Page 4 panel 4

And now, another silent panel. The editor appears to have cheered up enormously. His hair has also cheered up, and is now sticking up all over the place, as if he has been running his hands through it while talking, as a necessary aide to communication. Which is in fact the case.

NO DIALOGUE

Page 4 panel 5

Penultimate panel. An idea has struck him. It’s getting late. He’s raised a finger, and is making a suggestion.

EDITOR: Y’know, if you just pretend that the real title for this book is A Sampler: Some Really Good Comics, Including Extracts from Longer Stories We Thought Could Stand on Their Own, you could ignore everything I’ve said so far.

Page 4 panel 6

Last panel. We’ve pulled back a way. The stars are coming out. We are still looking at our editor. Now he’s got all that off his chest the editor looks both relieved and pleased with himself. He’s sort of smiling, a bit nervously, perhaps pushed both hands deep into his pockets. And being English, he allows himself the highest possible form of praise for the book he’s introducing.

EDITOR: It’s not bad, actually.

This was my introduction to The Best American Comics 2010.

VI

INTRODUCTIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS

“Having a place the story starts and a place it’s going: that’s important.

Telling your story, as honestly as you can, and leaving out the things you don’t need, that’s vital.”

Some Strangeness in the Proportion: The Exquisite Beauties of Edgar Allan Poe

We are gathered here together so that I may tell you, and myself, several matters concerning Edgar A. Poe, “Edgar, a poet to a T,” as he once described himself, and the strange tales and poems by him that are here assembled.

I met Poe first in an anthology with a title like Fifty Stories for Boys. I was eleven, and the story was “Hop-Frog,” that remarkable tale of terrible revenge, which sat incongruously beside the tales of boys having adventures on desert islands or discovering secret plans hidden inside hollowed-out vegetables. As the king and his seven courtiers, tarred and chained, were hauled upwards, as the jester they had called Hop-Frog clambered up the chain, holding his burning torch, I found myself astonished and elated by the appropriateness of his monstrous revenge. I do not believe there were any other murders in Fifty Stories for Boys and certainly none with such a colorful and satisfactory cast, nor such terrible and appropriate cruelty.

Suddenly it seemed like Poe was everywhere. I discovered the Sherlock Holmes stories, and in the first tale, “A Study in Scarlet,” Holmes is found decrying Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin—but decrying him in a way that made it very obvious that Dupin was Holmes’s literary progenitor. Ray Bradbury’s story “Usher II” solidified my fascination; it’s a short story (a hybrid, from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 future set on the Mars of The Martian Chronicles) in which a set of bloodless critics and reformers of fiction, of fantasy, of horror, are walked around a house filled with tableaus of Poe’s stories, and watch themselves murdered—by Pit and Pendulum, by murderous robotic orangutan, and so on.