People certainly know about this gentleman and it's not like theres a general rumbling of negativity against him.  Regardless, he starts off the list of under appreciated.  I should be hearing this man's name come out of every one's mouth. For one, he lost his dominant drawing arm in World War 2.  Then he trained himself how to write and draw with the remainder.  That's tough enough as it is.  I'm horrified of losing my hand, war or not.  After getting back on the drawing horse though, and finding himself still incredible at it, he became a wholly successful manga artist in horror and military comics.  My favorites are in the Ge Ge No Kitaro series, where I'm consistently impressed with his ability to juxtapose loose, expressive characters with intricately rendered, lovingly hatched, thoroughly real settings.

Gus and His Gang is one of the best comics I've ever read.  Blain's storytelling is amplified by so many things: His posing, his palettes, his writing, the quiet moments, the explosive moments...    Blain uses visual devices to describe emotions, thoughts, paranoia's, in ways Ive never seen.  We watch them dream and imagine possible futures, we see manifestations of love and lust emitting from their bodies as colored steam and sweat, more often than not the plot comes through in facial expressions, without words.   I came away from this book feeling like I was seeing comics at their full potential...you should read it.

I bought Marc Bell's Shrimpy and Paul and Friends a couple years ago and got blown back.  His style of storytelling and drawing seems so direct and spontaneous, like one long jam comic.  The man makes entertaining, engaging comics.  So many things I like about them: the loose nature of the world, the sudden appearance of surreal, outlandish characters, the dramatic about-face's in the plot, the tiny creatures running side plots in the bottom of a panel, the conversational expositional dialogue...Comics that are fun to read.

I don't know a ton about Miguel Calatayuda, but what Ive seen I cant get enough of.  In the 1970s Calatayuda made a phsyadelic comic about Peter Petrake, a dapper spy James Bond kind of guy.  Ive never read them in engilsh and Ive never even seen the comics in print, but the jpegs Ive hoarded have done more than enough to prove how incredible these comics are.  Somewhere between Heinz Edelmann and Pablo Picasso, the Petrake comics are filled with inventive  design, thematic colors, and warped heros and villains.  The whole thing rolls around in pulp and pop with unvarnished abandon like a mongrel in its own glorious waste...too much, too much Josh, its a gorgeous comic though, I love the look of it.

This man, cmon.  He made a whole BUNCH of comics in Hong Kong between the 70s and the 80s.  I read he was published at THIRTEEN.  The above cover, is from the comic Little Rascals.  He even acted in movies adapted from his own comics.  The man could switch up his drawing styles too, a Renaissance man, if you will.  The gore and the mania strike a soft spot in my heart, but its really the all the time action lines that I love the most.