The ninety-eighth comic: #46 Destiny: A Novel in Pictures

While a lot of comics in the early parts of the list are newspaper strips, we're also seeing experiments with the media at this point. Destiny: A Novel in Pictures is a graphic novel at its most basic form: It's completely wordless, using one panel - from lead cuts - per page to tell a story. It's a dire one reflecting social life at the time, a poor woman living a bad life that she's unable to escape, sometimes through fate and sometimes by choice. It feels powerful enough for that even now, in a way that feels unescapable as it did nearly a century later in Scalped.

The art is gorgeous, the black line work creating a contrast that paints an even more bleak world,adding even further to that atmosphere of being inescapapble while being its own stylistic treat. It makes for a sharp work in several ways, and the fact that it's now digitized helps more with being able to enjoy that.