As you can see, there's work from a giant in the field, Winsor McCay (a Little Nemo collection and a Checker-published collection of McCay's early work, with an unfortunate cover) as well as a couple of collections of popular mainstream strips Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes and Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks. Most of the other collections are of what I guess what would be considered "alternative" comics, like Tony Millionaire's Maakies, Neil Swaab's Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles (about a foul-mouthed degenerate talking teddy bear that far predated Seth MacFarlane's Ted stuff), the work of Keith Knight and a Ted Rall-edited collection with the phrase "alternative cartoonists" right there in the title.
Oh, and a paper collection of Chris Onstad's webcomic Achewood.
You'll notice there are several sideways books whose spines you can't see, shelved that way for stackability rather than to show them off. These include a pair of additional Calvin and Hobbes collections, a collection of Nicholas Gurewitch's Perry Bible Fellowship, a pair of postcard books of Matt Groening's Life Is Hell, a collection of David Rees' essential chronicle of the Bush years Get Your War On and, the rarest book on the shelf, a hardcover entitled Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond, published in conjunction with the gallery show of his work at Ohio State University's Wexner Center for the Arts in 2008 (This was before OSU's The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library Museum; double-checking Wikipedia, I guess that name was adopted in 2009, and the current building was completed in 2013) (Oh, I also see that I wrote about Bone and Beyond and a sister exhibit on this here blog way back in 2008; here's a link, although I was afraid to reread the post myself in case it is cringe-inducingly poorly written).
The biggest outlier here is Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster, Craig Yoe's book about the down-on-his-luck Shuster's illustration work for the small press BDSM magazine Nights of Horror. It's a pretty bleak read, really, but a perhaps important bit of context for the sort of work Shuster was forced into after he and Jerry Siegel's shabby treatment by the company that became DC Comics. Imagine, Shuster co-created one of the most popular characters in American media history and practically invented the superhero genre, and less than 20 years later he was working anonymously to illustrate pornographic prose (It's worth noting that Shuster's art has very little in the way of nudity and doesn't depict any intercourse; the stories his illustrations ran alongside was where the really dirty stuff was). It's downright surreal to see Shuster's clearly recognizable art featuring bondage and whips and suchlike here...doubly so when the characters bear a resemblance to Lois Lane, or Superman or Lex Luthor.
Now from the sordidness of 1950s fetish art to the innocence of childhood...!
The stack on the left is about two-thirds not comics. These include a copy of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan illustrated by Charles Vess (so maybe tangentially comics), Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop, The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter and a Little Golden Book of The Saggy Baggy Elephant.
While those were all more recent acquisitions—or "recent" anyway, as I remember the Beatrix Potter book was a gift from a girlfriend my freshman year of college, 30 years ago—the other kids books in this stack I've had literally had my entire life, as they date back to 1977.
These are a copy of William Steig's Caleb & Kate that was given to me for the obvious reason (Caleb wasn't so popular a name 49 years ago, and you can see from the lost dustjacket and spine damage that this book is an old one), a Random House "Pictureback" book entitled Favorite Tales of Monsters and Trolls collecting three short stories and featuring gorgeous, elaborate illustrations by John O'Brien (Actually, now that I see this book again, I kind of want to write a post about it in the near future) and Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy World.
This last was a favorite of mine as a child, and I have a rather clear memory from before I could even read regarding it, as it was the first time I had made the realization that particular people were responsible for particular books. My late aunt, who spent a lot of time with us when we were very little children, must have asked me to bring her a book to read to me, as when I presented it to her, she said, "Oh no, not Richad Scarry again!"
That was the first time I had heard the name "Richard Scarry", which obviously made an impression on me given that his surname sounded just like the word "scary", which his stories so obviously weren't, and started to put together in my little brain the concept of authorship.
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