• Murphy Anderson’s inks on Curt Swan’s pencil art in ’60s and ’70s Superman comics; their feathery details softened the stiff edges of Swan’s drawing and brought out its genial power
• Eddie Campbell’s sweet-and-bitter After the Snooter, in which Campbell’s long-running, quasi-autobiographical Alec series becomes fully autobiographical (he stops changing his name on the page, basically).
• The ’60s-era “Atomic Knights” stories in Strange Adventures, a post-apocalyptic scenario in which a team wearing ancient plate-mail, which turns out to be radiation-proof, sets about rebuilding the world after a 1984 atomic war.
• “Glx sptzl glaah” — the transliterated baby talk spoken by the pre-verbal kids in Sheldon Mayer’s charming Sugar & Spike series.
• The tour-de-force opening scene of the first issue of William Messner-Loebs’s Journey: a 19th-century backwoodsman being chased by a bear through the Michigan wilderness for 14 riveting pages.
• Scott McCloud’s DESTROY!!, an oversize 1985 one-shot in which he tried to get all the old-school superhero violence out of his system in the course of one story — about two long-underwear types smashing Manhattan in the course of a fight. Final line, spoken by the kindly police commissioner amid the rubble of the World Trade Center (!!): “Well, at least no one was hurt!”
• Marc Hempel’s first Gregory book, a set of short stories about a hopelessly insane, nonverbal, institutionalized little boy whose only friend in his padded cell is a rat who keeps getting killed; it is played for laughs and is actually kind of adorable.
• Larry Marder’s Tales of the Beanworld, a sui generis series about talking beans inspired by Native American mythology and Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass.
• The cubist-inspired cartooning technique Mary Fleener used for her autobiographical comics in Slutburger.
• “Hypertime,” the actually-it’s-all-true plot device along the lines of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” invented to explain all inconsistencies within DC Comics (variously attributed to Grant Morrison and Mark Wall).
• The old tradition of the “splash page” — an oversize panel on the first page of a genre-comics story that was a literal or symbolic representation of a conflict or dramatic moment that would happen later in the story; the narrative proper could begin with a quiet moment, since the reader knew that something exciting would be happening eventually.
• The conclusion of the final issue of Legion of Super-Heroes before its mid-’90s relaunch, in which, basically, the universe ends — and then the final four pages of the comic are totally blank. (Premonitions of the Sopranos finale?)
• R. Sikoryak’s hilariously on-the-mark adaptations of classic literature into the forms of specific comics: The Scarlet Letter as a Little Lulu story (“Hester’s Little Pearl”), Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as a series of Peanuts daily strips (“Good Ol’ Gregor Brown”), the entirety of Dante’s Inferno condensed into a page’s worth of Bazooka Joe strips.
• Kalo, the forgotten New Yorker cartoonist in Seth’s It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, many of whose readers thought Kalo must have actually existed.
• Not so much the Hostess pastry ads that ran in ’70s superhero comics, but the joke of throwing pastries at villains to distract them that has persisted ever after.
