Preferably in tandem with a comic-book-club, at least the first several…
1. Cerebus #1-300, plus the collected letters and Following Cerebus Magazine
2. Sandman #1-75, The Dreaming #1-60(?), Various mini-series, Lucifer #1-75(?), Books of Magic #1-75, and more… this could really be a list unto itself…
3. Akira
4. 100 Bullets #1-100
5. Promethea #1-32 (Awfully short but very dense… And probably with From Hell, Tom Strong, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the Supreme trades, and several reference texts nearby)
6. Swamp Thing #1-171
7. Animal Man #1-70 or so
8. Hellblazer #1-300 (not there yet…)
9. Strangers in Paradise
10. Eddie Cambell’s Bacchus
11. Y the Last Man (I know I’m going to hate how it ends)
12. Preacher (to wash the bad taste away) and Outlaw Nation (Jamie Delano’s under-appreciated companion piece)
13. Love and Rockets
14. Stray Bullets
15. Bone is not on this list because I’ve read it through three times and I think that’s enough
16. Shade the Changing Man
17. The whole Milestone Media run: Static, Hardware, Blood Syndicate, Icon, Shadow Cabinet, Xombi, and the one about the white guy maybe except I don’t think that one is worth buying to read.
18. The Modern Batman cycle: Year One, The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, Year Two, Cult, Killing Joke, Death in the Family, Arkham Asylum, Venom, Knightfall/Quest/End, Cataclysm, Contagion, Legacy, No Man’s Land, Bruce Wayne: Fugitive, Officer Down, New Gotham, Joker’s Last Laugh, Wargames, and the post-One Year Later-stuff. Like Sandman, this deserves to be a list of its own. My chronology is probably off too.
19. The Hal Jordan cycle from the first Green Lantern Corps stories when John Stewart took over, up through Blackest Night
20. Earth X, Universe X, Paradise X (one more time… with patience…)
21. The whole Marvel Ultimate universe run? Maybe?
22. Elfquest (Core series and some spin offs)
23. Savage Dragon
