The Best Comics of 2011 Project
I recently found myself agreeing — as I often do — with Tony Isabella on the issue of the Best American Comics series of annual anthologies. Tony’s recent blog post took the series and editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden to task for not being truly representative of comics in North America. While I was initially excited about the series, year after year I’ve been more disappointed and felt more distant from it, and Tony nicely summed up why:
story from Dark Horse, Image, IDW, Marvel, Boom!, or any other publisher of comics entertainment was good enough to appear…”
Apparently (I have no hard facts one way or the other, it appears to be “internet true”), DC and Marvel have refused to participate in the collection. Perhaps it’s because of legal reasons, or perhaps, like the average superhero junkie, they can’t see anything as comics unless it’s filled with people in spandex kicking the shit out of each other. Who can say?
A discussion about all this quickly developed on Twitter, and finally it came down to myself and of of my favourite cartoonists — and former TWC contributor — Diana Tamblyn and I talking about what we would do if we had total control over a project like Best American Comics. This theoretical collection really would comprise the best of all comics published in 2011, including Marvel, DC and other major publishers. If we think they make great comics, we want them included.
Diana and I plan to reveal our full list of the best comics of 2011 soon, and we’ll try to include links to the artist websites, links to buy, and links to sample pages and stories (where available). Hopefully our little project will better represent the best in comics from the past 12 months.
— Alan David Doane
