The things I have from "The 50 Things That Every Comics Collection Truly Needs" (via the Comics Reporter)

Last Sunday, Tom Spurgeon ran an article on his Comics Reporter website featuring his list of "the fifty things that every comics collection truly needs." It's an interesting list, with lots of illustrations and numerous suggestions and sub-suggestions within broad categories. I recommend checking it out here.

He also posted a suggestion from one Stephen Frug on how to play along with his list by sharing what your collection already includes. Tom Spurgeon has tweaked Frug's helpful visual shortcuts to yield the following code:

Leave Plain = Things I don't have
Make Bold = Things I do have
Italics = I have some but probably not enough
Underline = I don't agree I need this

This seems easy enough to play along with, so here's my list as of today. Isaac, if you are so inclined, it would be interesting to see your list, too. Anyway, my list, with occasional notes:

1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library
2. A Complete Run Of Arcade (I have most, but not all)
3. Any Number Of Mini-Comics
4. At Least One Pogo Book From The 1950s
5. A Barnaby Collection (I don't own any myself, but I know where there's a copy at my wife’s parents' house)
6. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary
7. As Many Issues of RAW as You Can Place Your Hands On (alas, I passed on my one chance as a youth to buy a remaindered copy of Read Yourself Raw)
8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics (sorry, my only interest in Archie is when the ISB brings it up)
9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels
10. Several Tintin Albums
11. A Smattering Of Treasury Editions Or Similarly Oversized Books
12. Several Significant Runs of Alternative Comic Book Series
13. A Few Early Comic Strip Collections To Your Taste
14. Several "Indy Comics" From Their Heyday
15. At Least One Comic Book From When You First Started Reading Comic Books (Sad to say, I actually read the "Anatomy Lesson" issue of Swamp Thing from the spinner rack at an Eckerd Drugs when I was a kid--and I put it back, unpurchased, but fully read. That story haunted me like no other comic story I had ever read. A few years later, as Watchmen rolled out, I realized what I had let slip through my fingers. Ah, well; at least I still have my copy of Marvel Tails starring Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham!)
16. At Least One Comic That Failed to Finish The Way It Planned To (If Eddie Campbell's Egomania counts, then I got one, at least)
17. Some Osamu Tezuka
18. The Entire Run Of At Least One Manga Series (Lone Wolf and Cub; Mai the Psychic Girl; Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind: all outstanding)
19. One Or Two 1970s Doonesbury Collections (again, the in-laws have some)
20. At Least One Saul Steinberg Hardcover
21. One Run of A Comic Strip That You Yourself Have Clipped (Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers, from its original run in the Forward)
22. A Selection of Comics That Interest You That You Can't Explain To Anyone Else (it's my job to figure out how to explain what I find interesting, so I am having real trouble thinking of a suitable comic to fit this category)
23. At Least One Woodcut Novel
24. As Much Peanuts As You Can Stand
25. Maus
26. A Significant Sample of R. Crumb's Sketchbooks
27. The original edition of Sick, Sick, Sick (my in-laws probably have this one, as well)
28. The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics (possibly the single best present I ever received as a child; thanks, Uncle Bill!)
29. Several copies of MAD
30. A stack of Jack Kirby 1970s Comic Books (in collected editions, at least)
31. More than a few Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 1960s Marvel Comic Books (ditto)
32. A You're-Too-High-To-Tell Amount of Underground Comix
33. Some Calvin and Hobbes
34. Some Love and Rockets
35. The Marvel Benefit Issue Of Coober Skeber (I've seen it; I really don't think I need it. Seth's Vernacular Drawing suits me just fine for his superhero renderings)
36. A Few Comics Not In Your Native Tongue (I have a few of these, yes...)
37. A Nice Stack of Jack Chick Comics (I've seen enough not to be that interested, and not just because I have a friend who is a Rabbi Waxman)
38. A Stack of Comics You Can Hand To Anybody's Kid
39. At Least A Few Alan Moore Comics
40. A Comic You Made Yourself
41. A Few Comics About Comics
42. A Run Of Yummy Fur
43. Some Frank Miller Comics
44. Several Lee/Ditko/Romita Amazing Spider-Man Comic Books
45. A Few Great Comics Short Stories
46. A Tijuana Bible (I've seen some; do I need to own them?)
47. Some Weirdo
48. An Array Of Comics In Various Non-Superhero Genres
49. An Editorial Cartoonist's Collection or Two
50. A Few Collections From New Yorker Cartoonists

What does this tell me? (a) My tastes overlap with Tom Spurgeon's to a rather high degree. (b) I can cut back on the comics a bit, probably.

Update: Upon further reflection, I have altered the replies for items 21 and 27 from their original state.

Pogo for President!

It so happens that the onset of the Democratic convention this year coincides with one of the most important holidays in my personal calendar: Walt Kelly's birthday. Today marks the ninety-fifth anniversary of Kelly's birth, so it seems appropriate to offer my endorsement of the perennial nominee possum:


The timing seems right to honor Kelly. Only yesterday, Eddie Campbell considered the remarkable coherence of Impollutable Pogo as a through-composed comic--remarkable given its origins in the daily papers over a period of many months. I remember that volume fondly as one of the earliest Pogo books I acquired, back in elementary school when you could still find newly-reprinted Pogo paperbacks for sale at Waldenbooks.

Over the years, my loving parents and friends have helped me to amass a pretty satisfying library of Pogo books, prints, and tchotchkes. Here's a glorious print of practically the whole Okefenokee gang gathering for a perloo (please excuse the reflected glare from the flash: without the flash, the picture was blurry, but I did try to position the glare in a blank area of the drawing):



A few years ago my parents gave me a color print of the most famous Kelly tag, used here (as in Impollutable Pogo) as a cry against pollution:



My most recent Pogo art acquisition was courtesy a friend of my brother. Here is what looks to be a color proof for a Pogo Sunday page--possibly with annotations by Kelly or one of his assistants?:



Still, my happiest acquisition came three years ago, when my parents came through with a copy of the final original Pogo book missing from my collection, Pogo à la Sundae. Here's a photo of that glorious moment when I unwrapped the prize (and the photo is flanked by a couple of plastic Pogo pals):



And having revealed just a snippet of my Pogo shelving, I owe it to Isaac--who challenged me to produce some "shelf pr0n" of my own to match his--to post one last Pogo picture:


That's all the original Pogo books, many in original editions; all the trade paperbacks collecting material from the Pogo fanzine The Okefenokee Star; several issues of Animal Comics and the Dell Pogo quarterly (including the Pogo Parade); a few non-Pogo Kelly projects; some souvenir cups; and figurines of Pogo and Howland Owl. And just in case you were wondering: yes, I've read all the books and comics. Most of them several times over since my impressionable youth. Which, if you know me, explains a lot of how my mind works...

Two Comics Collections

How have I spent my summer vacation? Well, I may still have a post or two in me about my comics "discoveries" in Wales, but mainly I've been busy with moving in to this new place. I did take a day off from unpacking this week, though, and that took me back down to White River Junction and the Center for Cartoon Studies, where I met up with a few other comics scholars for a nice lunch and a quick tour of the CCS facilities.

Something I hadn't seen before is their Schulz Library, which is just a single room lined with shelves in the same building as the Main Street Museum. It's an incredible repository of interesting comics, books, and minicomics.


From the expression on Gene Kannenberg's face, you can see that it's a sort of treasure trove—about as close to Mrs. Hicks's library as you're likely to get in this hemisphere. I was particularly impressed with the minicomics collection (as yet uncatalogued), which is in the central island between Ana Merino and Robyn Chapman. Those gray bins are full of minis, on shelves all the way down to the floor.

Part of the reason I found the space so impressive is that I've been working on my own accursed comics library, unpacking it from boxes and alphabetizing as I go. I think I've got it all unloaded now. For a while I was worried that the comics wouldn't all fit on these new (crappy) shelves. (I do not recommend IKEA's "Leksvik" shelves: they look nice, and they're fairly light, but both of mine are distinctly wobbly.)


I think it's going to work, though: ceiling-to-floor comics. The perspective shift in the middle is the result of stitching two photos together: even IKEA shelves aren't going to distort that much in their first week of use.

If you click on that image above, you'll see a fuzzy image that hints at my dedication to Krazy Kat, to Lewis Trondheim, to Mome, and to Alan Moore. (How did I wind up with three copies of Watchmen, and how have I not discarded at least one of them?)

I'm afraid that's about as much comics activity as I can report this week. I did catch up on the latest Fables paperback (and the last Y: the Last Man one), but I don't have much to say about those. (Well, except that I thought it was genuinely weird that Yorick shaved his head to look more like the writer of the series. I'm not sure what to do with that.)

Anyway, as long as I'm showing blurry photos of the shelves in my study, here's the bookshelf in our house with the most books on it. It's not especially wide or tall; it's just that most of the books are quite skinny.


That's poetry, twentieth and twenty-first century only. It's all alphabetical, but I defy you to read those spines.