The 50 Things That Every Comics Collection Truly Needs
September 28th, 2008This is part of a feature from one of my favourite websites: The Comics Reporter. Check out the specific article at this link. If you are interested in comics and are not already a regular reader of this site, you should do yourself a favour and start reading it now.
The idea here with this particular post is that anyone who’s serious about comics would/should own everything on this list. It’s a pretty daunting task to put together the type of collection that’s described below, but it’s fun to look it over and see how one measures up. I’ve put in bold the things I own and in italics the things I own but would like to own more of.
1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library
2. A Complete Run Of Arcade
3. Any Number Of Mini-Comics
4. At Least One Pogo Book From The 1950s
5. A Barnaby Collection
6. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary
7. As Many Issues of RAW as You Can Place Your Hands On
8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics
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
16. At Least One Comic That Failed to Finish The Way It Planned To
17. Some Osamu Tezuka
18. The Entire Run Of At Least One Manga Series
19. One Or Two 1970s Doonesbury Collections
20. At Least One Saul Steinberg Hardcover
21. One Run of A Comic Strip That You Yourself Have Clipped
22. A Selection of Comics That Interest You That You Can’t Explain To Anyone Else
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.
28. The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics
29. Several copies of MAD
30. A stack of Jack Kirby 1970s Comic Books
31. More than a few Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 1960s Marvel Comic Books
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
36. A Few Comics Not In Your Native Tongue
37. A Nice Stack of Jack Chick Comics
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
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










September 28th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
What a great list! And you’ve got a good chunk of it too.
I think I’ll repost the list in an upcoming blog entry and see how I measure up (it won’t be nearly as comprehensive, but it still looks fun!).
September 29th, 2008 at 6:25 am
Hey Mike! If any of you are not already reading MIke’s webcomic One Swoop Fell, go check it out immediately!
October 13th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
You need some Neil Gaiman!!!
I must recomend “The Sandman”. It’s one of the greatest ever writed
Khemm
October 13th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Khemm: Thanks for the recommendation. I have read the odd Neil Gaiman comic (and a book or two) but I should absolutely delve into Sandman.