Review: ‘The Best American Comics: 2009’, edited by Charles Burns

The Best American Comics 2009
Edited by Charles Burns; Series Editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 2009, $22.00
Long ago, the wise minds at the “[[[Best American]]]” series of annuals at Houghton Mifflin – now covering everything from sportswriting to mystery stories – realized that they didn’t need to wait for the calendar year to turn, if that was bad timing for their deadlines. They could simply declare some other standard 365-day period to be their “year” and stick with it. And so this book has 2009 in its title – since that’s the year it was published, and consumers are noticeably reticent to pick up a book that appears to be outdated – but collects Charles Burns’s choices for the best comics of the year that ran from September 1, 2007 through August 31, 2008. (And why shouldn’t that year be just as legitimate as the one that begins on January 1st, or September 19th, or February 14th?)
This is the fourth entry in the [[[Best American Comics]]] series; 2008 was edited by Lynda Barry, 2007 by Chris Ware, and 2006 by Harvey Pekar. All of those guest editors come from what’s vaguely the same end of the comics world – art comics rather than commercial comics, personal stories rather than assembly-line works-for-hire – but they’re each idiosyncratic individuals, with their own tastes and agendas. So the Best American Comics books have certain family resemblances, but each book is quite distinct.

Brittany Murphy, the actress who got her start in the sleeper hits Clueless and 8 Mile but best known to comics fans as Shellie in Sin City and Luanne Platter in King Of The Hill, died Sunday in Los Angeles at the age of 32, according to




After twenty-two years, Rene Russo is coming back to properties based on comics.
fter that, I’m amazed she came back, I wouldn’t think twenty-two years would be enough time away.
Six more windows to close… at this rate, I’ll be down to only two hundred open windows by the end of the year. Sigh…


Roy Edward Disney, the son and nephew of The Walt Disney Company co-founders Roy O. Disney and Walt Disney, respectively, passed away yesterday after a yearlong battle with stomach cancer at the age of 79.
