On the sixth day of Christmas, le Père Noël gave to me...

#7 Boulet



Boulet (Gilles Roussel) is a French cartoonist who is swiftly becoming one of the giants in the field. He's also a shining example of what a "do it yourself" artist can do, using only an admittedly formidable talent, great intelligence, profound artistic integrity and a lot of guts. (He's also very, very, very fast... with no compromise regarding quality. Just look at one of his videos where he goes straight to ink and color... )



I would never dare to attempt such work without a safety net!

Take a look at this comic, which he published in the US last year or the one before that. Yes, it's great in and of itself... hilarious and touching story, amazing art, well-defined characters. But there's something more about it: it's a 24-hour comic. Yes, it was all done in one go, within a day! I am green with envy, torn apart by the demon of jealousy, but ecstatic to know that at this rate, Boulet will probably produce thousands and thousands and more thousands of excellent pages during his career!



His business plan is also very uncommon, very much in the spirit of the independent artist. Boulet publishes his comics online, for free. Each week. He doesn't even try to shove derivative products down our throats, though it's probably possible to find a t-shirt or a print somewhere. Once in a while, every year or so, he has a collection of his stories printed.

His stories can be long or short, make you laugh or go aaaaaaw, refer to obscure pop culture elements or daily life, but are always moulded by a deep humanity and a profound sense of self-deprecating humour. Is it possible to read this unusual time-travel story and not end up smiling from ear to ear?

Unlike the old grouch that I have become, Boulet is a fan of video games, cell phones and new technologies. The comic below is probably the longest single image story yet produced, and it really could only have been done on a computer. (*Please, please read it... It takes about ten minutes, but they might be among your ten best minutes of 2015*)!

The long journey

Definitely one to discover if you're not already following his work.

#7. Robert Sikoryak

It is extremely difficult to rank someone like Robert Sikoryak, who while an utter master at what he does, doesn't quite do what anyone else does. Rather than make this list for being a pioneer in his art or writing, what Sikoryak does best is perfectly mimic the artistic styles of others and adapt the writing of others in unexpected pairings with fascinating and often brilliant results.

Whether depicting Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment through the lens of Atom Age Batman



Capturing Faust via Garfield



Dorian Gray as Little Nemo



Or pairing pulp adventure with the Apple iTunes Terms of Service contract



Sikoryak is never just funny, and never just an extremely talented mimic. He somehow exposes new truths in contrasting two unalike works against each other. It's brilliant stuff, but comparing it to more traditional comic book efforts is difficult at best.

I had never heard of the man...but this stuff is amazing!!!

His approach reminds me of what George Perec or David Lodge do when they play with literature.

I'm satisfied, yes.

Cei-U!
I summon the benediction!

Great to see Boulet here!

So my #7 will also be a "let's try to help Shaxper getting it" as I give you Jeff Smith!


I first encountered Bone when it first came out, on the suggestion from a bored clerk at my LCS. This was close to the begining of my comic book days, so everything was fairly new. I came in with pre-Vertigo and was still adjusting to superheroes. But I had read a healthy dose of bandes dessinées my whole life, some manga as well starting with Akira, so Bone was just gonna have to fit somewhere in the middle of it all. I guess I got completely sold with the second arc, "the great cow-race", but I was often going back to the begining, and then I got it, what utterly fascinates me with it, and it's all in the very first page.


Now I read this first in black and white and I'm not sure what colors really add to this but the strenghs remain the same : with a mere three panels, Smith is already telling us a whole story, one that most decompressed writers would struggle to fit within 24 pages!
Well, I say three panels, but it really is four as that last phoney bone "AAAH!" caption makes us construct an extra panel in our heads. But just through facial expressions, contextual scenery and a few captions, we learn sooooo much already, and seamlessly!
This is storytelling at its finest, and it came as no surprise that none of this was improvised as Jeff Smith took years to fine tune every details of his story and world before realizing and releasing it.



For 55 issues, this level of quality in storytelling is maintained, the world-building effortlessly grows, and just maybe the plot wears off towards the end, but yet, as a craftsman, Smith is a giant.
That is still obvious in his latter three wroks of importance.
His Shazam mini series was probably the most interesting take on the character in decades, a wonderfull all-age book that had some dark turns when needed.
On his next work, RASL, Smith proved that his ploting could be as ambitious as Alan Moore's as he embarked us on the most unlikely SF story with many very neat storytelling tricks.
His current Tüki is still in its infant stages, but so far, it's been extremely enjoyable as an "initiation" story.
With Smith, the storytelling craft just surpass any other aspect of his work, but he's proven his agility in all other domains, and if you're not reluctant to the topic he's tackling, you're in for a great journey.
Over the years, I've used Bone as the main tool in my teaching english to french kids, and it's worked miracles as all of those kids turned from un-interested to grade A students in that specific class, Jeff Smith, the greatest cheat

7. Masashi Tanaka
...for his work on Gon

The second and final manga entry to make my list, Tanaka is the creator of Gon, one of my all-time favorite comic series. A dinosaur who exists in modern jungles, in a different part of the world in each story, but always getting his way. Sometimes a bully, but a bully we can root for as he often bullies the bullies. Below is a page from my favorite Gon story, in which Gon and his posse of cats walk through the savannah getting their way, and an orphaned and frightened kitten follows them longingly.



Tanaka’s art is ultra-realistic for the most part. He draws the animals and forests entirely convincingly. He lets the realism slip only when he wants it to, of course to have his small dinosaur amongst the animals, and to sneak some very human emotion into an animal’s facial expression. Gon is a masterpiece of comic storytelling.

Now the rules of the contest claim our choice had to do the scripting. And, well, nobody else did the scripting. He is the sole creator on Gon. However, his “scripting” is never more impressive than the occasional “growl” or “snap”.

These are animals, after all.

My #7 pick is Frank Miller for his writing/drawing work on Daredevil, The Dark Knight Returns and, to a smaller extent, Sin City.



I came to Miller late, totally missing his Daredevil run at the time and first encountering him via The Dark Knight Returns in 1987 or 88. I then read the "That Yellow Bastard" story-arc of Sin City in the late '90s and finally got around to reading his Daredevil run in the Marvel Omnibus reprint about 10 years ago. What I love about all of the three series that I've listed above can be summed up in one word: noir. That gorgeously stark, heavily shadowed and often brutal artwork of Miller's seemed to get more severe as time passed, until taken to its furthest extremes in Sin City. And there's so much movement and energy, in an almost cinematic way, to his fight scenes.

As a writer, Miller also excels at unlocking what makes his characters tick and not just the main cast either: his development of reporter Ben Urich in the Daredevil comics from a bit part player to a full co-star, with his own fleshed out backstory is as good an example as any of what Miller can do with his characters. And what he did with Batman was, for better or worse, revolutionary -- forever removing him from the campy character the public new from the mid-'60s TV series. Yeah, I know the likes of Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil tried to return the character to its gritty detective roots prior to The Dark Knight Returns, but their work didn't change the general public's perception of Batman in the way that Miller's work or the media that was influenced by it did (the Tim Burton and Chris Nolan Batman movies etc).

I'm not terribly interested in reading much more of Miller's stuff, to be honest, and I understand from things that I've seen and read that the guy is a right-wing nutjob these days. However, for his incredible, game-changing and hugely enjoyable work on Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns, he just had to be on my list.