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THE BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2009

One of the more recent additions to the Best American Series has established itself as one of the most valuable.

Annual anthology finds the state of graphic narrative in robust health.

With the estimable Burns (Black Hole, 2005, etc.) taking a turn as guest editor, readers might expect a darker mood to this year’s offerings. Yet if anything connects the dots in this varied collection, it’s how self-referential comic authors are as they pursue their craft. There’s a meta-comic dimension to much of this work, whether it’s a comic focused on the creation of a comic (“Spirit Duplicator,” Dan Zettwoch), a comic that reflects the inspiration of older comic strips (“Indian Spirit Twain & Einstein,” Michael Kupperman), a comic that pays homage to another contemporary comic artist (“Cruddy,” Ron Regé Jr., “stolen from the novel by Lynda Barry”) or comics that focus primarily on the self, either real (“Why I Write Only About Myself,” Aline Kominsky-Crumb) or surreal (“When I Was Eleven,” Gabrielle Bell). Some artists extend the net well beyond self and craft, from the futuristic “Galactic Funnels” of Dash Shaw to the apocalyptic, cross-cultural desolation of Gary Panter’s “Dal Tokyo.” Other forms of popular culture provide inspiration as well, with Kevin Huizenga’s “Glen Ganges in Pulverize” steeped in video-game obsession, Tim Hensley’s “Jillian in the Argument” providing a subversive sitcom twist and “Skim,” by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, illuminating goth. Among the additional familiar names are Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Gilbert Hernandez and Art Spiegelman, making this collection a fine introductory primer. As series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden write in their preface, “The comics you read in this book aren’t the ‘best’ in the sense that they beat out other comics, American Idol-style. What they are is a personally curated selection of top-notch work that reflects just some of the excellence and variety that exists out there.”

One of the more recent additions to the Best American Series has established itself as one of the most valuable.

Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-618-98965-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009

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HERE

A gorgeous symphony.

Illustrator McGuire (What’s Wrong With This Book, 1997, etc.) once again frames a fixed space across the millennia.

McGuire’s original treatment of the concept—published in 1989 in Raw magazine as six packed pages—here gives way to a graphic novel’s worth of two-page spreads, and the work soars in the enlarged space. Pages unspool like a player-piano roll, each spread filled by a particular time, while inset, ever shifting panels cut windows to other eras, everything effervescing with staggered, interrelated vignettes and arresting images. Researchers looking for Native American artifacts in 1986 pay a visit to the house that sprouts up in 1907, where a 1609 Native American couple flirtatiously recalls the legend of a local insatiable monster, while across the room, an attendee of a 1975 costume party shuffles in their direction, dressed as a bear with arms outstretched. A 1996 fire hose gushes into a 1934 floral bouquet, its shape echoed by a billowing sheet on the following page, in 2015. There’s a hint of Terrence Malick’s beautiful malevolence as panels of nature—a wolf in 1430 clenching its prey’s bloody haunch; the sun-dappled shallows of 2113’s new sea—haunt scenes of domesticity. McGuire also plays with the very concept of panels: a boy flaunts a toy drum in small panels of 1959 while a woman in 1973 sets up a projection screen (a panel in its own right) that ultimately displays the same drummer boy from a new angle; in 2050, a pair of old men play with a set of holographic panels arranged not unlike the pages of the book itself and find a gateway to the past. Later spreads flash with terrible and ancient supremacy, impending cataclysm, and distant, verdant renaissance, then slow to inevitable, irresistible conclusion. The muted colors and soft pencils further blur individual moments into a rich, eons-spanning whole.

A gorgeous symphony.

Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-375-40650-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014

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HEART OF DARKNESS

Gorgeous and troubling.

Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.

As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.

Gorgeous and troubling.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019

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