Comics Anthologies

An Under-Appreciated Category of Comics

Shortly after graphic novels started to be a thing in the late 80s, publishers stared producing comics anthologies around specific themes. Often the themes were around political or cultural issues, in which case the anthology would be about education and fundraising. Or sometimes it would be built around a particular theme or event. The comics festival in Bethesda called The Small Press Expo used to issue an anthology every year. And many of the best had no theme at all—they were just a collection of stories that the editor or publisher liked. I’ve edited a few of these over the years. As a comics fan, anthologies have long been my favorite format. I like getting to sample a variety of different works by many different cartoonists. I like a buffet-style comics experience.

Comics anthologies come in several different flavors, which I will attempt to describe. I mentioned those associated with a particular event. An important category are anthologies around a particular issue or cause. These are often fundraisers or serve as consciousness raising exercises. Examples of this type of comics anthology include StripAIDS and StripAIDs USA, two anthologies from the late 80s that addressed the AIDS crisis, Women Life Freedom which deals with the plight of women in Iran. Some have explicitly political content, such as the magazine and subsequent book collection of World War 3 Illustrated.

The have been many anthologies published to introduce American readers to the comic scene in another country, such as Books First, an anthology of German comics published by the Goethe Institute; Ax, an anthology of alternative Japanese manga from 2010; From the Shadow of the Northern Lights, a collection of comics from the Swedish alternative comics magazine, Galago; Dead Herring, a 2004 collection published by the Israeli alternative comics collective, Actus Tragicus; Seattle Laughs, a 1994 collection edited by underground cartoonist Shary Flenniken and featuring a story by ex-Seattleite, Robert Boyd; 2016’s Spanish Fever collects a sampling of the best Spanish comics.

Some are built around a theme of historically important comics, either in a sense of bestowing that honor, or in the sense of explaining the art history of comics. One of my all-time favorite books is The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics which I read when it was published in 1977. I edited a two-volume anthology called The Best Comics of the Decade 1980-1990 in 1991. The Best American Comics series was published annually by Houghton Mifflin from 2006 through 2019.

Finally the most important category of comics anthologies have no particular theme—they simply reflect the editors’ tastes. The grandfather of this sort of anthology was Arcade, published in the late 70s and edited by Bill Griffith and Art Speigelman. Spiegelman went on to edit the greatest comics anthology of all time, RAW. RAW ran from 1980 to 1991. Its main competition was a magazine anthology called Weirdo, edited first by Robert Crumb, then Peter Bagge and Aline Komisky-Crumb. The publisher I worked for, Fantagraphica made several anthology attempts over the years with mixed success. I edited one called Pictopia in the early 90s, but the best was Mome, edited by Eric Reynolds, which ran from 2005 to 2009. Drawn & Quartely has published groundbreaking anthologies at various points in their history. The great Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte published Scratches, which collects short comics stories by many of the best European alternative cartoonists.

Often regional comics scenes with produce an anthology that doesn’t have an express intent on representing comics from its location, but there ends up being a regional focus because that’s where the editors are. I was slightly involved with the rough-and-tumble Slovenian anthology, Stripburger, in the late 90s. Rough House are (were?) a comics collective based in Austin who published several volumes of their anthology Rough House on a Risograph.