The Best American Comics 2012
The 2012 edition of Best American Comics was edited by Francoise Mouly, the art director of The New Yorker. She 'decoupaged' an introduction by assembling panels from other cartoonists into a kind of sequence and then writing new text. (I believe all the panels came from works that were finalists for this book but didn't make it in.)
New this year are one-page author bios to introduce each selection, and a section of kids comics, including an excerpt from Zita the Spacegirl, although the selections from 60 Ways to Leave Your Mother (Alone) were my favorite from the kids section.
By this point, I think Chris Ware and Love & Rockets are the only ones who've made it into every volume to date. There were a few others I recognized - Charles Burns's X'ed Out, Gary Painter's Jimbo, Jim Woodring's Frank. And I spotted Jesse Jacobs' distinctive art style on the endpapers. (I've read his Safari Honeymoon, although that's not the work included here.)
Almost all the graphic non-fiction was about war - the Battle of Buron, the biography of a failed Kamikaze pilot, a history of the Golan Heights. (I think some form of graphic journalism about Israel might be in every year of BAC by now too.)
The graphic memoirs had more variety - planning a wedding, hiring a prostitute, caring for aging parents, cheating on one's wife at a Hollywood party, attending Basic Training in one's 40s and immediately destroying one's knee, the discomforts of a long plane ride, plus quick comics of daily observations from The Believer, and excerpts from someone's watercolor-sketch-a-day diary that had been published in The New York Times.
My sister's favorite, Sergio Argones, had a couple one-page comics included too!
The new thing I found that I'd like to read more of is Dakota McFadzean's Leave Luck to Heaven. It has a lot of trade dress in the style of old Nintendo instruction manuals, and the excerpt here shows us an older nerd teaching a younger nerd how to appreciate the details of Super Mario Bros 2.
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