Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern 13
An Assorted Sampler of North American Comic Drawings, Strips, and Illustrated Stories, &c
edited by Chris Ware
McSweeney's
2004
When I first started reading The Best American Comics, the series editor mentioned a couple inspirations for the project, and on was Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, number 13, spring 2004, An Assorted Sampler of North American Comic Drawings, Strips, and Illustrated Stories, &c, known more simply as the McSweeney's comics issue. Edited by Chris Ware, the comics issue is a mix of comics and short articles about comics.
The featured artists include a lot of names I recognize as recurring contributors to BAC. The comics themselves frequently seemed like Ware was picking things that resembled his own work - lots of very small panels with miniature text totally filling the page. I sometimes wished for a magnifying glass while reading this one. In addition to the hardcover 'magazine' itself, Ware drew what looks like a newspaper comics page, this is folded to create a dust jacket, the same way I used to fold brown paper grocery bags to make book covers for my textbooks in school. The folds create two pockets, which have a couple of tiny bonus zines in them.
Among the essays, there's an example of an early illustrated pamphlet (a precursor to modern comics) about a man repeatedly trying and failing to commit suicide, which then became a common motif for humorous illustrations, there's some preliminary Peanuts sketches and unpublished Krazy Kat strips (along with discussion of Charles Schultz's and George Herriman's art styles), there are personal essays by John Updike and Chip Kidd about the importance of comics to them, and someone else wrote a brief history of the time a teenage Michael Chabon made amateur comics with a couple friends.
Beyond the foldout cover and an introductory essay, Ware also includes a sample of what would eventually become Building Stories. Ware gives us an excerpt from Charles Burns' Black Hole, a bit of the very recent In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman about 9/11, and an excerpt from Joe Sacco's graphic journalism on the Bosnian War. I had a strong sense reading this that the comic scene Ware was canonizing was rooted in the 1990s. (Which in turn makes me wonder about how the BAC series continued to amplify so many of the same artists.)
Other graphic nonfiction includes a Lydia Barry comic about losing and then rediscovering the joy of creation, and a number of graphic diaries, often about unrequited love and other forms of sexual anxiety. Among the fiction strips, we get usual suspects like Robert Crumb, Jim Woodring, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Adrian Tomine, and Ben Katchor, who I've become quite fond of via anthologies.
This is a cool artifact, and I probably still want to read more from a few of these artists, many of them now modern classics - but at the same time, I don't want to be so immersed in this specific moment in time than continuing to find and appreciate newer works.
When I first started reading The Best American Comics, the series editor mentioned a couple inspirations for the project, and on was Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, number 13, spring 2004, An Assorted Sampler of North American Comic Drawings, Strips, and Illustrated Stories, &c, known more simply as the McSweeney's comics issue. Edited by Chris Ware, the comics issue is a mix of comics and short articles about comics.
The featured artists include a lot of names I recognize as recurring contributors to BAC. The comics themselves frequently seemed like Ware was picking things that resembled his own work - lots of very small panels with miniature text totally filling the page. I sometimes wished for a magnifying glass while reading this one. In addition to the hardcover 'magazine' itself, Ware drew what looks like a newspaper comics page, this is folded to create a dust jacket, the same way I used to fold brown paper grocery bags to make book covers for my textbooks in school. The folds create two pockets, which have a couple of tiny bonus zines in them.
Among the essays, there's an example of an early illustrated pamphlet (a precursor to modern comics) about a man repeatedly trying and failing to commit suicide, which then became a common motif for humorous illustrations, there's some preliminary Peanuts sketches and unpublished Krazy Kat strips (along with discussion of Charles Schultz's and George Herriman's art styles), there are personal essays by John Updike and Chip Kidd about the importance of comics to them, and someone else wrote a brief history of the time a teenage Michael Chabon made amateur comics with a couple friends.
Beyond the foldout cover and an introductory essay, Ware also includes a sample of what would eventually become Building Stories. Ware gives us an excerpt from Charles Burns' Black Hole, a bit of the very recent In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman about 9/11, and an excerpt from Joe Sacco's graphic journalism on the Bosnian War. I had a strong sense reading this that the comic scene Ware was canonizing was rooted in the 1990s. (Which in turn makes me wonder about how the BAC series continued to amplify so many of the same artists.)
Other graphic nonfiction includes a Lydia Barry comic about losing and then rediscovering the joy of creation, and a number of graphic diaries, often about unrequited love and other forms of sexual anxiety. Among the fiction strips, we get usual suspects like Robert Crumb, Jim Woodring, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Adrian Tomine, and Ben Katchor, who I've become quite fond of via anthologies.
This is a cool artifact, and I probably still want to read more from a few of these artists, many of them now modern classics - but at the same time, I don't want to be so immersed in this specific moment in time than continuing to find and appreciate newer works.
