If buying a book was like buying, oh, I don’t know, peanuts (for example), there would a word count on the back cover near the price, and the cost breakdown per 1000 words. Then, you could walk through the store and pick up the books and think to yourself, “Hmm. Do I feel like 50,000 words? Or should I just get this 6,000 word short story? But the price point is better for the longer books, and this book is much cheaper per word than that one…” And then you could just get the book with the right number of words and the best price per word.
And if that were so, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories, Vol. 1, edited by Ivan Brunetti, would be one of the best values for money around. This is a BIG BOOK, and it’s pretty reasonably priced.
“But wait,” you might say. “There are Spanish peanuts, Runner peanuts, Valencia peanuts, Virginia peanuts and Tennessee Red and Tennessee White peanuts. You didn’t take into account the different kinds of peanuts and my preference for one over the other. Maybe some peanuts are better than others and therefore worth more than others. Just how good are these peanuts?”
And I would say, “Pretty good.”
Brunetti has done a fabulous job of picking up where Chris Ware left off with McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern #13. There is a lot of overlap in terms of artists, but there is a lot of different stuff here as well, and I’m pretty sure there is no duplication of content. The book, like Issue #13, is full of “indie” comics, all of which range from “quite good” to “excellent.”
And so, that makes this book a particularly good book to pick up. It’s high quantity AND high quality. You can’t do much better that that.
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