Read These Comics, Human Scum!
(Ed. Note: So, a friend asked me to write up a quick list of must-read comics, and this is my first stab. It ended up being so huge and taking so much longer to write than I anticipated that I'm going to post it to every medium I use just so that I feel like that wasn't time I could've better spent building things in my garage.)
I'm full of stuff, and most of that stuff is information I'll never need to use. I have become, at this particular stage of life, a vile beast whose primary metabolic function consists in absorbing, digesting, and subsequently doing away with the stuff that is usually called art. Every once in a while, I figure that I should try and make some sort of /product/ of some kind from this. Something must be excreted, or regurgitated (according to your preferences for digestive imagery). Usually this comes in the form of recommendations. To change the imagery up a bit, the only decent use for this infovoria disease is to communicate it.
A while back, someone tasked me with coming up with a list of must-read comics, and I figured (with no small amount of hubris) that I might be up to the task. I'm not. Very few people should even be tempted to attempt such things, and I am almost definitely not one of them. However, things being what they are I'm going to give it a whirl anyway. What follows is an incomplete and poorly considered list. I have been asked to summarize a medium's best work (much of which I still haven't read). So the result is a vaguely categorized tour not of "the best" comics has to offer, but instead a list of those comics I've read that most made me want to consume more comics.
I've shuffled them into categories based, broadly, on what was most seductive about a particular work. The sequential art is about words and images, and the best of them use both effectively. However, I'm forced to realize that my brass artistic palate for art means that I'm often more interested in one than the other and consume different sorts of comics for different moods. There are, of course, some comics that cannot be fairly dumped into either category so they've gotten their own.
As a last note, this list skews heavily towards superheroes and responses to them. If there's anyone reading this list who'd rather I write one that didn't have that bias, say as much and I'll extend it. But at the point where I'd hit 12-15 picks here I figured it was time to stop. Also, in cases where I felt two works filled too close a niche for me I dropped my lesser favorite. V for Vendetta, while awesome, was cut because I already have one dense, metafictive, narratively inventive Alan Moore work on the list.
Notable for their Arts:
Paper Eleven
Daniel Kim's concluded webcomic Paper Eleven is a study in stylizing. While strictly speaking a linear, story-based comic, PXI has a tendency to go for weeks without dialogue, and occasionally days with nothing but fully blacked out panels broken up by occasional white splotches. The comic's story is a horror yarn about a girl who is in a train accident and awakens to find herself in another world populated by creatures that look like something Jhnonen Vasquez might've drawn after a two week anime bender. It's a world where names are currency, no one is trustworthy, and the rules of the game are unclear. I still haven't figured out the plot, but the work remains fascinating to me as a study in comic conventions subverted.
(http://manga.clone-army.org/pxi.php)
Automatic Kafka
Written by Joe Casey, with standout art from Ashley Wood, AK follows the midlife misadventures of an ex-superteam android. The art is layered, scratchy, and frequently off-kilter. Pages are rarely made up of arranged panels so much as they are pasted together out of five or six colorful layers that happen to contain panels within them.
Wormwood- Gentleman Corpse
Ben Templesmith, who's probably better known for 30 Days of Night (which I haven't read yet), has a really fun solo series here. I've only read the first arc, but his quirky take on the supernatural and his art's cloudy-with-neon-outlines style is one of the most distinctive (and imitated) going in comics today. Plus the protagonist is a sentient worm who animates a variety of corpses for use as his mouthpieces and, on occasion, action heroes.
Sin City - The Hard Goodbye
Frank Miller is a divisive figure for me. He's descended pretty thoroughly into hoary self-parody of late. The less is said about his adaptation of Eisner's The Spirit, the better. And worse, everything you'd hoped was ironic about the hyper-sexed, hyper-violent ultra-noir of Sin City may turn out to have been the work of a twisted sort of fan rather than a commentator. None of this diminishes the fact that the man really knows how to put ink to a page. In Marv, Miller has one of his most distinctive physical presences as well as one of his most perversely likeable protagonists.
Notable for their Writing:
Preacher
Garth Ennis' writing sticks out like a sore thumb wherever he goes because he really only seems to have one style, a trademark brand of gleeful and constant obscenity, fifth-grade level scatology, and almost confusingly tender and layered interpersonal relationships. When a small-town reverend and sometime thief acquires the Voice of God, the result is a story that ranges widely between broadly drawn arcs that deal crudely with cartoon-evil versions of the Catholic church, effete libertines, and bumfuck southern hicks; taking detours to explore peoples' relationships with friends, with lovers, with God, with country and whether any of these complicated relationships can have satisfying endings. As a bonus, Preacher has the greatest vampire ever written, a boozed-up angry Irishman named Cassidy whose one-shot issue Blood & Whiskey is a beautiful rebuttal to every horrible thing that's been done to blood-suckers in fiction ever. I'll avoid the obvious twilight jokes.
Top Ten
I mentioned that superheroes were kind of a thing on this list, and anyone who's been reading this straight down may be starting to doubt me. THis is where things change. In what is, to my tastes, Alan Moore at his most accessible and popcorn-ishly enjoyable, Top Ten is something like a police procedural set in a city built to house "science heroes" and keep the mayhem they tend to cause somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. Crime, punishment, and daily life are shuffled around in interesting ways when the majority (if not all) citizens have powers. The commentary on capes is fairly light-hearted, with a sub-plot about an infestation of super-powered mice a particularly adorable example, but strong characters, dense plotting and emotional resonance keep things moving forward without them feeling like fluff.
Astro City
A mirror universe cousin to Top Ten, Astro City deals with life in a city where the superheroic has become a kind of commonplace. The titular city isn't choked with heroes, but they are enough of a background noise to everyday life that it opens up the book to stories told both from the perspectives of heroes and from that of their observers. While its arc stories are good, AC is strongest in its single issues, that tell well-drawn and self-contained arcs. The first issue, in particular, is amazing and accomplishes what I thought (at the time) couldn't be done: making me care about a Superman-type hero. The other stand-out that comes to mind concerns the melancholic story of a cartoon lion brought to life by accident, and forced to eke out a living in a world where he is truly the only one of his kind.
Y the Last Man
So, what if all the males of all species above a certain degree of complexity died off and all the winking and nudging about the only man who survived was gotten out of the way right quick? Brian K. Vaughn would like to tell us all about this. It's a road story, a love story, a mystery, and a suprisingly rewarding exercise in world-building all rolled into one. Snappy dialogue, well-executed humor, and an ear for making every character who appears on screen into an individual voice are the primary merits of this book.
Art and Words, So Wonderful:
Planetary
I'm going to get off my chest right away that I love Warren Ellis a whole big bunch. I had to restrain myself from putting basically everything of his that I've read on this list. I managed to trim it to this and Transmet, so I'm pretty proud of myself. Planetary is his superhero-inflected exercise in genre-hopping under the guise of being a story about a group of kinda-misfit metahumans who go around uncovering the "secret history" of the world. The dialogue is never flat, the plot choices are inventive, and the genre riffs are enjoyably chosen and executed. The overall arc is not the shining point, but each individual issue has things to recommend it on its own. John Cassaday's covers and art are differently awesome. His award-winning cover work acts as a signpost to alert readers, as it usually apes style conventions from whatever genre we're visiting that week, and his internal art brings a really expressive realism to the faces and actions of his subjects.
All-Star Superman
The only straight-ahead superhero comic that makes this list is Grant Morrison at his least Grant-Morrison-y. No one ever meditates on the nature of fiction, takes psychedelics, or breaks the fourth wall in order to talk to his creator about the nature of reality, but the bones of the weirdness are there. The metafictive intertextuality at work was obvious even to someone who'd never read a Superman comic before in his life. Thankfully, that's not all it has to recommend it. Morrison's work here is like some sort of weird ode to the simple ethos of good that Supes embodies. The attempts to redeem the image of the big blue boy scout have been numerous and variously successful, but Morrison's is strongest as a sustained effort to demonstrate just how much good one good man can do. Frank Quitely's simplified, dynamic line work and bright color palette make the comic feel almost retro in how utterly heroic everyone looks. The thematic marriage is pretty much perfect.
Transmetropolitan
The person who asked me to compile this list told me I didn't bother having to put this on here because she'd already read it, but fuck her I'm doing it anyway. I'm doing things my way, which is exactly how Spider would've wanted it. Warren Ellis writes fun-to-read asshole characters like no one else I know. They are sharp-witted, acid-tongued, violent, and usually insufferably convinced of their own rectitude and I absolutely cannot read enough of them. Spider Jerusalem, his near-future Hunter S. Thompson with a somehow even more wicked drug habit, is probably the best of even this beloved type. Transmet's political conclusions and arguments are, in retrospect, kinda half-baked. It's hard to get behind a stand taken against some of the most laughingly evil politicos this side of 1984 without feeling like you've just beat the shit out of a straw man, but the underlying ethos of investigation and love of information still feels fresh. The world-building is excellent, a future that is both bright and dirty, strange and recognizable all at once. This is born up on the wings of the art, a dense concoction whose street scenes are the best this side of Top Ten's. And there's rarely been a hero as explosively expressive as Spider Jerusalem's rubber face. He has five kinds of grin, three kinds of sneer, and at least four kinds of "gobsmacked."
Scud the Disposable Assassin
This book is an oddity. Born from the same time period and ethos that brought us the comic versions of The Tick, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles who were all (in their original incarnations) absurd critiques of existing comic tropes, Scud is like some sort of weird apotheosis of these things with a pop culture obsession thrown into the blender. Each issue contains voice actor and soundtrack recommendations for the comic to come, as well as character creations that appear to have literally been made by throwing darts at grids of amusing words. Viz. Jane Mansfield's Evil Rescuscitated Head, Performing Ancient Gypsy Magic! Helpful Mute Sidekick Made Entirely of Zippers! Evil Giraffe with Robot Head! Disposable Assassin with Grafted Werewolf Super-Arm! This comic sets out to indulge in every kind of awesome that it can, and would be grating for how well it panders to exactly the sort of ugly awesome-ness-obsessed nerd that I am if it weren't for the fact that the comic is actually Just. That. Awesome.
Wanted
Another comic that shouldn't be judged by its movie. The original does for villainy what Watchmen did for superheroes. In gleefully button-pushing writing, Wanted details the story of a broken-down schmuck who suddenly becomes heir to a fortune and a title when his absent father dies. Daddy, it seems, was a high-up in the fraternity of allied supervillains that have been controlling the world since they finally got their act together and attacked en masse (one villain observes that each hero has at least ten adversaries, and that all it took was actually marshalling that ten-to-one advantage). The Watchmen comparison belies the fact that the literary pretensions and trenchant commentary in Wanted extend only as far as the contention that being one of the evil guys may be way too much fun for anyone to really pass up. Still, the dialogue is smart, the plot propulsive, and the overall book stands as a testament to while I always enjoyed the pontification of villains more than that of heroes. About the art, the character designs are fun and the action is well-communicated. The comic is burdened by a brief vogue for modeling comic characters on actually existing famous people, which means that you'll spend most of the comic trying to care about the adventures of someone who looks shockingly like Eminem. Not so cool.
The Filth
So, how about some Grant Morrison being more Morrison-y? Ah yes, a story about a broken down schmuch who, rather than donning the black leather of supervillainy, dons the lurid spandex of an agent of the Hand, a clandestine group of folks who try and keep society in line with the Status Q by sweeping away the "filth" of the universe, which mostly consists of anything so utterly weird that its mere existence is too unsettling to be allowed. Giant sperm attack LA, city-sized ocean liners suffer mutinous disasters, personalities are uploaded, downloaded and swapped through the use of vials of rainbow liquid. The whole endeavour is tinged with literary symbolism, and the nature of fiction and humanities relationship to the fictional is explored. It's like The Invisibles, if it were put in a blender with all the porn your dad hides under the bed where not even mom can find it. The covers are the sort of minimalist awesomeness that wins awards but doesn't sell comics, and the internal art manages to shoot for realistic depictions of (definititionally) unrealistic things and ends up falling into a sort of pleasantly uncanny valley of awesome.
Sandman
Some things are almost too obvious to make the list. I almost axed this one for that reason, but I had no good excuse other than wanting to focus on recommending things other people might not already recommend. Sandman is a triumph. Neil Gaiman is a one trick pony ("Do the one about how even immortal and supernatural beings are surprisingly human again, Neil!" "Yay!") but he is doing that trick with singular skill here. Do I even need to summarize this? There are a sibling set of cosmic forces whose names all begin with the letter D because, for the purposes of symbolism, English is the lingua franca of the universe itself. Dream is imprisoned, he escapes, and spends the rest of the comic coming to terms with the life he has led. He's Endless, so this takes a while. Along the way, Neil will parlay this framing narrative into stories about every damn thing ever because there is very little that isn't at least a little bit about dreaming and imagination. Some of these will break your heart. You may weep openly. This is normal. Eventually, lessons are learned and reality itself is changed. My only dark confession is that I really only like some of the artists. The style of the early issues was unmoving enough that I almost dropped it right there... Some of the later artists, however, are simply amazing.
Watchmen
I'm running out of steam. I have nothing to say about this that hasn't been said by more articulate people but this book is a turning point for so much of comics, such a standout work of both letters and pictures, and so utterly lives up to its intent that it should be required reading for man, woman, and child. The movie was rubbish. The only mean thing I have to say is that I didn't enjoy the art style that much on its own. I just have a thing for more dynamic action in my comics, but even this complaint is more a comment on my being a bad reader for this book than any fault of its own.
I'm full of stuff, and most of that stuff is information I'll never need to use. I have become, at this particular stage of life, a vile beast whose primary metabolic function consists in absorbing, digesting, and subsequently doing away with the stuff that is usually called art. Every once in a while, I figure that I should try and make some sort of /product/ of some kind from this. Something must be excreted, or regurgitated (according to your preferences for digestive imagery). Usually this comes in the form of recommendations. To change the imagery up a bit, the only decent use for this infovoria disease is to communicate it.
A while back, someone tasked me with coming up with a list of must-read comics, and I figured (with no small amount of hubris) that I might be up to the task. I'm not. Very few people should even be tempted to attempt such things, and I am almost definitely not one of them. However, things being what they are I'm going to give it a whirl anyway. What follows is an incomplete and poorly considered list. I have been asked to summarize a medium's best work (much of which I still haven't read). So the result is a vaguely categorized tour not of "the best" comics has to offer, but instead a list of those comics I've read that most made me want to consume more comics.
I've shuffled them into categories based, broadly, on what was most seductive about a particular work. The sequential art is about words and images, and the best of them use both effectively. However, I'm forced to realize that my brass artistic palate for art means that I'm often more interested in one than the other and consume different sorts of comics for different moods. There are, of course, some comics that cannot be fairly dumped into either category so they've gotten their own.
As a last note, this list skews heavily towards superheroes and responses to them. If there's anyone reading this list who'd rather I write one that didn't have that bias, say as much and I'll extend it. But at the point where I'd hit 12-15 picks here I figured it was time to stop. Also, in cases where I felt two works filled too close a niche for me I dropped my lesser favorite. V for Vendetta, while awesome, was cut because I already have one dense, metafictive, narratively inventive Alan Moore work on the list.
Notable for their Arts:
Paper Eleven
Daniel Kim's concluded webcomic Paper Eleven is a study in stylizing. While strictly speaking a linear, story-based comic, PXI has a tendency to go for weeks without dialogue, and occasionally days with nothing but fully blacked out panels broken up by occasional white splotches. The comic's story is a horror yarn about a girl who is in a train accident and awakens to find herself in another world populated by creatures that look like something Jhnonen Vasquez might've drawn after a two week anime bender. It's a world where names are currency, no one is trustworthy, and the rules of the game are unclear. I still haven't figured out the plot, but the work remains fascinating to me as a study in comic conventions subverted.
(http://manga.clone-army.org/pxi.php)
Automatic Kafka
Written by Joe Casey, with standout art from Ashley Wood, AK follows the midlife misadventures of an ex-superteam android. The art is layered, scratchy, and frequently off-kilter. Pages are rarely made up of arranged panels so much as they are pasted together out of five or six colorful layers that happen to contain panels within them.
Wormwood- Gentleman Corpse
Ben Templesmith, who's probably better known for 30 Days of Night (which I haven't read yet), has a really fun solo series here. I've only read the first arc, but his quirky take on the supernatural and his art's cloudy-with-neon-outlines style is one of the most distinctive (and imitated) going in comics today. Plus the protagonist is a sentient worm who animates a variety of corpses for use as his mouthpieces and, on occasion, action heroes.
Sin City - The Hard Goodbye
Frank Miller is a divisive figure for me. He's descended pretty thoroughly into hoary self-parody of late. The less is said about his adaptation of Eisner's The Spirit, the better. And worse, everything you'd hoped was ironic about the hyper-sexed, hyper-violent ultra-noir of Sin City may turn out to have been the work of a twisted sort of fan rather than a commentator. None of this diminishes the fact that the man really knows how to put ink to a page. In Marv, Miller has one of his most distinctive physical presences as well as one of his most perversely likeable protagonists.
Notable for their Writing:
Preacher
Garth Ennis' writing sticks out like a sore thumb wherever he goes because he really only seems to have one style, a trademark brand of gleeful and constant obscenity, fifth-grade level scatology, and almost confusingly tender and layered interpersonal relationships. When a small-town reverend and sometime thief acquires the Voice of God, the result is a story that ranges widely between broadly drawn arcs that deal crudely with cartoon-evil versions of the Catholic church, effete libertines, and bumfuck southern hicks; taking detours to explore peoples' relationships with friends, with lovers, with God, with country and whether any of these complicated relationships can have satisfying endings. As a bonus, Preacher has the greatest vampire ever written, a boozed-up angry Irishman named Cassidy whose one-shot issue Blood & Whiskey is a beautiful rebuttal to every horrible thing that's been done to blood-suckers in fiction ever. I'll avoid the obvious twilight jokes.
Top Ten
I mentioned that superheroes were kind of a thing on this list, and anyone who's been reading this straight down may be starting to doubt me. THis is where things change. In what is, to my tastes, Alan Moore at his most accessible and popcorn-ishly enjoyable, Top Ten is something like a police procedural set in a city built to house "science heroes" and keep the mayhem they tend to cause somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. Crime, punishment, and daily life are shuffled around in interesting ways when the majority (if not all) citizens have powers. The commentary on capes is fairly light-hearted, with a sub-plot about an infestation of super-powered mice a particularly adorable example, but strong characters, dense plotting and emotional resonance keep things moving forward without them feeling like fluff.
Astro City
A mirror universe cousin to Top Ten, Astro City deals with life in a city where the superheroic has become a kind of commonplace. The titular city isn't choked with heroes, but they are enough of a background noise to everyday life that it opens up the book to stories told both from the perspectives of heroes and from that of their observers. While its arc stories are good, AC is strongest in its single issues, that tell well-drawn and self-contained arcs. The first issue, in particular, is amazing and accomplishes what I thought (at the time) couldn't be done: making me care about a Superman-type hero. The other stand-out that comes to mind concerns the melancholic story of a cartoon lion brought to life by accident, and forced to eke out a living in a world where he is truly the only one of his kind.
Y the Last Man
So, what if all the males of all species above a certain degree of complexity died off and all the winking and nudging about the only man who survived was gotten out of the way right quick? Brian K. Vaughn would like to tell us all about this. It's a road story, a love story, a mystery, and a suprisingly rewarding exercise in world-building all rolled into one. Snappy dialogue, well-executed humor, and an ear for making every character who appears on screen into an individual voice are the primary merits of this book.
Art and Words, So Wonderful:
Planetary
I'm going to get off my chest right away that I love Warren Ellis a whole big bunch. I had to restrain myself from putting basically everything of his that I've read on this list. I managed to trim it to this and Transmet, so I'm pretty proud of myself. Planetary is his superhero-inflected exercise in genre-hopping under the guise of being a story about a group of kinda-misfit metahumans who go around uncovering the "secret history" of the world. The dialogue is never flat, the plot choices are inventive, and the genre riffs are enjoyably chosen and executed. The overall arc is not the shining point, but each individual issue has things to recommend it on its own. John Cassaday's covers and art are differently awesome. His award-winning cover work acts as a signpost to alert readers, as it usually apes style conventions from whatever genre we're visiting that week, and his internal art brings a really expressive realism to the faces and actions of his subjects.
All-Star Superman
The only straight-ahead superhero comic that makes this list is Grant Morrison at his least Grant-Morrison-y. No one ever meditates on the nature of fiction, takes psychedelics, or breaks the fourth wall in order to talk to his creator about the nature of reality, but the bones of the weirdness are there. The metafictive intertextuality at work was obvious even to someone who'd never read a Superman comic before in his life. Thankfully, that's not all it has to recommend it. Morrison's work here is like some sort of weird ode to the simple ethos of good that Supes embodies. The attempts to redeem the image of the big blue boy scout have been numerous and variously successful, but Morrison's is strongest as a sustained effort to demonstrate just how much good one good man can do. Frank Quitely's simplified, dynamic line work and bright color palette make the comic feel almost retro in how utterly heroic everyone looks. The thematic marriage is pretty much perfect.
Transmetropolitan
The person who asked me to compile this list told me I didn't bother having to put this on here because she'd already read it, but fuck her I'm doing it anyway. I'm doing things my way, which is exactly how Spider would've wanted it. Warren Ellis writes fun-to-read asshole characters like no one else I know. They are sharp-witted, acid-tongued, violent, and usually insufferably convinced of their own rectitude and I absolutely cannot read enough of them. Spider Jerusalem, his near-future Hunter S. Thompson with a somehow even more wicked drug habit, is probably the best of even this beloved type. Transmet's political conclusions and arguments are, in retrospect, kinda half-baked. It's hard to get behind a stand taken against some of the most laughingly evil politicos this side of 1984 without feeling like you've just beat the shit out of a straw man, but the underlying ethos of investigation and love of information still feels fresh. The world-building is excellent, a future that is both bright and dirty, strange and recognizable all at once. This is born up on the wings of the art, a dense concoction whose street scenes are the best this side of Top Ten's. And there's rarely been a hero as explosively expressive as Spider Jerusalem's rubber face. He has five kinds of grin, three kinds of sneer, and at least four kinds of "gobsmacked."
Scud the Disposable Assassin
This book is an oddity. Born from the same time period and ethos that brought us the comic versions of The Tick, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles who were all (in their original incarnations) absurd critiques of existing comic tropes, Scud is like some sort of weird apotheosis of these things with a pop culture obsession thrown into the blender. Each issue contains voice actor and soundtrack recommendations for the comic to come, as well as character creations that appear to have literally been made by throwing darts at grids of amusing words. Viz. Jane Mansfield's Evil Rescuscitated Head, Performing Ancient Gypsy Magic! Helpful Mute Sidekick Made Entirely of Zippers! Evil Giraffe with Robot Head! Disposable Assassin with Grafted Werewolf Super-Arm! This comic sets out to indulge in every kind of awesome that it can, and would be grating for how well it panders to exactly the sort of ugly awesome-ness-obsessed nerd that I am if it weren't for the fact that the comic is actually Just. That. Awesome.
Wanted
Another comic that shouldn't be judged by its movie. The original does for villainy what Watchmen did for superheroes. In gleefully button-pushing writing, Wanted details the story of a broken-down schmuck who suddenly becomes heir to a fortune and a title when his absent father dies. Daddy, it seems, was a high-up in the fraternity of allied supervillains that have been controlling the world since they finally got their act together and attacked en masse (one villain observes that each hero has at least ten adversaries, and that all it took was actually marshalling that ten-to-one advantage). The Watchmen comparison belies the fact that the literary pretensions and trenchant commentary in Wanted extend only as far as the contention that being one of the evil guys may be way too much fun for anyone to really pass up. Still, the dialogue is smart, the plot propulsive, and the overall book stands as a testament to while I always enjoyed the pontification of villains more than that of heroes. About the art, the character designs are fun and the action is well-communicated. The comic is burdened by a brief vogue for modeling comic characters on actually existing famous people, which means that you'll spend most of the comic trying to care about the adventures of someone who looks shockingly like Eminem. Not so cool.
The Filth
So, how about some Grant Morrison being more Morrison-y? Ah yes, a story about a broken down schmuch who, rather than donning the black leather of supervillainy, dons the lurid spandex of an agent of the Hand, a clandestine group of folks who try and keep society in line with the Status Q by sweeping away the "filth" of the universe, which mostly consists of anything so utterly weird that its mere existence is too unsettling to be allowed. Giant sperm attack LA, city-sized ocean liners suffer mutinous disasters, personalities are uploaded, downloaded and swapped through the use of vials of rainbow liquid. The whole endeavour is tinged with literary symbolism, and the nature of fiction and humanities relationship to the fictional is explored. It's like The Invisibles, if it were put in a blender with all the porn your dad hides under the bed where not even mom can find it. The covers are the sort of minimalist awesomeness that wins awards but doesn't sell comics, and the internal art manages to shoot for realistic depictions of (definititionally) unrealistic things and ends up falling into a sort of pleasantly uncanny valley of awesome.
Sandman
Some things are almost too obvious to make the list. I almost axed this one for that reason, but I had no good excuse other than wanting to focus on recommending things other people might not already recommend. Sandman is a triumph. Neil Gaiman is a one trick pony ("Do the one about how even immortal and supernatural beings are surprisingly human again, Neil!" "Yay!") but he is doing that trick with singular skill here. Do I even need to summarize this? There are a sibling set of cosmic forces whose names all begin with the letter D because, for the purposes of symbolism, English is the lingua franca of the universe itself. Dream is imprisoned, he escapes, and spends the rest of the comic coming to terms with the life he has led. He's Endless, so this takes a while. Along the way, Neil will parlay this framing narrative into stories about every damn thing ever because there is very little that isn't at least a little bit about dreaming and imagination. Some of these will break your heart. You may weep openly. This is normal. Eventually, lessons are learned and reality itself is changed. My only dark confession is that I really only like some of the artists. The style of the early issues was unmoving enough that I almost dropped it right there... Some of the later artists, however, are simply amazing.
Watchmen
I'm running out of steam. I have nothing to say about this that hasn't been said by more articulate people but this book is a turning point for so much of comics, such a standout work of both letters and pictures, and so utterly lives up to its intent that it should be required reading for man, woman, and child. The movie was rubbish. The only mean thing I have to say is that I didn't enjoy the art style that much on its own. I just have a thing for more dynamic action in my comics, but even this complaint is more a comment on my being a bad reader for this book than any fault of its own.