Bookshelf #24

And so we reach the bottom shelf of yet another shelving unit. Theoretically, this shelf is devoted to a trio of publishers—Slave Labor Graphics, Alternative Comics and Oni Press—but, if you look very closely, you'll see that exceptions abound.

We start on the left with the SLG books...kinda. That fist book is an SLG book, The Complete Samurai Jam, collecting what I believe is the first published work of Andi Watson. I then shelved my collections of Watson's breakout work, the charming Skeleton Key, next to it, presumably because it was also by Watson. Then we've got more SLG books, like Where's It At, Sugar Kat?, Superheroes & Sea Monsters, David Hahn's Private Beach, Halo and Sprocket, the first volume of The Waiting Place and Your Ticket to Happiness.

Then to the right are the Alternative Comics, of which the work of Sam Henderson (one of the funniest cartoonists I've ever read) is best represented, but I see there's also some early work from Brandon Graham, a book from the Meathaus collective and one of the handful of 9/11 tributed/benefit books the industry produced after the attacks. 

And then, on the far right, are all of my Oni books, the best represented of the three publishers on this shelf. There's a copula books from J. Torres, some of Judd Winick's Barry Ween, some of Dan Brereton's Nocturnals work, another Andi Watson book and some of the Bryan Lee O'Malley's earliest comics work, including his Lost at Sea and the Hopeless Savages series he drew for writer Jen Van Meter. (Fun fact: Around the turn of the century, Oni was my favorite publisher, and the only one I have ever pitched a comic to. They rather gently turned me down of course, and while I was disappointed at the time, I am now glad that no one let 22-year-old Caleb write a comic book mini-series. Like the novel I wrote in college, I'm relieved it never actually saw the light of day, as I'm sure it would have been 1) bad and 2) terribly embarrassing). 

If you scrutinize those spines closely, you'll note a few outliers that aren't actually from any of those three publishers, and presumably ended up there because I was unsure where else to stick them: The Collected Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 4, collecting the three-part "Return to New York" arc (from Mirage), a trade paperback collection of J.O. Barr's original The Crow series (from Kitchen Sink Press), Dave Sim's Judenhass (Aardvark-Vanaheim), two random volumes of editor Kazu Kabushi's Flight anthology (the spines of which indicate the first is from Ballantine and the other from Villard), Jeff Smith's Bone: One Volume Edition (Cartoon Books) and Mike Allred's The Golden Plates Vol. 1: The Sword of Laban and The Tree of Life (AAA Pop). 

Taken all together, this is one really great shelf, containing a wide variety of great comics in many different styles and genres.