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Bill Willingham's Picks
Bill Willingham's PicksBill Willingham has been writing, and sometimes drawing, comics for more than twenty years. He's created many critically acclaimed comic book series, including Proposition Player, Shadowpact, Jack of Fables, and the Eisner Award-winning Vertigo series, Fables. Additionally, his work has been nominated for a number of other awards including the Harvey and Ignatz comic industry awards as well as the Hugo and International Horror Guild awards. He lives somewhere near a good poker room.
Cerebus is masterful, funny, heartbreaking, and wonderful and infuriating at times. What's it about? Well, it's about an aardvark that accidentally becomes Pope. It's about the nature of men and of women, feminism, barbarism, sexual politics, religion and a goofy look at the state of the comics industry during the time of its twenty-plus year run. One should also note that the best fight scene ever to appear in comics (or perhaps any other storytelling medium) occurs here, a little more than halfway through the series.
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Like many of the other books listed above, it's a graphic novel by virtue of the fact that the individual comic books that first told the story were later collected into a single volume. This one makes the list because it was my first experience of comics as more than a "single issue thing." It's a sprawling epic, spoiled by a change in art quality about two-thirds through and a deus ex machina ending, but since huge epics were a new thing to comics at the time, I can forgive it for faltering, and still love it for what it tried to be.
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The story takes place in Arthurian England that is sort of an amalgam of different times, from the early fifth century, to the High Middle Ages. It follows the life and adventures of the title character from childhood to the heroic ascendancy of his own first-born son, Arn. Edward, the Duke of Windsor, called Prince Valiant the "greatest contribution to English literature in the past hundred years." Though not sure I'd go that far, it's definitely my second all time favorite comic work, and once again, a sprawling epic that is simply gorgeous and wonderful.
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Bone is about a funny little creature who looks not quite but sort of like a truncated bone, who happens to be named Bone, and his two cousins - companions named Phony Bone and Smiley Bone. Bone and his two cousins are exiled from their own community - Boneville (natch') - and wind up in a strange and magical valley, full of lovely lost princesses, fierce dragons, and monstrous rat creatures. The fun and adventure begins there and never lets up. Bone is that always enjoyable perfect mix of humor and overarching drama that is so hard to pull off well, but can't be beat when it is.
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There are many Hellboy collections, but I chose this one only because a couple of the stories contained within are among my personal favorites. The title character is a demon from Hell, summoned to earth by evil Nazi sorcerers, to usher in the Apocalypse, but through the timely intervention of an American commando squad, is taken from the bad guys and raised in a good home to be a hero of good character. This is a story of the debate between nature over nurture in determining fate, but that's subtext. The main focus of the stories is rollicking action and adventure. Hellboy fights a lot of monsters and that's the joy of this series.
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V for Vendetta (Graphic Novel)
Even though Watchmen most often gets the credit for being the greatest graphic novel ever produced, this one, also written by Alan Moore is much better. Where Watchmen is burdened by considerable story and structural flaws, Vendetta holds together flawlessly and wonderfully. It posits a near future Great Britain which has fallen into fascism, and a lone masked hero/criminal, known only as V, dedicated to overthrowing the corrupt regime. It's exciting and thoughtful and should be read.
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This is probably the first graphic novel that really, dramatically settled the argument that comics are/are not just for kids. Maus tells the unvarnished story of the Holocaust, grim and unflinching, even though it employs the (oft-questioned) device of using animals in place of the historical people. It was the first comic to win the Pulitzer Prize, which speaks of its quality.
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Where every other book and movie structures itself as a mystery for the reader/watcher to discover who Jack the Ripper really was, this graphic novel reveals it to the reader early on. It's not a mystery about who is Jack, but a speculation on why Jack needed to exist and what sort of fellow might become him. It's also a stinging indictment of the Queen and the British royalty. I'm amused that the film based on this book restored the "who is he?" aspect of the legend, as if that were a crutch no Jack the Ripper story could survive. That's why, as per usual, the book is better. Much better.
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