From DC, we have some superhero team books in Teen Titans Vol. 1, Doom Patrol Vol. 1, Batman and the Outsiders Vol. 1, and then DC's great Hollow Earth barbarian hero comic, Warlord (Like All-Star Squadron, I do wish DC would have published more volumes of this series, as I would have happily snapped them up).
Those are followed by DC's war comics, and these volumes represented my first real exposure to that once robust genre of comics; prior to these volumes, the only real war comics I had probably ever read were the handful of Garth Ennis-written ones. What I liked about these ones in particular is just how...colorful they were. Like, each had a high concept of one sort or another. Enemy Ace starred a brilliant, brooding and noble faux Red Baron. The War That Time Forgot put G.I.'s on an island populated with dinosaurs, giant monsters and occasionally even weirder stuff. The Haunted Tank followed the adventures of a World War II tank crew, which was often slyly aided by the ghost of a Civil War general...or was it? The Unknown Soldier literalized the term, and presented a mysterious agent whose face was completely wrapped in bandages who was a master of disguise.
And then there's House of Mystery, which was of course fine, but I don't think I took as great delight in it as I did Warlord, the war comics or the super-team books on the shelf.
As for the Essentials, I guess you can guess which decade of Marvel comics most appealed to me, and that I was a little less interested in the publisher' superheroes than their attempts to Marvel-ize other genres. So here we have The Savage She-Hulk Vol. 1 (Especially interesting as, at the start, She-Hulk was very much a distaff Hulk, and hadn't yet transitioned into the comedic character she would later become), Supervillain Team-Up Vol. 1 (purchased because it had Namor on the cover), Defenders Vol. 1 (They actually published seven volumes of this, and I sorely regret not keeping up with it; Kurt Busiek and Erik Larsen's short-lived 2001 revival initially interested me in the team, and I was quite enamored of the book's apparent original conception as a misfit, B-list answer to The Avengers*) and then we get into the monsters and horror books.
The crown jewel here is, of course, the complete collection of Marvel's Godzilla series, a very weird comic that plopped a redesigned King of the Monsters into the Marvel Universe, and which, due to licensing agreements, wasn't available in trade until this book came out in 2006 (It's much more recently been re-released as the Godzilla: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus, in full color, although, as I mentioned last week, I actually prefer the black-and-white presentation of these old comics).
Then we have both volumes of Man-Thing, Tomb of Dracula Vol. 2 (No, I don't have volume 1, nor volumes 3 and 4; I believe I bought volume 2 during a sale, and assumed I would pick up the rest of them at some later point and then read them, but, alas...) and, finally, Werewolf By Night.
Perusing this list of Essential volumes, the ones I most regret missing out on were the future Defenders volumes, Howard the Duck, Ghost Rider (the first volume of which I found from the library and then wrote about relatively recently), Marvel Horror Vol. 2 (I'm particularly interested in The Scarecrow character, which I believe Marvel has since renamed The Straw Man, so as not to confuse him with their other Scarecrow), Monster of Frankenstein and the rest of Tomb of Dracula. I suppose copies of those books are probably out there somewhere though, so I suppose I'll be able to find them at some point...
*You know what? Given that we've already had a JLA/Avengers crossover, and it was very much the ultimate such book, and un-toppable epic, if DC and Marvel continue producing crossovers, maybe they should forego another JLA/Avengers team-up and instead do a Justice League/Defenders one...
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