I mean, I knew about a lot of fantastic artists already - Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine - but this volume opened things up, bringing a whole range of artists together in one place, defining a moment in comics history, while delving back into the geology to show where we've come from. Sure, I didn't like all of it - some of the artists I found to be too willfully obtuse and 'underground' for my liking - but that's not the point. Anthologies are necessary because they open things up. In a culture where increasingly we're asked to narrow our tastes down to a specific trend, and buy into niche fashions and ideologies while writing off others, the anthology threatens to push back against those narrowing influences, and challenge us with something new.
My encounter with Solipsistic Pop did the same for me three years later as Brunetti's anthology had. It opened things up and showed me a whole mess of comics I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. Tom Humberstone, editor of Solipsistic Pop, brings together artists from across the UK, working in a number of styles and with a number of voices, and is putting them in one place. Each volume is like the ring in a tree trunk, an exciting and fascinating moment in UK comics history. Through Solipsistic Pop I got to discover Luke Pearson, Kristyna Baczynski, Stephen Collins and Mark Oliver to name just a few. And from there I went on to investigate more and more.
