Ivan Brunetti, editor, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons & True Stories (Yale University Press, 2008), $28.00, hardcover.
Two years ago Hillary Chute reviewed
Brunetti’s first volume in these virtual first pages, and
she spoke for all of us here at guttergeek when she expressed a certain ambivalence
about the book. On the one hand: big, beautiful, and
overflowing with some of the most important graphic
storytellers of our time. On the other hand: um,
McSweeney’s
#13? Not that we could not
use more of Chris Ware’s groundbreaking and (for many in
the non-comics world) eye-opening anthology, and certainly
Brunetti is every bit up to the task of editing an
anthology very much in the same spirit as his friend Ware,
but some of us were kind of hoping for something a bit more
conventionally, academically, historically edited (and here
“some of us” refers to, well, me). The desire stems not any
deep-rooted predilection for academic editing (for what
Brunetti, half-mockingly, refers to as the sweater-wearing,
pipe-smoking distance of the academic editor in a recent
video commentary accompanying his new volume). Or at least
not entirely. No, in truth, my anthology dreams stemmed
from the same source as all my anthology dreams: a desire
for a big, beautiful, overflowing book that would slot in
effortlessly into my courses in graphic narrative. “This
week, we’ll be focusing on autobiographical comics, class,”
I would say. “Please read chapter three of Brunetti and
come back prepared to describe the role of the underground
comix movement in shaping the early experiments with this
form.”
Alright, it was a crazy fantasy. The work of teaching
comics will remain in my lifetime an unanthologized affair,
and for a lot of reasons that is a good thing (much to the
despair of reluctant, cash-strapped students: as we all
know too well, a graphic narrative library does not come
cheap). And I suspect I would viciously turn on any
anthology that attempted to do what I suggest for not doing
it exactly as my fantasies had dictated.
Fortunately, two years later, I turned to Brunetti’s second
volume with fewer preconceptions, ready to accept it for
what it was: the third volume in the Brunetti/Ware series
of deeply engaged, personal, and unbelievably gorgeous
anthologies—perfect for converting resistant relatives to
the wonders of the form. And this installment is perhaps
the most engaged and personal of the three. Here Brunetti
picks up with further examples of many of the creators he
focuses on in his first volume, as well as introducing some
lesser-known artists and a range of archival material from
the early days of Sunday comics. There is no clear logic to
the way the comics are ordered here, but instead Brunetti
lets the selection and the order take shape organically,
based, as he puts it, on the same kind of creative
intuition he would bring to the creation of one of his own
comics. And the result is truly something special. So many
of our favorites were here, and in almost every case
Brunetti honed in on just the right selection not just to
represent that given creator’s work, but to speak to the
other selections in this volume. In its own terms it work
wonderfully—arguably even surpassing Ware’s
McSweeney
volume as the best anthology
of its kind.
Still, our fantasies of a different kind of anthology have
not faded. Even less than the first volume can I imagine
using this in a class: it is just too personal and
idiosyncratic in its organization to serve as a foundation
to a syllabus. As an academic press, Yale University Press
has earned my undying respect and gratitude for their
contributions to this form in recent years, including the
two Brunetti volumes, Todd Hignite’s brilliant
In the Studio
interviews from
Comic
Art, and Daniel
Raeburn’s monograph on Chris Ware. And I don’t in any way
underestimate the risks in entering into this field for the
prestige of a university press (I can too well imagine the
eye-rolling in the board meeting when Raeburn’s volume was
first announced). But now that Yale University Press had
cleared such nonsense from the decks, it is time for
another similarly respected and endowed academic press to
enter the fray and provide an anthology (or better yet,
rival anthologies from rival presses) from which those of
us working to establish graphic narrative in the classroom
can draw.
