Alex de Campi has been one of the outspoken voices on Ninth Art's Forecast for over two years, as well as a columnist for the site, writing pieces on such subjects as the Bristol and Angoulême comic festivals and a round table dissection of the industry with Tristan Crane, Lea Hernandez and Laurenn McCubbin.

Alex has also recently been making a name for herself as a comic book writer. Her works include the self-published DEFECTIVE COMICS and the critically acclaimed SMOKE from IDW, for which she was last week nominated for an Eisner award. Her forthcoming books include MESSIAH COMPLEX, AGENT BOO and KAT & MOUSE. You can read more about her and her work at her website, www.alexdecampi.com.

Seven pm on a Sunday night and I've just made coffee. Night shift ends tomorrow, but until then, I am in this half-existence of twilight awakenings and dawn sleepings. And an editor has just put a gun to my head and told me to write about my top nine comics of all time. What top nine, I ask. The ones whose art I worship as if divine? The stories that I wish I had written? The books that got me into comics? My editor shrugs. "Your problem. Get writing."

Here we go, then. Black coffee, light a cigarette, whack The Evens' album on repeat. Stare at my bookcase. Grin at the old friends nestled there. If you hate my writing, you have only these books to blame for encouraging me. In no particular order:

LONE WOLF & CUB
Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

The first manga I read. I've always been one of those girls who loves Westerns and war films and Sam Peckinpah and stories of men doing manly and heroic things. And there is no greater tortured hero than rogue samurai executioner Ogami Itto, carting his little son around feudal Japan.

Koike is one of the greatest comic writers in any language, blessed with the ability to twist subtle and beautiful Buddhist meditations on the nature of life out of what is, fundamentally, Samurai Death Carnage. I think my favourite story is "Full mat, half mat, bowl of rice" in book three.

Matching Koike's writing is Kojima's masterly cinematic art, even if criminally reduced in the Dark Horse editions. I'm desperate to find a second hand copy of one of the early collected editions, as they weren't printed in the eyestrain-inducing, doll-sized bunkubon format Dark Horse insists on printing them now.

TANK GIRL: THE ODYSSEY
Jamie Hewlett and Peter Milligan

There were always crumpled copies of TANK GIRL lying around the floor of my and my friends' university dorm-rooms, amongst the empty beer cans, torn-up Rizla packets and mysterious articles of clothing that everyone refused to claim. So when I got back into comics, around 2001, and I saw this trade and I immediately snapped it up. After all, Hewlett! Milligan! Tank Girl! Mashing up Homer!

I took it home and pulled a bottle of vodka out of the freezer. Fast forward two hours, I've laughed so hard I think I've cracked a rib, and half the vodka has evaporated. I felt so rough the next day I had to stay home from work. Them's good comics.

And good Homer - If I had friends at university reading THE ODYSSEY, I'd recommend this book as Cliffs Notes.

PANORAMA DE L'ENFER
Hideshi Hino

Hideshi Hino is the granddaddy of Japanese horror. Unsurprisingly, he's a Hiroshima survivor, and the devastation he witnessed...well, his nightmares are on a whole different level from yours or mine. Panorama is a sometimes clumsy 200-page gross-fest, but about two-thirds of the way through it, it has the single most horrifying idea I've ever come across.

I was loafing in Aleister Crowley's chair in the Atlantis Bookshop (London's occult bookshop) and chatting to its owner - whose mother never let her read comics because they were 'A Bad Influence'. To repeat, the family that owns the UK's oldest and best occult shop, and were mates with Crowley, banned their children from reading comics for fear of the effect it would have on their morals. I described Hino to her, and the idea that had chilled me. She was so freaked out that she sat down, and we both just sat there for about five minutes in silence, then shuddered, went "ew", and started talking about voodoo.

FLAMING CARROT'S GREATEST HITS
Bob Burden

Another teen favourite of mine, and responsible for keeping my interest in the medium alive between my realisation that the X-Men stories were kind of puerile and repeated themselves about every 30 issues, and my discovery of Vertigo books back when they used to be edgy.

Yeah, spare-changing to get into punk gigs, ripping up and painting clothes bought in vintage shops, and hanging out in parking lots wearing Doc Martens and reading FLAMING CARROT. Ah, the clichés of fifteen. Bob Burden's madly absurdist tales of a guy with a carrot for a face, a zippo-flame for hair, and duck feet, saving suburbia from flying dead dogs, bikini teens and The Red Donut, and still getting home in time for the blue-plate special, both reflected the boring meaninglessness of American suburban existence in the 1980s as well as the desperate weirdness that lurked under its surface.

AMPHIGOREY
Edward Gorey

Okay, not exactly a comic book. But indulge me. My love for Edward Gorey is another one of the reasons I struggle along in this crazy stepchild medium. I've had AMPHIGOREY forever. Gorey is sick and funny and even though his little scratchy drawings are responsible for generations of mediocre Sisters of Mercy-addicted followers, whose designs are found on a good 80% of the girls' handbags at any given Goth club night. (Die, Emily Strange, die!) That's no reason to disrespect Gorey, who is greater than them all put together. His naïve yet knowing tales, such as The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an A-Z of children and their horrible deaths ("E is for Ernest, who choked on a peach / F is for Fanny, sucked dry by a leech"), the DoubtfulGuest, the Bug Book... ah, it's like Dr Seuss, but with killing.

MONSTER
Naoki Urasawa

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you write a thriller. Take,read, study. Naoki Urasawa's tale of a neurosurgeon trying to atone for a moment of hubris in his past that caused a serial killer to stay alive canters across more than 15 volumes and doesn't stumble once. The first volume is a bit slow, but then the brakes fail on the freight train and it's downhill and no stop until crash.

Urasawa's skill is in continuing to twist the story to keep it fresh, but without making you feel you've been manipulated, or that he's changing the rules of the game. And even the minor characters, the ones that only show up for an episode, have distinct and compelling personalities and character arcs. A lot of writers get lazy over a long series and they phone it in for a book or two. Naoki Urasawa doesn't, and his skill and sheer work ethic is something I aspire to.

UZUMAKI
Junji Ito

And this is how you write horror. Again, Junji Ito's obsessive art is as much a joy as his writing. This slow, creepy tale of a village gradually taken over by a madness related to spiral shapes has some of the most disturbing and spine shivering moments of any horror book I've read. I like intellectual horror - concepts and ideas that disturb, rather than 'bogeyman jumping out from the dark' horror, or gore. I don't think shock or grindhouse work well in sequential form anyway. An artist is never going to shock and disgust a reader (who has control over how fast they read the book) in the same way they will a viewer (where the artist controls the pacing).

UZUMAKI has that intellectual edge to it, and most importantly feels fresh and new. None of the clichéd standards of Western (or, indeed, Eastern) scary stories, but instead turning the furniture of everyday life, the very terrain of normal existence, into a hatching-place for nightmares.

POP GUN WAR
Farel Dalrymple

I suppose my love of Farel Dalrymple's first series is fairly predictable. Oh, American urban absurdism, pretty art. Sold! Actually, what I really love about POP GUN WAR is its sense of fable, and the idea that at any time in our drab urban existence, something mythical and amazing could happen. A boy with wings could fall out of the sky. And - as per Auden - most people would just turn and hurry away, having somewhere they had to go, having a train to catch. But there would be a couple of folks, probably kids, who would stand there and watch, eyes as big as plates. Who want to believe. Who rescue the wings from the trash and run home. And how can you not love a story with a giant floating goldfish who wears eyeglasses?

SWIMINI PURPOSE
Brendan McCarthy

I was having a blue moment in comics, wondering where all the verve and madness went, when SWIMINI PURPOSE arrived with a thud on my doorstep. OK, being SWIMINI PURPOSE and Brendan McCarthy, it probably didn't go 'thud'. It probably went, 'Mustard!' But I was asleep at the time.

McCarthy is the single most inventive person in comics, and his background in art and his interest in culture high and low puts him on a par with Bryan Talbot in terms of the sheer depth of knowledge that informs his works. Whenever I feel like I'm slipping into mediocrity, I pull out SWIMINI PURPOSE and flip through its images, snippets of writing, and comic excerpts, and it whispers to me, "try bigger, experiment more, fail, fail bigger, do not submit to their expectations..."

This is what comics should be: not paper movies by wannabe screenwriters, but visions that, due to their range and sheer dazzling ambition, could not exist in any other medium.

Alex de Campi is a comics writer whose projects include the Eisner-nominated SMOKE with Igor Kordey and the forthcoming KAT & MOUSE with Federica Manfredi.

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