BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2018 - PHOEBE GLOECKNER, EDITOR/ THE TALKING EGGS - ROBERT SAN SOUCI & JERRY PINKNEY

I’ve been getting bogged down in that new James novel (which is good but, like most fantasy, requires a long engaged chunk to really get a sense of the world and what’s going on, which can make for slow reading since I don’t always have the time for all that) as well as this Maya Daren book about Haitian religion (also involved and heavy) so I needed something of a quick hit/palate cleanser and I ran across the Best American in the library and picked it right up. I read comics pretty regularly (I’m caught up and emotionally invested in East of West, The Wicked and the Divine and Black Panther. The first two are on their last arch and I’ll review the whole series when they’re done) but I don’t usually review them here since individual issues are so short and because I haven’t thought to long about what I do and don’t review here (for instance, I don’t review the academic papers or the magazines I read). But this book was hefty so I figured I’d review it. First off, I don’t know who Phoebe Gloeckner is. Apparently she wrote, Diary of a Teenage Girl, which I haven’t read but comes highly recommended. I always want these sorts of compendiums to be much weirder and feature less famous folks. I like the Hernadez brothers (I actually haven’t read that much Love and Rockets) and Simon Hanselmann (the best) and Guy Delisle as much as anyone but I’m not sure they need any help brining their work to a wider audience. On the whole I would say 2 things: first, many of these artist seem to be from/working out of Chicago and Seattle. Shout out the Chicago and Seattle. Second, I would say with the exception of Alex Graham’s entry, Angloild pt. 2, the autobiographical/non-fiction comics feel really flat to me. This isn’t to say that comics aren’t good at telling “true” stories, it’s just to say that Gloeckner didn’t find any. But it’s a compilation so more global critiques are useless, here are the comics I liked and will now buy the full versions of: Angloid pt. 2, Crawl Space, Playground of my Mind (another exception to the non-non-fiction slump), Fatherson, Ugly, How to be Alive. 33 Comics

The Talking Eggs is a favorite children’s book from my childhood that I recently read to the group of kids I work with. It’s beautifully illustrated (it won a Caldecott) and has a moral I can support. It’s about a girl in the American bayou who lives with an evil mom and sister. She finds a witch in the woods and, after treating her kindly, is rewarded. The evil mom and sister attempt to exploit the witch and are dealt with harshly. It teaches kids the importance of respecting witches and being nice. It’s also got a good message about the way you ask people for things affecting whether or not they want to help you. Important stuff. Anyway, the kids liked it more than I was expecting which was a pleasant surprise. 11 dancing rabbits.