Comics I Recommend

• Neil Gaiman's Sandman is one of the best comics of all time.

  I've enjoyed every issue. Gaiman has a long story arc crossing years of comics with details meshing across the whole series. The stories use interesting tidbits from mythology and history and have a number of interesting characters. The artists are among the best in the comic business. You can get all the back issues of Sandman in graphic novel collections.

• The Watchmen is a tour-de-force by one of the best creative teams ever to work on comics.

  The 12-issue series, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Bill Gibbons, is a tribute to superhero comics with lots of intelligence, wit, drama, and fascinating "superhero" characters. You can easily find the collected graphic novel form of this series in many comic shops and bookstores. However, the original monthly schedule had some advantages for readers. Specifically, there's lots of background material at the end of each comic. When the next issue is available on the next page, it's a bit harder to justify slogging through this stuff, even though there are some gems in there.

• The Preacher is a great comic by a creative team that formerly worked on a popular DC comic called Hellblazer. The Preacher is violent, but has an interesting story and beautiful art by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon respectively. It's probably the comic I look forward to most each month.

• The Books of Magic is a nicely done comic about a young magician who doesn't know what he needs to given how powerful his magic ability is. It has some of the same mythological elements that make Sandman and--to a lesser extent--Preacher and Hellblazer so good. I highly recommend looking for this one.

• You might want to check out an unusual comic written and drawn Jeff Smith called Bone. This is a strange fantasy story, told with a cute, open, artistic style. It's now published by Image and is easy to find in comic book stores.

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