By Ruby Quince

My favourite comics

Another week, another scab. It’s personal development, they say. I thought I’d do something that may be useful to someone, and I get to indulge in a passion. Here is my list of favourite comics, sort-of in order.

Rasl
Love & Rockets
Animal Man
Rachel Rising
Irredeemable/ incorruptible
Doom Patrol
Walking Dead
Locke & Key
Wraith
East of West
My Favourite thing is Monsters
We3
Black Hammer
Secret Six
Daredevil (Mark Waid’s run)
All Star Superman
Madman

Concrete
Black Lung
Fables
The Boys
The Cape
Copra
Parker
Criminal
Monster on the Hill

Transmetropolitian
Rat Queens
Glory
Kill or be Killed
Rumble
Chew
Prophet
Southern Bastards
Invisibles
Paper Girls
Hellblazer
Deadpool
Apama
Bulletproof Coffin
Peanuts
Plutonia
Preacher
Stray Bullets
Sweet Tooth
Swamp Thing
Lost Dogs
Battlefields
Adventure Time
Fante Bukowski

I’ve kept it to stuff on Comixology, the digital comics reader/shop. I know a lot of people think that it’s sacrilege to buy digital comics, but I think I’ve probably spent ten times more than I would have in print. My app tells me I have 411 series, 1588 books. Gadzooks, that’s way more than I’d spend in the stores. Well done Amazon (they bought Comixology a few years ago).

I buy print for the really good stuff* but if I’m really honest, I prefer digital. Sure, a book is a beautiful thing, but I read these at night as I slope off: it’s me-time, swiping panel to panel until I’m gone. I love their Guided View tech. I think it’s magic. It’s more than a comic, more like a storyboard on steroids.

I don’t even know how I got into them. It wasn’t as a kid or even in my 20s. It started with graphic novels, and then I got Comixology, to check one particular writer. I haven’t looked back. I love how new writers start on an existing character and slowly develop it or radically reimagine them. Stories dance around organically and occasionally go way off piste, trying something really different. There’s issue of Daredevil which is told exclusively from the perspective of the dog, visualising the world through smells and sights. It’s incredible. I’m still making my way through the spectrum of comics, from the pretty dumb and enjoyable to quite complex and insightful. I used to avoid superheros, but the 80s experiments with the genre and the constant reexamining of it is intriguing. Maybe that’s a topic for my next 400 words.

*Oh hell, i feel bad leaving these print guys out: pretty much anything by Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Craig Thompson, the Hernandez Bros, Tony Millionaire, Jason, lots by Michael DeForge. Also series like MIND MGMT and Saga, and books like From Hell and Bone.

The copy scores 71.7 in the Flesch Reading Ease test