Summer has arrived, leading The A.V. Club’s readership to emerge, blinking, into the sunlight and hit the beach, only to place one tender, uncallused foot into the blazing hot sand, decide it’s not worth it, and head to the concession stand. Regardless, there are still a couple of hours left on the meter, leaving plenty of time to order one of those chocolate malt cup things and get started on that summer reading list.
Enter Comics Juice, a website devoted to the greater glory of the graphic novel that recently released the ultimate summer reading list for comics fans: its picks for “1000 Great Graphic Novels.” Not the greatest graphic novels of all time, mind you; Allen Rubinstein, the author of the list, freely admits he’s only read about 800 of them, and calls his project “a proposed list covering the broad sweep of the graphic novel medium” rather than a definitive ranking. However, the undisputed greats of the genre, from Maus to Watchmen, are all represented, along with an eclectic mix of titles that leans more Daniel Clowes than DC. The graphic novels mentioned are divided into two basic groups—fiction and non-fiction—with subcategories ranging from “Superheroes” to “History.” The entire list can be accessed on the Comics Juice website, but Rubinstein has also produced a YouTube video where covers of all 1000 graphic novels blaze by at blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speed, set (appropriately enough for our hypothetical heliophobic reader) to the Surfaris classic “Wipeout.”