It's not just Marvel though, and there are some books stuck on this particular shelf either because of their size and shape, or because there was some empty space in which to shove some comics.
Let's take a brief-ish look, going left to right.
We start with the last of my Essential volumes, Essential Marvel Horror Vol. 1, containing stories featuring Son of Satan and Satanna. As I mentioned last week, I was particularly drawn to the publisher's 1970s horror/monster hero hybrids, and, of these two, I was fonder of Daimon Hellstrom. I liked him best at this point in his fictional career, when the Satanism and the batshit crazy nature of the character were the selling points (I feel like he's been more-or-less watered down ever since, and I haven't enjoyed later portrayals where he was given a trenchcoat and turned into Marvel's answer to John Constantine).
Next to that are Cerebus Vol. 2: High Society and From Hell, both there because they are basically the same size and shape as the Essential volumes. And if you're wondering why I have the second volume of Cerebus, and only the second volume of Cerebus, well, the late Gib Bickel at the Laughing Ogre told me that Cerebus didn't really become Cerebus until volume two and suggested I start there. At the time, I was going to do a phone interview with Dave Sim for the paper I was working at, and the only Cerebus I had ever read was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #8. I did plan to read the rest of the series, but, as it was such a big undertaking, I kept putting it off, and I soon realized Sim was getting to be one of those artists you have to separate from the art and, well, 25 years later, I still haven't read all of Cerebus. One day, I hope...
From there, we get into the Marvels. There are some classics, stuff I think most people would say belong in the Marvel "canon", like Roger Stern, "Michael" Mignola and Mark Badger's 1989 Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment, and later collections of Mark Gruenwald, Bob Hall and John Beatty's 1985 Squadron Supreme maxiseries (which I had heard referred to as "Marvel's Watchmen"), Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross' 1994 Marvels and Alan Moore and Alan Davis' Captain Britain.
There are the first two Marvel collections I had ever bought, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's original Marvel Knights Punisher series, collected as The Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank and Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones' Marvel Boy (The reason I started buying Marvel comics in the first place in 2000 was that they started hiring writers I knew and liked from their DC work, like Ennis and Morrison, and then started their Ultimate line, specifically geared toward new Marvel readers like me.)
The rest is more or less a hodgepodge, books I waited to read in trade, like the Dwayne McDuffie-written Beyond! and the small-scale crossover Doomwar, some attempts to try and read some acclaimed runs I had missed the first time around in singles, some random stuff found in sales. Plus, some more Ennis Punisher, from when I stopped reading it in singles and switched to trades for a while.
Looking them over now, I see two others worth noting, as I highly recommend them: Hulk: WWH—The Incredible Herc (collecting Greg Pak and company's earliest stories pairing Hercules and Amadeus Cho, which eventually lead into the various "Incredible Hercules" books by Pak, Fred Van Lente and company that offered a comedic take on the mythological hero turned Marvel superhero) and two collections of Roger Langridge and Chris Samnee's short-lived 2010 series Thor: The Mighty Avenger (Which was, and probably still is, one of the better superhero comics I've ever read). The best way to engage the former now is probably The Incredible Hercules: The Complete Collection Vols. 1 and 2, and Thor: The Mighty Avengers—The Complete Collection, provided you can still find them.
I also notice that I have six volumes collecting Marvel's original G.I. Joe series from the '80s; I must have bought those and shelved them without ever getting around to reading them though, as when I recently started in on the Image-published Compendium collection, I had no recollection of any of the stories (save the one that introduced Kwinn, which I remembered from having bought a reprint of it off a drugstore rack in the '80s).
Finally, there's a handful of non-Marvel comics. There are four volumes of Roger Landgride's Muppets books for Boom Studios (which are all great although, if you don't already have an appreciation for the Muppets, I'm not sure how appealing they may be), two volumes of Sophie Campbell's predictably excellent Shadoweyes from Slave Labor Graphics and Yuichi Yokoyama's extremely weird Garden from PictureBox.
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