Aren't they just? Tom Spurgeon compiled a list — which really is a towering work of obsession, go and read it right this minute now — of 50 Things That Every Comics Collection Truly Needs. Here's the meme version.
Leave Plain = Things I don't have
Make Bold = Things I do have
Italics = I have some but probably not enough (optional)
Underline = I don't agree I need this (optional)
1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library (I keep meaning to buy the sketchbooks, but I have a couple of the bookshelf-busting issues. And Jimmy Corrigan.)
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 (Not so common in Britain. I have Archie Vs. The Punisher, but that's not really the same thing.)
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 (Nothing much beyond a bundle of early-200s Cerebus.)
13. A Few Early Comic Strip Collections To Your Taste (Gasoline Alley, Thimble Theatre, Dick Tracy, some Krazy Kat.)
14. Several "Indy Comics" From Their Heyday
15. At Least One Comic Book From When You First Started Reading Comic Books (Gerry Conway/Sal Buscema issues of Spectacular Spider-Man.)
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 (Eagle, mentioned a couple of posts down. This may be sort of a cheat, since it's incredibly short for a manga.)
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 (I bought some reissues of the first few issues. Lovely art. I think I gave up before it got funny.)
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 (The only C&H I don't have is a book that accompanied a museum exhibit, with reproductions of original art and thoughts from Watterson. GOSH! had a few the last time I was down that way.)
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 ('In Pictopia', 'The Man' by Vaughn Bodé, 'Street Code' by Jack Kirby. The minute I see a copy of Mazzucchelli's 'Big Man', I will buy it.)
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
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