The Best American Comics 2019

 
 
The Best American Comics 2019

edited by Jillian Tamaki

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2019

 

  

The Best American Comics 2019 ended up being the last one in the series. I sort of assume it was cancelled for reasons nebulously related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic turmoil, but that's really only a guess on my part. The series editor announced the publisher's decision in late 2020, but he didn't give any reason. He might not know it, or might not be allowed to say.

 

Jilian Tamaki picked 2019's comics. I think she chose fewer short comics than in the past. There are only a couple 1-2 pagers. Her excerpts from longer works feel particularly well-chosen to tell a complete sub-part of the larger story, which is something I've been critical of other editors about. I haven't been systematically counting, but I think Tamaki may have chosen a few more women artists than in the past, and I think the majority of her picks are nonfiction, mostly memoir.

 

Among the graphic nonfiction, we get Joe Sacco reporting on the petroleum industry at the oil sands in Alberta, Canada (the same region Kate Beaton wrote about in Ducks). Sophia Foster-Dimino has a harrowing account of her accidental pregnancy and abortion when she was in college and in an abusive relationship. There's an excerpt from Vera Brogsol's memoir Be Prepared about attending a Russian culture summer camp in America when she was a kid. And one of my favorite pieces in the book, Angie Wang writes about trying to find her favorite Chinese food in American restaurants, prepared the way she remembers it. Wang's piece was drawn for the cellphone, intended to be viewed by scrolling down and downward.

 

There were fewer fictional pieces. We get an excerpt from Nick Drsano's Sabrina about two strangers who are drawn together after both witnessing a murder, while omnipresent right-wing radio casts doubt on what happened in the background. I especially liked Unihabitable by Jed McGowan, a complete comic told from the perspective of a swarm of billions of nano robots attempting to terraform an alien world, then making peace with their failure. Like Angie Wang, McGowan (digitally?) painted his comic, making it look very different from the many black-and-white pen drawings that were the most common style earlier in the series.

 

I'll miss the BAC books. I've found a number of artists I like by reading them. There are a couple other comics anthologies I want to read, although they actually precede the Best American series.