Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day (see the list of free comics for more details). In honor of that, I thought I'd give some recommendations for other comics to check out at your friendly neighborhood comic book store. (Don't know where that is? Check out the FCBD Store Locator). I tailored my list to people who don't normally read comics and limited myself to ten to (I hope) avoid going too long.

By the way, if you're buying for kids, the first two below are all-ages books, Astonishing X-Men is rated Marvel's equivalent of PG-13, and Maus is great for anyone old enough to understand and handle a book about the Holocaust; the rest are mature readers titles (about the equivalent of an R rating).

Ongoing series:
The Spirit - A fun detective series with standalone issues - even though the latest issue is something like #17, you don't have to read the other 16 to know what's going on.
Runaways - A group of teens with superpowers finds out their parents are some of the world's worst supervillians. Early issues are written by Brian K. Vaughan (see Ex Machina); now written by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly/Serenity.
Astonishing X-Men - In my opinion, the best X-Men series since the Claremont and Byrne days of the '80s and one of the best superhero series published today. Like Runaways, it's written by Joss Whedon.
Ex Machina - Think The West Wing, but instead of focusing on a president, it's about the mayor of New York City, who just happens to be his world's only superhero - a superhero who saved the day on 9/11. Written by Brian K. Vaughan, who is not only my favorite current comic book writer, but also a writer and producer on the TV show Lost.
Fables and its spin-off Jack of Fables - Fairy tale characters like Snow White, Jack ("and the Beanstalk," "Frost," "Horner," and many more all in one), etc. living in secrecy in the modern-day real world as refugees from their homelands, which have mostly been taken over by a dictator known as the Adversary.

If you're worried about jumping into the middle of a series, all of the above have trade paperback collections of back issues. You can also check out the books below.

Completed Series, Limited Series, and Graphic Novels:
Watchmen - The only graphic novel to win a Hugo and the only one to appear on Time's list of the best modern English-language novels, Watchmen is about retired (and very human) superheroes in an alternate-history Cold War U.S. The former superheroes try to figure out what's going on when one of their own is murdered, while conspiracies and the threat of nuclear war are constantly hanging over them. By Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. One volume.
The Sandman - The only comic book series to win a World Fantasy Award and the only one to appear on the New York Times Best Seller List, Sandman is about Morpheus/Dream/The Sandman, the personification of dreams. He travels (literally) to Hell and back, meets William Shakespeare, and has run-ins with his siblings, The Endless, each of whom is also the personification of an abstract concept (Death, Destiny, etc.). By Neil Gaiman and various artists. 11 volumes.
Maus - The only graphic novel to ever win a Pulitzer Prize, Maus is the true story of the writer/artist Art Spiegelman's father Vladek's experiences as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust. It also depicts the relationship between Art and his father as Art gathers material for the book. By Art Spiegelman. 2 volumes.
Y: the Last Man - A plague has killed every male mammal except Yorrick Brown and his pet monkey Ampersand. Besides the drama and suspense of dealing with the collapse of society and Yorrick trying to find his fiancée Beth while avoiding capture (or worse) by various factions, the series also has a lot of humor. By Brian K. Vaughan & Pia Guerra. 10 vols.

I'm not sure if I completely did justice to all of the above, but I think I got the gist of them. You can find out more with a little searching online; Wikipedia's usually a decent starting point.

Enjoy!

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"Laughter is the language of the soul." - Pablo Neruda, as quoted by Lisa Simpson

To the people who don't like superheroes, I recommend two great comics:

TRANSMETROPOLITAN: Written by Alan Moore, so we're already off to a strong start. This is by far my favorite comic book of all time. It's about rogue journalist Spider Jerusalem (read: Hunter S. Thompson in the 30th Century) and his quest to find The Truth (as well as some really good drugs) in a futuristic world so dense and self-centered that nobody even knows what year it is anymore. This comic's vision of the future is wonderous, disturbing, and hilarious all at once - one of the MANY subplots in this series involves "revivals", which are people who were cryogenically frozen in our time and awakened, and the vast majority of them become catatonic upon their first glimpse of a city filled with cyborgs, transients (people who splice their DNA with aliens), werewolves, foglets (humans who upload their consciousness into clouds of nanorobots), and four-winged pigeons.

THE WALKING DEAD: A zombie comic that goes well beyond the zombie movie mythos. The human characters are not just potential victims with cookie-cutter personalities, they are actual people with actual lives, who just happen to be in the midst of trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. This series is still ongoing, however many of the back issues have been compiled into trade paperbacks and hard cover book.

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"He was cursed with a horrorshow of a face, like Guiseppe Archbold doing a study of mollusk tumors."

Invincible is a must read for anyone who does like superhero comics. It's fairly standard superhero stuff, but for some reason it's just a ridiculously good read. Written by Robert Kirkman who also does The Walking Dead.

The Goon is another fun one. Really funny, interesting and well drawn. Basically about a big dude who punches zombies.

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Poop.

Rabid_Weasle

*marks the feck out*

I read the first one, but have yet to see any of the other ones at my "local" comic book shop (I have to drive 40 minutes to buy comics). I was very impressed and quite amused by this series.

Actually, it's hard for me NOT to like comics with zombies in them. I've got nearly all the Marvel Zombies collections that are out (still trying to find out if they did a hardcover/TPB of "Marvel Zombies Vs. Army Of Darkness" and I pre-ordered the hardcover of "Marvel Zombies 2").

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"He was cursed with a horrorshow of a face, like Guiseppe Archbold doing a study of mollusk tumors."

I'd heartily recommend The Boys, or anything by Ennis for that matter- Chronicles of Wormwood and Preacher are also amongst his best. The Boys is by far the single greatest comic I've ever read.

Kirkman and Moore have both already gotten a mention, so that's good to see. I just finished re-reading Watchmen the other day, and seeing the prison fall in TWD earlier in the month was awesome.

Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again are definitely worth a read, I'm not generally a fan of Miller's work, but these are exceptional.

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Dinosaurs had eggs bro, the chicken came way later.

I personally enjoyed Daniel Clowe's Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

That was a graphic novel worth every bit. It's an insane story about a guy looking for his wife who left him when a year before, and  he sees her in a kinky x-rated movie...So the man sets off on a wild abstract adventure to find his ex-wife. He encounters cults, insane dominant women, and a fish-like creature that wants to have sexual relations with him.

(Daniel Clowes is more famous for making the Ghost World)

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http://mauston.deviantart.com/gallery/ Show me sum respect,nigga.

It's probably difficult to pick up at this point (because the plot is a tad convoluted), but Ed Brubaker's current run on Captain America is fantastic.  Like a really good spy novel involving people in costumes.

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I has a flavor!