10. Lynda Barry


In my 40+ years of comics fandom, there haven't been many cartoonists who have made me fully committed on first exposure.
Lynda Barry is one of those few. After my first sampling of her work, I was devoted. "I will buy anything this woman produces for sale. Sight unseen. She's got me."

Lynda's ability to recapture the voice of a precocious, curious, and confused child resonated with me. Her crude but effective art, enthusiastically festooned with frills, annotations, and extras, her ability to convey haunting moments in four panels, everything about her work pushed my buttons. OK, it's "ugly" art, but it's an ugly that draws me in, that merges awkwardness with ambition, that so evokes my memories of how it was to be a kid, how we thought, how we talked, how we processed the world around us.
Lynda's "Ernie Pook's Comeek" is a masterpiece that I'd give my wholehearted recommendation to, for any and everyone. Her stuff is real, it's funny, it's touching, it's heartbreaking, it's inspirational.

10. Frank Miller
...for his work on Daredevil

I started reading comics in 1989. Mostly (entirely) superhero comics. And they had a feel to them. A feel echoed across every comic I read. Until I read some older comics, comics from the sixties say. And these had a different feel. I liked many, I appreciated most, I've come to love some. But they all felt dated. Things from the forties felt even more dated and things from the seventies sometimes felt dated.

Frank Miller's Daredevil does not feel dated. It captured the pacing, storytelling, cinematography, character, and story that I associated with modern superhero comics. Now having read lots and lots of superhero comics, including most of Marvel, it really seems like a turning point. Pretty much every superhero comic after Miller's Daredevil kind of feels like Miller's Daredevil in some ways. And nothing before it does. I think this comic set the standard to be imitated. Moreso than Watchmen, moreso than even X-Men, I think superhero comics for the next couple decades ultimately looked to Miller's run on Daredevil in terms of how to tell a superhero story.



In terms of the figure work, Miller's style was excellent, but clearly influenced by the House style of the time. With Ronin, his sci/fi samurai epic masterpiece. He developed a new, more interesting style, and one distinctly his own.




We would see this style at work in Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, and 300. All great comics. Sin City was basically his platform for drawing babes, old-fashioned cars and guys in trenchcoats, and 300 captures and revels in the great melodrama of the final stand of 300 Spartans.



Frank Miller remains on my list of favorite creators by pretending he has done no work in the last 20 years.

I will admit, though an aside from our purposes here, it's really Miller the writer I love. I think his best work is as writer in collaboration with artists I find more talented. I think his Daredevil set the bar, but his true masterpieces are his later work on Daredevil. Man Without Fear with John Romita Jr., Love & War with Bill Sienkiewicz, and of course Born Again with David Mazuchelli, who I consider one of the most talented artists in comicdom. Born Again is easily one of the 10 best superhero stories I have ever read, along with some stories I'll spotlight on Day 10. And, superior to Dark Knight Returns, I think, is Miller and Mazuchelli's masterpiece, Batman: Year One.

I wound up with 3 of my final twelve being female creators.

I think I had 6 on my initial list. There were a few I would have included on that initial list but they didn't have work 10 years old to qualify.

-M

I would say quite a few, Brandon Graham currently being the best at this imho. But Alex Nino is no less impressive, so are Andrea and old school Kevin O'Neill...

Hergé

An obvious choice that will appear on many other lists, I'm sure, but I could not in all conscience leave him off mine since his Tintin books have provided some of my most memorable comics reading over the last two or three years.

Yes, I came to Tintin very lately, after having ignored it for years and years for what now seem the most trivial reasons - e.g. adolescent protagonists have never interested me, even when I was an adolescent myself.

When I finally did get around to giving it a chance - in large part because of comments and reviews from some regulars here at Classic Comics - I was more than a little surprised at how good it was, not only as an important step in the historical development of comics as a medium (something I'd already accepted), but purely in terms of its own narrative.

Hergé is undoubtedly one of the most skilful story-tellers I've ever come across, both as an artist and a writer. I think film-makers would do well to study the structure of his stories, not only how they move from one scene to another but also how each individual scene is a little story in itself. For example, have a look at the first page of L'Ile Noir, which I just started reading:



In just one page you have the shift from an innocent, carefree beginning (Tintin & Milou out for a walk) to the introduction of a troubling or unexpected outside element (the malfunctioning plane) which then develops further (the plane's crew turn out to be crooks who don't mind killing anyone who might witness their activities) and finally a dénouement (they shoot Tintin and leave him for dead). An entire story in just 12 panels!

Then, to step down to a smaller scale, even the individual panels here contain little worlds in themselves - landscapes with horizons and foregrounds and backgrounds of their own. Is there any wonder the reader is captured, drawn into Tintin's "universe"?

And finally, to return to the overall story itself, everything comes together in the most satisfying way, with all loose ends tied up - in contrast to some of the other cartoonists I'll be featuring later on. Granted, this kind of tidiness can be a negative, a cynical exploitation of popular demand - as for example in many recent Hollywood blockbsters -  but with Tintin, where it feels as right as in a good Agatha Christie book.

#10. Bill Amend

Bill Amend's Foxtrot pretty much defined my life in comic strip form growing up as a kid. In fact, I'd say the character of Jason Fox pretty much could represent many of us on this board. Amend's sense of offbeat slice of life humor appeals to all the nerds out there growing up and your family thinking you're a total loon.