By Shaenon K. Garrity
1. Sandman, Neil Gaiman and various. I was a nerdy teenage girl when
Sandman came out, which put me smack in the target audience. My gothy friends at Kent State, infinitely cooler than I, were into it too, as well as
Watchmen,
Preacher, and
Dark Knight Returns (the last of which was smuggled to me, like contraband, in a brown paper bag via my best friend's ex). My suburban high-school classmates had never heard of it. My mother didn't approve of it. It was perfect. I collected every issue and covered the walls of my room with pinups of the Endless.
I was seventeen and trapped in suburbia, and there was, amazingly, a comic-book store within walking distance of my house. When Wordsworth wrote, "Heaven lies about us in our infancy," he was probably remembering the time a comic book store opened down the street from
him.
I lived at Big Buddha's Comics and Sports Cards. And I read about Morpheus' funeral while walking home along the side of Arlington Road on a warm spring day. The green, wet smell of grass was in the air. My eyes misted. It wasn't the last issue, but it was the end of that first pure teenage love.
2. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson. In 1995, Frank Ahrens, writing for the
Washington Post, speculated on the immanent ending of
Calvin and Hobbes:
Calvin will say he hears something; maybe it's a monster.
"What's that?" he'll ask Hobbes.
"It's just your imagination," Hobbes will reply.
Then Calvin will turn away for a moment, to fashion the snowman's head. He will need help lifting it onto the torso, so he will call for his best friend, Hobbes. But Hobbes will not respond.
Calvin will turn around.
Hobbes will be there. But he will be small and stuffed and have short, blunted paws and button eyes. He will be slumped forward in the snow, flaccid, lifeless.
Calvin will blink. "Huh."
And then he will simply shuffle away, off the page, leaving behind his stuffed tiger, and the unfinished snowman, and his wonderful, wonderful childhood.
Supposedly the final sequence of Crockett Johnson's
Barnaby is something like this, though I haven't read it. I think we can all be glad that Watterson chose the opposite ending. Rather than making Calvin grow up, he crystallized him at age six (Barnaby loses his fairy godfather on his sixth birthday), flying away from us on a perfect, eternal sled ride.
My mother cut the final
Calvin and Hobbes strip out of the newspaper for me so I could take it to college and tape it to the door of my dorm room. Watterson's final strip is as true and perfect an ending as any comic strip has had. But Ahrens' ending is also true, and they're both there on that scrap of newsprint. Calvin didn't grow up, but the rest of us had to a little.
3. Peanuts, Charles Schulz. Everyone talks about Charlie Brown's pining for the little red-haired girl, but the most poignant unrequited love in
Peanuts, for my money, is Peppermint Patty's crush on Charlie Brown. Patty, tough and funny and loyal as a dog, is the only girl who sees something to love in that awkward hard-luck case—but he doesn't care, he doesn't even notice, because he's hypnotized by some disinterested beauty floating just off the edge of the panel border.
I've loved my share of nerdy guys, and perhaps I relate to this scenario a little too much. Anyway, the saddest sequence of
Peanuts strips is that in which Patty tells Linus about finally meeting the little red-haired girl and crying because she realizes she'll never be able to compete with someone so pretty. There is nothing in the world sadder than those strips. Charlie Brown thinks he's suffered in love? You're a solipsistic ass, Charlie Brown.
The second saddest
Peanuts strip is Spike's origin story. I can't even talk about that one.
4. Maus, Art Spiegelman. Well, of course I cried at
Maus, and of course it was that page near the end that did it, with the photo of Vladek Spiegelman inserted into the comic-book narrative.
So much of
Maus consists of distancing mechanisms—the nearly expressionless animal faces, the framing sequences in the present day, the metatextual commentaries about the critical success of Volume 1 or what type of animal head Françoise Mouly should wear—designed to keep the Spiegelmans' experiences at a tolerable distance, that the sudden intrusion of reality, of an actual photo of the actual Vladek in the striped uniform of a concentration camp, is almost too much to bear. (Typically, even this moment isn't entirely real: the uniform is a costume, the war is over.)
Spiegelman spends large chunks of
Maus questioning the truth of his father's life and his own, fretting over the nature of truth itself, but truth, no matter how imperfect, has a raw power fiction can seldom match.
5. Ethel and Ernest, Raymond Briggs. Which is, I'm sure, why I also cried at Raymond Briggs' small, loving portrait of his parents' marriage. There's nothing tragic about Briggs' parents; they are, in fact, toweringly ordinary as perhaps only working-class Brits can be.
They are solid, well-scrubbed people. They court and marry. They survive the Blitz. They put their son through grade school, art school, the military, and a marriage of his own. And their story ends the way every happy, lifelong marriage ends: in grief. Briggs has no grand statements to make about the human condition; he finds his quiet, humorous tone and follows it to the inevitable end.
Just to add a layer of melancholy, it's hard not to notice that Briggs' parents must have been the models for the cheerful old couple dying of radiation poisoning in his early graphic novel
When the Wind Blows, which I read and reread as a Bomb-fearing paranoid child in the '80s.
6. Maison Ikkoku, Rumiko Takahashi. The classic tearjerker, never done better in comics form. I cry liberally through the final volume every time. What makes
Maison Ikkoku work—and you can argue that
Maison Ikkoku doesn't work, that it doesn't move you at all, but I will suspect you of being the sort of severe social deviant who sets kittens on fire and visits maid cafés—is that, although the sitcom structure of the story is formulaic, the characters and their lives are very real, and Takahashi never betrays them.
(The setting also feels real; for all the cute kids and sexy ladies and hijinks, the characters are clearly living in 1980s Tokyo, and not some cartoonified, genericized manga version of same.)
Godai's eventual winning of Kyoko's heart comes at the end of a long personal journey, during which he develops from a directionless teenage "ronin" into a man with a career (a surprising one), a life, and a sense of responsibility. At the same time, Kyoko has been on a journey of her own, from a girl who wants a father figure to a woman who wants an equal. After following them for so long, it's a joy when their paths finally merge and they head into the future together.
If formula romantic tearjerkers are so easy, how come no one but the Japanese can do them?
7. Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware. Not for the emotional content of the story; where the private agonies of sad, sensitive milquetoasts are concerned, I can be shockingly hard-hearted, occasionally even rooting for Roast Beef to drop the toast. (I blame this on my unfortunate teenage idolization of Woody Allen, which was shattered the moment it became known that Woody idolized teenagers right back.)
But I wept for a good five minutes at a two-page spread of the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. How must it feel to create something so beautiful and so perfect? Did Ware allow himself a moment of hubris, or did he stay in character, set down his brush, sigh softly, stare out the window at the gathering clouds, and contemplate death for a few minutes before shuffling off to carve, paint and assemble a perfect scale model of a turn-of-the-century farmhouse? I like to think there was at least a "woo-hoo" involved at some point.
8. Phoenix, Osamu Tezuka. Similarly, I cried the first time I read Volume 4, "Karma," of Tezuka's eclectic opus, so overwhelmed was I by the sheer beauty of the sequential storytelling. No one has mastered visual pacing like Tezuka, no one before or since, and the "Karma" volume of
Phoenix is one of his greatest moments as a storyteller. The second time I read it, I cried again, at a completely different point in the book.
9. Basara, Yumi Tamura, and Here Is Greenwood, Yukie Nasu. Just because I worked on them as an editor at Viz, and they became part of my life for a time, and I loved them. I refer to some of my Viz titles as "my little special-needs children," usually the ones that require constant attention in the form of, say, toning down the poop jokes or retouching the character with penises growing out of his head.
But all the manga I edit are a little like my children, and when they end it's like they've grown up and moved away, except that they won't be coming back for Thanksgiving.
Basara is a remarkable manga, and I was very fortunate to work on it. And when the
Greenwood boys ran down their dormitory hall for the last time, urging me to come along (that's so cruel, they know I can't), it really was like saying goodbye.
10.Pluto, Naoki Urasawa. I admit to having a soft spot for certain iconic cartoon characters, especially those designed to play the better angels of our natures. Superman is one of my favorites, the alien sent to earth to show us how good and glorious being human could be.
Plenty has been made of the Christ symbolism there, but what really gets me about the character is that, to two Depression-era Jewish teenagers, Superman surely wasn't Jesus: he was the Nazi
ubermensch, the dark ideal of amoral perfection, reversed, reclaimed, and resculpted into a glowing golem of truth and justice.
Such evil reinvisioned as such good, such massive destructive power transubstantiated into a big blue farmboy who wears glasses and stammers around girls; that's what gives Superman his compelling poignancy. His very existence answers hate and death with humanity and hope.
And I feel the same way about the little boy in the raincoat at the end of Volume 1 of
Pluto, Naoki Urasawa's ambitious reworking of Tezuka. He's been through so much already, the little boy: the bad father, the slave circus, the faceless organizations that want to use or destroy him. The world's strongest robot is coming to kill him, for no other reason than human selfishness.
But still all the boy wants is to protect the soft, slow creatures of the world, which from his point of view includes us. When he looks up on the last page and says his name, that name that in Japan is a glowing knot of death and hope, it catches my throat every time. He is more than human, and still so very human, like the best of them, like the best of us.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
