This one was especially good.

Some favorites:

La Rubia Loca by Justin Hall
Portraits of My Dad by David Heatley
Nakedness and Power by Seth Tobocman, Terisa Turner, and Leigh Brownhill
Thirteen Cats of my Childhood by Jesse Reklaw
Walkin' the Streets by Robert Crumb ( )

Pikar did a nice job of putting together a bunch of stories in memoir style, and a few not. The themes are not for the young, or meak, but speak to the power of graphic novels. ( )

I was happy to see that this first volume was edited by the great Harvey Pekar, and his introductory essay is worth the price of admission alone. The collection itself brings together both familiar and unfamiliar (to me) artists, and has a good mix of men and women, and new and more established writers. Some of the entries are selections from larger works that don't have the impact they could as a smaller selection, but others really worked well in the anthology format, particularly David Heatley's "Portrait of my Dad," and Jesse Reklaw's "Thirteen Cats of my Childhood."

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-best-american-comics-2006-edited-by.ht... ] ( )

Moore and Pekar have chosen a good assortment of comics for this inaugural volume in The Best American Series. Comics chosen represent a range of graphic styles and topics. Notably, manga and Heavy Metal are absent. All of the comics, whether factual reports from the battlefield or fantasies about life after death, have a linear narrative (though Dart's narrative is plural). Crumb, as is often the case, provides the most visual texture and richness (though Reklaw does a creditable job with background detail and Barry fills every space with baroque oddities and scrawls. The sequence generally worked, though I'd have placed Dart's "RabbitHead," with its multiple simultaneous narratives, immediately after Hall's "La Rubia Loca," a long story about a woman who has what looks to me like a manic episode on a Green Tortoise bus to Mexico. Interesting introductions and bios round out the collection My one complaint is the format. Some comics are reproduced so small that even with reading glasses and a bright light, I had a hard time reading some text. I'm sure I missed some visual detail as well. ( )

An ode to the art of writing *and* drawing and the creators who are able to make these two mediums flow into a story. It made me long for a good full length graphic novel– a story I can stick with that will last longer than a page or two. Except for the one about the 13 cats the author had as a child, a page for each describing how they were obtained and what happened to them. Graphics are somehow the perfect way to portray highly disfunctional families. Is it because you can see facial expressions and somehow better imagine the tone of the words?Still, I enjoyed the montage of documentary comic (about soldiers in Iraq), comedy, classic comic, and memoir (Alison Bechdel). I skipped over a couple for storyline although the artwork was amazing, and read a couple that were great stories with only decent art. ( )