Books I’ve read

Zot! is a collection of Scott McCloud’s whimsical series (from the days before he wrote Understanding Comics) about the relationship between a restless young teenager of our world and Zot, a plucky super-hero in a high-tech Silver Age-style universe where good triumphs and the days are always sunny (as he puts it in one story, it’s not that they don’t have bigots and hatemongers, they just don’t let them run things). This later shifted into a multi-part story focusing on the ordinary characters in Zot and Jenny’s orbit. Quite charming, and well done.
A Contract With God is Will Eisner’s (The Spirit) collection of various episodes in and around a small tenement, which he described to his publisher as a “graphic novel” (thereby creating the phrase, though comics historians debate whether it was the first graphic novel). This is something of a mixed bag (one story involving a scheming 12 year old girl I utterly loathed), and I liked the follow-up graphics, better: A Life Force, in which Dropsie Avenue tenants struggle with the Depression, organized crime and life, and Dropsie Avenue, which tracks the setting from the days when the Dutch complained about the English moving in to white and black neighbors grumbling about the new homeowners from the Third World.
The Batman Chronicles is a series reprinting all of the Caped Crusader’s adventures from the first. This particular volume included battles with the Joker and Hugo Strange, a run-in with the Catwoman, several mysteries and a few straight melodramas (basically movie plots with Batman and Robin resolving things—though don’t get me wrong, this works).