Brooks on Books: The Best American Comics 2007

This cool hardcover anthology is part of the "Best American..." series published annually by Houghton Mifflin. The "Best" part of the title indicates, well, that you can expect to read the best, but in his introductory remarks, editor Chris Ware does his best to purge that expectation and claims only to have picked out a bunch of things he liked.

Turns out the things he liked don't include anything with superheroes, or anything published by DC or Marvel, but I don't know if this series could get reprint rights to that kind of "mainstream" stuff, anyway. What you get here, and in the 2006 volume edited by Harvey Pekar, is an assortment of independent comics, many crude-looking, others gorgeous; many autobiographical (Ware defensively addresses the tendency of so many indie comics, as well as the ones he selects here, to be autobiographical and risk "navel-gazing"), others more abstract.

It's a compact yet hefty package, a well-designed book that will look good on your shelf. I don't know how much re-readability it has, though. Many of the selections are excerpts of larger works, which is a little frustrating at times. "Best American Comics" is better as a sampler of what's going on in indie comics today than it is as an enduring, complete piece of work in itself.

It's an anthology, so you'll like some of it and maybe not like some of it. I personally found more affecting work overall in the 2006 volume, but that's probably just the luck of the draw. I'd rate highest, to name a few, the autobiographical story from Alison Bechdel and the faux-autobiographical work of Adrian Tomine. My favorite in here is the amazing "Won't Get Licked Again," Dan Zettwoch's tale from the 1937 flood of Louisville. A lot of the excerpts and pieces in here don't linger as much as I'd hope, though, possibly because of their incomplete nature. They might motivate you to seek out more of that creator,

There is indeed a certain sameness that sets in after reading a bunch of reflective autobiographical works with similar tones, but then something like the bizarre story by "Rad Print" comes along and shakes you up...and you may appreciate the autobios again.

Many of the artists represented here are familiar names that probably turn up in all these anthologies: Ivan Brunetti, Lynda Berry, the Crumbs, Jeffrey Brown...Ware feels he has to explain why Daniel Clowes is not in here (he didn't make any comics in the year covered), and it sort of makes me wonder if a lot of these artists would automatically pick each other for these kinds of collections. Is there only one type of comic that qualifies as "good" in the hip world? I suspect the hardcore comic audience knows a lot of this material already. But Ware acknowledges this whole sort of thing and stresses that he doesn't claim to have read everything or even close to it.

You might want to leaf through this one before buying it, but there is a lot of good reading material in "The Best American Comics 2007." Don't sweat the impossibly definitive title, but rather enjoy this as a chance to look at a bunch of lesser-known work (to a general audience) being done in the world of comics.