A boy with a chainsaw devil for a heart hunts devils for the government; Fujimoto's chaos.
Miyazaki's seven-volume manga of the toxic jungle and the princess who understands it; darker than the film.
Two brothers, a failed transmutation and a military state; Arakawa's tightly plotted twenty-seven volumes.
A robot boy built by a grieving scientist; Tezuka, the god of manga, from 1952.
Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf in exile in New York; Willingham's fairy-tale noir.
Charlie Brown, Snoopy and fifty years of small despair; start with the 1950s.
Goku from a boy with a tail to the Saiyan wars; the manga every shonen descends from.
A disgraced executioner pushes his son across Edo Japan in a cart of hidden blades.
Luffy and the Straw Hats chase the One Piece across 100-plus volumes; the best-selling comic ever.
Two Slavic warriors defend the village of Mirmilowo against the Zbojcerze; Poland's Asterix.
Scott McCloud explains how comics work, as a comic; the textbook of the form.
A masked anarchist against a fascist Britain of the 1990s; the Guy Fawkes mask comes from here.
Enid and Rebecca after high school in a suburb of nowhere; Clowes' teenage bible.
Spiegelman's father in Auschwitz, Jews as mice and Nazis as cats; the only comic with a Pulitzer.
A first love and a fundamentalist childhood in a Wisconsin winter; Craig Thompson's 600 pages.
Bruce Wayne's first year and Jim Gordon's; Miller and Mazzucchelli's crime comic.
A Texas preacher possessed by a divine-demonic offspring goes looking for God, with a vampire.
Morpheus, lord of dreams, escapes seventy years of captivity; Gaiman's ten volumes of myth.
Sacco in a Bosnian enclave during the war; the second reportage comic.
Jack the Ripper as a royal conspiracy, with 40 pages of footnotes; Moore and Campbell's Victorian London.
The Kingpin learns Daredevil's identity and takes everything apart; Miller and Mazzucchelli.
A demon raised by the army fights Rasputin and frog monsters; Mignola's shadows.
A sexually transmitted plague mutates 1970s Seattle teenagers; Charles Burns in ink black.
Spider Jerusalem, a Hunter Thompson of the future, against the City; Warren Ellis.
A boy in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, drawn by a survivor; the manga on the bomb.
The Joker's possible origin and Barbara Gordon shot; one bad day.
A dystopian 2013 where Sentinels rule and Kitty Pryde goes back to stop it; Claremont and Byrne.
Marjane Satrapi grows up through the Iranian revolution, in black and white.
Retired vigilantes in a 1985 with Nixon still president; the graphic novel that made comics grow up.
Harari's human story redrawn as a comic; the same argument in pictures.
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