In 2001, a couple years before I started interning at Fantagraphics, a college classmate asked me to recommend some comics, having, I believe, exhausted the usual suspects such as
Maus,
Watchmen and
The Dark Knight Returns, and so I made up a list. As I recall, it was off the top of my head and without the aid of the Internet, although I spent a bit of time honing it and drafting it. (To me, this list not only illustrates how many more options are out there today and how the marketplace and demographics have changed, but it's a funny reminder that the less I knew about comics,[1] the more confident I was to suggest them. Nowadays, if someone asks me what comics I recommend for him or her, I freeze, overwhelmed, and try to feel out what he or she likes while matching that up with my mental comics database.) This list is just an odd little snapshot of my taste at the time, as a fan rather than a professional, and a souvenir of old attitudes and beliefs that have since changed.
Reproduced in its entirety, with my embarrassing spelling mistakes for the world to see:
Must Reads
1. Understanding Comics: Scott McCloud
2. Death: the High Cost of Living: Neil Gaiman
Sandman
3. Love and Rockets: Music for Mechanics (1st of 13 or so compilations): Los Bros. Hernandez
Mind-Benders
4. Ghost World: Daniel Clowes
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
5. Black Hole: Charles Burns
Cute/Silly but Not Stupid:
6. Blue Monday: Chynna Clugston-Majors
7. Bone: Jeff Smith
8.
Anything by Takahashi Rumiko except Lum—I would recommend starting out with Rumic World, One or Double, then moving on to Maison Ikkoku if you like romance or Ranma 1/2 for sheer gender/genus bending silliness.
Super-Hero Related, but Not Really
9. Astro City: Kurt Besyiak (sp?)
10. Transmetropolitan
11. Rising Stars: Michael Strasczinsky (sp?)
12. Sin City: Frank Miller
Ronin
13. Usagi Yojimbo
Also embarrassing is that I didn't include the artists, writers and cartoonists for some of the titles. (I'm not surprised that I didn't include publishers, because people normally don't when they recommend books.) At the time, with the exception of
Black Hole,, everything on the list, even if it was still ongoing, had some trades out, which would make sense because as a thrifty college student, I probably took them out of the library, or borrowed them from friends, or had a you-buy-this-series-and-I'll-buy-that-one strategy in place with my boyfriend.
When I made this list, I hadn't quite broken with superhero comics: it wasn't my preferred genre, but I remember thinking at the time they had just as much potential to be good as to be bad (I revised that opinion in 2002). I also had the youthful belief that there were works that anyone interested in comics would universally like, because they were good, like
Love and Rockets, and that people who liked "good" comics would like all of the same comics, which was very naïve. That said, of all of the titles on the list, I apparently felt perhaps that Takahashi, as the most prolific, needed a more defined entry point, or simply, in some ways manga is a harder sell.
Strangely enough, even though manga has conquered shelf space at bookstores and libraries for the time being, I still find it much more difficult to suggest to individuals: maybe because of the use of sentimentality that would translate to corniness in the U.S., as many other critics have pointed out, or maybe because people seem to have a strong and immediate reaction to certain strains of manga art, particularly
shoujo and
josei. It could also be that I'm suspicious of my enjoyment of manga titles such as Yayoi Ogawa's
Tramps Like Us, because I suspect I like them because they've effectively manipulated me, pushed the right buttons, rather than my having discerned their aesthetic qualities, storytelling or formal techniques.
I would, in fact, feel comfortable still suggesting almost everything on that list today, depending on the person, except perhaps Straczynski's
Rising Stars (which had a very strong start, but quickly degenerated. Still, I can recall one memorable splash page, penciled by Keu Cha and inked by Jason Gorder, in which a comet speeding toward earth is paralleled with a sperm about to fertilize an egg); any more than a few volumes of
Sin City (probably no farther than
That Yellow Bastard); and
Ronin (which I liked quite a bit in high school, although I should reread it to see how I would respond to it now).
The Must Read category is the most problematic, too: while in 2009, I could make arguments for must reads for genres or formats, there are no longer just three, or five, or 20 books I can point to: the medium of comics is suffering from an awesome, but also, as aforementioned, overpowering, embarrassment of riches. The concept of trying to suggest comics in only 128 words would boggle my mind today.
Note:
[1] At the time I wrote this list, I didn't quite know who Stan Lee or Jack Kirby was, didn't "get" Little Nemo, and had never laid eyes on a minicomic or a full Tezuka page. I had read quite a few books about comics, though, which is also funny, because at the time it was easier to get a book about certain kinds of comics or cartoonists (like Frederik Schodt's manga books, or Trina Robbins' women in comics books) than it was to get the comics themselves. When I made this list, I was also doubtlessly thinking about what books he could actually obtain at the time, through the library or comics shop.
Tramps [©2004 Yayoi Ogawa]
Contrition [©2007 Gilbert Hernandez]
Usagi [©1991 Stan Sakai]
Maison [©1984 Rumiko Takahashi/Shokagukan, Inc.]
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
1. Understanding Comics: Scott McCloud
13. Usagi Yojimbo
Strangely enough, even though manga has conquered shelf space at bookstores and libraries for the time being, I still find it much more difficult to suggest to individuals: maybe because of the use of sentimentality that would translate to corniness in the U.S., as many other critics have pointed out, or maybe because people seem to have a strong and immediate reaction to certain strains of manga art, particularly shoujo and josei. It could also be that I'm suspicious of my enjoyment of manga titles such as Yayoi Ogawa's Tramps Like Us, because I suspect I like them because they've effectively manipulated me, pushed the right buttons, rather than my having discerned their aesthetic qualities, storytelling or formal techniques. 
