Ben Katchor, ed., _Best American Comics 2017_ (Bill Kartalopoulos, series ed.)

BEN KATCHOR'S SELECTION stays a good instance from the mainstream. He includes quite a few self-published items, for instance. A few things might even be called outsider art rather than comics: that is, they have not been "published" at all, but exist as singular items in art galleries. These items are "comics" in form, words, pictures, panels, so they fit in well and certainly reward attention--I'm not objecting to their presence.  That presence does, though, suggest a surprising development.

Comics, in the forms with which we are most familiar, were a commercial product designed for mass consumption before they were anything else. Whether newspaper "funnies" or comic books, their very origin occurred in a context that was all about broad appeal and high sales. Like the earliest cinema, they were about being as entertaining as possible for the greatest number of people possible, not about their creators' particular vision or sensibility.

It did not take long at all for an expressive, auteur-like streak to emerge in newspaper comics--Winsor McCay, George Herriman, E. C. Segar--and comic books eventually had their Will Eisner and Carl Barks. But these artists' brilliance was continually in negotiation with the necessity of pursuing the same objectives pursued by the creators of The Gumps and Nancy and Archie. I might even argue that it was not until the emergence of R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and the other underground-ers in the 1960s that we had comics that were mostly derived from the peculiar obsessions and fixations of their creators.

If Katchor's selection represents the best in American comics--not everyone would agree, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that it does--we are now 180 degrees away from those origins. Katchor includes nothing from the mainstream, not much from even the more prestigious kind of graphic novel. With a few exceptions, the material here is deeply personal, idiosyncratic, expressive, even alien and strange. Not only would they never appear in a newspaper, but even Fantagraphics would probably say, "Geez, I dunno...."

A surprising development, but an appealing one.