MATTHIAS WIVEL:
In your foreword to the American edition, you mention that you started [Alan's War] pretty raw and only later did extensive research and acquired reference material, plus eventually traveled to some of the places Mr. Cope went to. It must have been a considerable challenge to make this bygone era come alive in the images — how did you go about getting things right, and how much emphasis did you place upon historical authenticity as you went along?

EMMANUEL GUILBERT:
Plausibility was my aim. But you need a certain degree of exactitude in the details to attain plausibility. Not too much, but enough. That's a balance. In the beginning, I wasn't afraid of inventing most of the scenery. Alan was there to control the result; I knew he didn't mind a little invention, fantasy, and I tested the measure of my freedom in the treatment of the story. With a long work of this sort, one might imagine that the creator starts out kind of slow and uncertain and then attains greater self-confidence as he goes along and pages accumulate, and therefore works faster, finishing it in a rush of excitement to end something important, eager to get rid of the heavy burden it has been. With me, the opposite always happens. I start out rather fast, then slow down, and finish like a rheumatic slug. Besides the fact that I am older and supposedly more tired at the end than I was at the beginning, this is also because I feel more and more linked to my story, more and more interested in it, more and more aware of what I'm doing, and feel more and more responsible toward the lives that I'm exploring.

The Best American Comics 2008
Lynda Barry, ed.; Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, series eds.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
322 pp., $22
Color and B&W;, Hardcover
ISBN: 9780618989768

An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories Vol. 2
Ivan Brunetti, ed.
Yale University Press
400 pp., $28
Color and B&W;, Hardcover
ISBN: 9780300126716

The number of high-end comics anthologies has skyrocketed in the past few years. For a long time the two Smithsonian collections virtually had the market to themselves. With the appearance of McSweeney's 13 in 2004, and the launching of The Best American Comics series in 2006, this niche has started to flourish. The titles under review offer further evidence of the confidence and momentum of the present comics moment.