I think this is almost the full slate of 1963's best comics, give or take a few tweaks. I'm not sure exactly how I should organize this year-by-year project, especially since I've saddled myself with absurd idea of listing ten works of comic art for every year for 100 years. A strip like Peanuts is often among the best comics of any year it was published in, so in all likelihood I'll have to pick a single year which means maybe the debut year? Kind of hard for strips that have many peaks, or don't peak until years after their debut (like Kirby's Fantastic Four). While I expect certain artists to have multiple appearances over the decades, I'd like to avoid repeating titles or series too many times. This may be harder than I expect.
Anyway, here's a snapshot of 1963. In the world of U.S. children's comic books, there were many all-time great cartoonists working. John Stanley and Carl Barks were at the height of their careers, as were many of the other "Silver Age" artists and writers. Memorable debuts from that year include long-running superhero team features like The Metal Men, Doom Patrol, and The Avengers. Ditko's Amazing Spider-Man title also premiered in 1963 (the character debuted in 1962). In U.S. comic strips, giants like Milt Caniff, Roy Crane, Walt Kelly and others were also going strong. I'm trying to cast a slightly wider net here and luckily some amazing comics were being published around the world to help fill out this list!
1. Akuma-kun by Shigeru Mizuki: Groundbreaking series by the yokai horror mangaka about a little boy who can summon demons. Very similar to Mizuki's long-running Kitaro series, Akuma-kun is full of the same inventive grotesques and monsters.
2. The Castafiore Emerald by Hergé: In many ways the best Tintin album but also the least typical. In place of the usual globe-trotting adventure we get an exquisite farce with all the precision of a stage-play or classic film.
3. Nancy Collages by Joe Brainard. In 1963 poet and artist Brainard began cutting up Ernie Bushmiller's classic Nancy into new assemblages, recombining and detourning the comics into profane, looking-glass versions of themselves. Brainard was one of the first to incorporate comics and appropriation into a large part of his artistic practice. (He also adapted his friends' poetry into comics form in his C Comics magazine, but those will have to wait until 1964.)
4. The Black Smurfs aka The Purple Smurfs by Peyo. This first Smurf album includes the title story that is equal parts zombie tale and Cold War nuclear parable. The problematic colour choice was corrected in later editions.
5. The X-Men by Jack Kirby. One of a slew of properties created and co-created by Kirby during this period, the X-Men is perhaps the most influential of his superhero concepts. Incorporating many aspects of his work from the previous decade, X-Men features inventive superheroics, science fiction themes, and romance in a Camelot-era package.
6. Peanuts by Schulz. What more can I say? That cover is beautiful.
7. Feiffer's Album by Jules Feiffer. An early collection of Feiffer's groundbreaking syndicated Village Voice strip. Feiffer was really without peer in this period and also was creating early graphic novels around the same time.
8. Mort Cinder by Hector German Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia. Breccia's art is the real star of these philosophical, dreamlike tales of an immortal soldier who dies a thousand times and is reincarnated throughout history as a key participant in some of the most tragic battles and apocalyptic events.
9. Big X by Osamu Tezuka. An anti-fascist superhero epic with a premise reminiscent of Kirby's Captain America but full of Tezuka's animated storytelling and humour.
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