By Shaenon K. Garrity
Because I enjoy wasting the valuable time of people with much better things to do, I asked a wide selection of comics industry professionals the following question:
If you could take only one comic to a desert island, what would it be?
Thanks very much to everyone who answered.
Mark Waid, writer (The Flash, Captain America, Superman: Birthright, Kingdom Come) and Editor-in Chief of Boom! Studios
Action Comics #500 from 1979, a 64-page book-length retelling of the Life Story of Superman by Marty Pasko and Curt Swan. I know every panel by heart, but it's still my single favorite comic book of all time.
Gail Simone, writer (Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, Welcome to Tranquility, Killer Princesses)
Tough one!
I think it would either have to be a massive collection of Peter Bagge's
HATE, or one of the big collections of Linda Barry's Marlys strips, still one of the best-written things ever to appear in American comics.
Dylan Meconis, cartoonist (Bite Me!, Family Man)
I would take any volume of
Finder by Carla Speed McNeil. There are so many hidden cues, layered references, side characters, and back alleys for further imagination that it would give me endless material for mental occupation.
Mari Naomi, cartoonist (Estrus Comics, "Kiss and Tell")
I think it would have to be
Maus (can I take both I and II?), as that's the comic I've read more than any other comic, and I keep rereading it over the years. That is such a brilliant piece of literature. Yeah, it's depressing as hell, but there's also a lot of optimism and beauty in it. And I can make more comics for myself to read while I'm on that desert island, can't I?
If for some reason
Maus is sold out, or if I can only take one book (not I and II), I would probably go for Mary Fleener's
Life of the Party, which I adore on so many levels. Or some sort of anthology, like
Real Stuff by Dennis Eichorn, or
Twisted Sisters! Oh wait, will I have company on said island? If not, I would consider something like
True Porn.
Leia Weathington, cartoonist (The Legend of Bold Riley)
The slap-yo-mama-fine edition of
Bone by Jeff Smith. I swear there is something new every time I read it.
Or Colleen Coover's
Small Favors because…well, yanno.
Chuck Whelon, cartooist (Pewfell)
Can I say the whole of E.C. Segar's
Popeye? In particular the beautiful new edition that is being published by Fantagraphics, though they are only up to Volume 3 (of 6, I think). Firstly there is a lot of it, and it definitely stands up to repeated readings. The humor, in particular, is largely based on running jokes that just get funnier every time they are repeated.
Aside from making me laugh, the family of characters would keep me company (the more so, the crazier I get). It might even be practical, since there's lots of stuff about desert islands and nautical adventures in there.
Popeye wasn't one of my earliest comics influences, but someone once wrote me that
Pewfell reminded them of
Thimble Theater, so I was compelled to check it out. I immediately fell in love with it and try to emulate it whenever I can.
Joey Manley, founder of ModernTales.com and co-head of WebComicsNation/ComicSpace
The Adventures of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot, because while reading it I was impressed by its density and structure—but also perplexed by those characteristics. I've only read it once, but get the sense that, more than the average comic, it could stand up to rereading multiple times, and that it probably even requires rereading multiple times. I also think it probably has multiple meanings depending on when and how you read it. Maybe. I don't know. I only read it once, and didn't like it a whole lot, but imagined that if I had been able to give it more attention, I probably would have. If that makes any sense. Assuming I'd be on the island for some significant length of time before my rescue and/or death, all these characteristics would make it the ideal sole comicbookical companion.
Jason Thompson, manga editor, cartoonist (The Stiff, King of RPGs) and author of Manga: The Complete Guide
I'm torn between two desires: to take the longest halfway decent comic I can think of, for sheer quantity, to keep me from going insane (perhaps a newspaper strip:
Doonesbury,
Pogo,
Peanuts,
Little Orphan Annie if it wouldn't make me Republican by the time I got off the island, etc.) or to just take a single, short, really good comic. Perhaps Yuki Urushibara's
Mushishi.
Pancha Diaz, Viz manga editor and cartoonist (Iceheart)
If I can stretch "comic" to mean "finite series that could hypothetically be bound into a single volume without breaking the laws of physics," then I choose
Nausicaa.
Urian Brown, Viz manga editor and writer for Shonen Jump magazine
No question:
Booster Gold #148.
Naw, seriously…Is there anything more compelling and interesting than
Watchmen? So many layers, little doodads, and stuff to read. Plus, it makes you believe in comics again.
Either that or
Whistle.
Carl Gustav Horn, Dark Horse manga editor
Well, now, that depends on what
kind of desert island. If it was a balmy paradise—gypsum sands, natural springs gushing forth Mai Tais and Lancome Bienfait Multi-Vital—it would have to be something dark for balance: 1982's
Moon Knight #26, for its story "Hit It!" by Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz. This was as gritty as anything Frank Miller was doing with
Daredevil at the time—grittier, because there were no special powers involved; nothing but the most primal move of superheroes: hitting people. But, as "Hit It!" points out, "everybody is doing it these days, getting great satisfaction," and you don't need to be a hero to try. In fact, even if you are, it will make no difference at all. When the "villain" snarls at last, "It's too late, Moon Knight!
Nothing can stop it now!" he's not talking about any doomsday device or master plan, but everyday reality without end.
Has to be one of the most hardcore sixteen pages in the history of American comics: it was like Moench was writing songs for Black Flag, when much of the industry was still doing bad lounge covers of Zager & Evans. This was also my first exposure to Bill Sienkiewicz's expressionism—if it had been the full-clout version of
Elektra: Assassin a few years later, I don't know if I would have been prepared, but the apparent requirement to have it still resemble a contemporary superhero book only reinforced the tension of the storytelling. Finally, it was also the first time I read a comic where I was truly conscious of the possibilities of color as a free emotive element, independent of the line work. This must of have been a coordinated artistic approach with Moench and Sienkiewicz, as Christie Scheele also colored the backup story in
Moon Knight #26, which was more conventional in every way. No disrespect either to its writer, Denny O'Neil, as it was his editorial will that guided
Moon Knight as a whole.
On the other hand, if the island was more like Stephen King's "Survivor Type," I'd want something cheerful on hand. That would be 2006's
All-Star Superman #4, one of the many good things editor Bob Schreck has helped assemble. After I read it, I went through and counted the pages carefully. Yes: 22 only, like any American comic. What did I think I was going to discover—that it had been hyperfolded, and was actually like those manga—you know, 4000 pages and no ending? Well, you can't put spatiotemporal hijinks past Grant Morrison, of course. How was he able to put so much satisfaction into 22 pages, though? With Frank Quitely, of course, whom my man Dr. Brown (I have never learned to pronounce his first name correctly) introduced me to through
Flex Mentallo. I don't suppose I need to sell anyone paying attention to comics on the merits of
All-Star Superman, but I'm struck by Morrison's boulevardier approach to writing SF comics, as opposed to, say, Shirow Masamune's baroque one. I mean, you want a guy who can carve out all those fancy arcades, but you also want a Piccadilly Johnny who can stroll through them, and drop the perfect
bon mot about the tungsten gas life forms he chums with (Was the "41" painted beside the vault supposed to be an
Akira reference? Dude, that's Tetsuo. Just like an Alabama hellfire church of the kind shown in
The Other Side wouldn't have a Sacred Heart of Jesus on the wall. But that's just me being a rival company's editor). And talking of dimensions, I love how Quitely can stake out so much space using only one: his peculiar thin line that inker and colorist Jamie Grant knows to leave alone and just make luminous with constant gradient hues that remind you all color is a trick of the light. Anyway, it makes me simply happy that such comics can exist in this world. Ladyfingers, they taste just like ladyfingers.
Brian Moore, cartoonist (The Sweetened By-and-By) and my artist on Smithson
I'd take Jacques Tardi's
The Bloody Streets of Paris (a.k.a.
120, Rue de la Gare.) It's a WWII-era noir that snakes its way from a POW camp in Germany to the shadowy suburbs of Paris under the Occupation. After multiple readings, I'm no longer lost by the plot—think
The Maltese Falcon, but more complicated—but I still love to get lost in Tardi's meticulously researched world. The boring everyday details are given as much weight as the ever-present German soldiers and propaganda posters. At one point detective Nestor Burma gets relegated to the background while Tardi shows us how a newspaper pressman makes a proof page of the type he's just set. It's a dense and large (about European album-sized) book, so in addition to being a diverting read it would help keep the sun off my head while I waited for rescue, or the English-language publication of more of Tardi's books.
Jeffrey Wells, my cowriter on Skin Horse
Terry Moore's
Echo, Issue 1; I know nothing about the content of the book but the shiny cover would be useful for signaling passing ships.
...Unless you've already got a surfeit of smartass answers.
Andrew Farago, cartoonist (The Chronicles of William Bazillion) and curator of the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco
I studied in Europe for five months during my junior year of college, and it was the first time in a decade that I wasn't going to be able to buy new comic books on a weekly basis, which was practically like being on a desert island. All of my worldly possessions for that period had to fit into one large backpack and a couple of carry-on bags, and I only brought one comic book with me: the recently-published
Essential Spider-Man, Volume 1.
Five-hundred-plus pages of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko creating stories that still hold up as fun and innovative nearly 50 years later...I'm hard-pressed to pick another comic that would hold my interest every time I came back to it the way the early Spider-Man comics did.
From a logical standpoint, though, I'd probably take
Fleep or one of Jason Shiga's other comics, since those would contain the most practical information about surviving on a desert island.
Shaenon K. Garrity, nerd columnist
With no hesitation whatsoever, I choose
The! Greatest! Of! Marlys!, Lynda Barry's heftiest collection of
Ernie Pook's Comeek strips.
So what does this survey teach us?
1. Most people were pragmatic enough to consider the length of their stay on the island and picked graphic novels or collections thick enough to keep them occupied for a while. Only a few so loved old-school comic books that they chose a single pamphlet-style issue over something more substantial, although Mark Waid at least went for a 64-page Big 500th Issue.
2. A few people were even more pragmatic and selected comics they could actively use to survive on the island, whether by signalling planes with the cover of Terry Moore's
Echo or learning to drink urine through Jason Shiga's
Fleep. These people have excellent survival instincts and will be our masters after civilization collapses next month.
3. Two people hit on the idea of taking porn. Both were, of course, women.
4. One person chose a comic he doesn't like. I have mad respect for that.
5. There is no such comic as
Booster Gold #148.
6. No matter how much thought you have given to any topic, and I do mean any topic, Carl Horn has thought about it harder than you.
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
