Why it's the greatest comic of all time: Honestly, there's nothing else in comics like Arsene Schrauwen, at least not yet. This is where an interesting cartoonist becomes one of the great cartoonists.

Arsene Scrauwen is the story of its artist's grandfather and his time as a colonist in the Belgian Congo, and it manages to fold all Schrauwen's previously displayed obsessions - culture clash, lowbrow humor, colonialism, and continental European life in the early part of the 20th century - into a single engrossing, often beautiful narrative. In Arsene Schrauwen, though, the strangeness of Schrauwen's work is dialed back, and the story takes on that oldest of narrative forms, the biography. Both his graphic novel My Boy and his many shorts in Fantagraphics' Mome anthology were clearly superior to just about any comics out there, but beyond that it was a little difficult to know what to make of them. It's more interesting to look at Arsene Schrauwen in the context of its creator's career than that of comics as a whole: for years Schrauwen has been making gorgeously realized, visually immense, quite often hilarious comics that were a little too weird or conceptually daring to really hit as satisfying narratives. It's almost like Belgian art-comics savant Olivier Schrauwen knew these were the thoughts syruping up my mind when I ordered this first installment of his (English language) graphic novel in progress when I opened the Deutsche Post envelope it came to me in, this scrap of paper fluttered out. Unless you live in a major city the only way to get the best comics coming out today is knowing what they are and then submitting to the depressingly impersonal tyranny of Google searching and PayPal-ing. And so goodbye to the stories of stumbling across some hidden gem in a dollar bin, of being directed toward the real stuff by a knowing comic shop employee, of trying something wild because the cover leaps out from the new release racks. There's a riff to unspool here about how our current era is the one that's providing the least institutional support for the cutting edge of comics art, but the reality of it is that publishers and retailers may just have finally learned that the great unwashed (that's all you jerks reading this) just doesn't want to read comics that push any boundaries. How acquired: In the same dreary manner as I get most of the best comics these days: ordered off the internet.

Arsène Schrauwen by Olivier Schrauwen