And finally, and most frustratingly, maddeningly, that peculiar and elusive term Comics, which started as strips and as Sunday pages over a hundred years ago, then became eight page sequences in longer periodicals, then grew to become twenty-plus pages of monthly story, and then mutated to become books, to become webcomics (often closer in spirit to the strips and Sundays than anything else), to become graphic novels, whatever exactly they are (and they are, I suspect, anything you want them to be).

Now, so many comics are being created and intended as books, as longer stories. Which on the one hand is a very good thing, as excellent art is being made. It also has its downside: books are long things, filled with reverses and characters, plot and event. They are mad marathons in which the reader and the creators collaborate. Any extract from a longer work, no matter how well chosen, is simply that: an extract from a longer work: and the real art is the longer work, with a beginning and a middle and an end, often in that order.

In this collection I’ve tried to find sequences that worked on their own, that gave a flavor of a book, that would interest, intrigue, or irritate you enough that they would perhaps send you out to buy the whole thing, while always aware that what you are seeing is incomplete.

(Insert a silent panel here. The editor is looking out at us. He looks out of sorts, yet, having ranted and raged and grumbled for several pages, is nowhere near as grumbly as one would imagine.)

But having said all that . . .

The power of comics is simply this: that it is a democracy; the most level of playing fields.

One of my favorite comics of 2009, which is not reprinted here for reasons of utter redundancy and avoidance of infinite self-reference, was Lynda Barry’s introduction to the previous-volume-but-one in this series. It touched on what comics are and what they do so well. And it revealed the biggest secret in comics: that anyone can do them.

You just need something to draw with and something to draw on. A pen, some paper. A computer program. You do not need to know anything. You just need to do it. To make it. And then you send it out into the world.

It can be about anything: an account of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, a small-town punk-rock adventure, an imaginary story of the life and loves of a failed architect on the run from his life, the story of two robots arguing about gnomes and a retelling of the first book of the Bible, all of these are comics: small colored glass squares in the mosaic that forms a picture of what was happening in comics this year, all wonderful, essential parts of a medium that is so often mistaken for a genre.

And if this book impels one person to dig deeper into the world of comics out there, or if one teenager picks it up in a library and sees a way to get something out of her head and into someone else’s and begins to draw her own comics, then its purpose is fulfilled.