Leave Plain = Things I don't have
Make Bold = Things I do have
Italics = I have some but probably not enough (optional)
Underline = I don't agree I need this (optional)

1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library (I keep meaning to buy the sketchbooks, but I have a couple of the bookshelf-busting issues. And Jimmy Corrigan.)

2. A Complete Run Of Arcade

3. Any Number Of Mini-Comics

4. At Least One Pogo Book From The 1950s

5. A Barnaby Collection

6. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary

7. As Many Issues of RAW as You Can Place Your Hands On

8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics (Not so common in Britain. I have Archie Vs. The Punisher, but that's not really the same thing.)

9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels

10. Several Tintin Albums

11. A Smattering Of Treasury Editions Or Similarly Oversized Books

12. Several Significant Runs of Alternative Comic Book Series (Nothing much beyond a bundle of early-200s Cerebus.)

13. A Few Early Comic Strip Collections To Your Taste (Gasoline Alley, Thimble Theatre, Dick Tracy, some Krazy Kat.)

14. Several "Indy Comics" From Their Heyday

15. At Least One Comic Book From When You First Started Reading Comic Books (Gerry Conway/Sal Buscema issues of Spectacular Spider-Man.)

16. At Least One Comic That Failed to Finish The Way It Planned To

17. Some Osamu Tezuka

18. The Entire Run Of At Least One Manga Series (Eagle, mentioned a couple of posts down. This may be sort of a cheat, since it's incredibly short for a manga.)

19. One Or Two 1970s Doonesbury Collections

20. At Least One Saul Steinberg Hardcover

21. One Run of A Comic Strip That You Yourself Have Clipped

22. A Selection of Comics That Interest You That You Can't Explain To Anyone Else

23. At Least One Woodcut Novel

24. As Much Peanuts As You Can Stand

25. Maus

26. A Significant Sample of R. Crumb's Sketchbooks

27. The original edition of Sick, Sick, Sick.

28. The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics

29. Several copies of MAD (I bought some reissues of the first few issues. Lovely art. I think I gave up before it got funny.)

30. A stack of Jack Kirby 1970s Comic Books

31. More than a few Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 1960s Marvel Comic Books

32. A You're-Too-High-To-Tell Amount of Underground Comix

33. Some Calvin and Hobbes (The only C&H I don't have is a book that accompanied a museum exhibit, with reproductions of original art and thoughts from Watterson. GOSH! had a few the last time I was down that way.)

34. Some Love and Rockets

35. The Marvel Benefit Issue Of Coober Skeber

36. A Few Comics Not In Your Native Tongue

37. A Nice Stack of Jack Chick Comics

38. A Stack of Comics You Can Hand To Anybody's Kid

39. At Least A Few Alan Moore Comics

40. A Comic You Made Yourself

41. A Few Comics About Comics

42. A Run Of Yummy Fur

43. Some Frank Miller Comics

44. Several Lee/Ditko/Romita Amazing Spider-Man Comic Books

45. A Few Great Comics Short Stories ('In Pictopia', 'The Man' by Vaughn Bodé, 'Street Code' by Jack Kirby. The minute I see a copy of Mazzucchelli's 'Big Man', I will buy it.)

46. A Tijuana Bible

47. Some Weirdo

48. An Array Of Comics In Various Non-Superhero Genres

49. An Editorial Cartoonist's Collection or Two

50. A Few Collections From New Yorker Cartoonists

Let me state the basics just so we're on the same page about this series, you and I. Weekly comic. Lasted a year. 'Real time' gimmick (1 issue=the events of one week). Focusing on DC's second- and third-string characters; your Superman, Batman etc are nowhere to be found.

52 issues of a continuity-heavy crossover comic is rather more than one writer could be expected to produce in a year, and as a result the series was written by not one but four of the biggest paychecks in comics. Druggy weirdness guy Grant Morrison; slick mainstream guy Mark Waid; nostalgia and ultraviolence guy Geoff Johns; gritty realism guy Greg Rucka.

Rucka. He's the reason I got to this so late.

Now, I bow to no-one in my admiration for Greg Rucka's writing. I love his Atticus Kodiac novels. His and Ed Brubaker's Gotham Central is the greatest police procedural ever in comics. His spy series Queen & Country may end up being the most consistant longform comics serial there has ever been. I even liked his Perfect Dark videogame tie-in novels, for God's sake. And anyone who gets between me and the comics store the day the third Whiteout series is released is going to wind up with a Stu West-shaped hole in them.

Still, when I read an interview with Rucka where he revealed — this thing has been out for a year; you had your chance — that he was writing the part of the book where the old Charlton character The Question died of cancer I thought "Stuff that." Actually I'm being polite. I did a 180 degree turn in my computer chair and shrieked "Not another fucking superhero with cancer!"

Nothing personal against cancer, you understand. I just happen to think it's a bad fit with the bright costumes and gravity-defying antics of the superhero genre. I'd feel the same way about a comic that detailed a masked crimefighter's struggle with lupus. Or irritable bowel disease. It all takes me back to that dark period in the '90s when every comic cover seemed to feature the hero being nailed to a cross. I'd rather be used for live practice by a krav maga class. Not interested in reading that. No.

Then I broke my rib. And I was sitting around with a lot of time on my hands. And there was a complete run of 52.

I don't have any real principles. Not ones I live by, anyway.

This is where I have to make an embarrassing admission. Not only did I tolerate the Question storyline. Not only did I actually like it. But I think 52 would have been a worse book if it hadn't been there. First of all, as the Question is breathing his last, his protege hauls him halfway up a Himalaya looking for a magical cure from an ancient religious sect. Which, if you're a superhero and you really, really have to die of cancer, that's probably the way you should do it.

Also this. 52 is full of all sorts of crazy and wonderful stuff. Cosmic odysseys. Magical travelogues. An island full of mad scientists. An egotistical superhero who's only in it for corporate sponsorship. Super-families. Sad talking animals. Time travel — alongside all of that and more, there needed to be something that was emotionally down to earth to make it a satisfying read.

Which it is. I don't think we're talking here about a series that will go down as one of the all-time greats. In ten years, people won't be making lists that go 'Sandman, Maus, American Born Chinese, 52...' But I will say this: it took me the best part of two days to read this series, soup to nuts, and when I was done I had that empty feeling you get when you've reached the end of a really good, really absorbing novel and you've just realised there isn't any more.

Job's a good'un, as they say.

Commenting on the negative effects of these comics on children, one educator in HCM City said mostly teenagers, aged 12 and over, prefer Japanese comics -- which are full of inappropriate pictures and content, compared to books produced domestically. Teens are reading these harmful comics with great concentration.

...

"I'm worried sick about my son and his classmates when they read foreign comics. These books are not suitable for teens but they are very attractive to them," said Nguyen Thi Uyen. "I don't want any more comics for my son."

Alright, it's true. Reading Rumiko Takahashi comics has led to my striking up a close personal friendship with a panda and avoiding baths at all costs.

What really bothers me is that the Vietnamese are only just now getting around to channelling xenophobia into a 'ban the comics' campaign. Know when we did this in Britain? 19fucking54, slackers! See this here Children And Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act of the following year:

1. This Act applies to any book, magazine or other like work which is of a kind likely to fall into the hands of children or young persons and consists wholly or mainly of stories told in pictures (with or without the addition of written matter)

...

2. (1) A person who prints, publishes, sells or lets on hire a work to which this Act applies, or has any such work in his possession for the purpose of selling it or letting it on hire, shall be guilty of an offence and liable, on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding four months

Well, you can read the rest of it yourself, in your own time. The law proved to be mostly symbolic: it has been used, for example in the case against Savoy Books over Lord Horror in 1991, but there it turned out to be unnecessary and the publishers were found guilty under the non-comics obscenity laws. It does, however, remain in force to this day.

The secret history of the 1955 Act is written up in Martin Barker's book A Haunt Of Fears. Here's the short version. The 1954 anti-comics Senate hearings in the USA came about after psychologist Fredric Wertham published his book Seduction of the Innocent, which laid the blame for a rising tide of juvenile delinquency at the door of comics featuring sex, murder, and a gay Batman and Robin. Prosecutors worried that children were being corrupted by stories featuring unAmerican material.

In Britain it was almost the exact opposite. Ostensibly the anti-comics campaign here was also a response to sex, violence and uphill-gardening superheroes but in fact what provoked it was something simpler: the comics came from America. A movement on the hard Left was worried that children were being exposed to pro-capitalist propaganda in their reading material, and they were the ones who agitated for a change in the law.

From the standpoint of today, I think we can safely say that they got it wrong. I have read a broad selection of the EC horror comics which were outlawed. I remember several incidences of severed heads, rotting corpses and so on, but no mentions of markets or free trade. On the other hand, there were American comics which extolled the virtues of accumulating capital, which fetishised money and featured a rock-ribbed individualist in conflict with the forces of totalitarianism. British campaigners buried the Crypt Keeper, but they should really have gone after Scrooge McDuck.

(I actually think Scrooge might have been spared because his adventures were written and drawn by Carl Barks. Trying to ban a guy named 'Carl Barks' is probably a little too near the knuckle if you're a member of the Communist Party.)

DISCLAIMERS: I may do a separate list for comic strips so there are no newspaper comics here. I've stuck to things which are clearly one discrete story (Top Ten) or available in a single volume (Freak Brothers). Heartland is only 60 pages or so long and you can find it in the Rake At The Gates Of Hell collection of Hellblazer comics. All of these were originally published in English, which is partly a function of my not being terrifically well-versed in foreign material, and partly because I couldn't pick a single favourite Tintin or Asterix volume and couldn't be bothered to find links for multi-tankobon manga series. (If you like, you can pretend Eagle by Kaiji Kawaguchi is in there at number 11.)

So! A good positive start to the new site. I'm Stu West; I'll be your host. Let's play Blockbusters.