Bookshelf #39

This week's bookshelf is a manga shelf, and it's dominated by two creators, one of whom is among the most influential Japanese artists to ever put pen to paper. 

That is, of course, the late Akira Toriyama. On the far left we have four volumes of his Dragon Ball, volumes 13-16. Why does my collection start with the 13th volume...? Good question! If I had to guess without a more thorough investigation, I would guess that I had read the earlier parts of the series via single issues, when Viz was still publishing some manga series in floppy, stapled comic book format on a monthly basis (Note how much lighter volumes 15 and 16 are compared to volumes 13 and 14; I fear that the sun must shine through the blinds in that room in just such a way to land directly on those two volumes). 

After that, we have ten tankobon volumes of Dragon Ball imported from Japan, which I bought at my first Mid-Ohio Comic Con in 2000. I of course could not read them at all, but I thought they looked neat...and I especially liked the connecting images on the spines. I believe the comics within had yet to be published in English at that point, and while it was a long time ago, I want to say that part of the series had yet to arrive in the U.S. in anime form yet either. So, they were fascinating to look at, and I still appreciate them as objects. I assume they were relatively cheap since I bought so many of them. 

Then we have a few collections of Toriyama's Dr. Slump, his breakout work that preceded Dragon Ball, and Cowa!, a super-fun one-volume comic about some monster kids. 

Moving along the shelf, we then get to the work of Kiyohiko Azuma. First, there's his Azumanga Daioh, a slice-of-life comedy series about a half-dozen or so schoolgirls, the stories presented in the four-panel comic strip format. And then we have his later and better-known work, Yotsuba&!, a book I can't speak highly enough of. Here I've shelved the first nine volumes, while the later volumes are on another shelf we've already looked at in a different room on a different floor of my house. Here you can see how the design of the spines changed when the book changed hands from ADV to Yen Press. 

Finally, there's a trio of books from neither Toriyama nor Azuma. First is the CLAMP collective's Shirahime Syo, short stories set in the snow and featuring the legendary Snow Princess, and two volumes of Jae Sung Park and Sung Jae Park's romantic comedy Couple...which is actually Korean rather than Japanese, so is technically manhwa rather than manga. It looks like it only ran four volumes, so I guess I read the first half of the series before losing track of it. 

Bookshelf #38

This week's bookshelf is my original First Second shelf, and, indeed, most of the books here are from the publisher. 

On the furthest left are the bigger format books, like Aaron Renier's The Unsinkable Walker Bean, a couple of George O'Connor's Olympian books, a couple of Lewis Trondheim and Fabrice Parme's Tiny Tyrant books and, turned sideways to better fit the shelf but thus hiding their spines, the first of James Sturm and company's Adventures in Cartooning books and Gene Luen Yang's Prime Baby. 

Then comes more standard-sized First Second books, including Richard Sala's Cat Burglar Black, Trondheim's Vampire Loves, Dong Hwa Kim's The Color of... trilogy and more. 

There's no real rhyme or reason to the other, non-First Second books on the shelf; I seem to have just stuck the wherever they fit.

So, laying across the top of the First Seconds are Hope Larson and Rebecca Mock's two-book adventure series Compass South and Knife's Edge and a couple of Papercutz's Smurfs collections. 

And stacked up on the right, we have the second and third volumes of Sekihiko Inui's superhero manga Ratman (Is volume 1 around here somewhere? Or did I borrow it from the library, and then decide to buy the second and third volumes for some reason?), the final five volumes of Hiromu Arakawa's Full Metal Alchemist (In this case, I do remember that I had read all the volumes of the series that my local library had somewhere around 2010 or so, and then, too impatient to wait once I was caught up, I started buying the new volumes as they were released) and my copies of Scott Pilgrim, which I guess I decided neither to shelve with my Oni books nor on one of the manga shelves, where these tankobon-style graphic novels would fit perfectly. 

At the very top and the very bottom of that stack are two books so thin you won't be able to read their spines. On the top is the collection of the "What if Henry Rollins and Gleen Danzig were a couple?"  cartoons from Igloo Tornado entitled Henry & Glenn Forever and an Oh, Comics! anthology built around the theme of food (and labeled Vol. 1 No. 16). 

If you're not from Columbus, you may not be familiar with Oh, Comics!, but it was (Is? I am no longer in Columbus!) an annual anthology series published by cartoonist Bob Corby, who runs SPACE (The Small Press And Alternative Comics Expo, which is where I first became aware of the work of Jeffrey Brown, Tom Scioli, Ed Piskor, Paul Hornschemeier and, in 2000 or 2001, bought a self-published comic called Street Angel from Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca). Flipping through it now, I see lots of names and art I recognize—Max Ink, Matt Dembicki, Craig Bogart, Mike Carrol, Pam Bliss.

Bookshelf #37

This week's bookshelf is another small one (in fact, so small that hte picture of it looks pretty wonky here) and is also part of the repurposed entertainment center that last week's shelf was. 

You'll probably notice that it is also not all comics. 

There are three stacks of books there: One stack that's not-comics, one stack that consists of a not-comic book and a not-comic book about a comics creator and then a stack of comics collections.

The first includes a pair of Norton literature anthologies, both purchased for college courses, and never disposed of because hey, I paid a lot of money for them and, unlike some textbooks, it wouldn't hurt to have collections of great literature on one's bookshelf, right? You never know when you might need to consult them (Note: I have never once consulted them since graduating, although I have now moved them from one apartment to another some dozen times). Atop those is a collection of Kenneth Patchen poems; I mentioned him a previous installment of this series, but he is one of my favorite poets, and I first became enamored with his work when I saw a collection of his "picture poems", which married imagery and a line or two of words (That's right, some of his work involved combining pictures and words, just like comics).

In the middle, we have Beautiful Poems of Jesus, which, based on the spine label with a Dewey decimal number, I must have purchased from a library book sale somewhere (and, um, have yet to get around to reading) and Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, a 2004 from publisher Abiogenesis that collected tributes to comics best (?) writer on the occasion of his 50th anniversary. These are mostly prose, but there are a few pin-ups and comics in there, and the contributors include the likes of Stephen Bissette, Will Eisner, Dave Gibbons, Terry Gilliam, Sam Kieth, James Kochalka, Jim Lee, Michael Moorcock, Jeff Smith, Bryan Talbot, Rick Veitch, Len Wein and many, many more. I know I reviewed this for the Columbus altweekly I was writing for at the time, but almost everything I wrote for them has disappeared into the ether by now.

The final stack is the one with all the comics in it. These seem to be comics published by DC that are outside of the DC Universe setting, and so we have a real grab bag of creators and genres: Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest: The Searcher and the Sword, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, Will Eisner's The Best of The Spirit ("The Citizen Kane of Comics", according to a front cover blurb attributed to USA Today), Frank Miller's Ronin, 9-11Volume 1 (This one is actually published by Dark Horse, Image and Chaos, not DC), 9-11: The World's Finest Comics Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories To Remember (At some point, I think it might be interesting to revisit the half dozen or so such anthologies and tributes released back then and see how they hold up), Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Sleeper Vols. 1-3, Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco's Arrowsmith: So Smart in Their Fine Uniforms, Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris' Ex Machina Vols. 1-2 and Peter Tomasi and peter Snejbjerg's Light Brigade. 

Bookshelf #36

This week's bookshelf is a small one, and thus a relatively simple one. Here we move to a new wall, and start a new shelving unit, this one being one I found in my mom's house and turned into a place to hold books; I'm pretty sure it was another old entertainment center (The top two shelves have glass doors that close over them, and there's a huge, spacious shelf below, which I assume was meant to hold a television set, but now hold some art books). 

This top shelf belongs almost exclusively to the work of manga-ka Ken Akamatsu. Let's start in the middle, with the series which introduced me to his work: Love Hina. I believe this is what is known as a "harem comedy."

Aspiring college student Keitaro is trying to get into Tokyo University, mostly in order to fulfil a childhood promise made to a little girl on a playground...whose name he has forgotten. Nevertheless, he endeavors to make it into the prestigious school, in the hopes of meeting her there.

With his parents no longer willing to support him, he plans to move into an apartment building owned by his grandmother, but there's a couple of catches. First, it has since become a female-only building. Second, he is the new manager.

Among the young women who live there—at the outset, five of them, in a variety of shapes, sizes, ages, styles and personalities—is Naru, who is also trying to get into Tokyo University, and eventually agrees to help our hero. Could she be the little girl Keitaro had once made his promise to? And, regardless, could she be the love of his life, the woman he is meant to be with?

The answer will seem clearer to readers than to the characters, of course, despite plenty of complications. Much of the humor, as I recall, revolved around various misunderstandings, with Keitaro often accused of being a pervert and one of the women or another reacting with over-the-top slapstick violence, like Naru punching Keitaro so hard that he flies up into orbit and becomes a star. Despite this, he and all of the young women eventually become good friends, even something of a family, and most of them, at one point or another, seem to develop feelings for him. 

I liked it well enough that I read the whole series and sought out Akamatu's other work. (There was also a Love Hina anime. I never watched it. Just the opening on YouTube; the theme song is pretty upbeat and catchy though and gives you an idea of the various characters, as well as the physical punishment Keitaro takes.)

Prior to Love Hina, and thus shelved to the left of it here, Akamatsu had created a manga called A.I. ga Tomaranai!, which Tokypop imported as A.I. Love You, which was a pretty solid title in 2003 ("A.I.", obviously, stands for artificial intelligence, while "ai" also means love in Japanese). In 2026, not so much, as the term "A.I." no longer evokes a far-off, fantastical future, but is no associated with making Internet searches less reliable, making phone calls to customer service more unbearable than ever and the production of shitty art.

According to the Internet, A.I. Love You was collected into nine volumes, and Tokyopop published eight...although, as you can see, I only got the first four. It was about a high school programmer whose computer program comes to life in a freak lightning streak. The program is, obviously, a beautiful young woman, and high jinks ensue. I barely remember it and obviously didn't like it as much as Love Hina, as I dropped it midway through. 

After Love Hina, and thus to the right of it here, Akamatsu created Negima! Magister Negi Magi, which featured more girls than Love Hina by a factor of ten or twenty, and many of them more colorful than those in that series (I remember a vampire and a robot, for example). This beautifully drawn series had a rather weird-ass premise, basically What if Harry Potter was a teacher at a Japanese all-girls school? 

Here are the first eight volumes of the series, which I had kept up with for a while. I later found a bunch of future volumes for sale at a Half Price Books and bought those, assuming I would catch up with the series at one point, but those are currently in the piles we looked at in a previous installment of this series. 

Akamatsu seems like a pretty interesting guy. After his obviously quite successful career in manga, he became a successful politician. His Wikipedia page is a pretty good read. 

I honestly don't remember when, where or why I acquired those volumes of Jin Kobayashi's School Rumble. Given that I have volumes 6, 12 and 13, plus a three-volume collection numbered 14-16, I am guessing that I had read the series via the library, and that these are ones I acquired at a sale somewhere...? At least, a cursory look around my "library" didn't reveal any more volumes of it anywhere. I guess we'll see as I continue to explore my bookshelves.

Anyway, this one is a fun, somewhat silly high school romance involving a love triangle of sorts. Recovering juvenile delinquent Kenji Harima (who has a goatee, longer hair and always wears sunglasses) has a crush on Tenma Tsukamoto, his cute, petite classmate, but Tenma has a crush on Oji Karasuma, a weird, listless boy who has a crush on...well, he doesn't seem to have a crush on anyone, but he does love curry, which seems to be his main personality trait. 

I can't remember how far I made it into this series now, but as I don't remember the resolution, I am assuming it wasn't very far. I suppose I should try rereading it while I wait for new installments of the ongoing manga I'm currently reading——Zom 100, Skip and Loafer, Now That We Draw—to come out...

Finally, see that small object atop of this entertainment center-turned-bookshelf....? What do you think that is...? Certainly, it can't be anything comics related, can it...? 

Sure it is!

It's a tiny little bottle labeled "Super Spy Mint Flavored Cyanide Capsules", with a drawing by Matt Kindt. This must have come with a review copy of Kindt's 2007 Super Spy from Top Shelf. Jiggling it, it seemed to still be full, and lightly trying the cap, I don't think I opened it when I received it, um, 19 years ago now.

I assume that it actually contains real mints, rather than mint-flavored cyanide capsules, but I wasn't so sure that I ever tried one...

Bookshelf #35

This week's bookshelf is my Marvel shelf...or, at least, it was my original Marvel shelf, when I started reading Marvel in 2000, although I have since come to fill a few other shelves with various Marvel books, like those Essential volumes discussed last week, and the digests from a few weeks back.

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. 

Bookshelf #34

This week's bookshelf is pretty straightforward, like last week's, and for the same reason. To the left, you have the rest of my Showcase Presents volumes. To the right, most of my Essential volumes. I loved both series for the same reasons and, now that they have been discontinued, I wish I would have bought more of them when they were still available (Of DC's Showcase Presents, I kind of wish I had bought almost all of them; with Marvel's Essentials, I wish I would have at least stuck with Defenders and the various 1970s horror hero series, which, as you can see here, appealed to me).

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...

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....

A bookshelf interlude

Let's take a break in our tour of my bookshelves to address something I alluded to in the pevious post of the series. That is, this big pile of un-shelved comics. Yes, although most of the available wall space in my house seems to have a bookshelf filling it, I still don't have quite enough bookshelves, and this pile here are all the books that need shelved yet. (There's a similar series of piles across that same room that will also need shelved someday, although those particular piles are my To Be Read piles, so I'll need to read those before I shelve them). 

The majority of the books in these little stacks are manga, so let me just list those that aren't manga first. 

First, there's Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis The Menace 1953-1954, the second volume in Fantagraphics' typically handsomely designed series...and the last which I bought.

There's a pair of Marvel books, the collections of Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers Unleashed, the 2010 series by Chris Eliopoulos and Ig Guara, and Marvel Zombies 5, the 2010 Fred Van Lente and Kano entry into the franchise, this one featuring Howard the Duck and Machine Man travel to various Marvel alternate realities to retrieve samples of the zombie virus.

And there's a whole stack of DC Showcase Presents volumes: All-Star Squadron Vol. 1, Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld,  Batgirl Vol.1, Hawkman Vol. 1, Justice League of America Vol. 6, The Phantom Stranger Vol. 1 and Superman Family Vols. 2-3. (I sure would like to see the rest of All-Star Squadron collected, in any format. I loved this particular format, but DC has obviously ceased making them.)

The rest are all manga, from a bunch of different publishers...some of which I don't think are around anymore. I'm just going to list all of the titles below, and only offer some thoughts on a handful. You will probably notice that the numbers I have are...weird. 

There are a lot of first volumes, which is usually because I would try a series out and then stop at the first volume, because I either didn't like it, or else I got distracted and lost track of it immediately, or because it was a review copy from the publisher (When DC's short-lived manga imprint CMX launched, for example, they sent me the first volumes of their first wave of offerings). 

And sometimes I'll have later volumes in a series but not the first ones; that is generally because I started reading the series from the library, and then decided I would like it enough to own it, and started buying new ones as they came out...or that I got caught up on it via volumes from the library and then started buying new ones as they came out. 

I should also note that while I've read all of these, looking at their covers as I sifted through the piles for this post, I realized there were an awful lot of them that I have virtually no memory of at all.

Anyway, here's all the manga in those piles...

•Abenobashi: Magical Sohpping Arcade Vol. 1-2

•Animal Land Vols. 5-11 (Here's one where I read the first few volumes and was then enamored enough to start buying new volumes as they came out...and then I lost track of it. Looking it up now, I guess it only had 14 volumes, so I gave up just as it was nearing its climax, I guess. )

•Astro Boy Vols. 1-6 (These were from Dark Horse and were smaller and slimmer than the standard manga digest. I feel like everyone should read at least one volume of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, if only for, like educational purposes)

•Battle Vixens Vol. 1-5

•Cage of Eden Vols. 1-6, 11-21 (This one was recent enough that I know I've talked about it on the blog before. A comic about Japanese high schoolers fighting extinct prehistoric megafauna with rather horny art, it is one of those relatively rare works that seems like it was created just for me. There's a Lost like element, as it involves a plane crash on a remote island with an overarching mystery that unfolds clue by clure, and while the resolution left me cold, I liked the whole series up until the resolution was revealed. I started buying new copies with volume 11 and read the rest of the series. Then realized it was probably going to go out of print, so I went back and bought the first six volumes, and then I think I had trouble finding 7-10. Are you a comic shop that has them? Let me know and I'll buy 'em!)

•Elfen Lied Omnibus Vol. 1

•Flowers of Evil Vols. 3-11 (Fun fact: Volume 9 blurbs something I wrote here, and credits it to "Every Day Is Like Wednesday." My reviews have been blurbed a few times here and there, but almost always by the place the review ran, rather than by my name. Like, my Good Comics for Kids reviews get blurbed here and there, but the publishers always credit the blurb to School Library Journal, which is obviously more authoritative sounding than "J. Caleb Mozzocco", and is fewer words than "J. Caleb Mozzocco of School Library Journal's Good Comics for Kids.I think this instance was the only time EDILW was blurbed, though.)

•From Eroica With Love Vol. 1

•Full Metal Panic! Vol. 1

•Fushigi Yugi Vols. 1-4, 6-7 (Volume 5 was, randomly, on the previous bookshelf on the tour. I guess the series ran 18 volumes total, so I got less than halfway there.)

•Gals! Vol. 1

•Gothic Sports Vol. 1 (Still love that title.)

•Hetalia: Axis Powers Vols. 1-2 (Probably the weirdest manga in this post, and the hardest comic to explain to someone else.)

•High School of the Dead  Vols. 1-7 (Daisuke Sato and Shouji Sato's zombie apocalypse series, featuring a handful of Japanese high school students trying to survive the familiar scenario and distinguished by its extremely horny art. The series ended prematurely with the death of the writer. It must have been fairly popular, as there was an anime adaptation.)

•Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers Vol. 1

•Jim Henson's Return to Labyrinth Vol. 1

•Kare Kano Vols. 1-2

•Kimi Ni Todoke: From Me To You Vol. 1

•Land of the Blindfolded Vol. 1

•Leave it to PET! Vols. 1-3 (Volume 4, the final one in the series, was also atop the last bookshelf discussed. I liked this series a lot.)

•Lost World (A 2003 Dark Horse release of Osamu Tezuka's 1948 sci-fi riff on Arthur Conan Doyle's story, in which a rogue planet filled with dinosaurs and monsters approaches Earth and is visited by a group of explorers. Another seemingly made-for-Caleb book.)

•Madara Vol. 1

•Miyuki-chan in Wonderland (A CLAMP anthology, the first chapter is a loose riff on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.)

•Monster Collection Vol. 1

•Musashi #9 Vol. 1

•Negima! Vols. 10-11, 13, 15, 17-20, 23, 26 (This one has a pretty labored premise, following a 10-year-old boy wizard sent to Japan to teach English at an all-girls school where he's supposed to keep his magical powers a secret, but the weird student body, including a vampire and a robot, continually lure him into using them. There are elements of a harem comedy to it, but it's also a rather shonen-like fight comic, from what I remember...? Anyway, it's from Ken Akamatsu, who was responsible for the previous Love Hina, which I enjoyed. I started reading the series and, at one point, I found all of these available for half off at a used book store, so I snapped them all up. Unfortunately, I never made it through the first nine volumes, sooooo these are all still unread. I guess there were 38 volumes total. At this point, I can't imagine I will ever assemble them all and read them...) 

•Neon Genesis Evangelion Vols. 1-3 (Later printings of original manga adaptation of the anime. I originally read the manga in volumes borrowed from the library, hoping they would provide some clarity to the mysteries of the anime, particularly regarding the ending. They did not.)

•Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project Omnibus Book 1 (A manga based on a video game based on the anime; I never played the video game, and I don't think I knew there was a video game when I first read this. It features the same characters from the manga, but the tone is much lighter and more fun. I should probably reread this and then see if I can still find the rest of the series.)

•Phoenix Vol. 2: A Tale of the Future (More Tezuka; was there a volume 1? Do I own it? If I were texting you this, I would insert a shrugging emoji here.)

•President Dad Vol. 1

•Primitive Boyfriend Vol. 3

•Saving Life Vol. 1

•Soul Eater Vols. 4-6

•The Stellar Six of Gingacho Vol. 1

•Summoner Girl Vol. 1

•Swan Vol. 1

•Sweet & Sensitive Vol. 1

•Sword of the Dark Ones Vol. 1

•Triage X Vol. 1 (I checked this out as it was from the artist of Highschool of the Dead. It's about sexy, scantily clad nurses with guns fighting crime or something. I didn't care for it.)

•Tuxedo Gin Vols. 1-8 (Teenage boxer Ginji is on his way to a date with his dream girl when he's killed in a motorcycle accident. An angel tells him that, if he lives out the natural life span of an animal, then he can come back to life in his own body. He chooses his would-be girlfriend's favorite animal, an Adelie penguin, and spends his new penguin life with her, although she's unaware that he's really Ginji in penguin form. I liked this crazy-ass premise enough to stick with the series for eight volumes before losing track of it. I've always meant to return to and finish it though; it looks like it ran for a total of 15 volumes.)

•Who Says Warriors Can't Be Babes? Vols. 1-2

•Yakitate!! Japan Vol. 3 (This is a manga series about bread baking, and it's very good. One of the most magical things about manga, at least looking at it from the Western perspective, wherein most comics fall into one of a half-dozen or so genres, is that manga can seemingly be about anything and, no matter how off-beat the subject matter might be, it can still be incredibly engaging. Manga like this one are eloquent arguments that subject and genre don't matter nearly as much in the production of a good comic as the talent that goes into it.) 

Bookshelf #32

This week we move to the next bookshelf, the top of which is full of books, upon which have since been piled more books.

Let's start at the bottom and work or way up. The bottom layer is, of course, stuff from 2000 AD, the vast majority of which came out in trade between 2005 and 2010 or so. A good half of it is Judge Dredd in collected forms; it looks like, at the time, they were releasing collections as Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files (of which I have volumes 1-4 and, um, 11 for some reason), as well as specific storylines, (Judge Dredd: The Chief Judge's Man, Judge Dredd: Brothers of the Blood and so on). 

It's obviously been a while, but, if I recall correctly, this must have been from during a time I was writing for one of the bigger websites-covering-comics, and ended up on a review copy list, as while those Judge Dredd books certainly look like things I would buy, something like, say, The Complete Ro-Busters doesn't seem like something I would have picked up on my own. 

I do recall buying one of those Dredd comics from a comic shop though. That would be Judge Dredd: Emerald Isle, on the far left, which I purchased because it was by Garth Ennis, who, at the time I picked it up, was writing Hitman, my favorite comic at the time (and, come to think of it, probably ever). 

On the far right, there's a bit of Humanoids stuff, from when DC was releasing that. 

Of all these books, I don't remember anything specific in great detail but, as is often the case when taking a closer look at some of these forgotten bookshelves in my house, I find myself wondering why I stopped following particular series, and wishing I had not. At the very least, why didn't I get The Complete Case Files volume 5-10...?

Stacked atop them are the IDW collections of DC's TSR books, the 1988-1991 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which lasted 36 issues and an annual, and the 1989-1991 Forgotten Realms, which lasted 25 issues and an annual (which was a crossover with the cast from AD&D). 

I've talked about AD&D repeatedly before. That's the comic book series that got me started reading comic books; I had received #2 as a gift when home sick from school, and then later started buying it regularly with #7, very gradually picking up the earlier issues as back-issues (I remember #1 and the annual took me forever to get around to). By the time these trade collections came out, the word "Classics" added to the titles on the spine to distinguish them from IDW's more recent, 21st century comics based on the role-playing games, I had long since completed my collection of AD&D, but bought the trades anyway, in part to re-read the series all in one sitting, and because the trades are so much more re-reading friendly. 

I never bought Forgotten Realms new off the rack, aside from the annual, but read it in back-issues over the course of several years. I don't think I ever had all of those issues, and I tended to read them out of order, with long stretches in between (the same way I read the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League comics, come to think of it), so the trades gave me the opportunity to read it in the proper order all at once.

I'd recommend both as fun, action-packed, often funny fantasy comics featuring monsters, characters and setting from the role-playing games. 

AD&D's big selling point was the pencil art of Jan Duursema, who drew the majority of it (there were a few fill-ins by her husband, Tom Mandrake). After writer Michael Fleischer wrote the first four issues (probably the most straightforward and thus weakest arc of the book), Jeff Grubb and Dan Mishkin took turns writing arcs starring an unlikely group of characters—I quite clearly remember reading a ltter to the editor decrying the lack of white guys, as there weren't any white, male, human characters in the core cast—operating in and around an inn in Waterdeep. Mishkin's "The Spirit of Myrrth" and Grubb's "Catspaw Quartet" were probably my favorite arcs.

As for Forgotten Realms, it featured art by Rags Morales, which was so good that it attracted me to the book in the first place (That, and the paladin character from the first AD&D arc starred as the book's POV character, making it read a bit like a spin-off). I think it also benefited from being more closely tied to the Forgotten Realms novels of the time, some of which I read, as characters from the novels would show up in the book, as would several of the settings, as the book's cast was devoted to travelling the Realms to recover powerful magical artifacts. Grubb wrote the whole series, and Morales drew about 20 issues of it, with Chas Truog and Tom Raney also contributing pencil art. 

Finally, stacked atop those, are three completely random books: 2010's Showcase Presents: Dial H For Hero, collecting Jim Mooney and company's inspired superhero feature from the pages of 1960's House of Mystery (and including Plastic Man's first appearance in a DC comic!); the fifth volume of Yu Watase's epic shoujo fantasy Fushigi Yugi; and the fourth volume of Leave it to PET!, manga-ka Kenji Sonishi's funny kids comic about a boy who recycles a plastic drink bottle, which returns to him as a little plastic robot. 

As for where the rest of Leave it to PET! and Fushigi Yugi are, well, I do have the first three volumes of the former, but I never completed buying and reading the latter. They are scattered about in a pile of "to be shelved books", most of which are manga, which maybe we can go through together at some point in the near future.

The pile looks like this, and is right in front of this particular bookshelf: 

Bookshelf #31

This week's bookshelf is the final one on the little white unit we've been examining the contents of the last few weeks and, as you can see, it is filled with Marvel digest collections, the vast majority of which are branded Marvel Adventures. As the word "Adventures" has long since come to denote that a particular comic is all-ages or geared toward kids, these are thus mostly kid-friendly comics. 

Most of the book are Spider-Man ones, with seven of them being volumes of Marvel Adventures Spider-Man with volume numbers on the spines, and one without. And no, at this point I have no idea why I seem to have bought them at random, as you can see from the numbering on the spines. These trades all tend to feature a handful of issues of high-quality, evergreen, done-in-one stories apiece, often involving Spider-Man meeting guest-stars.

The creators involved include the likes of writers Peter David, Paul Tobin and Fred Van Lente and artists Pop Mhan, Mike Norton and Ryan Stegman, among others.

These are followed by three more Spider-Man digests: Spider-Man/Human Torch: I'm With Stupid, collecting the 2005 Dan Slott and Ty Templeton miniseries; Spider-Man Family: Untold Team-Ups, collecting issues of the 2007-2008 series pairing Spidey with The Agents of Atlas, Doctor Strange, Thor-as-a-Frog and others; and Spider-Man J: Japanese Knights, collecting a Spider-Man manga by Yamanaka Akira (I guess there was a second collection of this as well, but I missed it). 

Next, we have two volumes of Marvel Adventures Hulk, written by Paul Benjamin and penciled by David Nakamaya and others.

And there's 2006's Marvel Holiday Special, a stocking stuffer-sized collection of Marvel Holiday Special 2004 and Marvel Holiday Special 2005, plus 1972's Marvel Team-Up #1 and 1980's Uncanny X-Men #143. That means a bunch of stories 21st century stories featuring a wide swathe of the Marvel Universe by writers Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Mike Carey, Tom Defalco, Shannon Garrity and Jeff Parker and artists Roger Langridge, Takeshi Miyazawa and others. Plus, work from Roy Thomas, Ross Andru, John Byrne and Chris Claremont on the two issues from "Marvel Holiday Past".

Then there's a digest collection of Sean McKeever, Lou Kang and Logan Lubera's Mega Morphs, a miniseries tie-in to a toy line, the story of which involved various popular Marvel heroes piloting giant robots that resemble them and have powers similar to theirs (No matter how hard it might be to imagine some of those guys piloting giant robots, like Wolverine, Ghost Rider and, especially, The Hulk).

And finally, there's Zombies Assemble Vol. 1, Yusaku Komiyama's manga which pits the movie version of the Avengers against a zombie outbreak. Apparently, there was a second volume of this as well, but I missed it. This one is actually rated "T+" and thus is the only book on this particular shelf that's not all-ages friendly.  I don't remember this one too terribly well at this point, but flipping through it now, it is rather delightful to see manga versions of Robert Downey Jr, Mark Ruffalo and the other actors who play the Avengers in the movies. 

Bookshelf #30

This week's bookshelf is the penultimate of the four on this particular tiny white unit, upon the small shelves of which only the smallest of books can be held. The best represented publisher here is probably Top Shelf, but more so of their relationship with a particular cartoonist at the particular point of time these books mostly came from rather than anything else.

If there is a cohesive organizing principle here, other than the small size of the books, it is probably that all of the books left of that Dennis the Menace collection there are works of comics as literature...or the cartoonists who make comics as literature having fun with genre silliness.

To the farthest left, we have the 2005 Salamander Dream from AdHouse, which I believe is cartoonist Hope Larson's first published work, aside from appearances in anthologies and online. She's certainly come a long way since, with 2012's A Wrinkle in Time graphic novel adaptation seemingly being a particular milestone, after which her work became increasingly popular and mainstream, and her biography began to fill with "real" graphic novels from "real" publishers (That is, those that had traditionally published book-books and gotten into the comics business, rather than comics publishers). 

Oh, and until I just looked her up a few minutes ago, I had completely forgotten that she wrote a Batgirl series for a while (The 2016-2018 "Rebirth" series, which I think I only read a single issue of, as it was really hard for me to care about a lot of characters after The New 52, the magically un-paralyzed and de-aged Barbara being prime among them).

Next is the 2003 version of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, followed by James Kochalka's The Cute Manifesto from Alternative Comics and then Daniel Clowes' Ice Haven, also from Pantheon. All three are great books and I would recommend all of them if you haven't read them, but at this very moment I find The Cute Manifesto the most significant. It demonstrates Kochalka working both within and without his signature "cute" style, explains how and why he makes comics the way he does and, I think, is a fairly valuable book for a young cartoonist or artist still finding their way to check out.

The next three books feature another wide variety for shelf-mates. First, there's Kazimir Strzepek's The Mourning Star from Bodega, a wonderfully cartoony apocalyptic fantasy epic that I see the Amazon write-up says combines "the depth of Lord of the Rings with the showmanship of Star Wars" which...well, that's one way to sell a comic, I guess; I appreciated the book design, the cartoony characters and the scratchy, homemade aesthetic. I would definitely recommend it if you can find it anywhere (Sadly, as I flipped through it, I noticed the binding on my copy was falling out). Next is Scott Morse's Noble Boy, a biography of sorts of animator Maurice Noble, in an extremely interesting format that suggests nothing so much as a more rectangular than usual board book for the youngest children (albeit with many more words than such books typically feature). And then we have Alex Robinson's Lower Regions from Top Shelf, a 56-page mini-comic about a sexy barbarian lady with a battle axe fighting her way through a dungeon full of monsters, from the creator of Box Office Poison and Tricked. 

Between that and Dennis the Menace, we have a bunch of early Jeffrey Brown books from Top Shelf. These are the books through which I first encountered Brown's work, and why I still can't get over the fact that the cartoonist has now produced a shelf full of Star Wars books, as well as comics starring Batman, The Hulk, Thor, The X-Men and The X-Files. In order, these are Miniature Sulk (although the spine reads "Mini Sulk"), a collection of short, funny scripts; Any Easy Intimacy ("AEIOU" on the spine), a serious autobiographical novel about his relationships, like much of his early work; Sulk 1 and 2, an apparent anthology series, as the first follows his superhero parody creation Bighead and the latter is a mixed martial arts fight story drawn in a far more realistic style than most of his work; The Incredible Change-Bots, his full-color parody of the original Transformers cartoon which was my favorite Transformers comic until Tom Scioli's Transformers vs. G.I. Joe came around; Every Girl Is The End of the World For Me, another relationship comic; and, finally, Unlikely, the story of how Brown lost his virginity and one of his "girlfriend trilogy" of books. I think that was the first work of his I ever read. (Sadly, the sunlight has taken a toll on it, as the part of the back cover that towers over its neighbors is faded to a lighter red than the rest of the book.

And, as mentioned, there's a Dennis the Menace collection from Fantagraphics, Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace 1951-1952. Like Fanta's Peanuts work, it's a great collection and I also found it somewhat revealing at how different the single-panel cartoon felt in its first year vs. what it had become by my lifetime, where I would regularly encounter it in the funnies (And then, later, on The Comics Curmudgeon). I won't say these were necessarily brilliant comics or anything, but they were certainly funnier back then, and, I think, more sharply drawn.

Fun fact: I also have the second volume, although it is sitting amid a pile of stacks in the middle of the floor in my "library", as I have more books than I do bookshelves. (The obvious place to put it would be next to the first volume, but, as you can see, there is no room there). One day years ago my mother was stuck for an afternoon in my ancestral home, where I currently live and where all these shelves are, and she wanted something to read to pass the time. The only books in the house were mine, though, and were 99% comics rather than book-books. She ended up choosing a Dennis the Menace collection. 

Bookshelf #29

The organizing principle of most of my bookshelves has been the publisher, but with this particular shelving unit, it has actually been what books will fit on its very small shelves.

That said, the two best-represented publishers here are Oni Press and Tokyopop. 

From Oni, we have a quartet of books by Western creators that are all extremely manga-inspired, so much so that Oni published them in tankobon-like digests so that they could easily be shelved in the manga sections of bookstores. These are Corey S. Lewis' incredible Sharknife, the story of a busboy/Japanese-style superhero, James Stokoe's Wonton Soup, a crazy sci-fi story about a chef, Ray Fawkes and Cameron Stewart's Apocalipstix, about an all-girl rock band in a post-apocalyptic world (Josie and The Pussycats meets Mad Max!), and Rick Spears and Chuck BB's Black Metal, an all-ages mélange of heavy metal and dark fantasy with a Cartoon Network aesthetic. 

These were all great books by great creators, and I think my first exposure to each of them. They are all also from the same "class" of books that gave birth to Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim, although none of them obviously got as big. I'd recommend all of 'em if you can find them at this point...although Apocalipstix is obviously problematic at this point, given that it's drawn by Stewart. (Speaking of the now problematic, Sharknife has a blurb from Warren Ellis on the back, in which the writer says, "Did you ever wish you'd been at a great band's first gig? This is exactly the same thing." Which, true, but still...)

From Tokyopop, we have Bandon Graham's King City, another inspired American manga, this one involving a pet cat that can turn into anything. I was a big fan of this when I first read it, and it put Graham on my radar as one of a handful of great, emergent creators to watch...although he has since also had troubling allegations made against him regarding his treatment of trans women. (God, it's dismaying how often one has to stop and flag particular creators when discussing older comics...)

There's also the first four volumes of Kenji Sonishi's manga series Neko Ramen, a four-panel comic strip about a cat who runs a ramen shop and whose food is terrible...which probably shouldn't be a surprise given that he is, you know, a cat (Despite this, the same young Japanese businessman seems to stop by for lunch, like, every day, and plays the straight man). As with most manga, I didn't keep up with, but, looking it up now, I guess there were only five volumes of it total, so I didn't do so bad with this one.

I think it's interesting to note here how similar the packaging of Oni's Western manga-like comics (and Tokyopop's King City) is to that of Neko Ramen, an actual manga series.

As for the rest of the shelf? Well, there's Lewis' Seedless, and Image Comics original graphic novel about warrior grapes that is heavily inspired by toy franchises like Playmate's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles*. (I'm pretty sure I stuck this on this shelf so it would be next to Lewis' Sharknife.) There's a pair of Debbie Huey's charming Bumperboy books from AdHouse, a comic I think was probably ahead of its time, given that kids' comics weren't yet as big a presence in the market as they are now. There are some quality graphic novels from more literature/art-focused publishers, Jordan Crane's The Clouds Above from Fantagraphics (This is still one of my all-time favorite book designs; I just love looking at this book as an object), Renee French's H Day from PictureBox and Adrian Tomine's Scenes from an Impending Marriage and Pablo Holmberg's Eden, both from Drawn & Quarterly. 

The final book on the shelf is that little black one in the middle, the oddlyshaped, longer-than-it-is-tall Process Recess, an AdHouse published art book devoted to the work of James Jean, who comics readers probably know best from his striking cover work on Vertigo series Fables (He also did about a year and a half's worth of Batgirl covers circa 2003-2004, and a half-dozen Green Arrow covers in 2005; of those, this is might the best one, but this one featuring Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle's Anarky is my favorite).

*Though Seedless reads a bit like a tie-in comic for a toy line akin to TMNT and those of the 1980s like Masters of the Universe, G.I. Joe, Transformers and the like, the fact that it involves sentient food reminded me of Mattel's short-lived Food Fighters line, of which my little brother had a figure or two when we were growing up. I remember the doughnut guy being around the house, anyway. 

Bookshelf #28

This week we move on to a new set of bookshelves. This cheap little white rectangle was once a set of drawers for what I assume was meant to be a children's bedroom, which I had purchased from Target in Columbus in the early aughts but now, like all flat surfaces in my home, it has become a place to store comics and graphic novels. It's got four shelves, and they are not too terribly big, so they don't hold many comics. And the comics that fit in it have to be fairly small ones.

As you tell at a glance here, this was, at one point, where I was storing the volumes of Fantagraphics' The Complete Peanuts series that I had purchased (the other volumes I own, and other Fanta Peanuts comics, are on a shelf we looked at a while back). In addition to five volumes of the series, there's a trade paperback version of the first volume, that collecting strips from 1950 to 1952, so I guess even though there are many, many volumes I don't have, I have the first volume in two different formats...? (This is one of those series I wish I had been more diligent on keeping up with).

Aside from Peanuts, there are three other books on this shelf. 

On the far left, there's Fredrik Stromberg's 2005 The Comics Go to Hell: A Visual History of the Devil in Comics, a heavily illustrated book about comics rather than a comic itself (I'm pretty sure it's stuck here rather than with other prose books about comics simply because of its little size). On the far right is a minicomic version of Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson's 1979 adaptation of the original Alien movie, which was first published by Heavy Metal (If I recall correctly, this minicomic came as part of a big, fancy collection of the Aliens movies that the library had purchased, but as it wasn't practical to circulate it with any of the DVDs, it went into an up-for-grabs pile along with the stickers and posters that sometimes came with such sets) . And laying across the top is Drew Weing's Set to Sea. 

Perhaps of greater interest, or at least providing more material to talk about, are the stacks of little books atop the shelf. This is my collection of tiny little books. 

Here, I'll spread them all out on a table so you can see what they actually are...

Quite a variety, huh? (Although now that it's too late, I realize I probably should have put a comic book in there to provide scale, so you could see just how small these books really are).

The only comics-related books here are the Masters of the Universe mini-comics, the only half-dozen or so I had saved since I had originally acquired them, packed with the original action figures, in the early 1980s. 

Actually, the first of these, entitled "The Vengeance of Skeletor", bearing a 1982 copyright and carrying the signature "Alfredo Alcala" on the cover, is a little storybook rather than a comic, as Mattel must have switched formats at some early point. That particular story is pretty interesting because it predates the cartoon series. Many of what we now consider to be the familiar aspects of the basic He-Man story had yet to be solidified at that point, and thus this story contradicts the later lore.

The other five, from 1982 through 1984, are all comics, though (And were thus probably the first actual comics I had read, outside of the funnies in the newspapers). Only two of them have actual credits listed in them, and both of these are by writer Gary Cohn and artists Mark Texeira. The most recent of the minicomics, "Grizzlor: The Legend Comes Alive", has Bruce Timm's signature visible on the cover and in the last panel. If you're interested in these, Dark Horse collected all the Masters of the Universe mini-comics in a massive 1,200-page hardcover, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Minicomic Collection Vol. 1, which I started reading when it first came out, but have yet to finish. 

There are also a half-dozen "Penguin 60s" books. These are slim, sixty-page paperbacks that the publisher released on the occasion of their 60th anniversary in 1995. I'm not sure if Teenage Caleb was collecting them, or just buying ones he was interested in, but it looks like I have ones featuring the work from J.M. Barrie, Geoffrey Chaucer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mark Twain, plus one devoted to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats and one entitled Three Tales of Horror, which was comprised of three short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Each of these cost a mere 95-cents, so I imagine I was impulse-buying them at the counter of the Waldenbooks in the Ashtabula mall at the time. Now, thirty-one years later, I kinda wish I would have bought all of them, as that's a great deal for quality literature in such an appealing format. 

Unfortunately, the orange spines are all rather faded, and the pages are rather yellowed, especially at the edges, so I guess I probably didn't store them as well as I could have over the course of the last three decades. 

Speaking of bookstore impulse buys, that's certainly why I have in my possession tiny little books Unauthorized Posh Spice in My Pocket, a little collection of what I would guess are wire service photos of my favorite Spice Girl paired with facts about her (I posted about this on Bluesky, where I guess you can get a sense of just how small it is), and a doll-sized 190-page retelling of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by writer David Blair and illustrator Graham Evernden.

There's a decent amount of religious books, most of which I must have acquired in grade school (This being a comics blog, there's rarely ever an occasion to discuss faith, religion or philosophy here, but I'm a currently only sporadically practicing Catholic, meaning I rarely go to church, but I did attend Catholic schools kindergarten through college and I got all my sacraments).

There are a pair of tiny books entitled My Mass and My Holy Communion, both of which are children's instructional books about their subjects (Both of these, I see, say "Caleb from [my sister's name]" in a grown-ups hand-writing on the inside front cover, so I assume these were First Communion gifts "from" my little sister, who would have been in first grade at the time). 

There's a book on praying the rosary entitled Pray the Rosary, which may have also been a First Communion gift, and it looks like it may have come with a rosary at some point. 

And there's a Miniature Stories of the Saints Book III, which is filled with one-page biographies of various saints on one page with an illustration of the saint on the facing page (And which also has a water stain on the back of it, a thing I've been conditioned to notice after years of working in a public library). 

Oh, and there's a little green book from Gideon's International: The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ with Psalms and Proverbs.  I believe a street evangelist of some sort had handed me that  in downtown Columbus at one point, and it seemed like a good thing to hang onto for reference, although, now that I think of it, I'm not sure if I've ever actually consulted it, as I generally just use the Bible I'm most familiar with, the one I had to buy for one of my college courses (That's a battered copy of The New American Bible, copyright 1987, if you're interested in such things).

On the top row in the picture above, you may notice two books with small titles sandwiched between the book on the saints and the book about the mass, each of which has a cover image of fields of flowers. One says Life's Journey on the cover, while the other says Comfort. Both have copyrights from something called the Salesian Mission of St. John Bosco and are from 1981 and 1983. I'm not sure how they came into the possession of my grandmother, but I remember her always having such little booklets lying around her house when I was little. They are collections of prayers and inspirational thoughts, all illustrated with anodyne images of nature or quaint buildings, with no people or religious figures ever appearing in them. She died from breast cancer at just 58, when I was only eight years old, and these are among the few things of hers that came into my possession (along with a rosary). I confess that I've never really read anything from these books, and, in fact, this is the first time I've touched them in years. But I've kept them more as talismanic connections to her than anything else (That grandmother, by the way, bought me my first He-Man toys for Christmas when I was five, so some of those MOTU minicomics are actually from her too).

Finally, there's a copy of City Lights Books' "Pocket Poetry Series" presentation of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (I went through a brief Beat phase in the second half of the nineties, before I decided that comics were a better medium than poetry) and a copy of Retrospective: Guy Maddin, a brochure published in conjunction with Ohio State University's Wexner Center for the Arts' 2002 Guy Maddin retrospective, which was awesome, and which introduced me to the work of the extremely quirky and gifted filmmaker. Here, you should go watch his Heart of the World short film on YouTube right now. A frenetic silent film-inspired disaster epic about the end of the world, an unlikely love triangle and the power of love and cinema (and/or art in general), there's hardly a better way to spend six minutes. 

Bookshelf #27

This week's bookshelf is right below last week's and is thus also in the busted old entertainment center that I have stuffed full of books. The organizing principal seems to be comic strips. 

As you can see, there's work from a giant in the field, Winsor McCay (a Little Nemo collection and a Checker-published collection of McCay's early work, with an unfortunate cover) as well as a couple of collections of popular mainstream strips Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes and Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks. Most of the other collections are of what I guess what would be considered "alternative" comics, like Tony Millionaire's Maakies, Neil Swaab's Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles (about a foul-mouthed degenerate talking teddy bear that far predated Seth MacFarlane's Ted stuff), the work of Keith Knight and a Ted Rall-edited collection with the phrase "alternative cartoonists" right there in the title. 

Oh, and a paper collection of Chris Onstad's webcomic Achewood.

You'll notice there are several sideways books whose spines you can't see, shelved that way for stackability rather than to show them off. These include a pair of additional Calvin and Hobbes collections, a collection of Nicholas Gurewitch's Perry Bible Fellowship, a pair of postcard books of Matt Groening's Life Is Hell, a collection of David Rees' essential chronicle of the Bush years Get Your War On and, the rarest book on the shelf, a hardcover entitled Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond, published in conjunction with the gallery show of his work at Ohio State University's Wexner Center for the Arts in 2008 (This was before OSU's The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library Museum; double-checking Wikipedia, I guess that name was adopted in 2009, and the current building was completed in 2013) (Oh, I also see that I wrote about Bone and Beyond and a sister exhibit on this here blog way back in 2008; here's a link, although I was afraid to reread the post myself in case it is cringe-inducingly poorly written). 

The biggest outlier here is Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster, Craig Yoe's book about the down-on-his-luck Shuster's illustration work for the small press BDSM magazine Nights of Horror. It's a pretty bleak read, really, but a perhaps important bit of context for the sort of work Shuster was forced into after he and Jerry Siegel's shabby treatment by the company that became DC Comics. Imagine, Shuster co-created one of the most popular characters in American media history and practically invented the superhero genre, and less than 20 years later he was working anonymously to illustrate pornographic prose (It's worth noting that Shuster's art has very little in the way of nudity and doesn't depict any intercourse; the stories his illustrations ran alongside was where the really dirty stuff was). It's downright surreal to see Shuster's clearly recognizable art featuring bondage and whips and suchlike here...doubly so when the characters bear a resemblance to Lois Lane, or Superman or Lex Luthor.

Now from the sordidness of 1950s fetish art to the innocence of childhood...!

The stack on the left is about two-thirds not comics. These include a copy of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan illustrated by Charles Vess (so maybe tangentially comics), Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop, The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter and a Little Golden Book of The Saggy Baggy Elephant.

While those were all more recent acquisitions—or "recent" anyway, as I remember the Beatrix Potter book was a gift from a girlfriend my freshman year of college, 30 years ago—the other kids books in this stack I've had literally had my entire life, as they date back to 1977.

These are a copy of William Steig's Caleb & Kate that was given to me for the obvious reason (Caleb wasn't so popular a name 49 years ago, and you can see from the lost dustjacket and spine damage that this book is an old one), a Random House "Pictureback" book entitled Favorite Tales of Monsters and Trolls collecting three short stories and featuring gorgeous, elaborate illustrations by John O'Brien (Actually, now that I see this book again, I kind of want to write a post about it in the near future) and Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy World. 

This last was a favorite of mine as a child, and I have a rather clear memory from before I could even read regarding it, as it was the first time I had made the realization that particular people were responsible for particular books. My late aunt, who spent a lot of time with us when we were very little children, must have asked me to bring her a book to read to me, as when I presented it to her, she said, "Oh no, not Richad Scarry again!"

That was the first time I had heard the name "Richard Scarry", which obviously made an impression on me given that his surname sounded just like the word "scary", which his stories so obviously weren't, and started to put together in my little brain the concept of authorship.