Like any anthology, the quality of the material is uneven, but the good outweighs the bad, and by a pretty large margin, so this one definitely ends up on the plus side of things. Just about every alternative cartoonist you can think of from the last 30 to 40 years is represented here, with some choice examples of classic comic strips included as a nice palette cleanser... the Frank King Gasoline Alley strips are so beautiful to look at, and any book that slips even a tiny bit of Crockett Johnso...

huge compilation. 79 artists. NSFK (not safe for kids). cute stuff by Kochalka. sublime nonsense by Mark Beyer, funny crap by Mat Brinkman, my favorite strip by Jim Woodring, Prewitt's sof'boy, part of C. Burns Curse of the molemen, the sublime Black Cherry, by Michael Dougan. Stuff by J. Bradley Johnson. Seth, David Heatley, Chris Ware, part of Justin Greens Binkey Brown.

Any book with work by Pekar, Crumb, Clowes, Ware, Deitch, Los Bros, Spiegelman and Seth, plus a few other names I'm forgetting, can't be a bad thing, but I wouldn't recommend going out of my way for this one.Even the best stories are often excerpts from longer works, and thus lose impact when taken from the context of their story.

While there were some really great strong stories in here, there were also were many stories that were confusing, pretentious, and reprints that can easily be found elsewhere (Maus, Lynda Barry, etc). There were some interesting historical essays and reprints of classic cartoons, but overall, I found myself skipping large chunks of the book for being boring.

holy cow, what a great anthology! so logically complied and edited; it's the dream textbook for the dreamiest class on comics analysis and, to some extent, history. Brunetti admits that this is nowhere near a complete or comprehensive anthology but it is a great place to start your studies if you are interested in comics as more than funny little pictures.

A great collection, but not a perfect collection. This book is gorgeous and is worth reading just to sit in awe of its organization and presentation. It did one thing that I haven't ever seen before: it's table of contents was only images and page numbers. It seems so obvious that comics can be indexed this way, but this is the only instance of it that I know of. The choices for this anthology were fantastic and I saw a lot of authors that usually don't get the time of day they deserve. The one

Graphic Fiction is an anthology edited by Brunetti that features some of the absolute best work in the medium, including Jaime Hernandez's "Flies on the Ceiling," Richard McGuire's "Here," Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb's "Hypothetical Quandary," and outstanding selections from Art Spiegelman, Dan Clowes, Debbie Drechsler, Phoebe Gloeckner, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, and many more. It's such a complete package that I use it as the main textbook in my college-level English class, "Comic Books as Lit...

This is a pretty comprehensive collection of contemporary "comix" or graphic fiction. This is definitely not what I would call "funny books", instead it is much more adult-oriented. A good part of the book is an homage to Charles Schulz, which I enjoyed and which gave me a deeper appreciation of his work.There are some great stories here, especially Clowes' "Gynecology" and the long piece by R.Crumb. Some of the pieces didn't work well for me because (I believe) they have been reduced in size fr...

I received this huge -gorgeous-dense-400 page collection volume of "Graphic Fiction,cartoons, cartoons, and true stories", at a holiday party last Sat. night. Food, wine, and gift exchanging....this is a lovely gift. Right away - this book has that 'awe' and 'wow' feeling. It's PACKED FILLED with Authors and Artist's works. At first I flipped through the book seeing if I knew any of these authors. A few: Charles Schulz, Art Spiegelman, ....but I wasn't familiar with most of the contributors. I'm...

I really enjoyed this collection of graphic fiction from numerous artists. The only reason that I would give it 4 stars instead of 5 is because it was proclaimed (in the articles I read) as a young adult collection, but it is most certainly an adult collection. Granted, there are much more explicit materials to be found in a young adult collection, but in the graphic novel medium a little nudity goes a long way. As an adult graphic novel enthusiast I loved it!

Simply put, this anthology highlights many of my least favorite authors/artists in the genre. Of course there were some wowing, stand out pieces (there's one piece about all of the events that happen in a single corner of a house over the course of 100+ years that will make your head spin), but overall, it's all the Adrian Tomine and Chris Ware that so many people love...but that I've personally never connected with. Equally, there's something about anthologies that I've just never come to grips...

As the introductory essay makes clear, this anthology is basically made up of "some comics I like." But when the person compiling them is Ivan Brunetti, it's time to sit up and take notice. This book is a well-packaged and wide-ranging collection of images and essays that show Brunetti has a comprehensive understanding both of the history and of the current direction(s) of the graphic arts.There are too many contributors to list individually, but ones I recognized and liked include giants of the...

A pretty good anthology of the 'slice-of-life' style of comic book.One thing that does get tiring is how many of the stories are extremely down-beat, mopey, negative, depressive. What makes comic book writers hate life? Still, as an overview of the modern landscape, this is quite good, and there's some nice extended sections on Peanuts, Art Spiegelman, and Robert Crumb.

Since this has excerpts from various graphic novels/cartoons I slowly worked my way through this a little at a time. A few of the more comic book-like pages bored me. Some of the more graphic novel type material had me riveted though. The creativity mixed with (sometimes raw) humanity made for some intense page-turning action. I am hoping to read some of the actual books now that I've read some of the pages from the best.

I've had this for awhile but never written about it. This is one of the important comics collections. If you are a student of comics you have to know it, and there's a second volume Brunetti did, and The McSweeney's volume edited by Chris Ware.Faves: Chet Brown, Lynda Barry, Jeffery Brown, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Bill Griffith, Los Hernandez Bros, Kevin Huizenga, George Herriman, Ben Katchor, Richard McGuire, Seth, Charles Schulz, Jim Woodring, Chris Ware and about...

Picked up this massive anthology (and part 2) on a recent trip to this gnarly used media store (primarily books) in the Chicago suburbs for 6 dollars...6 dollars! I was excited as I LOVE comics/graphic novels as a form of storytelling and non-fiction.Unfortunately I was personally disappointed.Why?For a massive collection like this, the selections REALLY LACK stories/artists of color/ethnicity, gender, queerness, and just variety. The selections are a very heterosexual white male voice and the s...

I think this anthology works best either as an introduction to interesting artists or as sort of a museum exhibit of the state and history of modern graphic novels.As with most anthologies, it's hard to rate the book as a whole when some works shine and some I skipped over. I appreciated and enjoyed the book, and especially liked looking at the different art styles. There are also some great stories being told here and I have a brief list of books and artists to look into further.There is a dark...

Haven't read anything in a bit but recently just finished going through this. Overall a good collection of comics, nothing particularly unexpected or out of left field. A pretty good overview of the past 80-some years of Western comics. Unfortunately this is a pretty North American-centric collection, like most collections of this type go. Plenty of the hierarchs of the straight/white/male pantheon (Ware, Clowes, Crumb, Burns, etc. etc. etc.) are represented for the 100th time but there is a pre...

I'm a quite a newbie when it comes to comics and graphic novels, so I was excited to discover this doorstopper of a hardback at a second-hand bookshop in Tokyo the other day. I need educating, and the is Yale University Press book seemed as good a place to start as any. I've no idea how representative of the genre it was, but I really appreciated the range of artistic styles and topics presented, although the themes of Catholic guilt and weird-stuff-that-happened-to-me-in-my-20s were a little ov...

Brunetti's first volume of "Graphic Fiction, cartoons, and true stories" does a great, if sometimes uneven, job of collecting most contemporary "graphic novelists" and their progenitors in the genre.Any good anthology will inspire arguments of inclusion; I'll skip that here but will quibble with the space given certain folks: only 4 pages for Lynda Barry, but Justin Green and Joe Matt get 8 or 9 pages? And Brunetti, although he includes woodcut artist Franz Masreel and some of the early comic st...