If there was a recurring theme in American funnybooks this year, it would have to be that lots of fine cartoonists created fine comics that were pretty much like the fine comics they've created in past years.

Take, for example, Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library #15. A full-color pamphlet the size and shape of a Denny's menu, it's a staggeringly well-crafted objet d'art that's pretty much like the 14 previous Acmes. After years of work and hundreds of pages, one would expect Ware to have gotten much of what drove his novel Jimmy Corrigan out of his system. But Acme #15 stomps the same ground; the consumerist impulses, nostalgic longings and pathetic obsessions of the emotionally stunted, all illustrated with Corrigan's slick graphic style. But his design and drafting skills are so awesome, the amount of thought and effort obviously put into the work so astounding, that the flaws of Acme #15 are about as easy to brush aside as it is to open the book's amazing wraparound cover. The comics field is packed with cartoonists who seem to have one comic in them that they stake out entire careers playing variations on, but an artist of Ware's caliber can do better than coast on his sheer level of craft and serve up this bloated package of leftovers.

The Norwegian artist Jason made his English-language debut this year with Hey, Wait..., an elegantly drawn coming-of-age novel taken from the pages of his series Mjau Mjau. The greatest flaw in this odd, beautiful, oddly beautiful, beautifully odd book is the artist's cartooning style; the rendering is so clean, the pacing so rigid (every page of the book is a six-panel grid), and the staging so clear that it's easy for a reader to blast through the story in a few minutes. And this is a story that deserves to take a pause now and then: Jon and his best friend Bjorn, two rabbity-looking grade-school-age best friends, spend their days together playing, sharing their pipe dreams of what they're going to do when they grow up, reading comic books and slowly discovering girls. An accident leads to Jon coming of age -- at the speed of a sneeze, no less -- at the end of the first act. At the beginning of act two, we find Jon living an aimless, rootless working-class life. Near the end of the book -- apparently, there are no third acts in Norwegian lives -- Jon wonders if this adult life is punishment for his part in the accident. I don't think so; we can't all be guilty, after all. The deceptively simple art in this book, despite its ill-serving of the story, is a delight; there are moments of poetry and grace in even the most mundane pieces of business, like the soccer game the boys play on the novel's penultimate page. The expressionistic depiction of drunkenness, from drinking to vomiting, is also memorably effective.

I'm not the only writer to name Australian-by-way-of-Scotland Eddie Campbell's Alec: How To Be An Artist the first great novel of the '00s. What starts out as fairly straight-forward "Alec" story, all the way down to the second-person narration, quickly transcends its conventions, alternatingly acting as art essay, memoir and people's history of the "graphic novel." As a historian, Campbell makes a great raconteur; commonly held erroneous pieces of information are accepted at face value. For example, Campbell relates the old saw about Will Eisner inventing the term graphic novel while talking to a publisher friend (the term had been in use for years before in fanzines like Graphic Story Magazine, though Eisner may not have seen them). But the memoir material is as breezy and sharp as always, though Campbell rarely makes it easy for people unfamiliar with the players to know who's who; for example, I don't think the name of "The Man at the Crossroads" is ever given in the entire novel (Paul Gravett, if you were wondering). But these are minor quibbles about a rich and vital work.

Campbell also published Alec: Three Piece Suit this year, a collection of three short books -- Graffiti Kitchen, Little Italy and The Dance of Lifey Death -- that have little reason to be collected together, outside of allowing for the charming title pun. Italy is the weakest of the bunch, a ragtag collection of bits and pieces of borderline juvenilia. Lifey Death is a similarly ad hoc affair of short stories and single pages, though it's far superior work; Campbell's use of screen shading is particularly striking, getting some gorgeously impressionistic images out of "the little dots." But what makes this book great, a bona-fide book of the year, is the republication of Kitchen, a heartbreaking, searing work that proves that a comics novel -- granted, a short one -- can be blasted out in a fit of passion. Much of the style forged in Kitchen is used in How To Be An Artist: the collage; the freewheeling pacing; the loose, sketchy drawing that shows Campbell's fluent body English; the unfortunate absence of screen shading; the ragged, soulful linework. Campbell writes in his introduction to Kitchen that he intended to draw one love story in his life that avoided the "clichéd stupidities" of the genre. He's succeeds admirably and what's more, he also succeeds at presenting himself as a fairly selfish jerk without asking for an unwritten "please love me for my honesty about the horrible things I do" contract with the reader -- a "clichéd stupidity" sadly common in autobiographical comics.

No roundup of contemporary collections would be complete without a mention of Palestine, American-by-way-of-Malta Joe Sacco's first novel-length novel, a journalistic account of his experience in the post-intifada occupied territories of Israel. This work pales in comparison to last year's Safe Area Gorazde, particularly the second chapter's disappointing retreat from comics to text and heavily photo-referenced illustrations to tell personal anecdotes and recount the larger historical background that the little-people protagonists of Sacco's novel live and work in. It's particularly disappointing when recalling how powerful the similar scenes, told in comics form, in Gorazde were. Perhaps the most exciting thing about this work, aside from its unfortunate timeliness in these post-9/11 days, is seeing Sacco sharpen the cartooning and reporting skills that would bloom into something extraordinary; a hybrid of Harvey Kurtzman and George Orwell.

The first truly great comics book of the new millennium was published in early 2001, a collection of a weekly newspaper strip that was launched over a decade ago. Odds are, you've never heard of it: Peter Blegvad's The Book of Leviathan. I'm convinced that there are now two types of people in the world: people who agree with me on the above, and people who haven't read it yet. In a Hit List review in TCJ #234, the esteemed Ng Suat Tong wrote, "A rare instance in which the label 'essential' is not misplaced, Leviathan is one of the great strips of the last decade."

It's disturbing and disappointing that work of this caliber has gone unnoticed in the United States for so long. Brit-by-way-of-New-York Blegvad's strip Leviathan, published in London's The Independent on Sunday, was launched in 1991. Had his strip been syndicated to just a few alternative weeklies on the other side of the pond, I have little doubt that Blegvad would have already been inducted into the contemporary pantheon (pun possibly intended) of Ware, Katchor, Clowes, Spiegelman, et al.

This paradigm-shift-inducing piece of Art stars the faceless baby Levi(athan), the pet cat Cat and battered stuffed-animal Bunny. Levi's skewed view of life is the focus of the strip; his misunderstandings and, occasionally, outright rejections of adult life and logic -- what we assume to be reality -- are the base that the strip is built on. Levi & co. travel to other dimensions and spelunk the hidden mysteries of their home.

What makes this book great is that it allows life's facade to slip just enough to show the reader how unfathomably complex the machinery of our shared existence is; it's a playful jab in the ribs that reminds us that, for all our talk, we will never fully understand our surroundings in our lifetimes. Blegvad, through Leviathan, shows us that there are other valid perceptions of reality; he cracks wise about the very nature of human understanding -- have we truly built our understanding on the right foundation (our parents') or did we build on the closest one to us, just as our parents did before us? - and it still works as someone just cracking wise. No mean feat.

Rafi Zabor notes in his introduction that The Book is but the tip of Blegvad's comics iceberg; it contains 150-odd Leviathan strips, meaning that there are two more Volumes worth of, according to Zabor, darker and less funny-haha material waiting to be collected and published. The Book mostly focuses on the humor continuities, but its first chapter is a chilling story of Levi searching for his dead parents. The arc grabs you right at the spine, reminding you of the overwhelming fear of abandonment you had at that age, when your toys and family were literally the only things you had. The story also works as an impressionistic picture of the arbitrary, ironclad rules (that must be followed, Or Else) that children believe they live under. It demonstrates Blegvad's skill for tapping into early fears and thoughts in childhood, and making them palpable to adults who thought they had long since forgotten them. If there are six more years of comics this affecting, then bring them on.

Blegvad uses an astounding range of styles to illustrate his and his characters' thoughts on things like philosophy, science and poetry, usually working in a few ridiculous textual and/or graphic puns for the ride. Leviathan is, technically, a full-color strip, though the artist seems to use color as needed, most strips being B&W save Levi's sea-green sleepers and the pink Bunny. Other strips are eye-singeing explosions of color. A strip that looks like it was engraved centuries ago could sit next to one that appears to have been done by computer last year and would they still work as a continuity. Blegvad even shifts into a non-representational style to draw impressions of sounds for a strip where Levi is awakening to the sounds of his neighborhood. Appropriately, the artist's visual style is as elastic as his protagonist's sense of reality.

Both being fanciful child-and-cat strips, there is an obvious comparison to make of Leviathan to Calvin & Hobbes. But as great a cartoonist as Bill Watterson is, he's no Peter Blegvad, and Calvin and Hobbes are skilled vaudevillians doing cutesy shtick when compared to Leviathan's Byzantine wonders. Even Blegvad's throwaway jokes show a level of thought and insight rarely seen in any medium, much less comics. Leviathan is closer to Hobbes the philosopher than Hobbes the stuffed tiger.

This hardcover is exquisitely packaged; the cover features handsome faux-marble moiré and snazzy silver lettering, the edges of the pages are stained red, and the strips are grouped into thematic chapters complete with an actual ending -- something you don't see too often in a comic-strip collection. Or a Year-In-Review essay.