Guest Editor Roz Chast’s The Best American Comics 2016 Lives Up to its Name
Contributors Include Kate Beaton, Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, Lynda Barry, Cece Bell and More
Cover Art by Marc Bell
Guest Editor: Roz Chast
Series Editor: Bill Kartalopoulos
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Release Date: October 4, 2016
This year’s Best American Comics (the 11th for those counting) would work nearly as well in black and white as it does in color. The average reader won’t have to face that restriction unless they come upon an early review copy, but it’s an interesting lens to consider the compilation and suss out how it differs from previous volumes.
This year’s editor is Roz Chast; she’s best known for her New Yorker cartoons, but has also done longer work like her graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant, which received numerous awards and best-of slots. In the required introduction, she says if the works she picked share any common element, it’s a strong narrative line. That preference for storytelling over drawing makes BAC 2016 the opposite of the most recent Kramers Ergot. And although many of the stories within are beautifully drawn, this uniting quality explains how the entries manage to be compelling enough without color. The visuals don’t carry the majority of the weight. The authors don’t use color to convey crucial story elements, and there are, on the whole, maybe more words here than in previous collections.