What can you say about Batman Year One that hasn’t already been said ten thousand times by two thousand people? Frank Miller gets pinned with the whole “dark and gritty” thing, but this is the kind of book Batman always should have been. No Robin. No ridiculous arch-villains. Just a slightly crazy dude in a bat suit, and a mostly honest cop, who take on a city packed to the gills with corruption, graft, and bad cops. In Batman #404, the story begins, masterfully following the arc of a young Bruce Wayne and Jim Gordon embarking on their two separate careers. Frank Miller not only tells a great crime/adventure story, but a human one, painting an extraordinarily well-conceived portrait these two men and the things that motivate them to stand alone against so many.

While David Mazzucchelli seems to have left comics forever, this is the story that stands as one of the most perfect unions of writer and artist ever in comics. For someone with such a small body of comics work, Mazzucchelli seems born to draw comics, effortlessly playing with time, rhythm, lighting, and the many visual tools of the cartoonist to somehow make these characters seem larger than life, and at the same time somehow frail, fallible, and mortal. For me this will always stand as the greatest comic ever–while Frank Miller swings and misses sometime, when he hits it’s always out of the ballpark. All the others–Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, etc.–sit at the kids’ table whenever Batman Year One comes to dinner.