What I Buy: Deluxe bank-breaking collected edition

Or: The Finely Organized Bookshelf

I’ve wanted to do this for a bit, because I accumulate a lot of trade paperback and hardcover ‘graphic novels,’ (or, y’know, to be less pretentious about it, collected comics). It’s funny, but reading a collected tpb is actually quite different from reading a periodical comic, and not just because of the length. It is a different commitment to read a full on book of one story than it is to taste a book’s flavor amidst the sprawling bevy of books I buy each Wednesday.

Ultimately, collectors be damned, comic magazines are disposable things. They are rarely built to last, unless you acquire the right and proper bags, boards, and long-boxes designed specially to house them. Books, though, are different. A book, and a hardcover especially, denotates a mark of quality that suggests permanence. A permanence, I might add, that saddle-stitched staples simply don’t offer.

So I don’t want to buy a collected edition, (or trade, or tpb, or graphic novel, or OGN, or whatever the hell package I’m purchasing), unless there is some sort of guarantee that it’ll be worth keeping. A mediocre comicbook, feh, I can afford to lose that, or give it away. But a bad trade? I’m pretty much stuck with that poor investment.

This all means that my trade-buying habits are a somewhat peculiar mix of books I know to be high-quality by reputation, books that I’ve already read in single-issue-format but enjoy so much I crave the prestigious packaging, and titles that I’ve read in part, but avoided for a period so as to be able to one day read the stories in their completed glory. Weekly stacks of books are my buffet meals, but good graphic novel purchases are exhaustively prepared main entres.

In the last few months, I’ve come into the possession of a quite a few such collections, and so, in the Merry McGuirk Tradition of What I Buy Wednesdays, allow 1point21jiggawhatts to present

What I Buy: Deluxe bank-breaking collected edition!!

The Starman Omnibus vol. 1 (DC): I was lucky enough to intern for DC Comics. My first day at the office, as I was kindly shown around their premises, my tour guide would point out the various framed covers that adorned the workplace walls. The covers ranged from old war books to modern painted classics, but the series most disproportionately represented on the walls were of James Robinson’s Starman series. “We here all really love Starman,” I was told. Considering the wide range of tastes from editor to editor, this spoke volumes.

I’ve heard the many praises of this series, but had relatively little exposure to it. I’d read the first collection, and a few straggling issues, but I hadn’t experienced the run in its full. Well DC Collected Editions had just the solution to that. After letting the trade paperback editions run out of print, a new Omnibus initiative of run-collecting HCs are being released, and the package is gorgeous. This is an edition worthy of the series critical acclaim, and I’m eager to make my way through this modern superhero classic that I’m lucky enough to have not yet experienced.

Popgun vol. 2 (Image): Look, we’re cool, right? We’re friends- I can speak my mind in this space? Well hey, one of my goals is to be able to write some good funnybooks someday. It’s on my to-do list, in permanent marker. It’s not all I want to do in this life, but, as I say, it’s on that list with the heavy ink. Well, in the service of my creative endeavors, I find nothing more inspiring than good anthology work. Everything I like about doing WIBW, the wide swath of comics’ culture you can cut on a week-to-week basis? A good anthology is like that, from page to page. Popgun is possibly the most respected antho out there, and after making my way through this volume, I can see why. There’s pretty much an endless supply of cool shit in this mega-book of comics. You get a chance to see the guys right on the fringes of broader success, something exceptionally intriguing with an older volume like this, where many of the talents have already moved on to higher visibility projects. You also just get to hear the voices of the people who want nothing more than to create strong, original comics just so that they exist, and who might move on to the worlds beyond comics before long. It is eclectic and superb, and I was thrilled to pick it up.

The Invisibles vol. 1 (Vertigo): Sometimes a series intimidates you. Vertigo series, with their 8-10 collections and “high concepts,” require a strong commitment to even start them. You’ve got to be willing to get into it for the long haul. Grant Morrison’s Invisibles series is a good example of that, because really all I knew about this book was that it was the most “Morrisonian,” work the comics’ shaman had ever worked on, and that a kid in my comicbook-history class during college (yes, my college offered such a course) once told me he’d masturbated on a page of one of the issues, per Morrison’s command, to somehow magically stave off cancellation for the series. So it wasn’t that I wasn’t curious about the series, but I was a bit daunted by it. After reading this first collection, I’m still not entirely sure I have a handle on what it is supposed to be. Morrison is somehow defining his own counterculture here, folding in some high-literature with his own sense of rock and roll revolution. I hear it takes a bit longer to get a good handle on just what’s so great about this series, but as with all Morrison projects, if you’re not confused, you’re not reading it right.

Wolverine: Weapon X (Marvel): Suckered by hyper-marketing, but wary of the studios’ capability of living up to its promise, I got a hankering for some Wolverine fare a few months back. With that in mind, I decided the time was nigh to finally read Barry Windsor-Smith’s acclaimed run from Marvel Comics Presents. This story is famed, and as such, a devout comic reader can become aware of the story and its consequence without ever having read it. I mean, I watched the X-Men cartoon, and had the Weapon X Wolverine action figure, so I already possessed ambient knowledge of the framework to this story. During a time when Logan’s origins were still deeply shrouded in mystery, classically brilliant illustrator BWS gave the first account of how the Canuck had come into the possession of his indestructible Adamantium skeleton. This story lived up to the hype. It was beautifully drawn, for one, and really played with the conflicting nature of Wolverine as a human animal. The writing, while perhaps a tad dated, was a pitch-perfect match for the art, never overpowering or overstating that which was portrayed on the page. It was a trip to hearken back to the days when Wolverine was a relatively untouched character, limited to his own occasional miniseries, and the pages of X-Men, and wasn’t the most overexposed character this side of Barack Obama.

Transmetropolitan vols. 1 & 2 (Vertigo): When a series is good enough, it leaves me infuriated that A) I wasn’t smart enough to conceive it, and B) frustrated that I might not reach the heights of creativity it represents. Transmet was like that. Spider Jerusalem is an outlaw journalist in an overwrought but familiar dystopian future, and his greatest weapon is his written voice. He uses his tool, along with indignation righteous enough to topple kings, to spread his seed of knowledge around the world like a sailor would an STD. This book is over a decade old, but the only prognostications that feel dated are the ones that have already come to pass. Spider seems like a pretty strong analogue for writer Warren Ellis himself, as his steely pessimism reads as a cover for an underlying humanity that is desperate for the world to live up to its promise. Darrick Robinson shows off his all-star talents in rendering the dirty, criminally commercialized but still charmingly diverse urban sprawl that surrounds our fair journalist. If Transmetropolitan doesn’t make you want to change the world with your words, well, probably nothing will.

Johnny Hiro (Adhouse Books): This is an example of the kind of book I have no problem buying twice. I proudly purchased each of Fred Chao’s masterful modern fairy-tale comics, and sung their praises to any and all in earshot. My socks were remarkably rocked, so when I saw this new collection, with new stories, well, it was among the easiest purchases I’ve ever made. I’ll keep buying this book until Fred Chao is a gajillionaire, if I have to.

Point Blank & Sleeper Season 1 (Wildstorm): Well hot damn were these among the finest comics I’ve ever come upon it. Much like Transmet, this was a book I’d held off on until it was cleanly repackaged, but it was very worth the wait. I’d already been loving Sean Phillips and Ed Brubaker’s collabos on Criminal and Incognito, but it was a blast seeing their work on Sleeper, the book that put them on the spot. I’ve never really been scared for a character, especially in genres outside horror, but the story of the operative so deep undercover he’s not sure when the assignment ends and he begins is powerful enough that I was genuinely worried. Point Blank makes for a great introduction to Sleeper’s dark underbelly, as WildC.A.T.S.’ Grifter bridges the gap from the superheroic world to the super-criminal one. This is the best crime you’ll read. I won’t even call this series “great comics,” I’m just going to call them “great fiction,” and leave it at that.

Mesmo Delivery (Top Shelf): Rafael Grampa is part of the Pixu gang, which is kind of like being a comics’ Crip- it offers immediate credibility and swag. He’s got a fine style, and his line packs a ton of personality within. This is a deceptively direct story, just off-kilter enough to upset the reader’s equilibrium. The obsessive detail of Grampa’s lines are downright 1990’s Image-ian, only his storytelling is crystal clear. This book is fast paced and hard livin’ with a dash of the devil in it. Guess it earned it’s Eisner nod.

Astro City; The Dark Age vol. 1 (Wildstorm): I had been dying to read this series. You don’t understand- dying. I’d read one random issue of the sequel series, and I wanted it all. But I wanted it when I could get through it on my time. It’s no secret that the book has fallend on an irregular schedule in the last few years, but none deny that the book is worth it once it arrives. There’s something appropriate about having Busiek and Anderson’s story covering comics’ darkest, most sobering hour be told in a multi-volume, series spanning epic. Astro City has always been rife with allegories and allusions to comics’ history and tradition, and it is exciting to see these esteemed creators’ take on the era in which the comics industry grew up.

Look for more WIBW: Deluxe bank-breaking collected editions to come, but for now, go break your back and bank with that roll of books.