The Best American Comics 2018
edited by Phoebe Gloeckner
2018
The Best American Comics 2018 is the second-to-last volume in the series. I don't know why Houghton Mifflin decided to stop this series from their Best American line, although if they gave any reason in the press, I guess I should be able to find out. My tentative guess is that it was a casualty of the pandemic. Each volume so far has included a call for submissions, to be considered for two volumes into the future, and the call for BAC 2020 is in here.
Editor Phoebe Gloeckner decided against placing the comics into categories, and she's the first editor to organize the comics alphabetically by author's last name. I think there were fewer comics this time where I really couldn't tell why they were included, how anyone could think they were the best of anything, but I don't know if that means Gloeckner's taste is more similar to mine, or if I now find it easier to appreciate a wider range of comics.
Both in her selections generally and in her choice of what to excerpt from longer works, Gloeckner seems to have an eye for comics that mix sex and nudity with ugliness and self-hatred. I think there might be more graphic memoirs in the mix this time, although they're always pretty common across BAC volumes.
Childhood memories, often upsetting, are another recurring motif in the memoirs. We get an excerpt from Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing is Monsters from right after her parents died; a truly traumatic childhood memory about pets dying from Gabrielle Bell, from whom we've seen more everyday life stuff up until now; and memoir blending with an architectural history of New York's children's spaces in Julia Jacquette's Playground of My Mind, which stands out for being about something pleasant. I really liked How to be Alive by Tara Booth and Ugly by Chloe Perkins, both of which had frank depictions of grappling with the artists' loathing of their own bodies and desires.
There's only a bit of non-memoirist graphic nonfiction, including Guy Delisle's Hostage, and a a couple different accounts of American and British involvement in the Middle East. I previously read Delisle's Factory Summers.
There are a number of familiar faces among the fictional comics, including Jaime Hernandez with a Love & Rockets excerpt, Simon Hanselmann with a Megg and Mogg comic, a shockingly bloody (and cartoony) excerpt from one of Ted Stearn's Fuzz and Pluck comics, and Jesse Jacobs with an even more overtly psychedelic offering than usual. My favorite was probably DJ Bryant's "Echoes into Eternity", which felt like a complete Twilight Zone story in 8 pages.
Editor Phoebe Gloeckner decided against placing the comics into categories, and she's the first editor to organize the comics alphabetically by author's last name. I think there were fewer comics this time where I really couldn't tell why they were included, how anyone could think they were the best of anything, but I don't know if that means Gloeckner's taste is more similar to mine, or if I now find it easier to appreciate a wider range of comics.
Both in her selections generally and in her choice of what to excerpt from longer works, Gloeckner seems to have an eye for comics that mix sex and nudity with ugliness and self-hatred. I think there might be more graphic memoirs in the mix this time, although they're always pretty common across BAC volumes.
Childhood memories, often upsetting, are another recurring motif in the memoirs. We get an excerpt from Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing is Monsters from right after her parents died; a truly traumatic childhood memory about pets dying from Gabrielle Bell, from whom we've seen more everyday life stuff up until now; and memoir blending with an architectural history of New York's children's spaces in Julia Jacquette's Playground of My Mind, which stands out for being about something pleasant. I really liked How to be Alive by Tara Booth and Ugly by Chloe Perkins, both of which had frank depictions of grappling with the artists' loathing of their own bodies and desires.
There's only a bit of non-memoirist graphic nonfiction, including Guy Delisle's Hostage, and a a couple different accounts of American and British involvement in the Middle East. I previously read Delisle's Factory Summers.
There are a number of familiar faces among the fictional comics, including Jaime Hernandez with a Love & Rockets excerpt, Simon Hanselmann with a Megg and Mogg comic, a shockingly bloody (and cartoony) excerpt from one of Ted Stearn's Fuzz and Pluck comics, and Jesse Jacobs with an even more overtly psychedelic offering than usual. My favorite was probably DJ Bryant's "Echoes into Eternity", which felt like a complete Twilight Zone story in 8 pages.
