I'm getting more and more uncomfortable at never having read Usagi Yojimbo...

Today we take a turn to the European with:

#7. Milo Manara

I realise this name is not necessarily popular among many US comic book fans these days, but that cover is so far from Manara's best work, and Marvel had to know what they were getting when they commissioned him.

Manara is best known for his erotica, but there is much more to him that. Le avventure africane di Giuseppe Bergman (known in English as The African Adventures of Giuseppe Bergman or An Author in Search of Six Characters and Dies Irae) is a heavily metatextual piece that delves into the nature of art and story-telling (as illustrated by the second page posted below). His work can be turns funny, thought-provoking, erotic...

But I won't lie. Even his work that is not purely erotica will usually contain nudity and won't be to everyone tastes. But that's the nature of these lists, right?

#7 Darwyn Cooke

Others have placed Cooke on their lists and spoken well about his worthiness.

I will add only that Cooke, following in the artistic footsteps of Toth and Eisner, was somehow able to make the early Silver Age gleam anew in The New Frontier, one of the few comic series I have not just bought, but truly enjoyed enough to revisit many times.

Cooke distilled the best of those years, extrapolated a bit, and presented his paean to Silver Age DC and the early 60s, when heroism was not scoffed at and idealism was seen not as a flaw, but as a necessity to making this world work for all of us.

What made it so enjoyable, though, was that Cooke embraced the silliness, transmogrifying the goofiness of the War That Time Forgot into something alien and sinister, tapping into the angst of McCarthyism and the unsettling first hints of the shakiness of certain unshakable truths like feminism and civil rights and American exceptionalism. This is not to say that Cooke was treading in Watchmen territory, but he was in some ways, stripping the nostalgic veneer from the Kennedy era without tossing it all into the crapper.

There were times I wish he’d broken free of the rigid layout, and my Silver Age inner child wanted the series to last longer and highlight more of the many characters who eventually crammed its pages, but these are minor quibbles compared to say, Identity Crisis, which ravaged rather than re-examined characters and ideas.

Cooke’s thoughtful, logical approach to characters and events that seem ludicrous in today’s world was not iconoclastic; it searched, and I think, found, explanations of those characters and events that made sense because we know more today. It was similar to an archaeologist’s discovery of the original siege engine that over the years was gilded by legend and myth into the Trojan Horse.

Maybe not groundbreaking, but a tribute to creators and their works to whom Cooke is indebted and an expansion on the themes they incorporated into their work, consciously and/or sub-consciously.

Nice job. I definitely feel guilty about omitting Toth. He was actually one of the first creators I thought of, as he easily among my top five favourite artists. But I had this disease in which I kept adding names, and those names were not very nice to Toth and shockingly sent the master packing... for no good reason.

I hope others choose him as well. Gil Kane is another I hope shows up, but at this rate I am not super optimistic, since he is not particularly known for writing, although he certainly has done some stuff.

Day 6...Italy's...

Giovanna Casotto



These comics were meant for adults only but I got them in the late 90s when I was still...well nowhere near 18 but got my hands on the Eros Comix catalog.

The creator, Giovanna Casotto modelled the main character...after herself...and it was fun having this hard stuff under the Jezebel counter. To produce her work, she has photos of herself taken, then she draws them over in a realistic style - so, in a way, she is an actress in her own stories

This is the only cover I can use, with no sample images cuz the Mods will fly up my arse.

#7 Basil Wolverton

Wolverton is kind of like the Wallace Stevens of comic books. I mean who would have thought that the vice-president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company would also be the writer of some of the greatest, if the not very greatest, modernist poetry ever.

Likewise, Wolverton displayed genius from the outside. A member, indeed ordained as elder, in an evangelical church, Wolverton was a pretty religiously devout man. And yet there was nothing shrinking or conservative about the insanity he plumbed in his art. Wolverton was a cartoonist on the margins.

He once presented Disney with some impeccably drawn samples, but received a curt no thanks as his plot of a moon bound Mickey was parlayed. In fact almost everything the young Wolverton submitted to paper syndicates or film makers was rejected for, frankly, being too weird.

Nobody seemed to get it. This genius in the weird.

His clean, primitive, but beautifully drawn pictures of bizarre things from the bizarre places of the mind are powerfully expressionistic. And his monstrous humour came from corners no less outré.

I think the man is brilliant, and that's why I salute him here.

Ulp! Thanks, b-d.