MangaDen — discover your next read

Jiggs came into money and would rather be eating corned beef with his old friends; Maggie intends them to be respectable and throws crockery about it. Drawn in a clean deco line that still looks modern beside the strips printed around it.

Painted handscrolls from medieval Japan, read by unrolling with one hand and rolling up with the other. Scene runs into scene with no frame between them, which is a way of handling time that comics spent centuries rediscovering.

A provincial shopkeeper takes his wife and daughters on a day out and they end up circling the globe, still complaining about the food. The first long-running French comic family, drawn by a botanist under a pen name.

A tall schemer and a short optimist, running a small swindle a day and losing on it. It ran daily rather than on Sundays, which almost nothing did in 1907, and every daily strip since has inherited the habit.

A tramp with a tin can for a hat tries to do somebody a kindness and is arrested for it in the last panel. Every week, for thirty years, the same good intention and the same policeman.

An orphan with no pupils, a dog called Sandy, and a habit of walking into other people's troubles. Adventure serial and melodrama at once, and it argued with its own readers about politics for decades.

Wordless picture stories from Paris in the 1880s, told in strict panel sequence so the joke lands without a caption. He took his name from the Russian word for pencil, and he is the reason the story without words became a form.

Two boys plan a prank on the old man; the old man saw it coming and turns it round on them. The joke never varies, which was the point — readers came back to watch the grandfather win again.