From Publishers Weekly
This book represents a welcome and long overdue idea: a survey of outstanding American work in the comics medium from May 2003 to December 2004. This sampler demonstrates the creative scope of contemporary comics and points out new directions for comics readers, old and new, to follow. It also provides a sense of a comics community, although unfortunately, Dark Horse and Marvel declined to participate. The selections favor alternative comics, with a smattering of superhero material. But whereas a "year's best" collection of SF short stories includes entire works, this anthology necessarily provides excerpts of longer comics. Readers will get a good sense of the various artists' styles, but this limitation does not always serve the writers well. For example, those unacquainted with Alan Moore's
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen will not realize key story points from this brief excerpt. Short text introductions to each segment would have been helpful. Nonetheless, some excerpts come off impressively, such as Jaime Hernandez's vignette from
Love and Rockets, and especially a somber segment from Joe Kubert's
Yossel. Neil Gaiman provides strong bookends with his introduction and part of his and artist P. Craig Russell's superb "Death" tale from
Sandman: Endless Nights.
(Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
The year's-best prairie fire reaches comics and, since comics is a medium rather than a genre, form, or subject, could conceivably ignite several new anthology series. This book covers three and, in its "Rest of the Best" section, more forms of comics published from June 2003 through December 2004. The graphic novels sampled include Craig Thompson's fictionalized first-love memoir,
Blankets (2003); Joe Kubert's story of a boy involved in the Warsaw ghetto uprising,
Yossel (2003); Anders Nilssen's coming--of-age parable,
Dogs and Water (2004); and several works that originated as comic-book serials. Several of the comic-book excerpts--the fourth
Fables story arc and the passages from Aaron A's
Serenity Rose; Eric Shanower's
Iliad retelling,
Age of Bronze; and Kyle Baker's stint on
Plastic Man, for instance--by now appear in full context within graphic novels, as do the
manga snippets and some of the "Rest." With a couple of exceptions, the excerpts stand well on their own, making this a fine display of the variety of the expanding contemporary comics universe.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
