Dan Nadel

It’s been a banner year for what highbrows call sequential art, what with a new volume of the splendid and absolutely sui generis Kramer’s Ergot and Ivan Brunetti’s An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories. The biggest revelation of all, though, might be Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time, a beautifully designed collection of mind-blowing work by assorted whackos and obscurities. Most of the strips and panels Nadel has assembled have never been reprinted before, and some date from the earliest days of the twentieth century; in a few cases, he got his hands on the only surviving copies. While the majority of the artists in Art Out of Time will be unknown to casual and even hardcore fans, there’s a consistently freewheeling aesthetic at work here, and a formal daring that’s light-years ahead of its time.