The Best American Comics 2006 (The Best American Series)

#319
Title: The Best American Comics 2006 (The Best American Series)
Guest Editor: Harvey Pekar
Series Editor: Anne Elizabeth Moore
Year: 2006
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
316  pages

Moore and Pekar have chosen a good assortment of comics for this inaugural volume in The Best American Series. Comics chosen represent a range of graphic styles and topics. Notably, manga and Heavy Metal are absent. All of the comics, whether factual reports from the battlefield or fantasies about life after death, have a linear narrative (though Dart's narrative is plural). Crumb, as is often the case, provides the most visual texture and richness (though Reklaw does a creditable job with background detail and Barry fills every space with baroque oddities and scrawls. The sequence generally worked, though I'd have placed Dart's "RabbitHead," with its multiple simultaneous narratives, immediately after Hall's "La Rubia Loca," a long story about a woman who has what looks to me like a manic episode on a Green Tortoise bus to Mexico. Interesting introductions and bios round out the collection My one complaint is the format. Some comics are reproduced so small that even with reading glasses and a bright light, I had a hard time reading some text. I'm sure I missed some visual detail as well.