The Best American Comics 2015
edited by Jonathan Lethem
2015
The 2015 volume of Best American Comics was edited by Jonathan Lethem, who I think is the first editor who's a comic fan but hasn't been involved in professional comics production. Though he says he drew unpublished comics when he was younger, and his introduction to the book, and to each thematic section is drawn as a comic.
This also might be the first year with no Chris Ware! There's no Love & Rockets either. The 'big names' I recognize this time around include Ed Piskor with Hip Hop Family Tree, Joe Sacco's harrowing wordless WWI comic, Jesse Jacobs's Safari Honeymoon (which I've read!,) another of Jim Woodring's Frank comics, and Roz Chast from The New Yorker with Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a memoir about caring for her mother's dementia. The rest are either new to me, or I've forgotten I've seen them before. Julia Gfrorer's name rings a bell, but Palm Ash, her comic about Christianity spreading among the slaves in a Roman colosseum, wasn't something I'd seen before.
My favorites this time included R Sikoryak's Sadistic Comics, a retelling of the Marquis de Sade's Justine as a series of parody Wonder Woman comics covers; Farel Dalrymple's Wrenchies, a postapocalyptic survival story rendered in washes of watercolor; and Eleanor Davis's No Tears, No Sorrow, about a workshop for people who can't cry where they can practice the motions until the tears come. The mix of silly and poignant, and the transformation of something personal into a communal activity with a leader, reminded me of Ben Katchor, although Davis's art looks nothing like his, with everything drawn in smooth blocks of primary color.
I was also impressed by the frank depictions of women's totally unfulfilled sexual longing in Gina Wynbrandt's Someone Please Have Sex with Me and Anya Davidson's No Class. Independent comics are full of memoirs and semi-autobiographical fictions by men who are by turns pathetic, gross, and horny on main, so it was refreshing to see examples of young women pining hopelessly for oblivious would-be paramours for a change.
I think Lethem might've chosen more avant-garde comics (and works by fine artists that combine graphics and text) than in previous years, or maybe the works he chose needed to be reprinted in a larger format than BAC allows, or maybe I just wasn't in the right headspace this time, but for whatever reason, I found it quite difficult to parse some of the more experimental comics, even on the most basic level of understanding what I was seeing or what was supposed to be going on.
This also might be the first year with no Chris Ware! There's no Love & Rockets either. The 'big names' I recognize this time around include Ed Piskor with Hip Hop Family Tree, Joe Sacco's harrowing wordless WWI comic, Jesse Jacobs's Safari Honeymoon (which I've read!,) another of Jim Woodring's Frank comics, and Roz Chast from The New Yorker with Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a memoir about caring for her mother's dementia. The rest are either new to me, or I've forgotten I've seen them before. Julia Gfrorer's name rings a bell, but Palm Ash, her comic about Christianity spreading among the slaves in a Roman colosseum, wasn't something I'd seen before.
My favorites this time included R Sikoryak's Sadistic Comics, a retelling of the Marquis de Sade's Justine as a series of parody Wonder Woman comics covers; Farel Dalrymple's Wrenchies, a postapocalyptic survival story rendered in washes of watercolor; and Eleanor Davis's No Tears, No Sorrow, about a workshop for people who can't cry where they can practice the motions until the tears come. The mix of silly and poignant, and the transformation of something personal into a communal activity with a leader, reminded me of Ben Katchor, although Davis's art looks nothing like his, with everything drawn in smooth blocks of primary color.
I was also impressed by the frank depictions of women's totally unfulfilled sexual longing in Gina Wynbrandt's Someone Please Have Sex with Me and Anya Davidson's No Class. Independent comics are full of memoirs and semi-autobiographical fictions by men who are by turns pathetic, gross, and horny on main, so it was refreshing to see examples of young women pining hopelessly for oblivious would-be paramours for a change.
I think Lethem might've chosen more avant-garde comics (and works by fine artists that combine graphics and text) than in previous years, or maybe the works he chose needed to be reprinted in a larger format than BAC allows, or maybe I just wasn't in the right headspace this time, but for whatever reason, I found it quite difficult to parse some of the more experimental comics, even on the most basic level of understanding what I was seeing or what was supposed to be going on.
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