FOUR-COLOR HEART: Second installment of things I love about comics. 26 through 50. Again, in no order.

26- Edward Gorey. Just get an Amphigorey and dive right in.
27- “With the inevitable forward march of progress come new ways of hiding things, and new things to hide.” A killer line, the best thing in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth.
28- TITLE BOUT. Oh, TITLE BOUT, I miss you! Title Bout on cloning: “If you want to create another human being, they have this thing called F—ING that I hear works too.” Title Bout on leadership: “With Great Power comes nothing ever being good enough.” Title Bout on Archie, rats, punks, and corpse-mishandling… well, just go here and search for “archie.” Complete craziness, bizarre locutions, Ninth Circuit jokes…. Wow. (Warning: filthy words and thoughts.)
29- the movie section: stuff I loved about the “Daredevil” movie: Jon Favreau as Foggy Nelson. Michael Clarke Duncan as Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. The rich colors. The water-walled office (and its role in the plot). The amazingly over-the-top angsty music. The way the movie found the good, basic elements of the Daredevil story. Admittedly, the extended flashback was painful, the plot often made no sense, and the movie itself seemed to have been stupidized somewhere in the process… but still, hmm, Jennifer Garner is much prettier here than in those bus posters for “Alias.”
30- stuff I loved about the “Hulk” movie: Okay, actually the only thing I loved about the “Hulk” movie was the underexploited technical weirdness. The whole “making movies look like comics” thing. That rocked! Too bad the movie was so awful! …I saw it twice.
31- Silent Bob. I think Silent Bob counts in the movie section, given that I think those movies are… based on comics? Or did the comics come later? Anyway, I love the silent mugging. My favorite moment of “Animal House” is the bit where John Belushi breaks a bottle over his head and then does jazz hands.
32- Jim Henley’s list reminded me that I never finished reading Spiders!!! YOU MUST READ THIS. “Distributed warfare” sci-fi, and it looks great.
33- The Pulse. Still petting this comic.
34- “In a way I’ll miss that second head! It was almost like having…a twin sister!”
35- Minisinoo (X-Men fanfiction)
36- in a similar vein, “Nameless“–lovely little piece about the relationship between language and world.
37- Jim Henley on The Filth.
38- PowerPuff Girls comics. Not because I read them myself, but because they are the most popular thing for kids we have at the pregnancy center. We move as many of those as we do of the annoying teen-y “study Bibles.”
39- This post on reading manga.
40- Alias: the necklace of speech balloons; the exploding brick wall of interrogation scenese; the muddied, punchy, beautiful-loser expressions on Jessica Jones’s face.
41- “Some Angels Falling” and “The Prime of Miss Emma Frost” (New X-Men)
42- “Calvin & Hobbes”–Cubist Calvin; the amazing use of blank space and outside-the-frame space in strips like this one; and really just how fun and sweet and perfect this strip was, at its best.
43- from Doom Patrol: the weird, unpredictable, memorable art (I was not so much into the story); also, the very creepy Scissormen. “The door flew open, in he ran, The great, long, red-legged scissorman.” Eeeeeesh.
44- Astro City: Confession. I mean, I’d prefer a comic about sublimation, but in its absence a comic about repression is a useful antidote to the usual “follow your bliss!” nonsense. …I liked the art in The Tarnished Angel better though.
45- the sound effects in Gyo: gashunk! shaaaaaaaa! How can a comic use sound so effectively?
46- the spirals appearing in the schoolgirl’s hair in Uzumaki
47- the ideas behind “Ghost World.” The execution left me oddly cold–most people loved the comic and movie, but I was not enthralled–but the ideas behind it make me suspect I have to recommend this to everyone, because the fault is probably mine. Themes of best-friendship and what it means to have a hometown.
48- I mentioned ElfQuest before, but I think I should say why: This is a quest story where the loss of innocence is real, heartfelt, no cheating. (The death of Nightrunner is the best symbolic representation of this loss. The whole sequence inside Blue Mountain is an incredible representation of what loss of innocence feels like. And the Leetah vs. One-Eye subplot is a heartbreaking account of what loss of innocence looks like.) And yet Book IV ends in joy (“Shade and Sweet Water”) and reconciliation. This is a truly compassionate comic, where every emotion is earned.
49- Everyone has mentioned Watchmen, but very few people have mentioned two of the things I liked best about the comic: the lovely women (especially, the lovely women’s legs) and the dead-on advertisements. Alan Moore on advertising is always worth your time. He’s not condescending; he knows that ads play on the same deep longings that true art plays on.
50- Ultimate Spider-Man. Dude, I can’t stand Spider-Man. I don’t know why. He just seems so… normal. And yet I must acknowledge that USM is funny and sweet and basically, unless you hate Spider-Man as much as I do, you should get this. (Why couldn’t it be about… Scott Summers? Or, I don’t care, Lois Lane? Or anybody?)