20 comics that can change your LIFE -NR.1

Alias by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos
Marvel Comics heroine Jessica Jones is a tough-talking private eye, a modern-day female Humphrey Bogart. But she's also a woman with a past — as a pink-haired young superhero who fought alongside the Avengers, then quit for reasons she's ashamed to reveal. In the first issue of Alias (unrelated to the Jennifer Garner show, incidentally), Jessica punches a client through a window, gets wasted at a local bar and initiates rough sex with a man from her superhero past. Here is a woman who began her life with a clear, noble purpose, only to have it taken away by the complications of the real world. When I was reading Alias, I'd just graduated from college, I couldn't find a job, and my idealistic ambitions were dying on the vine. Jessica's candy-colored superhero memories looked a little like mine; her sarcastic, vodka-drinking, ex-boyfriend-fucking mindset looked a whole lot like mine. Jessica Jones never goes back to being a superhero, but over the course of the comic, she learns to take her screwed-up, all-wrong life and run with it. And that's a good skill for anyone in their early twenties to learn

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20 comics that can change your LIFE -NR.2

Preacher by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
This epic Western about a young man named Jesse Custer hunting down God to hold him accountable for the mess he made of Earth is equal parts high comedy and horrific sadism. When the first issue hit stands in 1995, it scared the crap out of me. Glenn Fabry's painted covers of burning Southern mansions, leather-masked gimps and torn-off faces were plain too much. But I got hooked when Jesse, his girlfriend Tulip and his foul friend Cassidy headed south to New Orleans to consult a voodoo priest. This was the perfect Western — it was about friendship and love against all odds and protecting your own all the way to the end of the world. Ennis' dialogue was thick with stranger's voices I wanted to meet; Dillon's sweating faces showed me the sort of pain I never wanted to know and the kind of orgasms everyone deserves to have

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20 comics that can change your LIFE -NR.3

"Bomb Scare," Optic Nerve #8 by Adrian Tomine
I'm borderline-obsessed with angsty high-school stories — movies, music, books, you name it — and yet I've never read anything that felt as muted and true as "Bomb Scare." What struck me is how uncomfortable it made me, and yet how much I didn't want it to end. The comic depicts two teens — a bookish loner named Scotty, a party girl named Cammie — linked by their after-school job at a fast-food joint. Their young lives, like most, are full of shame and suckitude. But what Tomine really nails is how subterranean and baffling their own feelings are. By the time the story ends, I feel so unsettled and confused that I just don't know what to do. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how I felt in high school, too.

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20 comics that can change your LIFE -NR.5

Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis
This comic about gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem in futuristic America manages to achieve exactly what all great political journalism does: shame you into paying attention and giving a damn. I started reading this in 2003, right around the time I was starting to wonder why I'd voted at all in 2000 and 2002. Spider's column "I Hate It Here" — full of sermons to the people of the City, calling them out for their indecision and ignorance — made me itch with embarrassment. Ellis' city and Darick Robertson's images of just what the Information Age would evolve into didn't feel like the future; it felt sickeningly like right now

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20 comics that can change your LIFE -NR.4

Hate by Peter Bagge
I loved Peter Bagge's Hate when it first came out. I think I was attracted to Buddy, the slacker loser hero — attracted as in, I wanted to date him. I dimly recall some image of Buddy having sex with his girlfriend and leaving his socks on, and perhaps not even being all that enthusiastic about it in the first place. The ways in which the comic was gross (clothes riding up; hair in weird places; sweat) seemed scary in a not entirely unpleasant way. I later did date men like Buddy. It was just like I'd been led to expect by Peter Bagge, except with duller dialogue. At least the sex was better.

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20 comics that can change your LIFE -NR.7

Diary of a Teenage Girl comics by Phoebe Gloeckner
When fictional teenage girls have sex, it's usually because they're trying to manipulate someone, or are desperate for love and validation. When actual teenage girls have sex, it's usually more complicated. For Minnie, the narrator of Diary of a Teenage Girl, sex is not a means to an end; it's an important aspect of her life, as is the pleasure, power and fear that accompany it. Gloeckner's book, based on her own adolescent writing, inverts all expectations of a teenage diary: instead of angsty poetry, initialed crushes and doodles of hearts, we get frank prose, graphic sex scenes and graphic-novel versions of Minnie's memories. Gloeckner's technical skill as an artist is unsurpassed (she has a background in medical illustration), but her unflinching illustrations of Minnie's most private, awkward moments are more than skillful; they're storytelling at its bravest. Read the Nerve interview with Phoebe Gloeckner

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20 comics that can change your LIFE -NR.6

Heavy Liquid/100% by Paul Pope
Paul Pope's art is unlike anything else in "comics". It feels like you've been awake until dawn, like dancing, like kissing someone before you know their name. Liquid is about a young man addicted to a dark substance that circulates the black market; it came from a meteor and gives the user a trip greater than any drug made by man. But the story is less about the intrigues of criminals and users as it is about lost love and addiction. 100% is less frenetic than Heavy Liquid, but it explores the same themes in a more direct fashion, through six characters finding love and making art. Pope's art brings future New York to life in hallucinatory washed-out strokes, but it seems so real that you can almost smell the rot coming out of the sidewalk grates. When I go up on my roof some nights, I can see Pope's city growing and his characters being born

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20 comics that can change your LIFE -NR.8

Persepolis comics by Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi's coming-of-age memoir, about growing up through the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, got much attention in the mainstream media's traditional "Comics can be serious art!" fashion. It deserved the hype. As the child Marjane discovers punk rock and grows increasingly skeptical of the Islamist regime, the adult's sharp and tender re-creation of her precocious youth brings a vivid humanity to a piece of recent history many readers might think of as another world. Originally written in French, the book has since been translated into twelve languages, a fine measure of its universality. An animated film, directed by Satrapi, comes out this year

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20 comics that can change your LIFE -NR.10

Blue Monday by Chynna Clugston
When I was younger, my closest friends were women. We had a lot of fun for the better part of a year (which, when you're seventeen, feels far more like a decade), and even when sex inevitably intervened, it was healthy and comfortable. Just not for very long. Awkwardness and hurt feelings ultimately destroyed what we shared. I did very well at forgetting the troubles of home until I started reading Chynna Clugston's Blue Monday. The trials and travails of Bleu Finnegan, the book's teenage heroine, and her friends Clover, Victor, and Alan read like stories you traded with friends on Monday morning your sophomore year of high school. I've kept reading over the past six years, finding myself repeatedly charmed and pained by Clugston's forgiving romances, and every time the series stops again, I find myself wanting to pick up the phone and call one of my old friends. I don't, though. I've never figured out what to say

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20 comics that can change your LIFE -NR.11

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
First my mom made my dad read Fun Home. Then my dad made me read it. I made my girlfriend read it, and she made her mom read it, who made her dad and other daughter read it. Now I'm making you read this comic book.

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20 comics that can change your LIFE -NR.12

Fortune and Glory by Brian Michael Bendis
We've all had fantasies about fame. My personal delusions of grandeur were effectively extinguished by Brian Michael Bendis' memoir. Bendis started out writing and illustrating gritty noir comics; eventually, one of his works got optioned by a Hollywood studio. Glory follows his perilous journey through Hollywood, with its constant train of bullshit: the agents, the studio execs, the endless series of pointless meetings with pointless people in suits. It reads like a conversation between old friends, but also manages to make you squeamish, and it was so plainly earnest and funny that I walked away feeling more idealistic about art and love than I was before reading it

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20 comics that can change your LIFE -NR.13

Kabuki comic by David Mack

David Mack's series about a masked government assassin began as a black-and-white homage to Japanese storytelling. However, as the story's focus shifted to the heroine's interior life, the art began to take on a life of its own. Now every labor-intensive issue of Kabuki is a combination of painting, drawings, photographs and ephemera, all collaged in Mack's distinctive style. And the series has metamorphosed along with the art; it's no longer about government espionage, but about the blurred lines between fantasy and reality, and the struggle to find one's identity in a world full of masks. If you've ever looked back at your life and felt like you've been a dozen different people, you're bound to relate.

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20 comics that can change your LIFE - NR.14

Love and Rockets COMICS by Los Bros Hernandez
This soap-operatic Fantagraphics series was the darkest, most passionate of alternative comics. It ushered in a whole new kind of sex symbol, a busty-but-not-like-Wonder-Woman girl mechanic-turned-apartment manager with mixed romantic luck. L&R has been said to embody Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism, and I think that's fair. But the comics were also just so mysteriously, dangerously sexy that they always seemed like they should come in a brown wrapper

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20 comics that can change your LIFE - NR.15

Sandman by Neil Gaiman

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20 comics that can change your LIFE - NR.16

Miracleman by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, et al.
How does Miracleman end? It is a question that has haunted me for years, ever since I finished the final existing issue of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman's epic collaboration. It's the story of three real-life superheroes, each genetically enhanced by the government during WWII drug experiments. When one uses his powers to single-handedly destroy the world, the other two use theirs to rebuild it into a utopia, with themselves as rulers. The later, Gaiman-penned issues of Miracleman focus on individual lives inside this objectively perfect society. There are seeds of unrest, but only seeds — yet one has the impression that something is about to go horribly wrong. For a perfectionist, this is torture: given a glimpse at the perfect world we all struggle to achieve, knowing something is not quite right and then — what? What? How does it end? I'll probably never know (the Miracleman character has been tied up in a lawsuit for years), but I still love the series — maybe even more so for its non-ending, with all of the tantalizing possibilities frozen in time.

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20 comics that can change your LIFE - NR.17

Zippy the Pinhead COMICS by Bill Griffith
Who needs drugs as long as there are Zippy the Pinhead anthologies? The hero of Bill Griffith's long-running Mad-Libs-esque strip ambles through American wastelands spouting pop-culture saturated non-sequiturs like "Thank God miniature golf survives unscathed!" Baffled but game, he winds up in odd sexual situations that he greets with good humor and surreally appropriate remarks such as, "My pants just went to high school in the Carlsbad Caverns!" We could all approach dating with a little more of Zippy's delirious enthusiasm.

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20 comics that can change your LIFE - NR.18

Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai

My Japanophilia wasn't born of anime or video games. It started with this comic, a strange meeting of Charles Schultz and Akira Kurosawa that's as much a portrait of early-seventeenth-century Japan as it is high fantasy. Despite the fact that every character in Usagi Yojimbo is an anthropomorphic, Stan Sakai (who's been writing and drawing every issue himself since 1984) does an exhaustive amount of research to guarantee that every single corner of his Japan is an accurate historical representation. When Miyamoto Usagi, Sakai's ronin protagonist, stares across an open valley in the dead of winter, Sakai's penciling transports you to an austere and pure moment of storytelling. It isn't escapism. It's time travel

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20 comics that can change your LIFE - NR.19

"Fantastic Four Issues #1-#102 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby"
Back in the mid '60s, The Fantastic Four was a monthly guarantee that you could pay ten cents for twenty-some-odd pages and witness the most batshit insane spectacles imaginable. Outside of religious text and Greek epics, Four was the only place where you could see a building-sized, purple-crowned man descending from the sky and threatening to eat the planet, and where the only people who could stop him were invisible or on fire. It was unbridled imagination. Whenever I stop and consider anything that's ever entertained our generation, I can see Lee and Kirby's touch all over it.

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20 comics that can change your LIFE - NR.20

Planetary by Warren Ellis

Put simply, Planetary is about the weight of our collective history and humanity realizing its potential. And it's about "comics". Elijah Snow, like a select number of other unique individuals in Warren Ellis' world of Planetary, was born at midnight on January 1st, 1900. In 1999, he is part of a group that scours the world, documenting the strange and preserving it, an archaeologist of the twentieth century itself. There's a great deal more to say about the book itself, but it's one of the very few on this list that giving away even a hint would ruin the joy of reading it.

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