My #8 pick is the Brazillian artist/writer Léo (real name Luiz Eduardo de Oliveira) for his Aldebaran and Betelgeuse series.




I was recommended the English translation of the Aldebaran series a few years back by a guy in my local comic book shop who was trying to persuade more of the shop's customers to read some bande dessinée books. As well as turning me on to Edgar P. Jacobs' Blake & Mortimer series (which will be appearing later on in my Top 12) he also recommended the first book in the Aldebaran cycle. I dutifully purchased it and was hooked within a few short pages. I motored through the first volume, feverishly ordering subsequent installments from Amazon as fast as I could. The phrase "a real page-turner" doesn't even come close; this story is simply addictive!

Léo's artwork is really pretty and highly detailed. He's a master at communicating character emotion with facial expressions, but I feel as if his figures are a bit stiff or somehow mannequin-like. However, within the context of the strange, other-worldly locales that the Aldebaran and Betelgeuse stories take us, this stiffness actually plays into the strange environments and serves to accentuate the weirdness of it all. I must also make mention of the high degree of inventive imagination on display in Léo's depictions of alien fauna and flora, which is quite staggering.

At their heart, Aldebaran and Betelgeuse are fantastical sci-fi adventures and damn good ones at that.

Likewise! I love this forum for teaching me things like this.




Lots of the second-hand record shops that I used to frequent in the 1990s would have big posters of this cartoon pinned up on the wall for sale. While on the one had I thought that owning such a poster was a bit tacky, I couldn't help appreciating that it was one of the most brilliantly accurate depictions of what being really stoned feels like. And every time that I would indulge in a toking session (back when I used to do such things), I would be reminded of this cartoon and how spot on it is.

That does look interesting! Never heard of it before but will be looking for it.

But why did you go to Amazon for the subsequent volumes instead of the comic shop guy who recommended it?

Holy frijoles! Ileft leo out of my list because I thought English-speaking readers wouldn't be familiar with his work. Thank God you were there to pick up the slack, Confessor!!!

I fully agree with your assessment of leo's ability to create alien ecologies. His extra-terrestrial animals and plants are more than just bizarre: they are believable. Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Antares and now the Survivors are all very cool SF series, and Leo is consistently good.

Is it bad to mention that he also draws damn pretty human females?

#8 Jeff Smith

I had heard about Bone, but in the vast explosion of comics in the early 1990s I had not found room for it on my pull list. I did get a copy of the Bone Holiday Special in an issue of Hero Illustrated, but I still didn't pick up the series. I got the Bone Sourcebook in Wizard when it moved to Image. Image started to reprint the series from the beginning and STILL I didn't pick up the series. I bought back issues of Duck Books, I was currently buying kids books from DC Comics, I don't know why I wouldn't pull the trigger. Finally, the series ended and the Complete One Volume Edition came out. I saw it in my local Barnes & Noble, sat down to read the first couple of issues and bought it on the spot.

Bone is one of the great epic adventures ever made, only with a little more humor tossed in. Even better, a whole new generation has found it when Scholastic reprinted the series in color.

He will probably move up in a further edition of this list when his Shazam! Monster Society of Evil is eligible.



up next at #7...my highest ranking cartoonist that did all the heavy lifting in monthly superhero comics

#8 Bill Mauldin

A little distance helps you to see a bit more clearly what influences helped to shape you. Many are obvious, but there are also many tiny pieces in the mosaics of our lives that make you wonder how the hell they got in there. Bill Mauldin’s work didn’t change my life completely, but his work, primarily his World War Two cartoons and his later editorial cartoons, which I first encountered when I was 15, helped to shape my perceptions of the world, a small world that for many reasons had been circumscribed by a very few, very domineering influences.

I came to know Mauldin and many other cartoonists and strip artists through a book by Stephen Becker called Comic Art in America (1959), which I took out so many times from my hometown library that I knew it page by page. Even today when I take it down from the shelf, I am whisked back to the many nights I spent enraptured by its loving discussion of the art form we here find so compelling. The chapter devoted to editorial cartoons was one I read and reread. In those antediluvian days, books on comics were scarce, and they rarely appeared in anybody’s public library. Thus, my finding Becker’s book and Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes (of which more later), were akin to Moses’ finding a burning bush in the desert. They were the word of God in comic form for me.

Mauldin’s story burned into my brain: a teenager in the National Guard in 1940 who served with the 45th Infantry, was wounded in Italy and drew “Up Front,” a series of cartoons for Stars and Stripes. The cartoons showed the war from the average GI’s view: survival, not heroism, was the theme. What made such an impression on me was that Mauldin’s superiors, the officer corps, right up to Patton himself, had no use for him or his protagonists, Willie and Joe. You’ll recall that Patton wanted his soldiers clean-shaven and spiffy. It didn’t matter if they were up front.

Reportedly he wanted to arrest Mauldin, but Eisenhower gave the word that Mauldin was to be left alone. Mauldin was bringing a welcome dose of reality to the many readers who saw his cartoons at home, and Ike thought that Willie and Joe’s mud-soaked, fight to stay alive was a welcome balance to the unceasing flow of feel-good propaganda that was the steady diet on the home front. He hoped it would remind them that the war was no walk in the park.




The 1944 Pulitzer Prize went to...



Mauldin essentially spat in the eye of those who extolled war for its glory, honor, adventure and excitement. His drawings of Willie and Joe are laced with irony, sarcasm, and frustration. You don’t have to look far to find anger rippling beneath the surface, but Mauldin skillfully (at age 23!) walks the line between wryness and bitterness, and it is well he did, because he might well have been shut down if he’d turned strident.

Becker grasps Mauldin’s outlook perfectly: “Mauldin was apparently aware of every argument adduced to make war palatable: he was also aware that absolutely none of those arguments could stand up under any logical scrutiny… [his cartoons] are swift, uncompromising refutation of all the hymns of glory ever raised to war” (326).

After the war, with the 1944 Pulitzer in hand, Mauldin wandered from career to career, even trying acting (he was in John Huston’s Red Badge of Courage) because his savage irony and his strong support of civil liberties made it difficult for him in post-war America. He always said he was a born trouble-maker, and that was not going to change.

Eventually, though, he landed a gig with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, won another Pulitzer in 1959...


"Won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime?"

and soon went to Chicago, where he was a mainstay at the Sun-Times until he retired in 1991.

November 23, 1963...


Like so many vets, Mauldin did not have an easy time of it after he came home, but he probably owed much of the emotion, directness, clarity, and his acuity that were always so evident in his work to that horrendous experience. He never lost his anti-authoritarian streak, his humanistic sensibility or his enviable irascibility. Here are some examples from one of the great practitioners of a nearly lost art. He tried to make us think. He certainly succeeded with me and I will always be grateful.

And a couple on civil rights...