The Best American Comics 2014

 
The Best American Comics 2014

edited by Scott McCloud

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

2014

 

 

The 2014 volume of the Best American Comics series is absolutely crammed, and honestly, I think, a bit to its detriment. Certain comics got enough space to include a complete chapter or story (notably, Love & Rockets gets 23 pages right out of the gate.) Others are excerpted in ways that feel a little too brief to fully appreciate. And others just get a single 2-page spread, only enough room for the smallest taste of their work.

 
McCloud was able to include a lot of familiar authors and artists. In addition to L&R, the Hernandez family got another project included, plus the supposedly last ever comic from Robert and Aline Crumb, Charles Burns, and Chris Ware, whose Building Stories is McCloud's favorite of the year.

 
Others who are by now becoming familiar to me are Michael DeForge, Ben Katchor, and Brandon Graham. Graham caught my eye in 2013's volume also, so I want to seek out some more of his work.
 

New to BAC, but famous outside its pages already, we get the webcomic Hyperbole and a Half, the monthly comic book Saga, (McCloud said he also wanted to include Homestuck and Hawkeye, but you can't print GIFs on paper, and Houghton Mifflin couldn't come to a reprint agreement with Marvel, respectively,) plus Rene Telgemeier's bestselling Drama, John Lewis's March, and Ed Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree. McCloud also included BAC's first newspaper comic strip (I think,) with the final week of Cul de Sac, which I'd never heard of, but does look good.

 
McCloud chose to arrange the book into about 10 sections. Each comic doesn't get its own introduction (as in a couple of the most recent volumes,) but each section gets its own table of contents and intro. It's a gimmick that, to me, feels like it wastes a lot of space, especially when an intro spills onto a second page for just a sentence or so. 

 
Which was frustrating, because it felt like a slightly more economical use of space somewhere would've let him give more than 2 pages to so many of the experimental comics near the end. Or else, honestly, I think he shouldn't have included some of them, because the amount we get to see isn't enough to form a real impression of the piece or appreciate it, or even know that you want to see more.