Sunday, May 31, 2026

Bookshelf #32

This week we move to the next bookshelf, the top of which is full of books, upon which have since been piled more books.

Let's start at the bottom and work or way up. The bottom layer is, of course, stuff from 2000 AD, the vast majority of which came out in trade between 2005 and 2010 or so. A good half of it is Judge Dredd in collected forms; it looks like, at the time, they were releasing collections as Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files (of which I have volumes 1-4 and, um, 11 for some reason), as well as specific storylines, (Judge Dredd: The Chief Judge's Man, Judge Dredd: Brothers of the Blood and so on). 

It's obviously been a while, but, if I recall correctly, this must have been from during a time I was writing for one of the bigger websites-covering-comics, and ended up on a review copy list, as while those Judge Dredd books certainly look like things I would buy, something like, say, The Complete Ro-Busters doesn't seem like something I would have picked up on my own. 

I do recall buying one of those Dredd comics from a comic shop though. That would be Judge Dredd: Emerald Isle, on the far left, which I purchased because it was by Garth Ennis, who, at the time I picked it up, was writing Hitman, my favorite comic at the time (and, come to think of it, probably ever). 

On the far right, there's a bit of Humanoids stuff, from when DC was releasing that. 

Of all these books, I don't remember anything specific in great detail but, as is often the case when taking a closer look at some of these forgotten bookshelves in my house, I find myself wondering why I stopped following particular series, and wishing I had not. At the very least, why didn't I get The Complete Case Files volume 5-10...?

Stacked atop them are the IDW collections of DC's TSR books, the 1988-1991 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which lasted 36 issues and an annual, and the 1989-1991 Forgotten Realms, which lasted 25 issues and an annual (which was a crossover with the cast from AD&D). 

I've talked about AD&D repeatedly before. That's the comic book series that got me started reading comic books; I had received #2 as a gift when home sick from school, and then later started buying it regularly with #7, very gradually picking up the earlier issues as back-issues (I remember #1 and the annual took me forever to get around to). By the time these trade collections came out, the word "Classics" added to the titles on the spine to distinguish them from IDW's more recent, 21st century comics based on the role-playing games, I had long since completed my collection of AD&D, but bought the trades anyway, in part to re-read the series all in one sitting, and because the trades are so much more re-reading friendly. 

I never bought Forgotten Realms new off the rack, aside from the annual, but read it in back-issues over the course of several years. I don't think I ever had all of those issues, and I tended to read them out of order, with long stretches in between (the same way I read the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League comics, come to think of it), so the trades gave me the opportunity to read it in the proper order all at once.

I'd recommend both as fun, action-packed, often funny fantasy comics featuring monsters, characters and setting from the role-playing games. 

AD&D's big selling point was the pencil art of Jan Duursema, who drew the majority of it (there were a few fill-ins by her husband, Tom Mandrake). After writer Michael Fleischer wrote the first four issues (probably the most straightforward and thus weakest arc of the book), Jeff Grubb and Dan Mishkin took turns writing arcs starring an unlikely group of characters—I quite clearly remember reading a ltter to the editor decrying the lack of white guys, as there weren't any white, male, human characters in the core cast—operating in and around an inn in Waterdeep. Mishkin's "The Spirit of Myrrth" and Grubb's "Catspaw Quartet" were probably my favorite arcs.

As for Forgotten Realms, it featured art by Rags Morales, which was so good that it attracted me to the book in the first place (That, and the paladin character from the first AD&D arc starred as the book's POV character, making it read a bit like a spin-off). I think it also benefited from being more closely tied to the Forgotten Realms novels of the time, some of which I read, as characters from the novels would show up in the book, as would several of the settings, as the book's cast was devoted to travelling the Realms to recover powerful magical artifacts. Grubb wrote the whole series, and Morales drew about 20 issues of it, with Chas Truog and Tom Raney also contributing pencil art. 

Finally, stacked atop those, are three completely random books: 2010's Showcase Presents: Dial H For Hero, collecting Jim Mooney and company's inspired superhero feature from the pages of 1960's House of Mystery (and including Plastic Man's first appearance in a DC comic!); the fifth volume of Yu Watase's epic shoujo fantasy Fushigi Yugi; and the fourth volume of Leave it to PET!, manga-ka Kenji Sonishi's funny kids comic about a boy who recycles a plastic drink bottle, which returns to him as a little plastic robot. 

As for where the rest of Leave it to PET! and Fushigi Yugi are, well, I do have the first three volumes of the former, but I never completed buying and reading the latter. They are scattered about in a pile of "to be shelved books", most of which are manga, which maybe we can go through together at some point in the near future.

The pile looks like this, and is right in front of this particular bookshelf: 





No comments:

Post a Comment