Топ 10 графических новелл по версии Тime — 10 книг

It's way beyond cliché at this point to call Watchmen the greatest superhero comic ever written-slash-drawn. But it's true. In the world Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created, it's 1985, Nixon is still president, the Cold War is at absolute zero, and the nation's superheroes consist of a bunch of neurotic, washed-up has-beens, mostly without actual superpowers, mostly retired.

As the novel begins one of them, the Comedian, is murdered. What follows is an astoundingly dense, beautiful, sad story that begins as a noir mystery and ends with the destruction, or possibly the redemption, of the entire world as we know it. To tell this story Gibbons and Moore deployed about a dozen fugually interwoven plots and an intricate system of echoing visual motifs. The result is a masterpiece so powerful it caused the entire genre of superhero comics to immediately rethink its most sacred conventions.

—Lev Grossman

Oak 19 февраля 2011 г., 14:14

Morpheus is the Lord of Dreams. As our story begins, he has been magically captured by an occult group. A pale, skinny man clad in black — he's the quintessence of goth — Morpheus escapes, but his kingdom, the Dreaming, a kind of geographical expression of our collective unconsciousnesses, has fallen into disrepair, and he must restore it to its former glory.

Melancholy and occasionally very ruthless, Morpheus is one of the Endless, a pantheon of beings that includes Death, Despair, Destruction, and various other eternal principles that begin with D. In writing Sandman Neil Gaiman merrily pillaged the world's mythologies, and those of his own brain, to produce a rich, literary and often beautiful mix of horror and philosophy. Has any comic begotten as many goth tattoos as Sandman? Unlikely.

—Lev Grossman

Oak 19 февраля 2011 г., 14:15

In precise, almost jewel-like panels arranged in flow-charts and Mondrian-like grids, Chris Ware tells the story (does it count as a story, when there's no hope whatsoever?) of a solitary, withdrawn man in his thirties who meets his father for the first time. The bleakness of Jimmy's life is only relieved by his fantasies about his adventures as the Smartest Kid on Earth, which unfortunately also tend to end in ... bleakness. Every page in Jimmy Corrigan is a master class in minimalist graphic design, that slices time into discrete, intensely felt moments in a way that no other medium can.

—Lev Grossman

Oak 19 февраля 2011 г., 14:19

Art Spiegelman's father Vladek was a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. When Spiegelman told his father's story in Maus, he depicted all the Jews as mice and all the Nazis as cats. Strangely, the cartoonish conceit doesn't trivialize the story, it makes it viscerally real — it strips away our practiced indifference to an all too familiar story. Those mice are more human than most people. Alongside his father's tale Spiegelman lovingly but honestly depicts his own relationship with his father, who has aged into a difficult, prickly, fearful man. Maus won a Pulitzer in 1992, a landmark event in the history of the medium — its sheer power forced the mainstream world to take comics seriously.

—Lev Grossman

Oak 19 февраля 2011 г., 14:20

From his luxurious seat at Marlinspike Hall, Hergé's tufted, virtually sexless reporter investigates mysteries ranging from the criminal (counterfeiting) to the science fictional (a mysterious meteorite that causes things to grow at an astounding rate), in the company of a drunken ex-sailor, a half-cracked scientific genius, two identical bumbling detectives, and of course his white, apparently sentient dog Snowy.

Tintin is a weird mix of comedy, mystery and adventure — you never quite know what you're going to get when you open one of those skinny, oversized volumes. (Though you can be pretty confident that Tintin is going to say "Crumbs!" and that Captain Haddock is going to get drunk and fall down.) Hergé's art is an utterly inimitable mix of cartoonishness and photographic hyper-realism, inked in luminous, oversaturated colors, which renders Tintin's timeless, ambiguously European (Tintin was Belgian) world utterly believable. We'll see how well Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson can reproduce it onscreen when the movie comes out in 2011.

—Lev Grossman

Oak 19 февраля 2011 г., 14:25

Before he wrote Watchmen, Alan Moore picked up an obscure 1950s superhero and rewrote him as one of the greatest tragic heroes anywhere in comics. Miracleman — originally called Marvelman — is a middle-aged journalist named Mike Moran who is in the process of gradually remembering that he was once, and still can be, a superhero. As he rediscovers his powers, and figures out what happened to his memory, he reinvents every tired cliché of the Superman-style hero into something strange and new and somehow deeply sad.

In 1990 Moore handed Miracleman over to Neil Gaiman (yes, that Neil Gaiman — seriously, it's like watching Bach and Mozart improvise a fugue together) whose run on the title is as strange and astonishing as Moore's in a totally different way. It's infuriatingly difficult to find Miracleman today, because the rights to the character are part of a long and bitter legal dispute. But if you find him, read him.

—Lev Grossman

Oak 19 февраля 2011 г., 14:32

Alison Bechdel's father was 44 when he was hit by a truck, which he may or may not have stepped in front of. Fun Home is the story of what led up that moment: the author's childhood in small-town Pennsylvania and her gradual realization that she is gay, and that her father probably is too. The narrative isn't linear, it's more like a looped tape — she goes back and back over her own story, adding new details, mustering maps and photos and journal entries and allusions to Wilde and Proust and Fitzgerald and Joyce, each time deepening our understanding of it, and at the same time adding more layers of ambiguity. She never shies away from complexity, never forces a theory that doesn't fit. And all this is conveyed by line drawings that are simplicity itself.

—Lev Grossman

Oak 19 февраля 2011 г., 14:35

Two teenage girls are whiling away their nothing lives in a nameless nowhere exurb of malls and fake diners and empty sidewalks. They've graduated from high school, but in their hyper-ironic state any ambition they have feels cheap and pointless, so they just wander from day to day, sifting through the broken refuse of popular culture. Their sardonic banter is so funny, and their anomie so total, that on the rare occasions when an actual authentic emotion breaks through, it's like a battering ram that crushes the reader's heart. The movie — staring Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson — is fine, but it's no substitute for the book's pale blue-washed panels, so orderly and still and perfect that you just know nothing is going to happen, ever.

—Lev Grossman

Oak 19 февраля 2011 г., 14:36

A brutal reboot of one the greatest comic book characters ever created. Frank Miller pushes Batman into his 50s : he has retired 10 years earlier, after the death of Robin, and has sunk into brooding oblivion. Gotham has sunk too. A vicious gang forces Batman out of retirement, but once he's out of the cave, all his old foes come back out to play too. A major superhero had never felt this real before — all stubbly chin and aging sinews and black thoughts. This is the book that begat the Batman of the movies.

—Lev Grossman

Oak 19 февраля 2011 г., 14:37

Eight-year-old Marlys is indomitable. And not just in the normal way that 8-year-olds are indomitable — i.e. they can't shut up. Marlys lives in a beaten-down home with a missing father and a mom who might as well be, but from that unpromising material she generates an endless series of games, experiments, songs, dances and general theories about life. She's not a fantasist, she sees everything as it is — she just loves it all. Every once in a while it all comes crashing in on her, but somehow she bobs up again in the next scribbly black-and-white panel, unsinkable as ever. The Greatest of Marlys — a collection of Barry's comic strips about Marlys and her siblings, Maybonne and Freddie, a.k.a. Skreddy 57 — is probably the greatest novel ever written, in any medium, from a child's point of view.

—Lev Grossman

Oak 19 февраля 2011 г., 14:40