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The point of contention, as I understand it, may be in what Jack means by "mind-blowing." Plenty of gorefest books have been recommended, but save for the squeamish that's not terribly mindblowing; if you're above the age of consent and read comics it's a good bet you've seen a graphical representation of a human evisceration or twelve. On the other hand, I'd say any work that evokes a sense of gnosis or otherwise existential epiphany is probably fair game. That's the interpretation I ran with. I didn't list my favorites, though there's some overlap, of course. A couple other series/books I think are appropriate:
Paul Auster, Paul Karasik & Dave Mazzuchelli's City of Glass, which has already been disparaged, is likely misunderstood as just an adaptation of Don Quixote into a modern, domestic context. What's overlooked is that Don Quixote is itself a meditation on the boundaries between fiction and reality. City of Glass does it one better by dissolving the visual language of the comic form in a way that supplements the source text into a more synaesthetic experience, at times separating characters from their words while at others making them prisoners of them, sometimes literally. It's a commentary on both the liberating and entrapping powers of language, and what happens to fictional characters after their stories are over.
Someone already mentioned Phil Hester & Mike Huddleston's The Coffin, and I recommend their sophomore collaboration Deep Sleeper, which began publication at Oni and just finished up through Image. Again, fiction begins to intrude into reality, and a man who's practically sleep-walked through life suddenly finds himself very much awake but unable to actually wake up. In this story characters are trapped less by the semantics of their lives and more by their lives themselves. In the end, it asks whether it's better to live so consciously that you attain a sort of Christhood, or to sublimate enough to carry on the business of life.
Carla Speed McNeill's Finder is definitely one of those series that shows up on most of my lists, and for good reason: the art is wonderful, the characters are fully-fleshed, the world it inhabits is both wondrous and "real," and the ideas it plays with are broadly explored. In a recent storyline, a character named Magri White has become something of a human ISP, a virtual world made up of his rich internal fantasy life, that is so vivid that he's become less of a person than corporate property. Then another facet of his personality, an imaginary brother he'd long forgotten, begins dismembering vistors to this world, which does unpleasant damage to their actual neural pathways. Magri is desperate to rediscover who he is as an individual and make his dreams his own again, but forces out of his control put the kibosh on that. In this storyline the main protagonist of the series, Jaeger, is the image of Magri's imaginary brother, a connection to which has not yet been explained, and seeing as McNeill's comics hero is Dave Sim it may not be for quite some time yet.
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