The Greatest Graphic Novels Of All Time

Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's Transmetropolitan perfectly illustrates why comic books are so perfect for sci-fi. If this was a movie, the effects budget would be through the roof, but all it takes are some strokes of a pen to bring this dystopian future world to riotous life. Protagonist Spider Jerusalem is an uncompromising gonzo journalist who finds himself at serious odds with the leader of the Free World - his quest to see justice done and the truth told is harsh, hilarious and unlike anything you'll ever read. There are 10 collected volumes available, but Back On The Street should get you started.

Okay, so the "painted comics" trend of the late 1990s resulted in a lot of pretty lousy books. But it also gave us Marvels, Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross's look at how life in the Marvel Universe is for us normal Joes. One of the things that gave Marvel such a leg up in the early days was that their stories took place in a somewhat realistic world - Spider-Man lived in Queens, for God's sake. Marvels follows a news photographer in the early days, before NYC had been demolished dozens of times by super-dude squabbles, and it's pretty great.

A lot of the books on this list are fairly light reading - full of big pictures and little words, you can breeze through them in a couple days. But Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth won't go down so easily. In thousands of tiny, precisely-drawn panels, master cartoonist Chris Ware tells the tale of Jimmy, a sad-sack office drone who gets reunited with his missing father while also flashing back to the Chicago World's Fair, in a way unlike anything you've ever seen. There's a reason that highbrow comics nerds are unanimous in their praise of this book - it's just that damned good.

Daredevil has always been an also-ran in the Marvel universe - popular enough to have his own book, but never a real A-lister. That all changed when Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli took over his book in the mid-1980s. The pair turned the blind crimefighter into a true street-level hero, pitting him against new menaces and old foes in a plot orchestrated by the Kingpin, who had set out to ruin Matt Murdock's life. Born Again collects the emotional peak of their run, with Daredevil down and out but never defeated. It's good comics.