Houghton to Publish Best American Comics
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on March. 28, 2006 Sign up now!
by Chris Barsanti -- Publishers Weekly, 3/28/2006
In the latest sign that comics are finding a home on the lists of trade book publishers, Houghton Mifflin, which publishes the Best American Series—an acclaimed line of anthologies collecting the best in short fiction, essays, sports writing and other categories each year—is adding a comics and graphic novel anthology to its best-of publishing program. This October Houghton Mifflin will publish The Best American Comics 2006, edited by Anne Moore along with guest editor, comics writer and American Splendor creator Harvey Pekar.
According to Houghton Mifflin editor Meg Lemke, who first proposed and commissioned the series as the in-house editor, the anthology wasn't a hard sell. "The timing just seemed perfect," Lemke tells PWCW. "The support [at Houghton Mifflin] has been unanimous." The idea had been kicking around the company for some time, but there were a couple things that helped make Lemke's idea reality. First, Houghton has published the Best American anthologies for many years, including The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories and many other categories.
Five years ago, Houghton launched the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, which Lemke says has been "a huge success" and "a strong indication of the growing market for alternative forms of storytelling." Also working in the new anthology's favor, Lemke says, was strong in-house support for HM's June release of Dykes to Watch Out For cartoonist Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, a serious and probing graphic memoir that has been generating a good amount of pre-pub interest&mdashand work from her DTWOF comics strip will also be featured in Best American Comics. Houghton is showing its support in the best way possible, releasing a 50,000-copy first printing in hardcover, retailing for $22—unlike other books in the anthology series, which are released as $14 paperbacks and hardcovers at $27.50.
Like the rest of Houghton's Best American series, the Comics series will be handled by a series editor with significant editorial experience in the field, and each edition will have a well-known writer as guest editor. Lemke says she chose Chicagoan Anne Elizabeth Moore—a Columbia College professor whose previous editorial work has garnered a couple of Eisner and Harvey nominations—as series editor because "she has a gift for seeking out relatively unknown writers who are doing amazing work deserving recognition. She was able to find rare work that mainstream readers might not otherwise find."
The inimitable Harvey Pekar was brought on as the inaugural title's guest editor and made the final selections in consultation with Moore. Lemke said the famously ornery Pekar was not only "very invested and enthusiastic" about the project, but all his quirks "worked in my favor as his editor." One of Lemke's favorite moments working on the book with Pekar, an accomplished jazz critic when he isn't writing comics, was talking with him about procedural details while he played a Jazz recording for her over the phone.
While Best American Comics 2006 includes well-known artists—among them Chris Ware, R. Crumb, Lynda Barry, Joe Sacco and Jaime Hernandez—the editors made sure to dig deep and find some less-famous worthies. Lemke points to several "fantastic discoveries" likely to receive much more attention. Among them are Rebecca Dart (represented by her experimental work Rabbithead) and Lilli Carre (who also drew the book's cover). Another relative unknown is Justin Hall, who contributed the book's longest piece, La Rubia Roca, "a moving and fascinating travel narrative" that was a strong favorite of Pekar's from the beginning.
It's Lemke's belief that HM's investment in the genre "is not as a passing fad but as a legitimate narrative form"—good news for any editor trying to make her mark in a relatively new trade book category. "The work is fun, inventive, ambitious," says Lemke, about a genre that's "continuing to get lots of national media attention—that's a combination publishers get excited about."
