I’ve felt a little critical of The Best American Comics in the past, and that could just be that I wasn’t that familiar with them, but I’ve always felt they had a somewhat limited perspective on literary comics. You were going to find the approved creators — you know, the kinds of people who create “graphic novels” and those that your non-comics friends would possibly read, but not much else.

And then I read Neil Gaiman was the guest editor for the 2010 edition. Yes, I kind of rolled my eyes at bit there. I like Gaiman as a writer, yes, and his contributions to comics have been notable, but they’ve mostly been in the past and his work is fairly mainstream (maybe not initially, but I think once he’s showing up on CBS Sunday Morning, yes, he’s mainstream). He wouldn’t have been my first pick to put together a book of the best comics of the year.

However, Best American Comics 2010 is pretty cool and I think a lot of that is because of Gaiman’s perspective. I think since he’s not as closely connected to comics as someone else would’ve been, he’s more open-minded in his selections. The stories being told are what’s important here — not who is made them.

Yes, you have a lot of the usual suspects (too much Chris Ware for my tastes, but then, I’m not really a Ware fan), but you also have Theo Ellsworth, Bryan Lee O’Malley, C. Tyler, Lilli Carre. In other words, you have a lot of my people. It’s a wonderful mix of high-profile releases, like R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis and Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel’s The Alcoholic and smaller releases, like Jesse Reklaw‘s Slow Wave and Fred Chao‘s Johnny Hiro.

That’s awesome. That’s what comics is. It covers a broad range of styles and subjects. It encompasses creators and publishers of all ages, experiences and fame. This didn’t feel like “Oh, here’s a bunch of creators you’ve probably heard of and one guy who got a Xeric.” It felt more like “This is what was great in comics between Aug. 2008 and Sept. 2009.” I loved seeing a lot of the comics I loved in that time period showing up here.

Is the perspective still a little limited? Maybe. But overall, this ended up feeling a lot like a collection of comics I’ve read or would read.

So yes, it’s still not for me, since I’ve read a lot of these comics (and I bet you have to). But would I give it to a friend or family member who was interested in comics but didn’t know where to start? Absolutely. That’s what this book is designed to do and it does it incredibly well.

Advanced reading copy provided by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt through NetGalley.

You’ll Never Know Book One
A Good And Decent Man

So I’m averaging about one post a week now. Awesome. And I’ve even been a very bad Twitterer. But I hope things will settle down and you’ll get to hear from me more.

It’s Father’s Day and I think it’s a perfect day to review C. Tyler‘s You’ll Never Know Book One: A Good And Decent Man (Fantagraphics Books, 2009), her exploration of her father’s history as a World War II veteran and how it affects her current life.

The style of the book is beautiful. Done in soft watercolors (and watercolor pencils, from the looks of it), there is an old-fashioned airiness to the book. Many pages reminded me of antique, hand-painted postcards. The pages in which she tells her father’s story are done in a traditional/scrapbook format — handwritten text on the left, images on the right. Here, the images are done in sepia tones, mimicking old photographs.

While this is clearly the sort of material that could easily turn into “You screwed me up, dad!” Tyler avoids that. She obviously loves her father, for all of his flaws, and is proud to tell his story as well as learn about the events that shaped him. She doesn’t shy away from her father’s darker side, though, discussing his distant attitude when she was growing up and trying to make peace with it.

In the midst of recoding her father’s story, she is also coping with her estranged husband and raising her teenage daughter. Both parts of the book are neatly integrated. I always felt like I understood why Tyler wanted to do this at this point in her life. It’s her father’s story, certainly, but it’s also her story, and her mother’s, her daughter’s, her siblings. Her family’s past is echoed in the present and has shaped the choices she’s made and that her family has made.

The book ends on a dark note — the fun days of when Tyler’s father first joined the Army and met her mother are behind him and the specter of bloody fighting in Europe loom while Tyler herself faces more disappointment in her personal life. I can’t exactly call it a cliffhanger, but it did make me realize why this “Book One.”

But even taken on its own, You’ll Never Know is a touching and unflinching tribute to Tyler’s father. It’s a personal story, sure, but I think there’s something we can all relate to in discovering the histories of our own families.