Tony Isabella - 1,000 Comic Books You Must Read

Foreword by Tony Isabella

Did you hear the one about the beloved comics writer/columnist who, when asked to write a book called 1000 Comic Books You Must Read, immediately responded: Just a thousand?

I have loved comic books since I learned to read from them at the age of 4 in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio coincidentally, also the hometown of Superman. My mother bought me bargain-priced packages of funny-animal and Western comics from F.W. Woolworth's. When I could buy my own comic books, I bought Superman and Batman and Casper the Friendly Ghost. And I loved them all.

I still love all kinds of comic books. Super-hero comics have always been my favorites, as they have been for many of my fellow comics fans, but I'm also a fan of adventure comics, autobiography, biography, comic kids, crime and detectives, funny animals, glamour girls, graphic novels, historical adventure, horror and monsters, indy and alternative comics, Japanese manga, movie and TV adaptations, parody, political and religious comics, romance, science fiction and fantasy, spies, teen humor, underground comix, war, Westerns, and every other genre or subject you can name.

This book is my journey through seven decades of comic books.

Today, in the true Golden Age of Comics, readers can enjoy both the new groundbreaking material now being published and, thanks to affordable reprints, the classics of the past. There are comics exploring the limits of imagination, as well as the triumphs and the tragedies of our everyday lives. There are comics created by men and women from all over the country, from Europe, from Japan, and more. There are comics for every reader and every taste.

And I love them all.

Decade by decade, this book will introduce you to some of the best comic books ever published and the amazing writers and artists who created them. I won't include every milestone or even the best of the best. I'll most likely omit some of your favorites due to that pesky limit inherent in our title. I will cheat our title at every opportunity, often counting collections, runs of issues, and story arcs as if they were merely single issues. But, by the time you reach the afterword, you will have an impressive list of comic books you must, or, at the very least, should read.

We pause for a brief informational note:

Many of the comic books included in the thousand featured here were anthology titles containing more than one story and often with different creative teams for each story. Due to space limitations, I generally focus on just one story in any given issue. Those same limitations are why I also list just one or two writers or artists per issue, even though many more individuals contributed to these issues. And what great issues they are