The Best American Comics 2007
Edited by Chris Ware
Houghton Mifflin, 341 pages, $22
For at least 50 years, 10-year-olds paid for comics with allowance money. They carried their books curled in a back blue-jeans pocket. They read belly down in the unnatural light that shines on finished basement floors. Like water parks and double-pepperoni pizza and the great debate over whether Brooke Shields really showed her boobs in “The Blue Lagoon,” comics worked because they respected their target audience’s essential interests — not least corny jokes, colorful costumes, loud explosions and intergalactic travel. Comic books put children, or children’s projections of themselves as adults, at the center of the action. Good guys triumphed over bad guys. Girls, good or bad, wore extremely tight tops.
Then came “Maus” — or, more precisely, Raw, the avant-garde comics magazine anthology edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, first published in 1980. From its pages sprang much of “Maus,” Spiegelman’s book-length Holocaust memoir, 1992 winner of a special Pulitzer Prize. Raw was not the first underground alternative art cartoon anthology, and Spiegelman, likewise, had his predecessors. But “Maus” was the work that made obvious to intelligent readers that comics — Art! Literature! Together! Shazam! — could be about anything. Fifteen years later, it is one of the suddenly mature form’s two crowning masterpieces.
The other is “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,” a family and society novel of Joycean scope and precision by Chicagoan Chris Ware.
Since 2000, the year “Jimmy Corrigan” was published, Ware has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and the latest Penguin edition of Voltaire’s “Candide.” His work has been chosen for separate exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He has edited or helped edit at least three major anthologies of the best of the last century of American comics.
Now Ware has been called away once more from the drawing board, this time to edit “The Best American Comics 2007,” which includes exactly zero kids stories or superhero adventures. For several reasons, it is a strange book, and that strangeness speaks, I think, to why reading comics may currently be almost as challenging as it is rewarding.
Few of the pieces in this book are whole works, by which I mean what Aristotle meant: stories with a beginning, a middle and an end. Instead they are excerpts from complete books or book-length narratives, among them Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” a memoir of her relationship with her father, a town funeral director; Adrian Tomine’s “Shortcomings,” about a Japanese-American movie-theater manager looking for love with all the wrong races; and Charles Burns’ “Black Hole,” about suburban teenagers monstrously transformed by sex.
The excerpt effect is a little like forced channel-flipping: We enter a story already in progress and leave long before its conclusion. Closer to form, it’s as if “The Best American Short Stories” published Chapter 5 of Richard Russo’s new novel, or Pages 92 to 114 of the latest Amy Tan. In fact the short-story anthology explicitly excludes any work its editors know to be part of a novel in progress.
If “The Best American Comics” won’t (yet) adopt this code, it’s not Ware’s fault as an editor, but rather as a role model. Since the popular and critical successes of “Maus” and “Jimmy Corrigan,” the cartoonists of greatest talent and ambition are putting their best efforts into books rather than one-off strips or episodic stories.
What they write and draw, they write and draw for adults. Their work, which simply happens to be composed of sequential boxes of words and pictures rather than text or art alone, demands and rewards many hours of contemplation. While the popular-music industry steadily shifts studio time allotment from full-length albums to three-minute singles to ringtone-ready 15-second hooks, literary cartoonists can now count themselves among our nation’s leading advocates for longer attention spans. Is it possible merely to sample their offerings without selling them short?
Let me make things more confusing. Most cartoonists still publish their work serially — some in alternative weeklies; some in independently written, industry-backed or self-published pamphlets; some in comics-minded literary journals or literary-minded comics journals. The two major publishers of art comics put out and sell seasonal showcases of work in progress by the creators in their stables. While the advantages of the serial tradition are obvious for aficionados (a steady fix), comic-book shops (the latest and greatest goods) and cartoonists (deadlines), the average book-review reader may not be among those served. I remember reading “Jimmy Corrigan” as it appeared in weekly, one-page installments in New City. The strip was formally stunning, but it made no more sense to me than the architectural blueprints of Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion. When I read the completed novel, I was shocked. Put together, those incomprehensible installments constituted the best book of fiction published in the new century.
All anthologies, of course, are tasting menus. Their virtue is introducing you to work you would never have discovered otherwise. “The Best American Comics,” however, is not only a tasting menu but a tasting menu of a tasting menu — even a tasting menu of a tasting menu of a tasting menu, in that at least one-third of its 33 entries comes from other comics anthologies published in the preceding year.
“Any good annual anthology should have a sort of desert island condensation to it,” Ware writes in his introduction. “[E]ven if every single comic produced between August 2005 and August 2006 suddenly and mysteriously vaporized, this book should still at least hint at what was happening during those months.” This ethos strikes me as that of a collector or curator first and reader second — and I’m afraid it is the ethos of larger comics culture.
“The Best American Comics” is beautiful — more beautiful, for example, than my edition of the Bible, or “The Riverside Shakespeare,” or the Everyman Library edition of “The Brothers Karamazov.” Of the nine current categories in Houghton Mifflin’s annual “Best American” anthology series (including, besides short stories, travel writing, science and nature writing, and spiritual writing), only this — the newest — apparently requires hardcover binding, lavishly produced endpapers, a dust jacket and 350 full-color, cardstock-quality pages.
There is such a thing as being too beautiful for pleasure, and the medium formerly known as “the funnies” may have grown up faster than its fans. Sight unseen, readers might have anticipated a collection they could take on a bus or train ride, whiling away a commute. They could prop it up on their knees in bed, staying up an hour or two too late each night for a week. Waiting for warmer weather or a cheap flight, they might tote it to the beach with suntan lotion and a sandwich. Well, no. At almost 21/2 pounds, a brick like this would shatter commuters’ iPod screens, crush bed-readers’ kneecaps and squash beyond recognition any beachgoer’s unlucky sack lunch. “The Best American Comics” is built to occupy a coffee table.
I have a better idea, borrowed from the journal McSweeney’s, which surely borrowed it from somewhere else in the happy cannibalism of American culture. My idea is this: “The Best American Comics” shouldn’t be a book. It should be a bookcase. Each of the selections should be printed separately in a little stapled pamphlet that would fit inside. Then readers could buy each year’s anthology and invite over their friends. They could order pizza and pour all the pamphlets out onto their basement shag carpeting. They could divvy up the comics and sprawl side by side, reading, swapping. When it got late, the crowd could crawl into sleeping bags and use flashlights. They would finish when everyone had read every pamphlet. Any leftover pizza could be eaten cold for breakfast.
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Jeremy N. Smith writes regularly about books and comic books.
