The Best American Comics 2011

 
The Best American Comics 2011
edited by Alison Bechdel
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2011

 

 

I'm continuing to read my way through the Best American Comics series with the 2011 edition. In retrospect, 2010 was a very strong year, and 2011 is more like a return to the norm.

 
Chris Ware shows up again, and there's another Love and Rockets excerpt. This might be the first volume without Ben Katchor or R Crumb. Joe Sacco's graphic journalism is probably the most 'famous' comic in this volume. We get an excerpt of his interviews with Gazans who survived a massacre committed by the Israeli army 50 years earlier, which highlights both what we can verifiably know, and the ways that eye witnesses recall slightly incompatible versions of the same event.

 
Jeff Smith's RASL gets an excerpt (a biography of Tesla, a story that slightly-alt creative types never seem to get tired of re-telling), which mostly serves to remind me that I read the first volume of Bone back in the 90s and liked it.

 
The biggest highlight for me was seeing Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant get recognized, specifically, her "Great Gatsby" strips. Apparently Beaton is the first webcomic artist to make it into the BAC, so I'll have to keep an eye out for how well webcomics are represented in the future.

 

Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City is the one new thing I definitely want to read. It tells an alt-historical account of a New York menaced by flying predators large enough to eat humans, and the hot air balloon-riding municipal employees who hunt them.