The Best American Comics 2009 [Hardcover]

Charles Burns (Author), Jessica Abel (Editor), Matt Madden (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 8, 2009 | Series: Best American

Now in its fourth year, Best American Comics showcases the work of both established and up-and-coming contributers. Editor Charles Burns—cartoonist, illustrator, and official cover artist of the Believer—has culled the best stories from graphic novels, pamphlet comics, newspapers, magazines, mini-comics, and the web to create this cutting-edge collection. Featuring the work of such luminaries as Chris Ware, KAZ, and Robert Crumb, this volume is "a genuine salute to comics" (Houston Chronicle).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his introduction, guest editor Burns admits that most of the artists therein were already well known to me... if you're a reasonably talented cartoonist, it's hard to stay under the radar for long. So many of the usual suspects are in this volume. There's Adrian Tomine, with a particularly funny excerpt from his charged epic of postmillennial self-hatred, Shortcomings. Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb deliver one of their droll, kvetchy riffs on anachronisms, from the New Yorker. Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Peter Bagge, Tony Millionaire and Gilbert Hernandez are all present. Whereas this recitation of familiar names would in most other circumstances prove to be a minus, here it seems simply a recognition that the comics world may just be small enough that the core of truly excellent artists can (unlike print fiction) still be counted in the dozens, not the hundreds. Still, Burns and Co. have also dug up less expected pieces, including a number of Tim Hensley's wildly subversive Archie-esque deconstructions from Mome and Kevin Huizenga's surprisingly heartfelt take on the dot-com bust, Glenn Ganges in Pulverize. A collection of the mostly expected, maybe, but never less than satisfying. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

JESSICA ABEL is the author of the graphic novel La Perdida as well as two collections of stories and drawings from her series Artbabe. MATT MADDEN is a cartoonist and the author of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Together they are the authors of Drawing Words and Writing Pictures.

MATT MADDEN is a cartoonist and the author of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Together, they are the authors of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures.

CHARLES BURNS grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His work rose to prominence in Art Spiegelman's Raw magazine in the mid-1980s and took off from there, for an extraordinary range of comics and projects, from Iggy Pop album covers to ads for Altoids. He's illustrated covers for Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He was also tapped as the official cover artist for The Believer magazine at its inception in 2003. His eagerly awaited graphic novel Black Hole, published in 2005, received over a dozen Harvey Awards. Burns, along with several other prominent graphic artists, collaborated on Fear(s) of the Dark, an animated French horror film now touring the US. Burns lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two daughters.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1ST edition (October 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 061898965X
• ISBN-13: 978-0618989652
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #398,987 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My review for [...], October 1, 2009

By 

William Hoffknecht "SC2NewSCast com" (Fernley, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Best American Comics 2009 (Hardcover)

If you are a fan of comics, cartooning, and all forms of American creativity, this is one of the few books that you should be sure to pick up every year.

This is an anthology of various cartoonists that is the comic versions of the short story anthologies that come out every year and generally are one of the few places where you are find great, creative, and new writing that is worth reading.

This years issue is edited by the Harvey-Award winning cartoonist Charles Burns and he does an excellent job, starting with a wonderful introduction and following with comics by a wide range of artists including Kaz, Mimi Pond, Art Spiegelman, R. Crumb, Tim Hensley, Laura Park, and Koren Shadmi. Along with these great artists are many many more making up over 300 pages of excellent reading.

These anthologies are excellent because even if you read the entire thing and find only one cartoonist that you like, it is hard to think that you would have discovered that cartoonist anywhere else and now you have a newly found artist that speaks to you. This is another A+ collection and I do not see them going downhill anytime soon. Cartooning is starting a new era in what they can do and say, and this book contains a wide-range of those selections. It is worth every penny.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The ongoing series The Best American Comics returns in a 2009 edition, December 18, 2009

By 

GraphicNovelReporter.com (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Best American Comics 2009 (Hardcover)

The ongoing series The Best American Comics returns in a 2009 edition, this time edited by Charles Burn (the remarkable creator behind Black Hole). As always, series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden oversee the whole process, and, as usual, the collection is an eclectic yet charming mix of light and dark, truth and whimsy, and, of course, varying degrees of quality.

The hardest part about reading gigantic collections such as this is switching gears from one story to the next. To that end, Burns does a great job of keeping the flow seamless (some transitions work so well you can't help but notice them; I particularly like the flow from Dan Zettwoch's chaotic Spirit Duplicator to Matt Broersma's more calmly considered The Company).

The book hits some of the biggest names to release work in the past year (Art Spiegelman, naturally, as well as Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, and Gilbert Hernandez). Works from Tim Hensley both open and close the book. The overall tone of the book seems quiet and reflective, which perhaps makes the final edition of this series this decade end on the right note. That somehow seems reflective of where the industry is now.

The Best American Comics 2009 is a very nice retrospective of the year in review. It's a nice collection for new comics readers, who will get a powerful sense, almost immediately, of the gigantic breadth of the industry. Longtime readers will enjoy it too, especially because only the most voracious of comics readers would already have read everything inside its pages, and the joys of discovering a new talent is always one of the greatest pleasures of a well-done collection like this.

-- John Hogan

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars variety of styles, November 1, 2009

By 

D. Homsher (Lancaster, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Best American Comics 2009 (Hardcover)

I enjoyed the wide variety of visual and writing styles presented in this collection. However, my impression was that there were too many dark, strange, and/or enigmatic selections. I was often left searching for the point (maybe reading them in the morning rather than at night would have helped). My grade B+.