TOP TEN.

1 KAZ, UNDERWORLD Kaz is the only cartoonist left who can actually write a four-panel strip that's funny-milk-through-your-nose funny-instead of rotten with whimsy and chuckles. Underworld is populated by perverts, drug users, and chumps of every stripe, just as every great metropolis should be-except sometimes the comic's set in an enchanted forest or in hillbilly country. You can tell from the drawing that Kaz has studied everyone from Jaime Hernandez to E.G. Segar to Philip Guston, blending their influences into a vision of broken boards and barf depicted with elegant clarity.

2 RICK STEINER AND TANK ABBOTT TEAM UP (World Championship Wrestling) This tag team was too good to last, but while it was going strong, it was the best reason to watch WCW. Abbott is a lug, an escapee from ultimate fighting, who can't wrestle and can't talk. His big move is to stand in one spot and whack the opponent with his deadly right hand. He's the most appealing piece of manflesh on television, with squinty blue eyes, a dusting of bristly hair, and a ZZ Top goatee. Steiner, the Dog-faced Gremlin, a veteran who's still nursing a grudge against his brother Scott (aka Big Poppa Pump), has a body that's gone to seed in a way that makes my mouth water. Together they were a devastating pair.

3 CREATION, "HOW DOES IT FEEL?" (1968) It all starts with a thudding, plodding kickdrum. Then the guitars come in-the sort of shrieking slides you play when you don't really know what you're doing but know you have to make a lot of noise. The rest is a lurching, thrilling, onslaught that leaves the singer moaning "How does it feeeeeeeeel to feeeeeeel? How does it feeeeeel to feeeeeel?" How indeed?

4 LEPRECHAUN 5: IN THE 'HOOD (dir. Rob Spera, 2000) Needless to say, all the Leprechaun movies are worth watching, but this one contains a line of dialogue I would give a limb to have written: "From the depths of Hell I summon thee, ME ZOMBIE FLYGIRLS!" lce-T must need a paycheck pretty bad these days, since he consented to star. Contains the most frightening thing ever committed to film: Leprechaun rap.

5 SOCK MONKEY (Dark Horse Comics, 1999-) Tony Millionaire is another brilliant cartoonist, and Sock Monkey is his comic book, which depicts a universe tangential to the one explored in Maakies, his syndicated strip. The hero here is a stuffed sock, a creature of elegant locution and feckless optimism. Set vaguely at the turn of the century, Sock Monkey weaves courtliness and sudden savagery seamlessly together in a manner at times evocative of Poe.

6 SLUDGEMASTER Ostensibly porn for those who like it sloppy, these tapes (available via Sludgemaster.com) should be viewed by every graduate art student in America. Here men explore their relationship to mud, sewage, canned pudding, space-born toxic waste, worms, puke--you get the idea--all under the camera's devoted gaze. This is what pornography used to be: an aesthetic form that allowed for any contingency, so long as it's in the service of pleasure. The result? Thrilling narrative unpredictability. In many a Sludgemaster scene you couldn't begin to guess what might happen next--and you're left bewildered by your capacity to get off on it. Pure jouissance. This is why Jesse Helms hates homosexuality. (And that's why we hate him.)

7 HIM OF THE POWERPUFF GIRLS With his Santa Claus jacket and fishnet hose, his finicky facial hair and lobster-claw hands, and a voice that ranges from unctuous ululation to stentorian bellow, Him makes me think that one of the Powerpuff animators took a long, loving look at the work of Jack Smith. The symbol of ultimate evil, He doesn't indulge in the usual rock 'em sock 'em capers typical of the other villains on the show. No, His crimes are all psychological (making the citizens of Townsville hate the show's heroines, for example), which makes Him the only genuinely creepy villain on kids' TV.

8 BILL TRAYLOR (1854-1949) Some of the finest drawings made in America in the twentieth century, by a man who was treated with a reverence that could never fully mask the condescension behind it. Traylor's pared shapes and aching symmetries drain the fake jollity out of "folk art" and replace it with ecstasy.

9 PHASE FOUR (Cambridge, MA) Every good record I bought this year camefrom this shop. A labor of love, this is the kind of place you walk into and get an education. They don't have much floor space, so the stock of used CDs, vinyl, and Atari video games has been carefully culled. Nine times out of ten I buy whatever happens to be playing when I stop in-and I end up listening to it for months after.

10 TERRY ANDREWS, THE STORY OF HAROLD (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974) A friend lent me this book, and it's a revelation: a novel that recasts Scheherazade as an envenomed children's author who flings himself from fuck to fuck all the while beguiling us with anecdotes on the way to his impending suicide. First published in 1974, it's the missing link between Gore Vidal's Myron and Kathy Acker's The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula. Is this the first American novel to use fisting as a motif?

Nayland Blake is an artist who lives in New York.