Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12781 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780618989652
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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About the Author

Customer Reviews

My review for [...]
If you are a fan of comics, cartooning, and all forms of American creativity, this is one of the few books that you should be sure to pick up every year.

This is an anthology of various cartoonists that is the comic versions of the short story anthologies that come out every year and generally are one of the few places where you are find great, creative, and new writing that is worth reading.

This years issue is edited by the Harvey-Award winning cartoonist Charles Burns and he does an excellent job, starting with a wonderful introduction and following with comics by a wide range of artists including Kaz, Mimi Pond, Art Spiegelman, R. Crumb, Tim Hensley, Laura Park, and Koren Shadmi. Along with these great artists are many many more making up over 300 pages of excellent reading.

These anthologies are excellent because even if you read the entire thing and find only one cartoonist that you like, it is hard to think that you would have discovered that cartoonist anywhere else and now you have a newly found artist that speaks to you. This is another A+ collection and I do not see them going downhill anytime soon. Cartooning is starting a new era in what they can do and say, and this book contains a wide-range of those selections. It is worth every penny.

The ongoing series The Best American Comics returns in a 2009 edition
The ongoing series The Best American Comics returns in a 2009 edition, this time edited by Charles Burn (the remarkable creator behind Black Hole). As always, series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden oversee the whole process, and, as usual, the collection is an eclectic yet charming mix of light and dark, truth and whimsy, and, of course, varying degrees of quality.

The hardest part about reading gigantic collections such as this is switching gears from one story to the next. To that end, Burns does a great job of keeping the flow seamless (some transitions work so well you can't help but notice them; I particularly like the flow from Dan Zettwoch's chaotic Spirit Duplicator to Matt Broersma's more calmly considered The Company).

The book hits some of the biggest names to release work in the past year (Art Spiegelman, naturally, as well as Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, and Gilbert Hernandez). Works from Tim Hensley both open and close the book. The overall tone of the book seems quiet and reflective, which perhaps makes the final edition of this series this decade end on the right note. That somehow seems reflective of where the industry is now.

The Best American Comics 2009 is a very nice retrospective of the year in review. It's a nice collection for new comics readers, who will get a powerful sense, almost immediately, of the gigantic breadth of the industry. Longtime readers will enjoy it too, especially because only the most voracious of comics readers would already have read everything inside its pages, and the joys of discovering a new talent is always one of the greatest pleasures of a well-done collection like this.
-- John Hogan

variety of styles
I enjoyed the wide variety of visual and writing styles presented in this collection. However, my impression was that there were too many dark, strange, and/or enigmatic selections. I was often left searching for the point (maybe reading them in the morning rather than at night would have helped). My grade B+.