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It’s starting! PW’s Best Books will be out on Monday, but here’s the Amazon editors choices for the year:

1. The Art of Jaime Hernandez: The Secrets of Life and Death by Jaime Hernandez, Abrams Comic Arts
2. Batwoman: Elegy by Greg Rucka and JH Williams III, DC
3. X’ed Out by Charles Burns, Pantheon
4. Market Day by James Sturm ,Drawn and Quarterly
5. King of the Flies: Hallorave (Vol. 1) by Mezzo, Fantagraphics Books
6. 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective by G.B. Trudeau, Andrews McMeel Publishing
7. Hellboy Volume 9: The Wild Hunt by Mike Mignola, Dark Horse
8. Acme Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware, Drawn and Quarterly
9. Picture This: The Near-sighted Monkey Book by Lynda Barry , Drawn & Quarterly
10. Wednesday Comics by Neil Gaiman, et al, DC

A great showing and year for D&Q, no question. The only Fantagraphics book is one we’ve never seen nor heard of! To the library, Watson!

Picking The Art of Jaime Hernandez is a nice tribute to one of comics greatest living masters, but saluting his amazing work in Love & Rockets #3 might have been even better.

Link via J. Caleb Mozzocco.

1 COMMENT

  1. Great result for Rucka’s Batwoman!

    Its a shame we won’t get any more of his great writing for the character.

    Maybe DC should try getting him back!

  2. Very happy to see Rucka, Sturm and Barry on the list, but in what universe are coffee table art books, strip retrospectives and anthology collections “graphic novels”?
    The work of Hernandez, Trudeau and the creators of Wednesday Comics is as impressive as all get out, but to call these specific books “graphic novels” further blurs this rather arbitrary distinction.

  3. No Wilson? And Jaime Hernandez is maybe the best artist on the planet but I agree that’s an art book NOT a graphic novel.

    His story BROWNTOWN in Love & Rockets: New Stories #3 was the graphic novel of the year, though.

    That said, the Amazon list is a perfectly respectable cross-section of the most legitimately important books on the market.