9. P. Craig Russell

There's little doubt in my mind that Russell's strongest work was always done with a collaborator, particularly the Elric stories he did with Roy Thomas for Marvel and Pacific, but much like pizza, even bad P. Craig Russell is still P. Craig Russell. Even when the writing or the art falters a little, it's still so completely epic in expression and magnitude.

The best solo Russell work I've seen is his version of Ring of the Nibelung.









There just isn't another artist in the field like Russell, he's a decent storyteller to boot, and his taste in fantasy source material is...well...fantastic.

I agree with your assessment of the amazing work Russell did on The Ring, but... that second image is by Gil Kane!

The first image from Siegfried (I believe I saw it in Epic magazine #2) always struck me as the perfect rendition of Wagner's vision. I much prefer it to the way Russell depicted the same event in his Ring of the Nibelung comic; it was somehow more magical.

Another work he did that burned into young Hondo's mind early in his fandom was the Eclipse graphic novel Night Music.

Russell's work is poetry.  There are only a handful of artist's I could appropriately use that term with.

Highly recommended

My #9 pick has appeared on a few people's lists already, but Gary Larson's The Far Side is hands down my favourite series of newspaper cartoons ever. While he's maybe not technically the most incredible artist in the world, he's very adept at getting the mechanics of his gags across, with a minimum of fuss and confusion. Larson's work frequently makes me properly laugh out loud too, as opposed to Charles M. Schulz and Maurice Dodd (both of whose work I also really like), who tend to elicit the occasional snigger from me, rather than a full out laugh. There's also a nice thread of surrealism in Larson's work that greatly appeals to me as well.

Anyway, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here's some Gary Larson greatness...











...and possibly my favourite Far Side cartoon of all..

Coming in at number 9...Will Eisner.  

Beyond his ground-breaking work on The Spirit (and yes I know he had a number of assistants and ghosts, but it was still Eisner's show) he made the graphic novel a viable format in the U.S. and in many ways was at the forefront of making comic books respectable.  

He also did something that almost nobody else has managed to do...he made slice-of-life comics interesting to me.  Overall I find that sort of thing devolves into navel-gazing.  But with Eisner it never was anything less than entertaining and interesting.  His graphic novel The Dreamer is still my favorite look at the early history of the comic industry.  And To the Heart of the Storm is arguably my favorite original graphic novel and is a brilliant look at the end of an era.   

9. Darwyn Cooke
...for his work on DC: The New Frontier

Everything needs its meta-masterpiece. One great work that ties is all together, drawing on what has come before. The Marvel Universe had Marvels, a love letter to the universe from Busiek and Ross, showing what it was like to live in the Marvel Universe, to experience its great moments of triumph and tragedy, as somebody just outside those events, taking us from the Golden Age through the end of the Silver Age. DC had a couple stabs at this. James Robinson’s Golden Age. Kingdom Come by Waid and Ross.

For DC, their meta-masterpiece is Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier. It tells a story at once on three levels, giving us a fresh take on events within the comics, letting those events reflect what was going on behind the scenes in the comics publishing world, while at the same time what was going on in America. It is about as perfectly realized a tale as I could imagine.



I first encountered Cooke in 2000 with Batman: Ego, a really cool little psychological Batman thriller and liked it.

I encountered him sometimes as a writer, sometimes as a penciller, sometimes as both. He wrote a couple great stories in Spider-Man’s Tangled Web, a series filled with great stories from great creators (Brubaker’s Last Shoot being my favorite). He really made his name for me telling Slam Bradley-focused Catwoman stories in Detective Comics with Ed Brubaker, before the two split ways over creative differences. Cooke would not leave noir behind, as his Slam Bradley work was basically warm-up for his eventual acclaim adapting the stories of Parker.

But it’s New Frontier I love the most. The comic has only grown on me over the years. I reread it just a few months ago and loved it far more than I did upon my first read more than 10 years ago. It also adapted nicely into an animated film, perhaps the best of its type they have put out.

9. Gilbert Hernandez

I don’t think I can add much to what’s been written about Beto over the years. From the Palomar stories and beyond, he creates rich stories and characters that, at least at some levels, are better than anyone’s ever done in comics.