My Top 10 Influential Comicbooks

TOP 10 INFLUENTIAL COMICBOOKS

Folks are doing this, so why not. 10 comics that influenced me.

1 - Terrific

Before this I'd read Playhour & Robin and Pippin & Tog, but when Terrific (and its sister paper Fantastic) started reprinting Marvel strips I suddenly started paying attention to comics. I remember vividly a three panel sequence by Steve Ditko where The Hulk emerged from a hole or a tank (which I can't find online, so I've probably Maconied it). This was when I first 'got' comic strips. I was five years old.

2 - Asterix

Four Asterix books came free with Total petrol*. Though I've been aware of that fact for nearly 50 years, I've not till now asked the question: where on earth was there a Total petrol garage? I've never seen one. Whatever, four Asterix books came free, the rest you had to pay for. To be honest, their content may ultimately be better than any other comic I go on to mention in the rest of this list. (Update: I've looked at the rest of the list, Asterix is the best of the stuff on the whole list. Sorry rest of the list.)

*Asterix The Legionary, Asterix The Gladiator, Asterix & The Big Fight, and Asterix & Cleopatra.

3 - Lion & Thunder

A series of amalgamations, using the British "Hatch, Match, Dispatch" publishing tradition, meant that I ended up reading comics by default. Terrific had been swallowed by Fantastic, which then became Smash & Pow Incorporating Fanastic. And just as I was getting into the revamped Smash, with its Eric Bradbury lead strip and Leo Baxendale centrespread, it was sucked into Valiant & Smash. I'd started reading a new comic called Thunder and, within 6 months, found myself reading Lion &  Thunder which, with such strips as Geoff Campion's Spellbinder alongside Adam Eterno and Robot Archie, was such a delight I totally failed to notice the Marvel reprint strips had long since disappeared.

4 - Planet Of The Apes

Marvel came back into my life when I discovered the reprint strips based on my favourite TV show, Planet Of The Apes. I quickly discovered Marvel UK were producing about 10 comics a week, reprinting 40 pages of comic strips in black and white in every issue, meaning my generation was able to mainline every classic Marvel strip, from the early 60s superheroes through to the latest creations at a rate of over 300 pages a week. And you got change from a quid. The black and white litho printing of art from everyone from Neal Adams to Barry Smith, Gil Kane to Jim Steranko, enabled British readers to see the pages bigger, and clearer, than our American cousins had endured a few years earlier, buried in blotchy colours. This affected and nurtured a generation of comic artists who were about to flourish.

5 - Look-In

The highest quality printed comic art in the world at the time, by my reckoning. (As you can see from these copies in my collection, I treated them with scant respect, using them to decorate my diary). Though the stories only came in two-page instalments, the art by John Burns, Martin Asbury, Harry North & Mike Noble on such adaptations as The Tomorrow People, The 6 Million Dollar Man, Doctor In Charge and Black Beauty were devastating and put all other contemporary comic art to shame. Marvel art at the time looked so shoddy in comparison it convinced me that someday they'd be so desperate they'd even employ me.

6 - 2000AD

To begin with I dismissed 2000AD for not being as well written as the Marvel reprints, and new colour Marvel comics we were starting to be able to get (in particular Howard The Duck, which remains my favourite series of the period). But I got hooked when Starlord comic came out and, just like had happened in my earlier childhood, got subsumed into 2000AD. Early favourite were Dredd and Robo Hunter, with Bolland and Gibson being fan favourites. Then came Alan Moore and a proper revolution in comic book writing took place. See also Warrior.

7 - The Spirit

The longest delay between a comic coming out and me discovering it has got to be the forty years that passed between Will Eisner's Spirit appearing in American Sunday newspapers, and my starting to read it when it was reprinted by Kitchen Sink Press in the 80s. These strips, especially Eisner's artwork and storytelling, were as impressive then as they must have been when they first appeared. As I had the pleasure of saying when I gave a speech introducing Will at the 2003 Raptus Comic Festival in Bergen, I had for years attributed to lesser later copyists most of the techniques that Eisner had in fact originated. If my comic strips have draw on/ borrowed from one person more than any other, it's Will Eisner. (Also Doonesbury, I "do" Doonesbury so much!)

8 - Swamp Thing

That period in the early eighties, when American comics started using British talent, was something so momentous it's hard to describe to a younger generation used to an international publishing world. Just 10 years later I was to find myself working for Marvel, but in 1983 that was beyond our comprehension. DC and Marvel were so distant, so unreachable. And the fact that our own Alan Moore was then writing comics that made his American contemporaries look so primitive, derivative, old fashioned, it really was something to experience live. The post-modern approach to comics, whereby writers will "do an Alan Moore" and revive an old or rather silly character by bringing it into a gritty realistic world or deconstructing and remaking it, has become the norm, leading to the Christopher Nolan Batman films and the DC and Marvel Cinematic Universes, of which we're no doubt going to tire soon. 35 years ago, on a typewriter in Northampton, is where that glorious nonsense started. 

9 - Viz

Somewhere in a parallel universe, a guy called Chris who had no pretensions to being a comics creator and little or no interest in the world of comics started writing and drawing some nonsense that, quite possibly to his surprise, lots of people liked. Within a decade it became the biggest selling comics magazine in Britain, probably the world, and 40 years on it's still going. Viz remains possibly the only comic book that has genuinely made me laugh out loud (though Giles and Doonesbury are personal favourites, and make me smile, they've never made me spit a drink like Viz).

10 - Beano

I never read The Beano as a kid, having discovered Marvel reprints when I was five. But in 1999 I somehow noticed they were running long-form stories by writer-artist Mike Pearse and that they were excellent. The best storytelling I had ever seen in the Beano. I endeavoured to follow in his wake and, thanks to visionary editor Euan Kerr, found myself being able to write and draw a number of serialised comic adventures in the Beano, for a good few years, which remain the work of which I am proudest. Mike Pearse's work remains my favourite work I have ever seen in that comic, though the work of a recent generation including Gary Northfield and Nigel Auchterlounie has been of a similar high standard. I have my fingers crossed for its continued survival.

Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.