#12   Rich Buckler


Rich Buckler was famous in the 70’s and 80’s for drawing the Fantastic Four and Avengers. I really enjoyed his art , and although he was criticized a bit for swiping and copying the styles of Kirby and Neal Adams, I felt that he was a solid storyteller in his own right. It wasn’t until I picked up The Mighty Crusaders#1 that I was exposed to him doing all the “Heavy Lifting” as this years 12 days puts it. He was charged with being the creative force behind the Newly resurrected Red Circle line of comic books. This was an imprint of the Archie comics line that was also active( briefly) in the 40’s and 50’s. Anyway, he wrote drew and edited the first story arc and I really enjoyed it. It had the feel of the Avengers and I was curious to know more about the Shield, Fly, Darkling and the other RC characters. Well, his involvement as the main creator would be short lived as Cary Burkett took over writing duties with #4 and Buckler would continue to pencil parts of the stories. As of issue #11 his named disappeared from the comic books altogether. I understand He is credited with creating Deathlock and even wrote 2 issues but I have never read those.


My signed copy of Mighty Crusaders #1






Panel #2 in this page is famous ,or infamous, because Gary Groth  of the Comic Journal wrote a piece savaging Bucklers swiping in this series and calling him a racist for this panel.

#12. Dan Jurgens


If John Byrne was the nadir of the post-Crisis Superman books, then Dan Jurgens just may have been it's messiah, called on to save the struggling Superman franchise from Byrne's botched reboot. Jurgens was unstoppable in the 90's, returning many of the more familiar aspects of the Superman supporting cast and mythos. Superman was actually likable again under his pen and pencil, powerful yet restrained, godlike yet humble, and more likely to solve his problems with his head than his fists. It was really a throwback to what made Superman great before Byrne got his hands on him.



He also created Booster Gold and wrote him during his first series! Need I say more?

My #12 pick is Raymond Briggs.

Briggs is a very well known author of Children's picture books and comics here in the UK, having written and drawn such perennial favourites as The Snowman, Father Christmas and Fungus the Bogeyman. But the reason that he is on my list is because of his 1982 best-seller, When the Wind Blows...




It's the tale of an elderly couple named Jim and Hilda Bloggs, who live a mundane life in the English countryside, as the world outside teeters on the brink of nuclear war. We see them preparing for the coming Armageddon by following the advice in the British government's controversial Cold War leaflet, Protect & Survive...and there's some absolutely rapier sharp lancing of the government's well intention, but ultimately ridiculously ineffective, advice by Briggs. Once the "big one" drops, we see the bewildered couple slowly dying of radiation poisoning for the remainder of the book. It becomes an intensely bleak story, as you might imagine, and it's a tale that can't fail to move the reader on some level.

The sequential artwork is very well done and quite inventive at times. It mostly consists of small, tightly packed panels, which serve to subliminally represent the Bloggs's sheltered, insular world and Briggs delights in capturing the mundane, quintessentially English details of their day-to-day existence...




These tightly packed pages are then inter-cut with big, ominous looking, double page splashes of events that are transpiring in the outside world, as the bombs are made ready to fly. When the bomb does finally drop, the blast is so immense that it actually overwhelms and shatters the panel layout of the book itself, in what I think it a brilliant bit of comic drawing. Jim's single, oh-so-English, understated utterance of "Blimey!" as the blast dissipates in the final panel is a masterstroke...




When the Wind Blows isn't a flawless masterpiece, mind you (and I must say that I have zero interest in anything else Briggs has ever produced). For one thing, Briggs makes the Bloggs's so unworldly, so blindly trusting in their government and so naive that it's ultimately hard to have a lot of sympathy for them. Don't get me wrong, their naivety and their hopelessly unrealistic expectation that the emergency services will arrive any minute and rescue them is tear-jerking and this is definitely a very sad story. But I think Briggs over-eggs the pudding on this front a little; the Bloggs's extreme naivety boarders on stupidity at times and, as a result, it ultimately becomes quite annoying.

Still, it's a great book and one that made a hell of an impression on me as a 12-year-old kid when I first read it. It holds up to repeated readings very well too and, in fact, prompted by this year's Classic Comics Christmas, I re-read it again only yesterday.

Very nice choice BTW!

Never heard of Franka or Kuijpers, but the fact that this stuff has never been translated into English is a crying shame.

I must confess, I've never heard of Ethel & Ernest. That's one that has definitely passed me by. I'll have to have a look.