The Best American Comics 2009 - Hardcover

CHARLES BURNS grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His work rose to prominence in Art Spiegelman’sRaw 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 forTime, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He was also tapped as the official cover artist forThe Believer magazine at its inception in 2003. His eagerly awaited graphic novelBlack 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. JESSICA ABEL is the author of the graphic novel La Perdida as well as two collections of stories and drawings from her seriesArtbabe. MATT MADDEN is a cartoonist and the author of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Together, they are the authors ofDrawing Words & Writing Pictures.

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.)
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