Bookshelf #33

This week's bookshelf doesn't lend itself to much in the way in discussion (nor will next week's), given the fact that it consists entirely of volumes of a particular series from a particular publisher. And, as big as those volumes are, there isn't room for anything else on the shelf. 

They are, obviously, all volumes of DC's Showcase Presents series, which seemed devoted to collecting various Silver and Bronze Age books into massive, phone book-like 500-page black-and-white books for the relatively cheap price of $16.99. They were basically DC's answer to Marvel's Essentials line. 

I loved these books. Not just because they collected comics that I otherwise wouldn't have had access to—although some of this material, like the Brave and the Bold and the Justice League of America comics, has been made available in other formats since, like omnibuses and DC Finest collection. They were also an unbeatable value, and the main drawbacks, that they weren't in color, and had a pulpier paper stock, actually seemed like virtues to me. Given the coloring technology of the time, I actually preferred the black and white versions, which allowed one to better appreciate the line art. 

Now, I could easily have bought and enjoyed pretty much every volume in the series—and now that they are no longer available, I regret not buying them all*, even if I didn't have time to read them all as they came out—and here you see some of DC's bigger heroes mixed with the B- or C-listers. 

Obviously, I was most interested in these old Justice League of America comics, Grant Morrison and company's JLA having made me a fan of the Justice League in general (I have the sixth volume elsewhere in my house, in a to-be-read pile), the Brave and the Bold team-ups were also of great interest, and that Superman Family book, collecting Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane and Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, was a blast. 

I also particularly enjoyed the Elongated Man collection and the Metamorpho collection. The former contained 1960s back-ups from The Flash and Detective Comics in which Ralph Dibny and his wife Sue went around solving mysteries. These featured my favorite of his costumes, a light tone, and gorgeous artwork from Carmine Infantino. The latter featured one of DC's wilder, weirder characters, created by Boy Haney and Romana Fradon, and while, like Elongated Man, he has been around in various team books and events ever since, none of his later appearances were ever as great at these original ones. 

The one downside of the Showcase Presents collections? (Aside from how fast DC released them?) Because of the thickness of the books, they were all but impossible to scan images from, which often made blogging about them difficult.  

*Well, reviewing the list of what was published in the series, I'm not interested in the Green Lantern or Legion of Super-Heroes material, although the latter is probably the LOSH comics I would be most interested in reading....