Bookshelf #41

This week's bookshelf is an awful lot like last week's, in that it is a) mostly small press and b) a real mess, with no real logic as to what is on it. One thing that seems apparent is that I seem to have stuck a whole bunch of very thin books on this shelf, books that are more "prestige format" (that is, regular comics with spines) than trade paperbacks, collections or graphic novels. The sorts of comics that I could just as easily bag, board and stick in a long box as put on a shelf like this.

Considering the spines now, it seems that Archaia and NBM are probably the best represented publishers here. From the former, we have three volumes of David Petersen's Mouse Guard, zombie comic The Awakening Vol. 1, Alex Sheikman's "steampunk samurai" comic Robotika and mpMann and A. David Lewis' Some New Kind of Slaughter, which was wider than it was tall, and is thus turned sideways on the shelf so you can't see its spine. From the latter, there's the first seven volumes of The Smurfs (and another one laying across the top of the other books on the shelf).

There's also a half dozen The Best of Twisted Toy Fare collections and a half dozen or so books from Radical Comics, whom I believe used to send me review copies, which is probably why I have so many of them here. 

Of special interest? 

Well, there's Wonderland, a comics sequel of sorts to Disney's Alice in Wonderland movie by Tommy Kovac and Sonny Liew (from the unlikely publishing team of Disney and Slave Labor Graphics); a Gumby collection, featuring Bob Burden and Rick Geary's take on the character; an I Dream of Jeannie comic (I wasn't a fan of the show, but the highly cartoony interior art was nice; checking the credits, I see that two of the four stories within were written by Franco Aureliani, one story was dawn by Art Baltazar—though you wouldn't recognize it as his, given how different the style is from his more recent work—and another story is penciled by Dan DeCarlo!); Jill Thompson's Scary Godmother: Wild About Harry; Mike Migonla and Troy Nixey's Jenny Finn comics, which began as an Oni Comics mini-series around the turn of the century and are here published by Atomeka and Boom; Rafael Grampa's Mesmo Delivery, my first introduction to the artist who would go on to produce Batman: Gargoyle of Gotham , the collection of which is set for release next month; Walt Disney's Donald Duck: The Case of the Missing Mummy, which I'm pretty sure is the only Gemstone-published Disney comic I own, and The Bomb by Steve Mannion, an artist whose work I adore (and whom I can't believe isn't more popular than he is at this point; here, check out his Instagram page, if you're not familiar with him). 

Oh, and I also found this weird-ass Presidential Material Flipbook that I completely forgot existed. One side had a biography comic about Barack Obama, and, if you turned it over and flipped it upside down, you would find a biography comic of John McCain (scripted, oddly enough, by Andy Helfer). There were two covers, both drawn by J. Scott Campbell. The comics themselves look pretty dreadful, with good-enough realistic art and lots of text, but I confess it's fun to see Campbell's Obaman and McCain and, at the very least, it's an interesting artifact of its time.