lacunae

100 things I love about comics

I'm not too big on list-memes, usually, but Fred Hembeck started this one, a whole lot of other people are doing it too (scroll down to the Feb. 15 entry), and I'm really enjoying what's come out of it so far. (Plus I still owe Fred a CD from like a year ago.) It's the "100 Things I Love About Comics" list, and mine looks like this:

1. Jim Starlin's run on Warlock
2. The sound effect/dialogue of Rorschach eating beans
3. Finder
4. The glossy-paper reprints of Steve Ditko's Dr. Strange run in Strange Tales, especially those insane closeups of Dormammu
5. Alison Bechdel's extended narratives at the end of the last few Dykes to Watch Out For paperbacks
6. The free-form, interconnected short stories in the first few issues of Yummy Fur
7. Sound effects in American Flagg!
8. Paul Gambi, the "crime tailor"
9. The "wuffa wuffa wuffa" issue of Cerebus
10. The brief period in Thor when Stan Lee decided it would be more dramatic to end every word balloon without punctuation, and was correct
11. The unnerving "Petrified Forest" section of The Ballad of Halo Jones
12. Alan Brennert's half-dozen Batman stories
13. Don Rosa's Uncle Scrooge, especially the first few stories where he's trying so hard to prove himself
14. The fake ending to Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, followed by the real ending
15. The low-key desperation that sets into DP7 after the first few issues
16. Air Wave
17. The early Atomic Knights stories...
18. ...and the issue of DC Comics Presents that wraps up the series in a totally dramatically satisfying way
19. The last few issues of The Invisibles, as chaotic and messed-up as they are
20. The party scenes at the beginning of "Wigwam Bam"
21. The conclusion of "Love & Rockets X," with the one-panel cuts piling up one after another for pages
22. Don Newton and Dan Adkins
23. The personalities of the protagonists of We3
24. The conceptual perfection of Mister O
25. That Deadpool issue where he invades an early issue of Amazing Spider-Man
26. Mort Weisinger-era Jimmy Olsen covers
27. The brick from "Krazy Kat"
28. Abbott and Costello Meet the Bride of Hembeck
29. Gene Day's artwork on Master of Kung Fu
30. Mark Millar's run on The Authority
31. "The Oxygen Board"
32. Seven Soldiers, not that I've even seen any of it yet
33. Every parody R. Sikoryak has ever done, but especially "Good Ol' Gregor Brown"
34. Roy Thomas's insistence on shoehorning Hawkman into every issue of All-Star Squadron
35. Matter-Eater Lad
36. David Heatley's "My Sexual History (Slightly Abridged Version)"
37. The opening scene of Lost Girls, with the five-kinds-of-creepy action in the mirror
38. Oracle
39. The 3-D edition of Destroy!!
40. The Lesser Book of the Vishanti, by cat yronwode
41. The Silver Twist
42. Walt Feinberg's career in art
43. Spider-Man lifting that giant piece of Ditkotech, and every homage to it
44. Atari Force
45. "Li'l Octagon"
46. The first Gregory book
47. Quantum and Woody
48. "Frank in the River"
49. The existence of Psychoanalysis
50. Robert Loren Fleming and Trevor von Eeden's run on Thriller
51. The original Dishman minis
52. Kevin Huizenga's "Fight or Run" pieces
53. Jessica Jones's relationship with Luke Cage
54. Eddie Campbell's After the Snooter
55. The original Birdland miniseries, and its characters reappearing as the parents of Venus in Measles
56. The Beanworld ads that used to run in the Buyer's Guide
57. Sidney Mellon
58. Amy Unbounded
59. Characters greeting each other with "What it is!" in Nexus
60. Sgt. Fury and his Howling Defenders in the indicia
61. The Ray hooking up with Black Canary
62. Speculation about when the next D'arc Tangent is coming out
63. Speculation about when the 1963 Annual is coming out
64. All "jam" comics
65. Jules Feiffer's New Year's "fill-in" on The Spirit
66. Roy G. Bivolo
67. The digest incarnation of Adventure Comics being baited with new stuff to get people to buy the early Legion stories, or maybe vice versa
68. "68 Pages, No Ads from Cover to Cover!"
69. Diesel Sweeties
70. Anders Nilsen's bird-in-hand T-shirt
71. The tiny Quimby the Mouse images on the cover of his issue of Acme Novelty Library
72. Age of Bronze's explanations of divine visitations
73. "Mysticism and the Sublime in Aotearoa"
74. Vanessa Davis's story about the geese
75. The first year of "Five Years Later"-model Legion of Super-Heroes
76. "I don't even know what a ninja is!"
77. Amanda Waller vs. Batman
78. Gary Panter's sense of panel composition
79. The alien demanding that P.S. teach him English in the very last panel of the very last original Spirit story
80. The all-star minicomic tribute to Ivan Brunetti
81. The existence of Marvel's Essential line
82. Translating the Rannian dialogue in Swamp Thing into English
83. Paul O'Brien eviscerating terrible comics in "The X-Axis"
84. Astoria
85. Black-and-white British reprints of Steve Engelhart's Avengers, a few pages at a time
86. The entire multiple-Earths scheme of pre-Crisis continuity
87. Editor's notes, especially when the editor is obviously growing tireder and tireder of explaining things over the course of an issue
88. Stories that get abruptly cut off by the cancellation of a series, with editor's notes explaining that sorry, that's all we've got time for, perhaps it'll return someday
89. Jeff Nicholson's "Through the Habitrails"
90. Carmine Infantino captions with little pointing hands
91. Boom Tubes
92. The explanation of Phoenix in the X-Men FAQ
93. J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray, as a team
94. Murphy Anderson's inks on Curt Swan
95. "Bamf"
96. Mike W. Barr's obsession with Ellery Queen
97. The Journal of MODOK Studies
98. The Legion of Substitute Heroes
99. The original "Sinister Six" annual
100. Ch'p