Lieber’s Eleven

Steve Lieber recently started a meme that encourages bloggers to list eleven comic-book titles that no library should be without. Here’s mine.

1. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware

2. Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez

3. The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner

…and that’s it.

Nah, okay, wait a minute, here’s the second tier:

4. The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller

5. Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

6. Eightball #22: “Ice Haven” by Daniel Clowes

7. Poison River by Gilbert Hernandez

Okay, now, my criteria:

It’s really simple. I’m only listing books that totally knocked me on my ass, and continue to do so, both in retrospective remembrances and in re-readings. The top three is the top three because they so thoroughly destroyed me with their brilliance that I’m barely coherent about them. If I’m going to presume to tell every library what they shouldn’t be without, they’re what I’m looking for–absolute world-shattering brilliance.

The second tier’s members are second-tier for a variety of reasons. Words can’t describe how much I love Dark Knight, which I still think is as great as I thought it was when I first read it in sixth grade; Watchmen is in a similar league. I’m just not totally convinced that you don’t need some grounding in superherodom to appreciate them as much as I do. “Ice Haven,” astounding as it is, is just a pamphlet, and I have a feeling we’re really looking for graphic novels here. (We’ll see how the proposed expansion of the piece into graphic-novel length goes.) Poison River should have been collected into Palomar bu