Bookshelf #14

This week's bookshelf is my Fantagraphics shelf...or, to be more precise, my Fantagraphics-books-that-aren't-Disney-collections shelf, as those are currently all stuffed onto another bookshelf entirely.  

To the right are, obviously, the various Peanuts collections, including three volumes of The Complete Peanuts, four of the little gift book-esque books that Fanta released following 2012's similarly-sized  Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking and Snoopy vs. The Red Baron, which, as the title suggests, is a collection of the strips featuring the World War I flying ace's many battles against his archenemy.

There are also a pair of non-Fanta Peanuts books, both from Boom's Kaboom! imprint, which has (or at least had) the license to produce new Peanuts comic books. 

The first of these is 2018's Peanuts Dell Archive, collecting stories from the comics books of the 1950s and 1960s by Chales Schulz and others. These are obviously not Peanuts at its best, but they are certainly interesting, seeing some of the earliest non-Schulz Peanuts work, as well as seeing the characters feature in stories that are longer than even the Sunday strips of the newspaper could allow. \

The other is 2015's Peanuts: A Tribue to Charles M. Schulz, a 65th anniversary celebration of the strip, the characters and the man by a wide variety of other artists, including Patrick McDonnel, Mo Willems, Lincoln Pierce, Evan Dorkin, Roger Langridge, Paul Pope, Stan Sakai and others. Again, not great, but interesting...even fascinating, as seeing characters so associated with a single artist's vision translated into the styles of others can often be. (Unfortunately, this book is really wide and juts an inch or so over the edge of the bookshelf, so it mildly irritates me every time I look at it.)

If you're curious why I don't have more Peanuts on my shelf, I do have more volumes of The Complete Peanuts upstairs on another bookshelf (As I've mentioned previously, although I've been living in my current home for a little over a year now, I have not attempted the arduous task of reorganizing all my bookshelves into something that might make more sense). I don't have as many as I would like though; as with Fanta's Carl Barks and other Disney library collections, I wish I would have bought each new volume as they came out and thus had a complete collection, rather than putting doing so off and then falling hopelessly behind. Maybe one day. 

On the left you'll find more-or-less random books from Fanta, including works from Julia Gfrorer, Jason, Lucy Knisley, Benjamin Marra, Katie Skelly, Steven Weissman and a few others. The majority of these books are by the late Richard Sala though, who is one of my all-time favorite artists. These include The Bloody Cardinal, Delphine, The Hidden, In a Glass Grotesquely, Mad Night, Poison Flowers & Pandemonium and Violenzia & Other Deadly Amusements. That's not everything—Phantoms in the Attic is shelved elsewhere due to its large size, and Peculia, the first work of his I had read, is upstairs with the older comics. 

Considering this shelf now, I think this might be the most reviewed of my bookshelves. That is, the majority of these books are ones I ended up reviewing professionally (that is, somewhere other than my blog). This, I suppose, says something about Fantagraphics: They make great books worthy of discussion and recommendation, and for a more general audience than the floppy publishers of the direct market.