Bookshelf #45

This week's bookshelf—my last bookshelf!—is another one devoted to DC Comics. It contains some of the earliest comics I ever bought, certainly some of the oldest collections, some of which were purchased long before the publishers regularly collected their serially published comics.

The organization of this particular shelf makes perfect sense...at least to me. I suppose anyone else would be hard-pressed to find a particular book on this particular shelf.

First, there are the oversized books: JLA: Heaven's Ladder (the only JLA story that the post-Morrison/Porter team of Mark Waid and Bryan Hitch collaborated on; fill-in artists were needed for all of Hitch's arcs on the monthly series), the various Paul Dini/Alex Ross specials (Batman: War on Crime, Shazam: Power of Hope, Wonder Woman: Spirit of Truth, JLA: Secret Origins, JLA: Liberty and Justice...I guess I never bought the Superman one, although I know I've read it) and that How To Draw DC Comis Super Heroes book that I mentioned on Bluesky a while back. 

Next are the hardcovers: The Complete Frank Miller Batman (complete as of 1989, anyway), The Joker: Stacked Deck, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Kia Asamiya's Batman: Child of Dreams, Batman: Broken City, Batman: Ego and Other Tails (Darwyn Cooke!), Catwoman: Selina's Big Score (More Darwyn Cooke!), JLA: Earth 2, JLA/JSA: Virtue and Vice, Bizarro Comics and Bizarro World (A lot of Batman, as you can see). 

From there we move on to the trade paperbacks, and the rest of shelf is organized by hero, in the order of what I consider their importance. 

So first there's Batman: Batman In The Forties, Batman In the Eighties, Batman: A Death in the Family, The Many Deaths of The Batman, Batman: Hush Vol. 1 (Not sure why I have this or where it came from, as I also have those issues in singles), Batman & Dracula: Red Rain, Batman: Crimson Mist, Batman: Bloodstorm, The Dark Knight Strikes Again #1-3 (these could probably have gone in a long box, actually, but they had spines, so I guess they ended up here, I guess; you'll see a few other series of "prestige format" books on this shelf), Robin: A Hero Reborn and Catwoman: Nine Lives of a Feline Fatale.

Next up? Superman, of whom the only trades I have featuring him here are Superman: Panic in the Sky, Superman: The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen and the Elseworlds book Superman: Secret Identity. 

Then there's Wonder Woman, of whom I only have two books here: Wonder Woman Vol. 2: Challenge of the Gods and Wonder Woman Vol. 3: Beauty and the Beasts.

And then some Batman and Superman team-ups, which I suppose should have come before the Wonder Woman books, Batman & Superman: World's Finest and the ridiculous Superman and Batman Vs. Vampires and Werewolves, and then a Batman/Supeman/Wonder Woman team-up, Matt Wagner's Trinity.

Then we get into heroes who I have relatively few collections of. There's the four issues of Jeff Smith's Shazam: The Monster Society of Evil, Plastic Man: On the Lam (I have these issues in singles too, but I bought the trade because I liked the design so much; Kyle Baker draws the cover so as to suggest that Plastic Man himself has disguised himself as this trade and is hiding on your bookshelf), Green Lantern: A New Dawn, Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters, two volumes of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics, Tim Truman and company's Hawkworld, Jack Kirby's New Gods, Jack Kirby's Mister Miracle, all of Starman (which I missed in singles, but went back and read in trade due to the critical acclaim), a Hitman collection (Which I bought because it included Tommy Monaghan's first appearance in The Demon Annual #2, which I had not read at that point...also, that's a pretty great cover, isn't it...?) and three volumes of Marc Andreyko's Manhunter (but not, curiously, volume 2).

Finally, there are team books (Justice League of America Hereby Elects... and Challengers of the Unknown Must Die!), crossovers (Cosmic Odyssey, Zero Hour: Crisis in Time, Villains United, Rann-Thanagar War, Day of Vengeance) and Elseworlds (DC's Greatest Imaginary Stories, The Golden Age and Justice League of America: The Nail).

Oh, and then a couple of random books, only a few of which take place in the DCU: Doctor 13: Architecture & Morality, DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore, Space Ghost and Icon: A Hero's Welcome (I would like to read the rest of Icon, but I'm not sure if it was collected in an accessible format like this first chunk of the series was).

Later, I came back and stacked more books atop those on the shelf, and these are all mainly random ones, although all DC...except for The Immortal Iron Fist: The Last Iron Fist Story. Not sure how that one got in there...