Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #213921 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Comics make a second outing in the venerable Best American series, with nary a fluttering cape in sight. This collection isn't about such heroes or villains, it's about humor, fear, the finely observed details of life, and things of a generally more personal and less world-threatening nature. That (as well as a predilection toward Midwestern artists) is what you get when Ware (Acme Novelty Library) is guest editor. The book includes work from 39 different artists, but it's hard to find a weak entry, even if the editors are cheating a bit by including sections from already thunderously (and rightly) acclaimed book-length works like Charles Burns's Black Hole, Miriam Katin's We Are on Our Own and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Gilbert Hernandez contributes a particularly funny bit of his patented soap opera-comedy, while Adrian Tomine's selection from Optic Nerve, an epic of self-loathing and confusion, shows why he's one of the comics artists best worth watching. There are plenty of familiar names, and though the roster of usual suspects is starting to make comics anthologies look like annual class reunions, Ware has done a particularly good job here of celebrating the greatest, saddest and bravest in American comics. (Oct.)
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Review
Starred Review. Comics make a second outing in the venerable Best American series, with nary a fluttering cape in sight. This collection isn't about such heroes or villains, it's about humor, fear, the finely observed details of life, and things of a generally more personal and less world-threatening nature. That (as well as a predilection toward Midwestern artists) is what you get when Ware (Acme Novelty Library) is guest editor. The book includes work from 39 different artists, but it's hard to find a weak entry, even if the editors are cheating a bit by including sections from already thunderously (and rightly) acclaimed book-length works like Charles Burns's Black Hole, Miriam Katin's We Are on Our Own and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Gilbert Hernandez contributes a particularly funny bit of his patented soap opera-comedy, while Adrian Tomine's selection from Optic Nerve, an epic of self-loathing and confusion, shows why he's one of the comics artists best worth watching. There are plenty of familiar names, and though the roster of usual suspects is starting to make comics anthologies look like annual class reunions, Ware has done a particularly good job here of celebrating the greatest, saddest and bravest in American comics. (Publishers Weekly )

About the Author
Chris Ware is the author of Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, which won the American Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. 

Anne Elizabeth Moore is an author and coeditor of Punk Planet. She has earned Harvey and Eisner Award nominations for her work on the Comics Journal and the first two Comics Journal Special Editions. She's written for The Onion, the Journal of Popular Culture, and Bitch, and provided commentary on CNN and NPR. She has an M.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Customer Reviews

Solid collection, but format is wearing thin...
A solid collection that is organized very well. The anthology has works ranging from the autobiographical (which in his introduction, Chris Ware notes is a staple of these kinds of collections) to the fantastic to the esoteric. Each piece is graphically beautiful in its own way, sort of like different dialects of the same language. Introspection and inner dialogues are the chief modes of communication in these stories, which if you think about it is pretty logical for the comics medium.

Favorites of mine include: C. Tyler's sad reflections on raising her daughter in the eighties when she says "your time was completely mine", Anders Nilsen's minimalist forest fantasy in which birds comment to each other on the actions of a human wanderer, Gilbert Hernandez's sordid tale of sexy people, Ben Katchor's telling of the metaphysical prowess of shoehorns, Ron Rege Jr.'s love rectangle as only he can tell it, and C.F.'s insane story of a boy who morphs into beams of color after being pursued.

While each of the works is impressive some of the artists are guilty of being too repetitive, of not leaving their comfort zones. There's also something thematically distinct in each of the stories that make them "American" comics. I mean, there's a war going on and there's not a single comic addressing that fact. Tales of human suffering, tragedy and sacrifice are instead tales of personal shortcomings, quiet reflections on the human condition, or nostalgia for times past. Which is fine (art doesn't have to address war or any of that), just noteworthy to me for some reason. Personally, I would like to see more storytelling risks and more fiction rather than biographical uniformity. This goes for comics in general, not only the ones presented here

Better than 2006
Two things caught my attention scanning through the Best American Comics of 2007. The first was that it was edited by the multitalented Chris Ware and the second was a story by Gilbert Hernandez about a gigantically breasted woman. The later will get my attention every time. I found the 2006 Best Comics to be a big disappointment and I considered the possibility that perhaps one year just wasn't enough time to come up with 300+ pages of alternative comics. However, I put my faith in Mr. Ware (who also edited the fantastic `McSweeney's Issue 13') and bought the 2007 book with hopes of major improvements.

The cool thing about these anthologies is that it's like eating at a buffet. You can sample all sorts of different items and if you don't like something move onto the next. If you really enjoy a particular artist you might just pick up other things they've produced. The overall quality in the 2007 edition is higher than last year but I have to confess that nothing in this book jumped out at me and I only discovered a couple of artists I might look into further. In the opening section Chris Ware mentions one of the criticisms of these kinds of comics, that the artists tend to engage in a lot of naval gazing. Well, recognizing the problem doesn't make it go away and there is an unfortunate amount of depressing self introspection about how sad and lonely the artists lives are. I also have to say that this collection features some of the most primitive art I've yet to see in any of these anthologies with some looking like they were scratched out during lunch period at junior high. What this collection didn't have was any stories that I was wishing would just end which sets it apart from the 2006 collection.

I would like to give special mentions to Jonathan Bennett and Kevin Huizenga who I felt had the best art in the book. David Heatley's short pieces may be the most memorable as he puts ink to actual dreams he's had. I'll give the award for most interesting story to Kim Deitch for `No Midgets in Midgetville'. I would put this collection somewhere in the middle of alternative comic anthologies. It's not as good as `An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories' but much better than BAC 2006.

Editorially solid, graphically beautiful
First off, this is a beautifully designed book. The paper stock is heavy and bright. The dust-jacket and endpapers are themselves pieces of graphic art. Several of the included works are printed in full color. This deluxe treatment screams "comics are serious art."

And, for the most part, the quality of the stories bears out that premise. An outpost of the "Best American" brand, it's a survey of contemporary comic writing, with a handful of novelistic, introspective pieces; stand-by representatives of the alt-weekly aesthetic; and a couple truly out there pieces that I had a hard time grokking.

The collection includes a few stars (Alison Bechdel, I'm looking at you), only a couple duds, and the rest are fine -- I'm grading on a curve, but the average feels pretty high. No representatives of old-fashioned genre comics, though, and Brian Wood's "DMZ" is glaringly absent. I presume anything published by the corporate gorillas at DC and Marvel were off-limits for reprint rights reasons, if not also editorial ones.

Editor Chris Ware reprises his role from McSweeney's #13, confirming that highly-designed serio-irony is Dave Eggers' world. We just read in it.