Bookshelf #26

This week's bookshelf is...well, perhaps I should start by clarifying that this particular shelf isn't part of a set of bookshelves or anything. It's actually the interior of an old, cheap, wooden entertainment center that used to be in my parents' room in the '90s or so. The shelf pictured above is where the television used to sit...and the make of television set they had wasn't actually compatible with this entertainment center, which is why the back wall of it was cut—perhaps "hacked" is a more accurate word—out, so the back of the TV would fit in the space, and the cords and wires and what not could escape and drape down towards the electrical outlets. That's what the weird white shape beyond the books here is; a hole that looks like it was made with a hatchet in the wooden, and the white of the wall behind it. 

As with any and all furniture in my current home, I turned this entertainment center into a makeshift bookshelf, by cramming it full of books. There's a set of doors that one can close to hide the books, the badly bowing shelf not made to bear all their weight and the unsightly hole in the back from view. But I opened it to take this picture.

Anyway, the books. This is, as you can probably tell at a glance, another Fantagraphics shelf, and I am going to guess that the vast majority of these books are from the first decade of the 21st century. (We already saw another Fantagraphics shelf, containing more recent books from the publisher, in a previous post in this series.)

There's quite a variety, the main unifying factor here being that almost all of these books are really rather great. 

There's a big, huge format collection of E.C. Segar's Popeye and a couple of not-quite-as-large collections of George Herriman's Krazy Kat, both of which were comic strips I used to read about as a teenager and a college student and wish that there were whole collections of to peruse. Now I wish I would have been more diligent in keeping up with the collections Fanta eventually released. 

There's work from a who's who of cartoonists, including Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Gilbert Hernandez, Jason, Bernard Krigstein, Scott Morse, Boody Rogers, Joe Sacco, Seth, Art Spigelman, Barry Windsor-Smith and Basil Wolverton.

There are a couple of books by Johnny Ryan, who I personally think is one of the two funniest cartoonists I've ever read (The other being Sam Henderson). One of my fondest memories is sharing some dumb, vulgar cartoons of Ryan's with my old housemates in Columbus and watching them laugh until they were crying at them.

And then there's work from some of my all-time favorite comics art makers, Dan DeCarlo (The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo) and Richard Sala (Peculia, Maniac Killer Strikes Again, Peculia and the Groon Grove Vampires).

And scrutinizing the spines, I see there's also Small Favors Book One by Colleen Hoover, which, along with Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls from last week's shelf, is among the relatively little pornography I actually own (Although I suppose the word "erotica" is classier sounding, huh?)

As ever, my organization seems haphazard, as there are a few books here that aren't from Fanta, like PictureBox's 1-800-Mice by Matthew Thurber, Drawn and Quarterly's The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists by Seth and The Death-Ray by Daniel Clowes and IDW/Yoe Book's Dan DeCarlo's Jetta. 

Oh, and laying across the top is Dark Horse Book's A Home for Scared People, a collection of Chris Onstad's incomparable web-comics Achewood (I see there's a "3" on the spine; I hope that means I have the first two collections around here somewhere).

Finally, there are two books supporting A Home for Scared People and M. Tillieux's Ten Thousand Years in Hell whose spines aren't facing out. What might those be? Well, I checked. The first is Joe Daly's Dungeon Quest Book Two (Not sure why I didn't shelve that right next to Joe Daly's Dungeon Quest Book One, which would seem to be the ideal spot for it on this shelf). The other is Monte Beauchamp's not-actually-a-comic Krampus: The Devil of Christmas which, like Beauchamp's earlier Devil In Design, was what I consider a pivotal work in introducing America to the European holiday monster. Like, I don't think Krampus would be as popular as he is today without Beauchamp's art books featuring him.