Every time I wonder, “Will this be the Mailbag Q&A that I don’t roll incredibly deep on?” And every time, I find that the answer is, “No, absolutely not.” This is a beefy one, folks, as you all delivered the questions and I had to bring the answers to the degree they deserved.

So, let’s get to it.

You’ve written about diving deeper into the chaotic world of manga in the past two years, so what would you say are your top 10 favorites? I read some manga about 15 years ago and I’m trying to find titles I would enjoy now. On your recommendation I picked up Hirayasumi and really enjoyed it. I’ve also liked the more serious tone of Monster and Gou Tanabe’s manga adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft. – Tjas Debeljak

This is a good question, but I’m not sure if I’m well-read enough in manga to actually share a top 10. I’ve read way more than 10 different and distinct manga titles, but a top six feels much more reflective of my depth of reading. A top 10 might mostly be a list of Naoki Urasawa titles, which would be accurate but not as fun. So, here are my picks — albeit with the rule that I can only pick two Urasawa titles, so apologies to Master Keaton and Monster in particular — some of which will be extremely obvious to you as someone who has been reading the site for a while:

1. 20th Century Boys: This isn’t just my favorite manga. Naoki Urasawa’s series about childhood friends and the potential end of the world is tied for the top spot of my favorite comics period power rankings. Big fan.
2. Hirayasumi: In the end, could it surpass 20th Century Boys? I’m not sure. But it’s going to try!
3. Pluto: Another Naoki Urasawa joint, this take on Astro Boy is an incredible murder mystery and another fierce showcase of the mangaka’s talents.
4. Tokyo These Days: Taiyō Matsumoto just won an Eisner Award for this, and for good reason. This story about a manga editor who quits his job and decides to make his own manga magazine filled with personal works by the best mangaka is a heartfelt, insightful journey, and one that feels that much more important to me in my new era.
5. Witch Hat Atelier: I love this series in all the ways I can, but the #1 reason it makes this list is because Kamome Shirahama may actually be the greatest comic artist the world has ever seen.
6. Cats of the Louvre: Another Taiyō Matsumoto release, reading this was entirely thanks to writer Kelly Sue DeConnick picking this comic as a favorite in a Men’s Health article (??). For anyone who knows me, it’d be obvious that a book set in France that stars cats would hit with me, and this sure did.

I think the Would buy, but I’m a dirty, rotten trade waiter section of The Pull seems to be growing – is it really dirty and rotten to trade wait? (Where do trades even land on the sacred Immediacy Index!?) I can usually sleep soundly at night telling myself that buying the book matters more than the format, but the Nights team opening a Patreon for support continuing the series has me teetering on a Crisis(, DC Comics) about how I’m supporting the books I love (…while hopefully prioritizing reading them, too!). Would love to know what you think and how you decide to trade wait. – Chris Whamond

The truth is, Chris, that I’ve never felt that I am actually “dirty” or “rotten” to trade wait. That title is all about me pretending to care about how trade waiting has been perceived over the years, at least to some degree. But yeah, I’ve noticed it’s been growing as well, which tends to happen during times where I’m reading more period. The more I read, the more that needs to shift to trades for budgetary reasons — especially now. Also, I’ve oddly found that it spikes during the summer? I’m not sure there’s a correlation there, but it’s something I’ve noticed.

Quick aside: Trades typically reside on the Tier 3 or Tier 4 side of the Immediacy Index, but it often depends on the book. If I’m so desperate to read something, I’ll buy it in single issues, thus why trades largely do not exist in the first two tiers.

The real question here is your conclusion. How do I decide what to trade wait on? There are actually a lot of factors that play a part in there. For example, “Is this title a miniseries?” is a crucial part of my trade waiting arithmetic. If it is, it’s much more likely for me to trade wait a series, because I don’t have to wait as long for the trade — in theory — and it will be a complete story when I buy the trade. Other factors are the urgency I feel to read it (do I need to read it now?), the type of story it is, how the series will benefit from single issue sales (a new creator-owned project will likely get priority over another Batman comic, as just one example), and just how good it looks. It’s rare that I will trade wait a series I am unreservedly excited about.

One last factor I’ll mention is precedent. Have I historically read this creator or series in trades? A good example of that is cartoonist John Allison’s work. The only series of his I’ve read in single issues was Wicked Things, and that’s because it was a Lottie Grote joint. Everything is trades, and likely will be going forward for consistency reasons. I even have a “John Allison trades all” on my pull list, which likely perplexes the person who orders for my shop on occasion. He’s one of the few creators I’ve ever set up an “all” — meaning I get everything they do — for in my pull list, with Allison joining Mike Mignola’s Mignolaverse and…actually, it might just be them.

There are other intangibles in there, I’m sure. But in terms of top of mind factors, those are the biggest. And I’ve been giving my pull list a lot more thought in my new era as someone who makes a lot less money than I did before. I have to be a bit more thoughtful about my decisions. We’ll see what kind of factor that is on my decisions going forward, but I think it will play a part.

With incredible talents like Ian Bertram, Bilquis Evely, Nicoletta Baldari, and Jake Smith emerging onto the scene, is there a path to superstardom for an artist the way we saw in the 1990’s with the Image gang? The closest I think we get is DWJ these days (evidenced by the fact you know who I’m talking about just by me typing his initials) but even he is a LONG way from being the industry mover that we have had in past eras. Will we ever see the rise of the artist in comics again? Or has the Big Two forever squashed that from happening? – David Hedgecock

There are several questions in here, so let’s take them one by one.

Is there a path to stardom like the 1990s? No, or at least not one like the one we saw during that stretch. That’s not to say artists cannot become a star. It’s just that the 1990s are an impossible comparison point. It’s simply not replicable for artists. As retailer Brian Hibbs said in a piece I wrote for The Ringer for the 25th anniversary of Image Comics, founding creators like Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, and Todd McFarlane “were more popular than the characters themselves” at the time. I know it’s an easy and unfair note to make, but Liefeld was so popular he starred in a Levi’s ad. We’re not seeing that again.

Some of that was positioning. Artists were so enormously popular that they defined the comics and the medium at the time. And because they were so popular, publishers used them as fronts for the books. And when Image happened, the Big Two seemed to learn the lesson of, “Maybe we shouldn’t do that again.” Now, artists are treated as fungible, interchangeable talent, rotating through projects at a rate that’s hard to keep up with. They’re tourists, swinging from stint to stint. It’s almost the opposite of where things were 30-ish years ago. That isn’t every era for every publisher, of course. DC in the Marie Javins Era has been brilliant about handling artists. But it seems to be a real change. So, to answer the last question second, the Big Two has tried to squash it, to some degree.

Part of that, though, is the nature of the medium and business now, and what happened in the 1990s. Some Image comics just kind of stopped coming out. And publishers can’t have that. They have to keep the trains on track, so they do it by rotating artists, and they have more artists to choose from now that effectively any artist on the planet is available for work in a way that wasn’t possible when you had to mail pages. More than that, artists are asked to do more now, both in terms of the expectations of the work and the actual job itself. Everyone had inkers back then. These days, everyone inks themselves, both for the results and the superior paycheck. So, it’s just not possible to draw as much because you have to do two jobs during the same timeframe. It’s partially by design, I think, and partially just how the medium has shifted.

Let’s move on to the last question: Will we ever see the rise of the artist in comics again? I don’t think the artist has ever fully went away as a “star,” even if artists aren’t in the stratosphere they once were. And I actually think that artists are in a great position right now, at least on the high end, and that’s thanks to the original art market exploding to the degree it has. In the 1990s, Jim Lee and Scott Williams were selling pages for hundreds of dollars, which was a lot for the time. Now, relatively ordinary pages by notable but not buzzy artists go for hundreds of dollars as a floor, with particularly spectacular pages and covers going for four figures.

You may not perceive them as such, but folks like DWJ, Tradd Moore, and James Harren probably do well enough for themselves in original art that they barely need to even draw new pages on an annual basis. That’s the high end, but the heat surrounding these artists from an original art standpoint has resulted in a functionally similar position for the top tier as it was in the 1990s, even if it doesn’t seem like it from an optics standpoint.

The big difference is there’s probably a wider gap now than there was then. Many artists were thriving in the 1990s, and I’m not sure that’s true now, especially because there are so many more comic artists that are readily available to work. But the original art side of the world has changed the game, I believe, and at least some of the credit has to go to art reps like Felix Comic Art and Essential Sequential and beyond who helped ensure that the market has become as robust as it has.

So, long story short, no, the perception of artists will likely not return to where it was. But the ceiling is still there from an earnings standpoint. The visibility is not likely ever to return to 1990s levels, though, even if we’d all like it to.

One last note: I think publishers deprioritizing artists is a huge mistake. Art defines comics, and the ideal result for the medium and business is something that maximizes schedule and craft simultaneously. Making more comics on a consistent basis is a good idea in theory. But if it results in inconsistent art schedules and mixed quality of work, then you’re diminishing the art form in a real way. Art is what brings the wow in comics, and we could all use more wow.