EDITOR: It’s just wrong!

And about this point I decide that it’s probably kinder on the reader if I don’t write the rest of this introduction as a script to an undrawn comic, because comics really are a visual medium and a written description of what you would be seeing if I’d written this whole introduction as a comic is not the easiest way to assimilate information.

Comics, of course, are the easiest way to assimilate information, at least according to a study done by the CIA back in the 1980s. But a comics script is a strange hybrid beastie, part blueprint, part correspondence, part theoretical yogurt-starter. Let’s go to prose.

Imagine me telling you this. I would be outside in the garden of an old Addams Family–style house an hour’s drive from Minneapolis.

It’s just wrong.

It’s just wrong and I am a participant, dammit. I am a collaborator in this madness.

I have drawn you in by lending my name and my endorsement and my time. I have done my best to give you the impression that the volume you hold contains the Year’s Best American Comics. That by purchasing it, you will become au fait with the cutting edge. It says so on the cover, after all.

Buy it, read it, and know that you know what’s happening in comics . . .

Well, yes. Up to a point.

Take The Year’s. In this case, the year runs August to August. The biggest, the most important and, to my mind, the most fascinating comic of 2009, Robert Crumb’s retelling of the Book of Genesis, makes it into this book because an advance extract was run in the New Yorker.

Some of this material was published for the first time in 2008/2009. Some was simply collected in that time frame. Things I loved were excluded, and previous editors had not chosen them and nor would upcoming editors pick them. Oh, the injustice.

Best. It’s a weird sort of a word. I didn’t read every comic published in America over the time span of this book. I wish I had: it would have been fun. Jessica Abel and Matt Madden did not read everything published in America either. Twenty years ago, it might have been barely possible: today it’s a pipe dream.

(I remember arguing with Scott McCloud about his book Reinventing Comics, published in 2000, taking issue with his hypothesis that comics would find an easy outlet on the Web. I mocked him, pointed out how long it took comics to load, explained that paper would always be first port of call for young cartoonists, and was wrong about everything I could have been, except about the problems with getting people paid for their work. Sorry, Scott. You were right.)

We did our best. Still, I lay awake some nights wondering about the choices I made, suspecting that on another day I might have chosen a completely different set of pages.

American? A slippery term at the best of times, and here it slips through your fingers like mercury. American is, as a term, in this case, strangely parochial, fundamentally irrelevant and extremely difficult to define. The comics community is global. There are comics published in America by people who are not American that qualify as American and there are comics that don’t. (I loved a small strip in an American-published magazine that turned up to be by a Swede and is thus not here. Eddie Campbell is not represented in The Best American Comics purely because he is a Scot living in Brisbane, Australia.) (Your editor is English. He lives in America, and most of the comics he has written, during a career of writing stuff, have been published in America. Were they more or less American before I moved here? I do not know. Matt and Jessica are editing this book from Paris, the French one. I know that, left to myself, I would have declared all comics writers and cartoonists honorary Americans and made the issue moot.)