Best American Comics 2016
edited by Roz Chast
2016
The Best American Comics 2016 was edited by Roz Chast, who's probably best known for her cartoons in The New Yorker.
Chris Ware is back in this volume, and Gilbert Hernandez with a non Love & Rockets project. There's no R Crumb, but Drew Friedman has a comic about what a big influence Crumb was on him, including the couple times they met. Joe Sacco has a fictional comic about surveillance via our digital footprint instead of his usual reporting. There's actually almost no graphic journalism this time; nearly all the nonfiction comics are memoir. There's a lot of memoir! Ben Katchor shows up again with more comics about fictional trends in city life. And Kate Beaton got another batch of Hark! A Vagrant comics included.
Two comics I recognized from seeing them in bookstores this time are Lynda Barry's Syllabus, about teaching art to college students, and Cece Bell's El Deafo, about growing up hearing impaired after catching a nasty virus as a toddler.
There's always a challenge in these collections, posed by the very different lengths of the included comics. Artists who work in very short format can almost disappear among the longer works, though including multiple examples can help. For longer works, the editor has to decide whether to include the whole thing, and if not, how long the excerpt should be. Too short, and the reader doesn't really get a fair sample. Too long, and it dominates the collection, drowning out everything else.
I feel like Chast mostly erred on the long side, giving 15-25 pages to a number of works. El Deafo got 33. At the same time, a few people felt like their excerpt cut off short, before I got a chance to see their worth. Lots of the entries were only 2 or 4 pages.
So while I liked The Corpse, the Ghost, and the Hollow-Weenie by Casanova Frankenstein and Adults Only by Lance Ward, both graphic memoirs by troubled men struggling with low-wage jobs, tempestuous romantic relationships, and serious concerns about their sexuality - it's hard for me to think that my preference wasn't influenced by Chast's thumb on the scale. They got like 10 times as many pages to impress me, and I'm sure that helped.
Chris Ware is back in this volume, and Gilbert Hernandez with a non Love & Rockets project. There's no R Crumb, but Drew Friedman has a comic about what a big influence Crumb was on him, including the couple times they met. Joe Sacco has a fictional comic about surveillance via our digital footprint instead of his usual reporting. There's actually almost no graphic journalism this time; nearly all the nonfiction comics are memoir. There's a lot of memoir! Ben Katchor shows up again with more comics about fictional trends in city life. And Kate Beaton got another batch of Hark! A Vagrant comics included.
Two comics I recognized from seeing them in bookstores this time are Lynda Barry's Syllabus, about teaching art to college students, and Cece Bell's El Deafo, about growing up hearing impaired after catching a nasty virus as a toddler.
There's always a challenge in these collections, posed by the very different lengths of the included comics. Artists who work in very short format can almost disappear among the longer works, though including multiple examples can help. For longer works, the editor has to decide whether to include the whole thing, and if not, how long the excerpt should be. Too short, and the reader doesn't really get a fair sample. Too long, and it dominates the collection, drowning out everything else.
I feel like Chast mostly erred on the long side, giving 15-25 pages to a number of works. El Deafo got 33. At the same time, a few people felt like their excerpt cut off short, before I got a chance to see their worth. Lots of the entries were only 2 or 4 pages.
So while I liked The Corpse, the Ghost, and the Hollow-Weenie by Casanova Frankenstein and Adults Only by Lance Ward, both graphic memoirs by troubled men struggling with low-wage jobs, tempestuous romantic relationships, and serious concerns about their sexuality - it's hard for me to think that my preference wasn't influenced by Chast's thumb on the scale. They got like 10 times as many pages to impress me, and I'm sure that helped.
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