Krazy Kat

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our years on the Internet, it’s that there’s no aspect of comics that can’t be broken down and quantified in a single definitive list, preferably in amounts of five or ten. And since there’s no more definitive authority than ComicsAlliance, we’re taking it upon ourselves to compile Top Five lists of everything you could ever want to know about comics. In the 100-plus years that comic strips have served to brighten up newspapers, there have been various different genres to populate the pages of the comics section: adventure, soap opera, puzzles, Ripley's Believe It or Not, and so on. But there's a reason that section gets called the funny pages. No genre has dominated newspaper comics quite like the gag-a-day humor format. This video counts down five of the funniest, cleverest, and best drawn humor comics in newspaper history.

The premise is always the same: Cat loves mouse. Mouse hits cat with brick. Dog takes mouse to prison. While not literally every installment of George Herriman's Krazy Kat follows this exact premise, this is the framework around which the strip was built. One might think that such a simple formula would grow tiresome quickly, but Herriman — like a master of that other uniquely American art form, jazz — could take that simple framework and improvise around it, shifting characters and landscapes into something new and beautiful every day for over thirty years.

I've been black since the day I was born, reading comics since before I could properly read, writing about comics since 2005, writing about the intersection of race and comics since 2006, and purposefully writing about the intersection of race and comics since 2007...

Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week. KEY: * You wait months, and then two show up at once ^ Seas of eyes % Retrospectacle * % ALAN MOORE: STORYTELLER Gary Spencer Millidge has made something of a career of being an Alan Moore expert--he co-edited the Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman anthology a couple of years ago... Read Mo