Review: ‘An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories, Vol. 2’
An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories, Vol. 2
Edited by Ivan Brunetti
Yale University Press, October 2008, $28.00
Two years ago, we saw one of the biggest signs yet that comics had “made it” and were being taken seriously by the academic/literary community: the publication of a big, magisterial teaching anthology of comics, edited by Ivan Brunetti and published by the utterly respectable Yale University Press. That book was [[[An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories]]], and even its unwieldy title seemed to underline just how serious and important it was – the Anthology was the kind of comics collection that could be assigned as reading in English 214: Readings in Contemporary Literature, or some other similarly dull university course.
Inside the Anthology, Brunetti staked out a position for comics much closer to the Art History department than to English, leading off with intensely formalist works and only settling down to things like “Graphic Fiction” and “True Stories” deep into the book. (A lot of the first Anthology – and a lot of this second book as well – must be called “Cartoons” as a default; they’re clearly sequential art, but they’re closer to poems or painting series than they are to any kind of written prose. Not that this is a bad thing; I’m sure Brunetti would argue that those works show the unique abilities of the comics form.) Most impressively, Brunetti produced a book that wasn’t obvious – it wasn’t the book anyone would have expected, or a book anyone else would have compiled. (Not that the obvious anthology of great comics wouldn’t have had a use, and possible been more useful for teaching than Brunetti’s book ended up being.)
But that was two years ago, and now Brunetti, and Yale, are back with a second volume, [[[An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, Vol. 2]]], to give it its entire ungainly due. (The “An” at the beginning particularly bounces oddly off the “Vol. 2” at the end.) It doesn’t so much take up where the first [[[Anthology]]] left off as replicate the pattern (and, almost exactly, the contributors list) of the first book; it could as easily be a second attempt at the same idea as an extension. It doesn’t stake out any different territory than the first Anthology did; it focuses on mostly the same creators, and the same type of comics, and is organized in a similar, vaguely thematic, free-form fashion.
Vol. 2 doesn’t open quite as deeply into the woods of formalism as the first book did – it has a real, useful table of contents (including dates for all of the entries – essential for a teaching anthology), not the thumbnail sketch page that the first Anthology had. It does have an introduction that I’m afraid Brunetti means straight, and not as a parody of academic prose: “I have organize the book to mirror the free-association process of creation – and assemblage of observation, memory, and imagination – with the resultant structure acting as a document of its own discovery,” goes one representative sentence. The comics themselves kick off with a single page from Sammy Harkham, a number of early Ware pages (pre-Jimmy Corrigan), and some other mostly narrative art-comics before diving deeper and deeper into primitivism (Jeffrey Brown, C.F., an unknown old newspaper cartoonist named Eugene Teal, Elinore Norflus, Gary Panter, Anders Nilsen) and formalism (Nilsen again, Gilbert Hernandez, Kevin Scalzo, Cole Johnson, Richard McGuire).
The first book, though, had a lot of excerpts – from [[[Maus]]], from [[[Berlin]]], from [[[Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary]]], from [[[I Never Liked You]]], from [[[The Poor Bastard]]], from [[[It’s a Good Life]]],[[[ If You Don’t Weaken]]], from [[[Jimmy Corrigan]]] and [[[Safe Area Gorazde]]] – which served to highlight a lot of great and well-known comics works, but weren’t always fully-formed works in their own right. This second volume does have some excerpts – a more complete episode from Joe Sacco’s Gorazde, some Charles Burns [[[Black Hole]]] and Gary Panter [[[Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise]]] and Seth [[[Clyde Fans]]] – but they’re fewer and generally stand better on their own. Brunetti got the things he had to get into the first book; the ones that would have been mistakes to leave out. But this second book, though, might be more of the book he’d edit if there were no other considerations – a pure collection of comics.
Vol. 2 is still very far towards the art-comics side, and, even there, towards the art end of the art-story dichotomy (with an emphasis on ugly art, like Ron Rege, Jr. and Paper Rad). And most of the comics here are deeply personal – memoirs (several Robert Crumb stories) or dreams (Jim Woodring’s “Particular Mind”), transformed autobiography (Diane Noomin’s “Some of My Best Friends Are”) and stories I can only hope are purely fictional (Phoebe Glockner’s “Minnie’s 3rd Love”). It still has a pronounced tilt towards the last two decades – with thirteen pieces published since the first volume came out – but there’s more ‘70s work here, and a few earlier stories as well. (And those last are not primarily yellowing newspaper pages, looking more like collector’s artifacts than stories, as they were in the first book.)
It’s definitely not for everyone, but, if the Daniel Clowes cover intrigues you, and you want a good introduction to the odder and more idiosyncratic side of comics today, there are few guides more knowledgeable than Brunetti, and few books more useful than his Anthologies.
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
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