The Best American Comics 2013

by Jeff Smith (Editor), Jessica Abel (Editor), Matt Madden (Editor)

Overview

The Best American Comics showcases the work of both established and up-and-coming contributors. Editor Jeff Smith—creater of the classic comic Bone, a comedy/adventure about three lost cousins from Boneville—has culled the best stories from graphic novels, pamphlet comics, newspapers, magazines, mini-comics, and web comics to create this cutting-edge collection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544103733
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	10/08/2013
Series:	Best American Series
Sold by:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	171 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

JEFF SMITH launched a company in 1991 called Cartoon Books to publish his comic book Bone. Against all odds, the small company flourished, building a reputation for quality stories and artwork. Word of mouth, critical acclaim, and a string of major awards, which continues to this day, helped propel Cartoon Books and Bone to the forefront of the comic book industry.
JESSICA ABEL is the author of the graphic novel La Perdida. MATT MADDEN is a cartoonist best known for his book 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Together, Abel and Madden are the authors of Mastering Comics and Drawing Words and Writing Pictures.

MATT MADDEN is a cartoonist and the author of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Together, they are the authors of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures.

Editorial Reviews

09/16/2013
Acclaimed cartoonist Smith (Bone, RASL) collects 30 pieces in this year’s anthology, and his taste crosses plenty of genres: Alison Bechdel, a former editor of the collection, has a heart-wrenching excerpt from her memoir Are You My Mother?; in another space-time entirely, a lost time traveler ponders Star Trek episodes while wandering in dinosaur country in Malachi Ward’s brilliantly funny “Top Five.” A scene from Craig Thompson’s Habibi reveals the plight of a woman forced into a sultan’s harem, and a young giant hunter confronts her scariest challenge—going it alone after her friends realize she has lied to them—in the kid-friendly fantasy Giants Beware, by newcomer duo Jorge Aguirre and Rafael Rosado. Artistically, Sam Alden’s work on the wordless The Haunter and Joseph Lambert’s Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller are standouts. The cartoonists included show plenty of gender diversity—women make up over a third of the total creators—but there is less racial diversity in evidence. The current narrative strength of the comics medium gets a solid showcase in this year’s volume, which should inspire much further reading. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"At its best, a gorgeous, glorious inferno of imagination."—Kirkus "The current narrative strength of the comics medium gets a solid showcase in this year’s volume, which should inspire much further reading."—Publishers Weekly  "We’re living in a new golden age of comics...and there isn’t a better example of this than the Best American Comics series...Fans of the genre will find a surprise or two, but this is the ideal book to hand to a comics neophyte with mature tastes who is ready to be astounded."—Booklist

From the Publisher

2013-09-15
The eighth volume of the series collects 30 examples of graphic storytelling--either in whole or as excerpts--from graphic novels, pamphlet comics, newspapers, magazines, minicomics and Web comics. Editor Smith (RASL, 2012, etc.) explains his selection criteria as "originality; grasp of the tools and syntax of panel-to-panel progression; and most important, if the thing surprised me, it was in." In terms of surprises, Michael Kupperman's "Scary Bathtub Stories" offers a hilariously absurdist, 1950s-style warning about the dangers of bathtubs, such as their ability to expose bathers to Lovecraft-ian beasties and horrific demises ("I can feel its eye-mouth on my genitals!!"). Wry wit and simple lines are on fine display in James Kochalka's excerpts from American Elf, his semiautobiographical, slice-of-life comic strip featuring the artist and his family (and a cat who scratched Kochalka's face "just because I tried to play him as a harmonica!"). The collection offers strong personal, emotional stories, the most striking being Derf Backderf's "The Strange Boy," excerpted from his fascinating memoir-cum–investigative journalism about his adolescent friendship with Jeffrey Dahmer. Backderf presents a sympathetic though creepy portrait of the future serial killer, made all the more perverse when viewed through the cartoonish, R. Crumb/Mad Magazine lens of his art. Another standout is Eleanor Davis' "Nita Goes Home," a near-future homecoming that ingeniously nails its science-fiction tropes, highlighted by a scene in which two sisters mourn their father's passing, clinging to each other and bawling while the suits they wear for protection against a degraded environment render their faces as expressionless bedsheet ghosts. The best panel work comes in Sam Alden's pulse-pounding "Turn Back," Sammy Harkham's fine-lined grotesquerie "A Husband and a Wife," Joseph Lambert's chalky depiction of a young Hellen Keller's world in "Discipline" and the percussive pulp punches of Tony Puryear's "Concrete Park: (Chapter 1)." While all the stories are executed crisply, some feel a bit pat (Vanessa Davis' "In the Rough") or uninspired (Faith Erin Hicks' "Raiders") or strain for cleverness (Grant Snider's "Four Comics"). At its best, a gorgeous, glorious inferno of imagination; at its worst, great art.

Kirkus Reviews