The Best American Comics 2013
edited by Jeff Smith
The 2013 volume of Best American Comics has cover art by Kate Beaton (famous for Hark! A Vagrant!) and was edited by Jeff Smith (famous for Bone.)
Strangely, one of the first things that stood out to me about this one is that there's much less white space than in the past. There's more color, but even in the black-and-whites, just more ink than in previous years. I don't know if that's something caused by Smith's idiosyncratic editorial decisions, or more efficient graphic design on the part of the publisher, or some change in either fashion or technology that's really leading comic-makers to use less negative space than in the past.
The comics in this volume were mostly originally published in 2012, my last full year in grad school before I moved to where I live now. I feel like I recognize more of the selections this time as well.
We get an excerpt from Alison Bechdel's second graphic memoir Are You My Mother?; a scene from Habibi, which resembles 1001 Nights and is by Craig Thompson, who wrote Blankets; the beginning of My Friend Dahmer; and a scene from the kid's comic Giants Beware!. I also recognized Unterzakhn, about sexuality and Jewish life in pre-WWI New York. I think one of my friends in grad school owned a copy - or maybe I just saw it at the bookstore.
Kate Beaton's velocipede comics from Hark! make it in, as do a handful of Grant Snider's incidental comics. The deeply weird Jesse Jacobs and Michael DeForge both have entries. Terry Moore has an excerpt from a murder mystery comic, and Paul Pope recreates some of the first moon landing. This might be the first BAC with no Chris Ware. The title pages for each entry, introduced the year before, are here again, though simpler this time.
Seeing them here does tempt me to go find a couple of the comics I already knew about but have never read. The ones that are new to me that I liked best were the excerpt from Faith Erin Hicks' Friends with Boys and Elanor Davis's Nita Goes Home. Friends is in black and white, but uses a lot of black, and the faces are so striking I feel like I've seen them before - but I don't know if that's real recognition, or an effect of the art. Nita is colorful and surreal, a tale of going home for a funeral in a strange future world. It's complete here, but it makes me want to seek out more from Davis.
I don't really want to read it, but the scene from Joseph Lambert's biography of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan is able to visually express Keller's sensory experience - of a world that can only be felt, not heard or seen - in a way that I thought was empathetic and compelling. In the panels in Keller's perspective, we see her body, and whatever she's touching, rendered as shapes in flat color, and everything else is black. It doesn't sound like much, but the effect, especially as we switch between how Sullivan and Keller experience the same interaction, is powerful.
I may have to slow down the pace I'm trying to read these anthologies though - I've got too many other comics on the docket in the mean time!
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