The Best American
Comics 2011
Buy at Powell’s

I think I’m finally sold on The Best American Comics as a series.

I’ve always understood that these books aren’t necessarily for me, but for that friend who keeps expressing interest in comics but balks when I try to hand her a graphic novel (this is a metaphorical friend for me — you, however, may have one). This friend is well suited to an anthology — if there’s something she doesn’t like, well, it’s over pretty quickly.

But I think within the past couple of years, series editor Jessica Abel and Matt Madden have figured out the voice they want these books to have. I do think guest editor Neil Gaiman did a good job with last year’s collection, but looking back, there was some of a sense of “Look at all these hip and cool indie creators!” about it. He made fun and thoughtful choices and I would’ve gladly given it to a friend newly interested in comics. I just didn’t need to own it myself.

In Alison Bechdel‘s hands, The Best American Comics 2011 (2011, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), on the other hand, is a book I would absolutely own (as well as, of course, give it to my friend interested in comics).

I love Bechdel already, but she absolutely won me over in her introduction to this collection where she pointed out how few women these collections have contained (and calls herself out for not doing that great of a job on that part — there’s a chart and everything) and also points out she didn’t manage to include any black creators in this collection. I admire her willingness to show the shortcoming in terms of diversity of this volume.

I admire the diversity of selections Bechdel has picked. Yes, of course creators like Chris Ware and Jaime Hernandez show up here, but so do Kate Beaton and Gabrielle Bell, who both deserve to be included just as much. There were even some creators I wasn’t familiar with, such as Kevin Mutch and Angie Wang. As many comics that have passed through my life in the past year, it’s a thrill to see something new.

I also love Bechdel’s willingness to embrace and showcase the weirder side of indie comics, from Michael DeForge‘s grotesquely colorful “Queen” to the excerpt from Dash Shaw‘s Body World. Surprisingly though, the book never feels alienating or like there’s an attempt to be shocking. There’s definitely some dark subject matter and imagery, like Gabby Schulz (Ken Dahl)’s “New Year’s, 2004″ and Julia Gfrörer‘s “Fear of Fire” but those stories are balanced with lighter ones, like Joey Allison Sayers‘ “Pet Cat” and Jillian Tamaki‘s “Domestic Men of Mystery.”

As all collections go, not everything here is going to appeal to everyone, but I think that’s partially by design. Still, Bechdel has selected comics that are both accessible and representative of where independent comics are now.

The Best American Comics 2011 is beautifully and thoughtfully compiled collection of comics. Forget about that friend you usually buy these collections for. Buy this one for yourself. (But then maybe let said friend borrow it when you’re done.)

Advance reading copy provided through NetGalley.

I already knew this, of course, since I’ve met them before, but the two of them are incredibly smart, witty and fun. They’re clearly good friends and have an easy-going rapport with each other. While I know they’ve made presentations like this before, it didn’t feel over-rehearsed or artificial. They were very natural on stage.

The majority of the audience last night did seem to be those who attended productions and other events at the Folger, but there was a group of the messenger-bag types (like myself) and, surprisingly, a few parents with older children (preteen to middle teens, I’d say). But overall, it wasn’t really a crowd of comic-book readers. Obviously, this title is reaching a type of person who usually doesn’t read them.

McCreery and Del col started out with how the idea for the comic was born (Kill Bill had just come out and so they were joking about other “Bills” they could kill. In one of their many jokes about being Canadian, they said they rejected William Shatner because he was one of them) and that they originally thought it could be a video game before shelving the idea for a while.

They then ran through a basic summary of the plot (including a sneak preview of issue #9 that will be out next week) and a rundown of the characters. They discussed the changes they made to the ones they’ve picked and said that while they’ve played loose with some of the details, they try to keep them recognizable and just extrapolate what would’ve been next for everyone.

Most telling for me was when McCreery mentioned that he has a lot of teenage girls telling them they really like the take on Juliet in Kill Shakespeare. I tend to agree — Romeo & Juliet is not my favorite play by Shakespeare, but Juliet was the driving force and decision-maker for most of the events there. It’s great to see her get to be strong.

Del Col and McCreery also showed some before-and-after examples of how comic pages get made, which was probably more interesting to the rest of the Folgers audience than it was to me. (They continually praised artist Andy Belanger, who couldn’t be there since they were making him stay in Canada and draw their comic.)

They both talked a lot about that reading Shakespeare on the page can be kind of overwhelming and boring but his work is pretty well-suited to comics (I feel like comics do have a great deal in common with theater — more so than film). They’ve said that both teachers and students have been pretty excited by Kill Shakespeare and it’s created more interest in the source material.

In one of the night’s lighter moments (and there were many), Del Col said he wants action figures, because to him, that “equals success.”

The audience question-and-answer portion was a mixed bag, as they usually are. I was most surprised at the answer to a woman’s question of “Is this your day job?” They both said yes, and McCreery said before they started, they worked very hard on crafting a business plan. I think that’s an excellent thing.

The Sandman and Neil Gaiman came up a few times in the Q&A portion, since, you know, Gaiman did write some stories involving Shakespeare in his comic. People wanted to know if that was an influence, and McCreery said he was kind of intimidated by the comparison, but that Kill Shakespeare is a different thing. It’s not better or worse, but just different.

That did make me think about something though — The Sandman reached (and still reaches) a lot of people who don’t read comics (and in fact, there are a lot of people who just read The Sandman and don’t ever branch out beyond that). It’s hard to say if Kill Shakespeare will still be read 20 years from now (but you never know) but it is connecting with non-comics audiences right now. It’s a very different comic than The Sandman, sure, and Del Col and McCreery are very different writers, but they do share Gaiman’s interest connecting with fans. I think there are worse comparisons.

ComicsDC‘s Mike Rhode questioned the loose geography of where Kill Shakespeare is set. Del Col pointed out that they just mention it’s in a “strange land” that’s vaguely European and vaguely in the middle ages. They compared it to the island from Lost before joking it was actually set in Canada.

Someone asked about their future plans, and both said they have more Kill Shakespeare planned out (they would love to use The Tempest) and they’re currently writing a screenplay and want to do video games and more.

But ultimately, they’ve been happy with Kill Shakespeare and the reaction it’s received so far. Both seem genuinely appreciative of it. McCreery said he just wants someone to pick up the comic and think “It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s not half-bad.”

Del Col said that should be the blurb on the back of the book.

Lenore: Cooties
Buy at Amazon.com

Roman Dirge‘s Lenore is about a dead 10-year-old girl. Which is to say, Lenore will basically be a dead 10-year-old girl forever. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by her longevity.

I don’t actually remember when I first knew about Lenore. I knew about the comic although I never really read it, but I do remember watching the animated shorts made for Sony’s Screenblast (you can view them on Dirge’s site). Still, Dirge’s comic, along with Jhonen Vasquez’s Johnny the Homicidal Maniac did a lot to bring in non-comics readers to comics, partially due to their sale at mall stores like Hot Topic as well as the two creator’s association with Invader ZIM.

I’m happy Lenore has found at home at Titan Books and Lenore: Cooties (2010, Titan Books) is the third and final volume of Dirge’s original run of Lenore.

This isn’t for everyone. A comic about a dead 10-year-old, her ex-vampire friend who is now in the form of a ragdoll and her obsessive suitor/stalker Mr. Gosh is going to have pretty limited appeal, after all. And then you combine that with all kinds of gross-out humor and gore, and well, this definitely becomes the sort of thing teenagers enjoy giggling over and hiding from their parents.

It’s self-consciously subversive, obviously, but what Dirge is doing here is actually playful. It’s certainly twisted and pretty sick, but it never feels overly cruel. I don’t feel there is a compassion underneath all the comedic gore — that’s not the point of this, after all — but Dirge is obviously having fun seeing what he’ll let himself get away with. It’s hard to not feel a bit charmed by that, even if this isn’t for you.

Dirge’s art has a kind of make-it-up-as-he-goes-along feel to it, with his trademark thick black outlines and handwritten word balloons that threaten to take over some panels. Still, he has a good sense of comedic timing, even when his punchlines are disgusting, and I enjoyed how much it kept throwing the unexpected at me.

(And if the “real life” strip of Dirge’s father scaring him as a child by doing things like hiding under his bed to grab his ankle and hiding in his closet are to be believed, Dirge has obviously come by this perspective naturally.)

The washed-out colors (except for the deep bloody reds) in this edition are a nice addition to the original black-and-white artwork. Also featured is an art gallery, bonus strips, and a foreword by none other than Neil Gaiman, who praises Lenore as his favorite little dead girl in all of literature.

I will say, at this point, you will probably know if Lenore is for you. If it is, you really can’t do any better. For me, it doesn’t quite match up with my sensibilities at this point in my life, but I was more entertained than I expected to be.

Review copy provided by Titan Books.

The Best American Comics 2010
Buy at Amazon.com

I have a strange relationship with The Best American Comics collections. I understand that they’re not really for me, a comics fan, but rather for people who tend to collect The Best American [Insert Subject Here] books. Or for comics fans to give to their non-comics-reading friends (people have those?) to prove to them that comics are cool.

I’ve felt a little critical of The Best American Comics in the past, and that could just be that I wasn’t that familiar with them, but I’ve always felt they had a somewhat limited perspective on literary comics. You were going to find the approved creators — you know, the kinds of people who create “graphic novels” and those that your non-comics friends would possibly read, but not much else.

And then I read Neil Gaiman was the guest editor for the 2010 edition. Yes, I kind of rolled my eyes at bit there. I like Gaiman as a writer, yes, and his contributions to comics have been notable, but they’ve mostly been in the past and his work is fairly mainstream (maybe not initially, but I think once he’s showing up on CBS Sunday Morning, yes, he’s mainstream). He wouldn’t have been my first pick to put together a book of the best comics of the year.

However, Best American Comics 2010 is pretty cool and I think a lot of that is because of Gaiman’s perspective. I think since he’s not as closely connected to comics as someone else would’ve been, he’s more open-minded in his selections. The stories being told are what’s important here — not who is made them.

Yes, you have a lot of the usual suspects (too much Chris Ware for my tastes, but then, I’m not really a Ware fan), but you also have Theo Ellsworth, Bryan Lee O’Malley, C. Tyler, Lilli Carre. In other words, you have a lot of my people. It’s a wonderful mix of high-profile releases, like R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis and Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel’s The Alcoholic and smaller releases, like Jesse Reklaw‘s Slow Wave and Fred Chao‘s Johnny Hiro.

That’s awesome. That’s what comics is. It covers a broad range of styles and subjects. It encompasses creators and publishers of all ages, experiences and fame. This didn’t feel like “Oh, here’s a bunch of creators you’ve probably heard of and one guy who got a Xeric.” It felt more like “This is what was great in comics between Aug. 2008 and Sept. 2009.” I loved seeing a lot of the comics I loved in that time period showing up here.

Is the perspective still a little limited? Maybe. But overall, this ended up feeling a lot like a collection of comics I’ve read or would read.

So yes, it’s still not for me, since I’ve read a lot of these comics (and I bet you have to). But would I give it to a friend or family member who was interested in comics but didn’t know where to start? Absolutely. That’s what this book is designed to do and it does it incredibly well.

Advanced reading copy provided by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt through NetGalley.

I have two more Toon Books to review, which I should to get to this week (tomorrow, perhaps).

This is his favorite trailer for Coraline:

I was very grumbly and ambivalent on this movie at first — mostly because it wasn’t going to be my vision of Coraline (it’s probably the book of Neil Gaiman’s I most related to) but then I was won over by how awesome it looks. I am very excited to see it.

(And I will, one day soon, review P. Craig Russell’s comic version of it. When I remember what pile of books it is in.)

I certainly didn’t think my idea was unique and I have no clue if Eric San Juan knows of it. But it’s a lot of fun to see someone else’s take on the series. I loved re-reading it and discovering new things in the process. It delights me that someone else is doing the same thing and recording his thoughts on it. Obviously, I don’t agree with everything he’s said, but I’m also surprised at some of the conclusions we both came to, like that Dream Country is where Neil Gaiman finds his voice in the series. I’m also surprised at where we differ — he likes Season of Mists much more than I did this time around.

I also admire his ability to write about each volume every week day — I could barely manage one per week.

Both those things are interesting on their own, but not so much worthy of their own post.

But I do feel the Coraline trailer is worthy of one.

OK, so it wasn’t a comic (although I did quite like P. Craig Russell’s comic version of it, which I’ll get around to reviewing here eventually), but I like Coraline. I was dubious about the movie at first but I’m now squarely in the “WANT TO SEE NOW” camp on this one.

I do think it’s funny that Neil Gaiman is not mentioned anywhere in the trailer. Not that I noticed, anyway.

What has changed in these 14 years? Well, for one thing, I can tell you there was no young adult novel that featured a young female Neil Gaiman fan as one of the major characters 14 years ago.

It’s impossible to know quite how The Sandman changed comics. Yes, the title gave rise to the Vertigo imprint and showed there was interest in adult stories (even if most of those take the sex-and-violence bit of “adult” too much to heart). It gave creators permission to make titles that were finite from the beginning. It opened a door for titles like Hellboy, with their mishmash of history, literature and mythology. It put comics in the hands of people who never picked up a superhero title, who in turn, put comics into the hands of other people who’d never read comics either.

And it was – and is — read by a lot of girls and women. This is undeniably important.

The comic book industry is still trying to figure out what women and girls want. They give us things like the Minx imprint, which is, at most, well-intentioned. They try out titles like Mary Jane Loves Spider-Man. They create manga-style comics. They do all the gimmicks they can think of. They never stop to think girls and women may just want something that doesn’t set out to appeal to them. They just want something that’s good.

Women read The Sandman because it’s good. Yeah, it’s a cliché that boys recommend it to their girlfriends (a few weeks ago, a man at the bar was overheard doing so to his date). And I’d gladly recommend it to women. Not in a general “you’re a woman so you’ll like this” kind of way, but to a woman I’d think would like it? Yes, there’s no question there. (Of course, I’d also gladly recommend it to men who I think would like it.)

Personally, it opened up a new world to explore. It was a world of literature and myth, of music and art. It was one I fit into. It’s one I could see myself being a part of. It’s maybe a little dramatic, but feeling trapped in the halls of high school, it was important to me to know that there was more out there. I’m not trying to give it too much credit, but I think The Sandman showed me who I could be, if I wanted. (I was 14 when I first read The Doll’s House. Rose Walker was 21. That seemed impossibly distant to me. It’s funny for me to think that I’m as far from that age now as I was then.)

I’m glad that Neil Gaiman is currently associating himself with Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls. This will only mean that a new generation of teenage girls (of certain sensibilities, of course) will want to know who this “Neil Gaiman” is and pick up The Sandman. No bad can come of this.

I still love the comic. Maybe I love it more now than I did, but it’s in a different way. I see the craft (or sometimes, the lack thereof) of it, I see the beauty and the storytelling. It’s far from perfect, but I can’t think of anything else that covers so much history, encompasses so many characters. Like I said, The Sandman just has so much stuff in it. Maybe “24 Hours” freaked you out but “Ramadan” made you cry. Maybe you wanted to smack Dream sometimes and then other times you just felt sorry for him. The Sandman feels like it set out from the beginning to be huge and ambitious. Maybe it didn’t always make it to where it should’ve gone, but it’s a fabulous, lovely series.

It deserves its reputation. I’m proud to own it. I think if I learned anything by rereading it, I learned that. Or, at the very least, just had it re-affirmed.

(And also, it was a lot of fun rereading it. I recommend it!)

The Wake Buy from tfaw.com

Three things first off:

1. The hardcover of The Wake is beautifully presented and I think the cover is my absolutely favorite Dave McKean image. So perfect and gorgeous. I feel lucky to have the book in this form.
2. Matthew’s comments at Dream’s funeral make me cry. Like in that impossible-to-read-anymore-can’t-see-through-the-tears-have-to-put-the-book-down way. Every time.
3. The pun of the title is an obvious one, but I still love it.

It’s hard to know what to say about The Wake, really. After the manic The Kindly Ones, this is a quiet, meditative conclusion.

Michael Zulli’s intricate art in the first four parts provides a great counterpoint to Marc Hempl’s blocky, saturated art in The Kindly Ones. The contrast is a fitting one. There’s little action here. It’s mostly just characters talking, trading stories about Dream. I especially like his old lovers exchanging their thoughts about him. I like seeing Richard Madoc again (who, until he appeared, I’d forgotten about). I also like Batman and Martian Manhunter showing up here. While Neil Gaiman did get farther and farther away from trying to put this story in the DC Universe, I like the little reminder of “yes, friends, this was, in fact a comic book by the same people who publish Batman.” It’s a subtle bit of self-awareness.

While the three issues of “The Wake” and its epilogue, “Sunday Mourning,” do a good job of wrapping up the major plot points, I liked the feeling that these stories weren’t over. These characters are going to go off and have other adventures. I just may not get to watch. The Sandman exists in such a rich, lovely world that I feel like I was just given small glimpses into.

Hob’s decision to live in the end is beautiful and hopeful – it’s a choice that Dream couldn’t make for himself. Gwen even jokes about “they all lived happily ever after.” (And I know that he has a black girlfriend in the end was, in part, a reaction to that most of the black women in the comic ended up dead.) We know, from having read this comic, that there probably aren’t too many cleanly happy endings out there, but we leave most everyone at the point of a new beginning.

“Exiles” is a strange story – almost unnecessary, except that Jon J. Muth’s style here is amazing and for one line – “Sometimes I suspect that we build our traps ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement the while.” That is, essentially, the theme of all of The Sandman. Dream was his own prisoner. The only way he could find the way out of his cage was by dying.

And it’s impossible to not read “The Tempest” without injecting Gaiman himself into the story. Shakespeare is at the end of his career, writing his final play, and Gaiman’s wrapping up a nine-year long project. Shakespeare’s comments about family neglect, using personal tragedies in his work may or may not be autobiographical, but it’s pretty clear that any creative work involves making some sacrifice. It’s Gaiman’s explanation as to why he didn’t want to do this anymore, in one way or another.

And it’s the perfect ending to an amazing series. I closed the book and was left feeling thoughtful and complete. There’s other stories we could’ve been told, sure, but I don’t think I could really ask for The Sandman to be anything other than it was.

Except, for you know, being told about Alianora. But tiny, tiny complaint.

–

In a few days (next week?), I’ll do a final wrap-up on The Sandman. But I will say this now: I am absolutely glad I reread it. I don’t know what took me so long to do it. I already knew the series well, but I was amazed at how much there was in it I didn’t remember or didn’t notice before. I’m sure, in a few years, if I reread it once again, there will be even more. I think that is what struck me this time – just how much stuff there is here.