Madman Comics Yearbook '95 by Mike Allred

Picture the scene, okay? I'm 11-years-old, I've been taken on a trip from my little home town up to Glasgow on the train. Go and buy them they've got loads of Grimlock in them. Titan has just released a series of digest-sized reprints of the whole lot. The Earthforce stories, a series of black-and-white five-pagers, veered between multi-part action stories and one-off character pieces, and they're the Transformers equivalent of a box of Celebrations - little bite-size pieces of robot goodness. What it is, though, is a dramatic (and often melodramatic) war story, with giant robot battles, religious overtones, an epic scope and the possibility that your favourite character could bite the dust at any time. A licensed comic about giant robot toys isn't the first thing you'd think of when coming up with a list of great literary works in the medium, and that's because it's not that at all. Yeah, a few other folks who've done their Top Nine choices have named the UK TRANSFORMERS comic as being pivotal to their comics-reading habits, but that's just because it really was that good.

Now he gives us the rundown on the nine comics that he loves the most. He's also the co-author of Alphabetti Fumetti and a regular contributor to the Forecast, and he currently administrates the sporadically updated pop culture blog PunchDrunk Pop. (The conclusion was negative, though Kennedy claims he nonetheless regards 'The Man' as the greatest living American.) Since then he's written articles on what kids want from comics, comic creators who want to be rock stars, and the phenomenon of convention fancy dress. Alistair Kennedy got his start writing for Ninth Art in 2001 with a reappraisal of Stan Lee's writing skills.

Madman Comics Yearbook '95 by Mike Allred