From My Shelves – Comics

From My Shelves is a series of occasional posts that look at items from my personal collection to which I have a special attachment.


Comics – The Complete Collection by Brian Walker (2011) – I grew up reading the “funny pages”.  My dad would come home from the office with a newspaper in hand.  Once he finished it, we could dive right in.  It’s where I began reading newspapers from back to front.

The comics were almost always buried in the back sections and that’s where I began.  When I was younger I remember lying on the living room rug with the paper spread beneath my elbows. I worked my way through the comics, then the sports and whatever else caught my eye.  As I grew older, the news sections got increased attention, but I always read the comics.

Sundays were the special treat.  My favorites, in color, plus a few that were “Sunday only”.  And they were huge!  And they had whole pages devoted only to the comics.

I don’t read newspapers as often as I once did.  In my radio days, I would read three.  Two had comic sections (though I judged one to be vastly superior to the other), and I still read the comics first.  On my shelves, you will find collections of “Calvin and Hobbes”, “Doonesbury”, “Bloom County”, and “The Far Side”.  My bucket list goal is to own the complete collection of “Peanuts”.  It was the first comic I fell in love with, curiously in book form rather than in the newspaper.  A dear family friend had collections of the early comics that I would read every time we visited.  The entire series is a dozen or more hardback volumes.  I’d love to be able to return to all those wonderful panels at will.

Brian Walker created a comprehensive look at over a century of work.  The names we know and love are there, but so are many that I didn’t know.  Walker, son of Mort Walker creator of “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi and Lois”, has a fan’s love of the art form and a historian’s eye for detail.

If you love the comics as I do, it’s a wonderful book.  But I also imagine it as an incredible gateway for new generations to discover the glory of the funny pages.