Bookshelf #21

Now here is an interesting selection of comics! Atop a small bookshelf in my old, childhood bedroom you'll find various trade collections and original graphic novels from several different DC Comics imprints from the first decade of the 21st century. Of those imprints three were discontinued, although one of them was recently revived. The contents of these books are all over the place in terms of style, genre and audience, the one thing they all have in common being that they are small, digest-sized trade paperbacks, presumably published in that particular format to appeal to the emerging audience of manga readers who were used to reading comics in tankobon-style collections rather than stapled 22-page floppies.

The only real exception? Rick Veitch's 2006 original graphic novel Can't Get No, a bizarre 300-page black-and-white 9/11 book from Vertigo that read like an illustrated poem, the protagonist's experiences communicated more directly through the imagery than the words. A horizontal rectangle that's five-and-a-half-inches tall and about seven-and-a-half inches wide, it's only one of the books pictured here that deviates from the digest size.

Let's take these books left to right. 

The first two are both from DC's now long-defunct Paradox Press imprint, Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner's Road to Perdition and John Wagner and Vince Locke's A History of Violence, both of which were adapted into feature films. 

Then we have Superman Adventures Vols. 1-4, collecting issues from the 1996-2002 series based on Superman: The Animated Series (Yes, Superman Adventures was a DC comic based on a cartoon that was based on DC comics). The stories in these collections are written by Evan Dorkin, Sarah Dyer, David Michelinie and Mark Millar and feature art from Terry Austin, Bret Blevins, Mike Manley and others, the various artists all working in with the designs of Bruce Timm and hewing to the style of the TV show. 

While far from his most famous work, these are without a doubt the very best comics Mark Millar has ever written, and I don't think it's particularly close, either. You may suspect that I am kidding or perhaps exaggerating so as to cast aspersions on Millar's body of work, but I am being completely sincere; these are good comics. 

These stories are all set in the publisher's "animated universe", but are technically DC comics proper, rather than belonging to an imprint. Two of the four do bear the then-current Johnny DC logo that was on many of their kids comics back then, and the $6.95 digests all say "Suitable for ALL AGES" and "Don't Miss these other great Cartoon Network Collections from DC Comics!", beneath which are listed Justice League Adventures, The Powerpuff Girls, Scooby-Doo and "Cartoon Cartoons!"

Next? A plain old DC Comics collection: 2005's Secret of the Swamp Thing, which collects the first ten issues of the original 1972-launched Swamp Thing series by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson. I have no idea why the publisher decided to collect this run in this format, as the smaller size hardly flatters Wrightson's detailed work, and I don't really see anything about the then rather straightforward monster comic that might suggest it would be of interest to young manga readers. I snapped it up though, and it was my first exposure to pre-Alan Moore Swamp Thing. (I haven't read any of DC's "Compact Comics" collections, as so far they have only collected books I already own, but I just checked, and I guess this 21-year-old Swamp Thing collection is only slightly smaller than those.)

That's followed by some Vertigo comics. There's Jill Thompson's manga-style Sandman spin-offs Death: At Death's Door and The Deadboy Detectives (the first of these is particularly great, and an ideal gateway for manga readers into the Vertigo "universe" of mature reader fantasy comics, though I fear that, like everything associated with Neil Gaiman in anyway, it's fatally tainted at this point), a collection of the 2004 miniseries My Faith in Frankie by Mike Carey, Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel, the last of whom handled the covers (I remember liking this at the time, but 20+ years later, all I really remember is how fond I was of the art) and the aforementioned Can't Get No.

Finally, there are five books from the extremely short-lived (like, 2007-2008 short-lived) imprint Minx: The Plain Janes, Clubbing, Good As Lily, Re-Gifters and Water Baby. That's just under half of the dozen Minx books that were published, each chosen because I liked one or more of the creators involved (All these years later, Sophie Campbell's Water Baby is the one that I remember the most clearly). 

In retrospect, what's interesting about this line of books was that it demonstrated DC attempting to reach a particular market (YA readers) with a rather particular type of book (that is, more straight literature or popular fiction than the genre stuff they usually publish) but then giving up almost immediately. The types of books Minx was producing are now quite prevalent, although publishers like First Second and the imprints of the big publishing houses are the ones producing those comics now.