The Best American Comics 2017
edited by Ben Katchor
2017
The 2017 edition of The Best American Comics series was edited by Ben Katchor, who I only know about because of seeing him in previous years. Katchor's comics are about city life, and are written in a style that appears to be non-fiction. He adopts the tone and style of journalism, anthropology, and nature documentaries to write about entirely fictional fads, trends, local cultural traditions, etc. I feel like, more than any other editor so far, I'm aware of Katchor's own style, and how that must affect his preferences for what he considers 'best' when evaluating other comics.
I'm pretty sure there's more graphic nonfiction this year than in the past - both journalism and history, as well as graphic memoir. We get an excerpt from Ed Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree, and Joe Sacco has a comic he made to support someone's city council campaign, that the campaign then mailed out to potential voters. Sacco spent some time shadowing the candidate while she met with locals to talk about how they're affected by rising rents, and reports the experience faithfully. Gabrielle Bell, who I've enjoyed here before, has some diary entries. And Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall have part of a biographical comic about John Wilcox, one of the founders of the Village Voice newspaper.
In the fictional comics, there are several that initially look like nonfiction. Kim Dieth's "The Shrine of the Monkey God" is a wild shaggy dog story and the longest piece in here, and it has two frame stories trying to present it as truth. At the monkey diorama at a museum, an old man tells his adult daughter thestory of how, when he was in grade school, he got accosted by a man at the same exhibit, and the man told him the story of how when HE was young, he got lost in the jungle and raised by monkeys, until his human parents found him again, shot all the monkeys, and taxidermied them into this exhibit. Deb Sokolow has a comic of absurdist claims about Willem de Kooning, drawn in a style similar to de Kooning's art. It reminded me of Tommaso Landofli's short story "Gogol's Wife," which purports to be a true account of the famous Russian author's 'marriage' to an inflatable rubber sex doll.
There are a couple very colorful weird comics by Ben Duncan and Michael DeForge, who both write very strange psychedelic comics, but do so in a way that's still very legible, and thus reasonably commercial.
And then there's even more esoteric stuff. Some seem like comics that insiders might be familiar with - works whose art style and narrative are rather far from clear black-and-white illustrations telling a comprehensible, sequential story - but that seem to still be produced and distributed within the same industry and art world as the stuff that amateurs and dilettantes like me would be familiar with. Some of this kind of thing has been in each previous year, but I think Katchor liked more of it.
Moving further afield still, Katchor includes some works that originally appeared in art galleries, probably on panels much larger than the pages here, but that still can be counted as 'comics' based on their appearance, even though they're distributed through an entirely different system, the one that connects buyers to fine art, such as Dapper Brue Lafitte's panels about Muhammad Ali.
And, through search methods unknown to me, Katchor also found what I'd consider true outsider art - comics produced by people who never went to art school, who aren't part of the contemporary comics scene, who aren't aware of the trends and wouldn't have the experience or technical skill to follow then even if they knew, but who nevertheless have stories to tell and were willing to put ink to paper to tell them, that seem to have been published in community center newsletters.
One challenge with all three of those last kinds of comics is that they can be quite challenging to understand or even read. The rendering of figures and division of story beats into panels can be unfamiliar, and because it's deeply specific to the author, unlike the conventions a reader might be used to. And the text in particular might be semi-illegible due to combination of unusual syntax, idiosyncratic handwriting, and simply due to its extremely small size.
I'm pretty sure there's more graphic nonfiction this year than in the past - both journalism and history, as well as graphic memoir. We get an excerpt from Ed Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree, and Joe Sacco has a comic he made to support someone's city council campaign, that the campaign then mailed out to potential voters. Sacco spent some time shadowing the candidate while she met with locals to talk about how they're affected by rising rents, and reports the experience faithfully. Gabrielle Bell, who I've enjoyed here before, has some diary entries. And Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall have part of a biographical comic about John Wilcox, one of the founders of the Village Voice newspaper.
In the fictional comics, there are several that initially look like nonfiction. Kim Dieth's "The Shrine of the Monkey God" is a wild shaggy dog story and the longest piece in here, and it has two frame stories trying to present it as truth. At the monkey diorama at a museum, an old man tells his adult daughter thestory of how, when he was in grade school, he got accosted by a man at the same exhibit, and the man told him the story of how when HE was young, he got lost in the jungle and raised by monkeys, until his human parents found him again, shot all the monkeys, and taxidermied them into this exhibit. Deb Sokolow has a comic of absurdist claims about Willem de Kooning, drawn in a style similar to de Kooning's art. It reminded me of Tommaso Landofli's short story "Gogol's Wife," which purports to be a true account of the famous Russian author's 'marriage' to an inflatable rubber sex doll.
There are a couple very colorful weird comics by Ben Duncan and Michael DeForge, who both write very strange psychedelic comics, but do so in a way that's still very legible, and thus reasonably commercial.
And then there's even more esoteric stuff. Some seem like comics that insiders might be familiar with - works whose art style and narrative are rather far from clear black-and-white illustrations telling a comprehensible, sequential story - but that seem to still be produced and distributed within the same industry and art world as the stuff that amateurs and dilettantes like me would be familiar with. Some of this kind of thing has been in each previous year, but I think Katchor liked more of it.
Moving further afield still, Katchor includes some works that originally appeared in art galleries, probably on panels much larger than the pages here, but that still can be counted as 'comics' based on their appearance, even though they're distributed through an entirely different system, the one that connects buyers to fine art, such as Dapper Brue Lafitte's panels about Muhammad Ali.
And, through search methods unknown to me, Katchor also found what I'd consider true outsider art - comics produced by people who never went to art school, who aren't part of the contemporary comics scene, who aren't aware of the trends and wouldn't have the experience or technical skill to follow then even if they knew, but who nevertheless have stories to tell and were willing to put ink to paper to tell them, that seem to have been published in community center newsletters.
One challenge with all three of those last kinds of comics is that they can be quite challenging to understand or even read. The rendering of figures and division of story beats into panels can be unfamiliar, and because it's deeply specific to the author, unlike the conventions a reader might be used to. And the text in particular might be semi-illegible due to combination of unusual syntax, idiosyncratic handwriting, and simply due to its extremely small size.
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