he is, using each season of the year to reflect the different aspects of his character. Sale's beautiful signature art style is evocative of the German expressionist filmmakers, yet in this book has an added warmth, complimenting the story. If you don't really know anything about Superman or even comics in general, this is a good place to start.

www.dccomics.com

New Tales From Old Palomar

Los Bros. Hernandez are indy comics gods. Starting by self-publishing in the 1980's Gilbert Hernandez - along with his brothers Mario and Jaime, began Love & Rockets, one of the first books that began the modern age of independent comics. This book is one of many tales of the fictional small Mexican town of Palomar, where an assortment of masterfully interwoven characters try to get by in everyday life, as well as the occasional extraordinary, even supernatural events. Awe-inspiring, evoking everything from cave paintings to Archie comics to dirty cartoons, "Beto" is one of the best storytellers working today. You will be awed.

www.fantagraphics.com

Meatcake

Dame Darcy is the official ambassador from Fairy Land to comicdom. Using her easy hand to create visions of hilarity, horror and hubris, Dame truly creates worlds of her own. In them, you will find hip witches, man-servant sailors, bitchy princesses, three-legged acrobatics and of course, plenty of fairies. Stories are mixed with activity pages and soapbox-style diatribes. Don't expect a straight narrative, rather uncover a box of different fun stuff to do, all seen through the bizarre veil of one of the freest spirits of the medium.

www.damedarcy.com

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

This is the comic that made the Batman movies possible. Forget Ledger and Nicholson, this is where the darkness began. Legendary creator Frank Miller along with inker Klaus Janson and colorist Lynn Varley explore Bruce Wayne years after he has retired from his alter-ego. Seen through Miller's distinctive noir lens, we learn the uglier nature of the pathos of a vigilante and those he hunts. This book was not only a reimaging, but a revelation, single-handedly changing the way superheroes were widely seen. Completed in 1985, you can still feel its reverberations in most mainstream titles and beyond.

www.dccomics.com

Jackass

Jeremy Eaton created this book as a series of four-panel strips which appeared in a big-city weekly. But when a friend took selected strips and arranged them into a certain order, it felt to me like a whole other book. Basically a series of wordless sight gags, Eaton uses a single face with a single expression over and over again to play on the most basic fundamentals of drawing to puzzle and delight your brain. All he's doing here is dancing with lines, perspectives, sequence and expectations to pull off the simplest of laughs. It feels more like a game - where will this smiling head end up next? Is that line on the ground a shadow or a hole? Will this circle be an eye or a cat's head in the next panel? This work breaks things down to basics for a most profound experience.

www.jeremyeatonart.com

Tintin

The classic series by Belgian artist Hergé is the most popular European comic of all time. Following the adventures of the title character, Tintin centers around a boy reporter who gets mixed up in fantastic adventures. A rarity for its ability to engage children and adults equally, this grand body of work - 24 long-form books over a period of about 50 years - always maintains its central qualities: compelling characters, impeccable pacing, hilarious sight gags, and more twists and turns per tale than you can keep up with. Hergé's imagination took us from forgotten lands, to grand palaces and even to the moon! Just plain fun.

www.tintin.com

Hellboy

I'm sorry, but the comic is so much better than the movies. But then, that's almost always the case. Creator Mike Mignola's superb series about the predestined demonic destroyer of the world being far too human to fulfill his fate is funny, moody, well-crafted, and horrific. Watching Hellboy fight monsters is only half the fun - the real treat is Mignola's drawings. Using a great deal of darkness to augment the mood, he is a master of setting atmosphere. And his preference of hard angles over the more traditional roundness of muscle in the way he approaches anatomy adds to the hardness of the tormented characters he depicts. Aside from the fancy analysis, Hellboy is a great fantasy book.

www.darkhorse.com

Akira

I have to confess - I am woefully undereducated when it comes to Japanese comics. This classic book from the great Manga tradition is gladly one of the few exceptions to my ignorance. A bizarre story of super-science gone terribly wrong, master artist Katsuhiro Otomo employs his meticulous design sense to put us in Neo-Tokyo, a post-apocalyptic landscape where teenage motorcycle gangs fight for turf. But when they get unwittingly mixed up with a secret government project which threatens all life on Earth, things get weird. Wildly popular, spawning an anime adaptation which broke box office records in Japan, Otomo's storytelling is just as compelling as his fantastic illustrations.

www.darkhorse.com