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The Best Comics of 2019 - The New York Times

This year in comics gave readers an assortment of wonders big and small, and Graphic Content’s choices for the best of 2019 range from long-fermenting multi-character epics to graphic novels and memoirs for younger readers to a variety of forceful works addressing women’s experiences. The exquisite design of many of the titles below is a good reminder that, in this age of instant gratification, there’s something deeply satisfying about a story that can transmit its magic as a physical book.

Hillary Chute and Ed Park

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As in his more whimsical work, Seth mines the past — ’50s Canadiana — for visual inspiration in CLYDE FANS (Drawn + Quarterly, 488 pp., $54.95): hatbands, company calendars, the lettering on a shop window. But this deceptively mannered “picture novel” isn’t an excuse for nostalgia; rather, it shows the furies that drive the mismatched Matchcard brothers, who have inherited their father’s business, into lifelong enmity. It’s an epic about the passing of time, flavored intensely by the passing of time — 20 years — involved in its own creation. (Park)

The intergenerational DRAWING POWER: WOMEN’S STORIES OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE, HARASSMENT, AND SURVIVAL (Abrams, 272 pp., $29.99) was inspired by Donald Trump and the #MeToo era, but feels depressingly timeless. The editor Diane Noomin, who helmed the feminist “Twisted Sisters” anthologies of the 1990s, presents new real-life stories by 63 diverse contributors, from heavy hitters like Emil Ferris, Joyce Farmer and Aline Kominsky-Crumb to newcomers such as Ebony Flowers, whose six-page “Mr. Stevenson” reveals, like many of the scenarios here, events both terrifying and commonplace. This landmark collection, beautifully produced, shines a light on a relentless, unwelcome aspect of women’s lives. (Chute)

How do you explain to your brown son that his (white, doting) grandparents are all in for Trump? That’s one of the charged dilemmas in Mira Jacob’s GOOD TALK (One World, 368 pp., $30), which somehow also manages to be one of the funniest books of the year. Jacob opens up her life for readers, from charming chapters about her upbringing as an Indian-American in Albuquerque and her coming-of-age in New York City, to incisive examples of the way certain people of color became instant scapegoats after 9/11. The simple, witty visual style is the perfect setting for a book that’s appropriately dialogue heavy. Reading these searching, often hilarious tête-à-têtes is as effortless as eavesdropping on a crosstown bus. (Park)

The only serene thing in Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s GRASS (Drawn & Quarterly, 480 pp.,$29.95) is its pastoral title. In this unflinching nonfiction work, translated by Janet Hong, the artist races against time to record the life of “Granny” Lee, born in 1928, who as a 15-year-old was forced to become a “comfort woman” (that abominable euphemism) during Japan’s occupation of Korea (1910-45). Gendry-Kim can capture Lee’s gap toothed raucousness as a girl on one page, and on the next plunge us fully into nightmare. “I’ve never known happiness from the moment I came out of my mother’s womb,” Lee says. By the end of this searing book, those words read more as understatement than exaggeration. (Park)

Raina Telgemeier’s third graphic memoir to zero in on her childhood is a publishing phenomenon and an engaging work of comics storytelling for readers young and old. Set in San Francisco in the 1980s, GUTS (Graphix, 480 pp., $12.99) tracks the onset of 10-year-old Raina’s anxiety, which results in emetophobia (a fear of vomiting). The book engages vividly with bodily functions and the vulnerability, both physical and emotional, of children. It’s also about the medium of comics itself: Reading and drawing them is young Raina’s comfort zone, while the adult artist Raina uses the form to illustrate the disconnect between her protagonist’s thoughts and feelings. (Chute)

Does the comics legend Lynda Barry’s MAKING COMICS (Drawn & Quarterly, 200 pp., $22.95) belong on a list full of more traditional narratives? The newly minted MacArthur genius teaches “interdisciplinary creativity” at the University of Wisconsin, and this slim volume — mimicking the feel of the composition notebooks that she requires her students to keep — initially appears to be a glorified lesson plan. But my ambivalence evaporated when I actually tried one of the exercises. Using a yellow colored pencil, I closed my eyes and drew a skeleton for one minute. Then I repeated the process in orange, then blue. (The result made me so happy I put it on my fridge.) Barry’s infectious belief in art turns “Making Comics” into the ur-text out of which every other title on this list could have sprung; at the very least, it’s the self-help book of the year. As Barry reveals, “Everything good in my life came because I drew a picture.” (Park)

PITTSBURGH (New York Review Comics, 216 pp., $29.95) is Frank Santoro’s breakout title, a lush, innovative and important monument to loss. This affecting book is partly inspired by the fact that Santoro’s mother and father, who married in the late ‘60s, now work in the same building and pass each other wordlessly in the hallway: a loss of the nuclear family. Then there’s the collective loss embodied in the book’s title: What happens to once-booming postindustrial cities when working-class community and vibrancy comes to an end? Gorgeous and evocative — its aesthetic is palimpsestic and purposely sketchy — “Pittsburgh” limns a large-scale American loss as it stretches back to become a Vietnam War story. (Chute)

A pioneer of underground comics in the 1960s and ’70s, Kim Deitch has always been entranced by the popular culture of the ’20s, ’30s and beyond. The uncanny REINCARNATION STORIES (Fantagraphics, 260 pp., $29.99), his weirdest and thickest title yet, vigorously weaves fact and fabulation in a collection of nesting stories. Making cameos are D. W. Griffith; the western movie star Buck Jones; Deitch’s father, Gene (a Terrytoons director and animator); and Spain, his late friend and fellow East Village Other cartoonist. Deitch’s style seethes with detail; his fact-flipping meditations on cycles of life are both an escapist pleasure and an optimistic note for this mind-bending moment. (Chute)

Like “Clyde Fans” and Jason Lutes’s recent “Berlin,” Chris Ware’s RUSTY BROWN (Pantheon Graphic Library, 356 pp., $35) is a feast roughly two decades in the making, a project of the imagination marinated by time. Beginning on a snowy school day in 1970s Omaha, the reliably wizardly Ware tracks his characters backward and forward across time, letting us into their innermost lives while also illuminating how they all connect. The showstopper is a chapter devoted to Jordan Lint (savor the abject mundanity of that name), structured so that one page roughly equals a year in his life. You’ll start visualizing what your own existence would look like with each year compressed onto a 9-by-7-inch piece of paper. (Park)

R. J. Palacio’s WHITE BIRD (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 224 pp., $24.99), an extension of the popular “Wonder” series that stands entirely on its own, is her first graphic novel. She should do more. A Holocaust story set in France, focused on a Jewish girl in hiding, it’s aesthetically lovely: Palacio’s line is spare and elegant, accompanied by a graceful muted color palette (inked by Kevin Czap). “White Bird” offers forceful storytelling — realism with well-timed supernatural touches — and deploys basic comics techniques like evolving three-panel close-ups to dramatic effect. The book’s surface holds stillness and movement in tension, reflecting its young protagonists’ lives. Pedagogical back matter is explicitly aimed at young readers but those of any age may find the sequence of events moving. (Chute)

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