Six leading graphic novelists choose their favourite peer

I was 11 or 12, growing up in Cleveland when I visited [comic-book artist] Harvey Pekar's apartment – I only knocked on his door because his paper boy said he was some guy who had comics. He kindly showed me his record collection and then pulled out a full colour original drawn by Robert Crumb. This beautiful colour pencil art showed a large cartoon character whistling while he urinated into a toilet with flies buzzing around him. It blew my mind – I had no idea that cartoon characters could have genitals!

I met Crumb a few years after I saw that drawing. He showed me his sketchbook, and I sat there looking at it for hours. I got a sketchbook and started drawing. He demonstrated that comics could address anything you wanted and pointed me in that direction.

The Book of Genesis. Copyright Robert Crumb 2009, used with permission/Robert Crumb

There is a level of honesty in Crumb's work that scares, intrigues and outrages people. There are few corners of his psyche or subjects that comment on our society he hasn't shone a spotlight on. Crumb does what he does, regardless of audience response. There are very few artists who take that chance and yet are so effective.

One of the things that makes Crumb's art so accessible is its clarity. Lots of the 1960s underground cartoonists experimented with comics in many wonderful ways. Crumb generally worked in a simpler panel-to-panel format that was about character and story more than about bending the medium. He also tapped into the history of turn-of-the century comic strips such as Popeye and Krazy Kat, as well as the roots of jazz and other aspects of Americana, which felt completely fresh and yet very familiar. He managed to bring these influences to a wider public, and be both loved and hated. He ignored both reactions, and has kept drawing and inspiring new generations.

I have many favourite graphic novelists, as diverse as Posy Simmonds, Jeff Smith, Robert Crumb and Hannah Berry, but I think I'll have to plump for Joe Sacco. He was trained as a journalist and singlehandedly created the genre of reportage in graphic-novel form. Immersing himself in a situation, his in-depth reports use the medium of sequential art – like "graphic novel", the word "comics" is such a misnomer – to its full advantage, using the mix of illustration and text to convey complex issues very directly. His books, such as Palestine, Safe Area Goražde or his recent Footnotes in Gaza, follow his investigations and interviews, explaining the history, politics and dynamics of the situation as he goes along. The palpable sense of place and the feeling that we're personally in the presence of the people who relate their experiences to him (and us) is a testament to his storytelling skills; his work is far more intimate than that of a filmed documentary. Comics have many superficial similarities to film – the use of long shots, closeup, zooms and pans, for example – but, filtered through the perception and artistry of their authors, they are much closer to prose in the way they transmit a personal vision. Joe Sacco is a master of this medium.

Jacques Tardi's work is brilliantly designed and graphically immaculate, drawn in the "clear line" style, but a line that is relaxed, inventive and personal like handwriting. He's a master of black and white, and colour. His book C'était la Guerre des Tranchées (It Was the War of the Trenches) is a compassionate and meticulously researched story about patriotism and disillusion in the first world war.

I've always been inspired by Gabrielle Bell's work. It's very experimental in that she uses a lot of different forms – diary comments, fiction, topical stuff. She brings in autobiography, even some science fiction. She also experiments with different mediums: colour, black and white. One of the things I like most about her is her knack for the peculiarities of dialogue. She has a really good sense of picking up on some of the weird things you might say. She is very good at characters and human relationships, and is interesting on artists' role in society. I have seen her working, and she goes through a lot of revisions. It shows how much reworking can get it to a better place.

Martin Rowson on Joe Sacco

From Footnotes in Gaza. Illustration: Joe Sacco

Although Art Spiegelman's Maus [about the Holocaust] is a work of incredible importance, I think it gave the entire genre a bum steer. It then got into this terrible kind of introspective, personal, adolescent angstiness. All this "you have to be serious about this because it's a serious art form": well, it is and it isn't. Therefore, discovering Joe Sacco was a liberation. Here is somebody who is using the medium as journalism and reportage. It's taking the best bits of the underground comics of the 60s – the radicalism – with the personal immersion you got with Spiegelman. It's an extraordinarily powerful way of telling a story – a true one in this case. The fact that he places himself in the heart of it makes it gonzo journalism turned into a graphic novel, although it's not really a graphic novel, it's a sort of visual journalism. In one of his books, there is a double-page spread of a crossroads in a refugee camp in Gaza, seen from about 30ft up in the air, and it's a beautiful piece of artwork.

The whole point of the medium is that it's meant to be immediate because you consume images much more quickly than you consume text. It has to have a visceral effect, and as reportage, art and sequential visual narrative, his work is just brilliant.

Chris Ware is an American cartoonist whose work is so unusual that some hesitate to call what he is doing "comics". When I read his work, I get a Wright brothers feeling of being in something big, right as it's being invented. Eventually we will know what to call what he does, but for now "graphic novel" is all we have. And it isn't the right term for what Ware is doing at all. You can see through to the middle of the heartbreaking things in his work and know why this medium is the only way to say it.

Some think what is happening in his work might be literature, and they think this is a compliment. There are books about how to read comics in a serious way as if they were literature; how to take them apart to find out what makes them go. If you do this with Chris Ware's comics, you'll find the complicated structure you've been told is there, but you'll miss everything else. Looking at a diagram of an airplane is not the same as being able to glide in one.

• The fifth annual Observer/Cape graphic short story prize launches this weekend. Judges include David Nicholls and Rachel Cooke. For more details, read Sunday's Observer.