Best of ‘05 II—Publishers Weekly

David Welsh writes in to remind us that there is another list out in addition to the Amazon.com effort featuring the best comics in book format releases from 2005. That would be found in Publishers Weekly, offering a list that looks to have been assembled by PW comics triumvirate Calvin Reid, Douglas Wolk and Heidi MacDonald.

Their picks:

* Black Hole, Charles Burns (Pantheon)
* Epileptic, David B. (Pantheon)
* Ex-Machina: The First Hundred Days, Brian Vaughan and Tony Harris (DC/Vertigo)
* Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface, Shirow Masamune (Dark Horse)
* King, Ho Che Anderson (Fantagraphics)
* Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Bryan Lee O'Malley (Oni Press)
* The Rabbi's Cat, Joann Sfar (Pantheon)
* WE3, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (Vertigo)

That's not a bad list, and it's nice to see someone reach out to Ho Che Anderson's work after a modest reaction from reviewers and consumers early this year when it dropped. It still reads like something that was assembled in part to piss off as few people as possible, a kind of UN assemblage of comics by general category instead of a rigorous aesthetic at work. There's always been this myth in comics that all facets of comics have a part in the medium's successes. That's why you can have article about superhero companies using growth figure spurred totally by manga, for instance. Anyway, it's an impulse I mistrust when it comes to picking the best the art form has to offer.

UPDATE

Calvin Reid writes in to say I jumped the gun a bit:

Thanks for throwing the spotlight on our best books list but that list is a work in progress.

Because of the unusual number of comics projects we're working on around PW these days, the crack comics editorial team put that list together somewhat hastily so the editor of another article would have several outstanding comics work include in their piece. We have plans to produce a larger more representative list. The books on that list will remain but it will grow significantly and we'll make a bigger deal about announcing it.

 
posted 6:31 am PST | Permalink
 

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