Bookshelf #22

This is my original Dark Horse shelf, and some of these trades are pretty old at this point. The first of these I purchased was Predator Vol. 1, which you can see between the Adam Warren Dirty Pair books (one of which I now notice is actually from Eclipse, not Dark Horse) and the Tank Girl collection. That trade collects the first of Dark Horse's many, many Predator miniseries, originally released in 1989; the trade was released in 1990, and I would have bought it a year or two later, from a Waldenbooks at a mall. 

Not only was it my first Dark Horse comic, it was among the first trades paperbacks I had ever bought. I continued to read Predator comics off and on, but usually in serially published comics-comics, rather than trade; if you scrutinize the spines here, you'll note the only other Predator comics on the shelf are the 2018 collection Predator: Hunters and Predator Omnibus Vol. 4. (If you look at the numbers on those omnibuses, you'll see they are pretty random; at this point, I can't remember where I got them, but, based on those numbers, I assume they were second-hand purchases from Half Price Books, or bought at a it-would-be-crazy-not-to-buy them discount at a shop sale or at a con; as with Marvel's Essential and DC's Showcase Presents collections, I kind of wish I would have bought all of those Dark Hose omnibuses when they were on sale, especially the Predator and Aliens ones). 

While there's a rather wide variety of characters and creators here, best represented on the shelf is Little Lulu by John Stanley. I love that comic, and I loved Dark Horse's presentation of it in these smaller-sized trade paperbacks. If I recall correctly, as I had done with some manga series, I read all of the earlier volumes that my library happened to have on the shelf, got hooked and then started buying the new volumes when they were released, which accounts for the weird numbering of those on the shelf here. Not sure how I missed volume 16 there, though.

There's one book there that's not a comic, and that's the slim volume lying atop Predator: Hunters. That is Hallelujah Anyway by poet Kenneth Patchen, a 1966 full of his "picture poems", which married his poetry with his artwork (You can see why this might be appealing to someone who would also grow to love comics).

A high school English teacher had originally introduced me to Patchen, through a copy of this very work, and Patchen was for a long time one of my favorite poets and my favorite writers in general. He definitely influenced me when I was young and wrote poetry...something I eventually gave up on, as there didn't seem to be any money or much prestige in the writing of poetry.

Not that there's much in writing about comics either, of course...