The 100 Pages That Shaped Comics

To assemble our list of 100, we assembled a brain trust of comics professionals, critics, historians, and journalists. Our criteria were as follows: A page had to have either changed the way creators approach making comics, or it had to expertly distill a change that had just begun. In some cases, there were multiple pages that could be used to represent a particular innovation; we’ve noted those instances. We didn’t necessarily pick the 100 best pages — there are many amazing specimens we didn’t include because they didn’t have a significant influence on the craft of comics. These are also not the only 100 pages that have shaped comic books, but each, in its own way, has had a profound impact on the form as we know it. And, this being comics, we had to get a little nitpicky: We’re only dealing with comics first published by North American publishing houses, and we’re not including newspaper comic strips, webcomics, or reprints thereof.

They did a great job compiling this list and there are a lot of pages I remember reading as a teen. While I would have loved to have seen Japanese manga-ka included, they limited the list to North American publishing, and that was probably a good thing. A list of Japanese manga pages deserves a list of their own. I can think of a lot of pages that would be considered influential from Katsuhiro Otomo, Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishinomori, Shigeru Mizuki, Junji Ito, Rumiko Takahashi, Izumi Matsumoto, Inio Asano to name just a few.