![]() ![]() The best list in my opinion is Comic Books Are Burning in Hell's, and it is also the shortest. This decade has been dominated by book-sized publications, which is reflected in their lists. (I would fear for the sanity of anyone who tried.) Nonetheless, some brave souls have attempted to construct their own "best of the decade" lists. (To limit it to one genre or format is something I am not willing to do, especially a genre controlled by two large entertainment megacorporations, Warner Brothers-which owns DC Comics and all its properties-and Disney-which owns Marvel and all its properties.)īut in the 2010s, so many comics have been published that there is almost no way one person could have read them all. As I have pointed out many times before, I am interested in comics as a category of art, like literature, theater, music, film, visual art. They still do to a certain extent-I know when I tell someone I am interested in comics, they usually ask about superheroes. While superheroes now dominate our pop culture, in the world of comics, they are no longer utterly dominate comics mind-space as they once did. Back then, "alternative comics" (i.e., anything that wasn't super-hero comics) were eking out an existence on the fringes. That's another thing that has changes a lot in the past 30 years.) (Because we thought that book buyers back then would never shell out for a 240-page book of comics, we published it in two volumes. ![]() We had each read thousands of pages of comics and felt like we had a grasp of what had been published. The thing about assembling this volume was that we editors felt that knowing what comics actually were published in the 80s was a doable task. If we had, would we have included something? Maybe an excerpt from Watchmen? We did include an Alan Moore story which we loved, called "Pictopia," which is a weird story about how the innocent fun of old-time heroes in comics had been replaced by a grim and cynical type of superhero-one that Alan Moore himself is partly responsible for (along with Frank Miller). ![]() Our volumes excluded superheroes from Marvel and DC, partly because we were snobs about mainstream comics, but partly because we didn't have access to that material. The age of the graphic novel hadn't yet arrived, although Maus volume 1 had been published in 1986. Another part of our thesis was that most of the greatest works had been in short stories. The thesis behind these volumes was that the 80s had seen an explosion of great comics in anthologies (like RAW and Weirdo), in newspapers (specifically in alternative newsweeklies), and in what at the time was called alternative comics (which included publishers like us, Fantagraphics Books). In 1990, I worked on one of my favorite publishing projects, a two-volume anthology called The Best Comics of the Decade, published by Fantagraphics Books and co-edited with Gary Groth and Kim Thompson. ![]()
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