Dead Trees

Another year, and another edition of the Best American Comics will be hitting shelves soon, bringing us the picks of this year’s honorable guest editor: Neil Gaiman. Fangirl that I am, the name alone was enough for me to find an advanced digital copy and give this 352-page tomb a read through. Gaiman’s selections are (mostly) great, and he is very funny in his introduction as he struggles along with us to come to grips with the ideas of “Best” and “American” in an international comics world.

“Best” is pretty subjective and, as my father always said, taste is all in your mouth. So to give you a flavor of what the 2010 edition has to offer, allow me to present the good, the bad, the weird, and the historical.

The Good: There is a lot of good here. Lilli Carre’s The Lagoon about a mysterious water-monster with a haunting voice has me wanting to go out and pick up the full story. 20 days of American Elf strips humorously tell the story of the birth of Jame Kochalka’s second son in 2007. And Peter Bagge’s The War on Fornication had me up in arms over people wanting to control my reproductive rights.

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Breathers by Justin Madson is a series of self-published comics that I first found out about at SPX.  It's up to Issue #5 now and it remains an intriguing premise with some great characters and story arcs.  (There are actually six books as there is an Issue #0)  From what I can tell jumping around the web, it's criminal how few mentions of it there are, considering how good it is.  Some of that is simply due to its minimal presence on the web (which it would be well suited to as each book's chapters are episodic in nature) but it's also just another reminder that simply producing good work isn't always enough to connect with a big audience.

The world of Breathers is one where a virus has rendered the air unfit for humans to breathe without the assistance of a breather — a mask to filter out the virus. The world is fairly well-adapted to this new status quo when the story starts although people do remember the world before.  Madson does a nice job of thinking through the implications of this situation, but this is not a hard core science fiction type story; it seems more interested in its characters and is even prone to bits of magical realism.

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Chris Cantrell, long-time webcomics creator, has a new collection of his most recent webcomic, Please Rewind, called At The Movies (We reviewed Cantrell's other webcomic The Asylumantics here.)  It's the second collection of comics, from roughly 2007 to 2008 in the archives on the website.  It clocks in at 48 pages filled with almost 100 comics (in black and white with a color cover).

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