Sunday, May 17, 2026

Bookshelf #30

This week's bookshelf is the penultimate of the four on this particular tiny white unit, upon the small shelves of which only the smallest of books can be held. The best represented publisher here is probably Top Shelf, but more so of their relationship with a particular cartoonist at the particular point of time these books mostly came from rather than anything else.

If there is a cohesive organizing principle here, other than the small size of the books, it is probably that all of the books left of that Dennis the Menace collection there are works of comics as literature...or the cartoonists who make comics as literature having fun with genre silliness.

To the farthest left, we have the 2005 Salamander Dream from AdHouse, which I believe is cartoonist Hope Larson's first published work, aside from appearances in anthologies and online. She's certainly come a long way since, with 2012's A Wrinkle in Time graphic novel adaptation seemingly being a particular milestone, after which her work became increasingly popular and mainstream, and her biography began to fill with "real" graphic novels from "real" publishers (That is, those that had traditionally published book-books and gotten into the comics business, rather than comics publishers). 

Oh, and until I just looked her up a few minutes ago, I had completely forgotten that she wrote a Batgirl series for a while (The 2016-2018 "Rebirth" series, which I think I only read a single issue of, as it was really hard for me to care about a lot of characters after The New 52, the magically un-paralyzed and de-aged Barbara being prime among them).

Next is the 2003 version of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, followed by James Kochalka's The Cute Manifesto from Alternative Comics and then Daniel Clowes' Ice Haven, also from Pantheon. All three are great books and I would recommend all of them if you haven't read them, but at this very moment I find The Cute Manifesto the most significant. It demonstrates Kochalka working both within and without his signature "cute" style, explains how and why he makes comics the way he does and, I think, is a fairly valuable book for a young cartoonist or artist still finding their way to check out.
The next three books feature another wide variety for shelf-mates. First, there's Kazimir Strzepek's The Mourning Star from Bodega, a wonderfully cartoony apocalyptic fantasy epic that I see the Amazon write-up says combines "the depth of Lord of the Rings with the showmanship of Star Wars" which...well, that's one way to sell a comic, I guess; I appreciated the book design, the cartoony characters and the scratchy, homemade aesthetic. I would definitely recommend it if you can find it anywhere (Sadly, as I flipped through it, I noticed the binding on my copy was falling out). Next is Scott Morse's Noble Boy, a biography of sorts of animator Maurice Noble, in an extremely interesting format that suggests nothing so much as a more rectangular than usual board book for the youngest children (albeit with many more words than such books typically feature). And then we have Alex Robinson's Lower Regions from Top Shelf, a 56-page mini-comic about a sexy barbarian lady with a battle axe fighting her way through a dungeon full of monsters, from the creator of Box Office Poison and Tricked

Between that and Dennis the Menace, we have a bunch of early Jeffrey Brown books from Top Shelf. These are the books through which I first encountered Brown's work, and why I still can't get over the fact that the cartoonist has now produced a shelf full of Star Wars books, as well as comics starring Batman, The Hulk, Thor, The X-Men and The X-Files. In order, these are Miniature Sulk (although the spine reads "Mini Sulk"), a collection of short, funny scripts; Any Easy Intimacy ("AEIOU" on the spine), a serious autobiographical novel about his relationships, like much of his early work; Sulk 1 and 2, an apparent anthology series, as the first follows his superhero parody creation Bighead and the latter is a mixed martial arts fight story drawn in a far more realistic style than most of his work; The Incredible Change-Bots, his full-color parody of the original Transformers cartoon which was my favorite Transformers comic until Tom Scioli's Transformers vs. G.I. Joe came around; Every Girl Is The End of the World For Me, another relationship comic; and, finally, Unlikely, the story of how Brown lost his virginity and one of his "girlfriend trilogy" of books. I think that was the first work of his I ever read. (Sadly, the sunlight has taken a toll on it, as the part of the back cover that towers over its neighbors is faded to a lighter red than the rest of the book.

And, as mentioned, there's a Dennis the Menace collection from Fantagraphics, Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace 1951-1952. Like Fanta's Peanuts work, it's a great collection and I also found it somewhat revealing at how different the single-panel cartoon felt in its first year vs. what it had become by my lifetime, where I would regularly encounter it in the funnies (And then, later, on The Comics Curmudgeon). I won't say these were necessarily brilliant comics or anything, but they were certainly funnier back then, and, I think, more sharply drawn.

Fun fact: I also have the second volume, although it is sitting amid a pile of stacks in the middle of the floor in my "library", as I have more books than I do bookshelves. (The obvious place to put it would be next to the first volume, but, as you can see, there is no room there). One day years ago my mother was stuck for an afternoon in my ancestral home, where I currently live and where all these shelves are, and she wanted something to read to pass the time. The only books in the house were mine, though, and were 99% comics rather than book-books. She ended up choosing a Dennis the Menace collection. 

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