The Best American Comics 2011 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), edited by Alison Bechde

Always diverse in theme and style, The Best American Comics is an annual anthology of the universe beyond the DC superheroes. The 2011 edition offers a good sampling of the prolific permutations in the post-Love & Rockets world. Most selections are smart and visually interesting and play with their medium, as in one panel where one character's head partly covers someone else's word balloon. Comics are employed to many ends, whether mirroring everyday life or investigating a 1956 Israeli massacre in Gaza or mythologizing the legend of Nikola Tesla. Epistemology and phenomenology enter the frames. This year's editor, cartoonist Alison Bechdel, readily admits to the hopelessness of actually culling the “best” from such a rich menu of possibilities.