The Greatest Graphic Novels Of All Time

If all you know of The Walking Dead is the AMC series that's basically already self-destructing, you need to get down to your local bookery and pick up the comics that started it all. You can get a gigantic Compendium of the first 48 isses in one 1000-page volume. Robert Kirkman's tale of life after the zombie apocalypse is tense, gripping, and utterly impossible to put down. Once you start reading, you're not going to be able to stop, and you'll be complaining about the show with the rest of us.

Love him or hate him, Warren Ellis will always have our ear just for creating Planetary. His long-running series just wrapped up, and it's a doozy. Unlike other books on this list, the more plugged in you are to the wild world of comics, the more you'll get about Planetary. Three investigators - Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner and the Drummer - work as "archaeologists of the impossible," tracking down mysteries around the world. What this means is reinterpretations of pop culture from Godzilla to John Constantine, through a twisted lens.

This is sort of cheating, since Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli's adaptation of City Of Glass is based on, you know, a real novel, but whatever. The comic book take on Paul Auster's tale of a writer turned private detective slowly losing his mind as he gets too involved in his first case is good in prose, but transcendent in pictures. Mazzucchelli, who gained fame illustrating Daredevil and Batman, pulls out every trick in the cartoonist's handbook for this slim little book, twisting yoru perceptions until you're as mixed-up as the protagonist.

Hardcore comics fans, when asked for a series that doesn't get enough props, point to Mark Gruenwald's 1985 Squadron Supreme miniseries. Hitting stands a year before Watchmen, it took the Squadron Supreme - Marvel analogues of DC's greatest heroes - and let them carry forward a story of exactly what would happen if superheroes really tried to change the world. The results, naturally, are horrendous. It's an amazingly bleak and bizarre book that was published at one of the stinkiest times in Marvel's history, making it a true cult classic.