Kerry's review
status:
Read in February, 2008
I've had this sitting on my shelf for couple years now, and decided to finally tackle it in the wake of reading the Chris Ware-edited Best American Comics. To be honest, I found it a little daunting; it's a beautifully designed book, but the elaborate packaging and preponderance of academic essays on early and esoteric cartoonists made the whole thing seem more like a textbook than something I'd, you know, actually want to read. Even the dust jacket folds out into a newspaper broadsheet and houses a couple of loose mini-comics. Once you get past the book's busy layout, this is actually a nice survey of the modern "literary" comics scene, comprised almost exclusively of excerpts from longer, book-length comics. There's a lot of the usual suspects, like Ivan Brunetti, R. Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Gary Panter, Art Spiegelman, Seth, Adrian Tomine, and at least one Bro Hernandez, and the material runs the gamut of style and tone just as one would expect in an anthology like this. ...more
I've had this sitting on my shelf for couple years now, and decided to finally tackle it in the wake of reading the Chris Ware-edited Best American Comics. To be honest, I found it a little daunting; it's a beautifully designed book, but the elaborate packaging and preponderance of academic essays on early and esoteric cartoonists made the whole thing seem more like a textbook than something I'd, you know, actually want to read. Even the dust jacket folds out into a newspaper broadsheet and houses a couple of loose mini-comics. Once you get past the book's busy layout, this is actually a nice survey of the modern "literary" comics scene, comprised almost exclusively of excerpts from longer, book-length comics. There's a lot of the usual suspects, like Ivan Brunetti, R. Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Gary Panter, Art Spiegelman, Seth, Adrian Tomine, and at least one Bro Hernandez, and the material runs the gamut of style and tone just as one would expect in an anthology like this. As a whole, in fact, I think it's a lot more consistent than Ware's Best American installment, even though both anthologies share the bulk of their contributor; in fact, a handful of these cartoons wind up in that later collection. Ware, being an aficionado of old-time newspaper cartoons, and unconstrained by a submission deadline, indulges himself with the inclusion of a handful of excerpts by (and abstracts of) pioneers like Charles Schulz, George Herriman,and Rodolphe Topffer, which are interesting enough to comics nerds like myself but will probably make laymen's eyes glaze over, especially when accompanied by pedantic essays (footnotes=not casual reading). The essays are actually the weakest link, unless listening to chronic over-pontificators like John Updike recount virtually identical childhood anecdotes about relating to superheroes (none of whom are included in this collection, by the way) floats your boat. It's a nice sampler of material despite all that, though anyone besides a novice to the form would be better off seeking out the full version of the books excerpted....less
McSweeney's Issue 13 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern) 
