I enjoyed this. Were the pieces selected the best of what was published all year? I have no idea, not being that immersed in the comics world. A few left me flat, a few were good but not amazing, and a few knocked me out and were added to the list of full-length works that I want to check out when I can: Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault's Louis Undercover, Joe Sacco's "Bitumen or Bust" (mostly for the drawing, which my crosshatching self loves) in Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life, Vera Brosgol's Be Prepared, Nick Drnaso's Sabrina,, Connor Willumsen's Anti-Gone, and Eleanor Davis's "Hurt or Fuck" in Now #1—she's someone I really want to see more of; I love her handling of bodies and the way they occupy space. Also really liked Lauren Weinstein's "Being an Artist and a Mother," which I remember from the New Yorker. This was a good introduction for me to work that's being done right now—I fell off the comics map (or I guess it fell off of my map) years ago, but have been wanting to pick up more graphic narrative stuff lately. This is a good push in the right direction... I wish my library had more editions of this series in ebook format, but I guess you can't have everything. ( )

A fairly decent anthology as long as you keep in mind that hardly any of this is the best of anything except alternative comics to which the publisher could wrangle reprint rights. No DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse here. No, Drawn & Quarterly and Koyama Press are the dominate publishers according to this.

Seriously, I read more than 500 graphic novels a year, and only 3 of the 25 excerpts were from books I had previously read.

At least there were fewer unreadable selections than in previous years, and the new-to-me Joe Sacco story was enough to make the whole book worthwhile. ( )