Jack Of All Trades #1 by Dave Wallace – The Tradewaiting Game

Dave Wallace writes for Bleeding Cool;

Welcome to Jack of all Trades, a new Bleeding Cool column focused exclusively on trade paperbacks and other collected editions. Each week, I’m going to be picking out a handful of the most interesting new TPBs and hardcovers going on sale, as well as reviewing a couple of recent (and sometimes not-so-recent) collected editions that are well worth your time and money.

I’ll also try and keep abreast of what collections are coming up a little further down the line so you can start saving those pennies – like that insane Invisibles hardcover we heard about recently.

But first, I think this opening column needs to address the issue of tradewaiting itself. For some, tradewaiting is a bit of a dirty word, referring to those of use who prefer to skip comics as they’re coming out in individual issues and read them only once they’re available in a sturdier collected format, which usually works out cheaper, too.

Of course, there are arguments against tradewaiting – most notably that if everyone did it, the current market model for monthly comics would pretty much collapse. It’s also true that, in the case of titles that are teetering on the brink of cancellation, buying trades isn’t the most direct way to show your support, as by the time a collected edition comes out, it’s often too late to rescue a title that has been marked for death, no matter how much interest there is in the trade. And then there’s the slightly irritating tendency for certain writers to pad out multi-issue stories because they’re pacing them with a view to eventual collected editions, rather than writing them at whatever length the story deserves.

Nonetheless, I still choose to tradewait the vast majority of comics I read, and there are plenty of good reasons why. For one thing, there are no adverts to break up the flow of the story. By tradewaiting, I can also be reasonably sure that I’m going to get a complete story (or at least a substantial chunk of one) for my money, and not have to wait months at a time for each issue to come out. I also like having my comics in a more substantial format than floppy single issues: collected editions are easier to handle, and if I’m searching for a story that I want to reread it’s far easier to pull an easily-identifiable, properly-bound volume off a shelf than it is to go digging through longboxes for a specific issue.

As you’ll see from the following image (which captures a small portion of my Ikea Billy Bookcase – the tradewaiter’s shelving of choice) I’m also a huge fan of the larger, more luxurious hardcover editions that have become so popular over the last decade or so.

(I like big books and I cannot lie.)

Yes, these Absolute editions, deluxe hardcovers and omnibuses can be expensive.

But if a comic is good enough – and especially if the art is strong enough to warrant a larger page size – I’m happy to pay a little bit extra for better reproduction, bigger pages and the slew of extra material that these fancier collections usually provide.

Which brings me to the first item that caught my eye on this week’s shipping list: DC’s latest reprint of Absolute Batman: Hush. This is a story that has been collected in about as many formats as you can imagine: first as two separate TPBs and hardbacks, then as an Absolute edition containing all 12 issues, then as a TPB collecting the entire story, and even in an “unwrapped” hardcover that presents the story in Jim Lee’s uninked, uncoloured pencils rather than using the finished art.

However, the fact that they’re going back to press on yet another printing of the Absolute indicates that there are still plenty of people out there who are willing to pay top dollar for the most expensive version of the story that exists. Given how great Lee’s art looks in the Absolute format, and the amount of extra material (in the form of interviews, sketches, and extra story pages) that the book contains, I can’t blame them.

(Although given that it’s obviously easy enough to go back to press with an Absolute edition if there’s the demand for it (I know that the Sandman, Watchmen, Planetary and New Frontier Absolutes are onto multiple printings, at least), would it be too much to ask for DC to get those two long-out-of-print Absolute Authority volumes back on the shelves?)

Staying with big expensive hardcovers, this week also sees The Complete Invincible Library volume 3 finally hit the stands. I have to confess to never actually having tried Invincible, but it’s on my to-do list. Either way, fans of the book have been waiting quite a while for this third volume, which collects issues #48-70 of the title. Although the RRP of $125 sounds pretty expensive, if you shop around then you can knock roughly $50 off that, which works out at about $3.40 an issue – which is cheaper than a lot of floppies these days.

Next up, Nick Spencer’s Morning Glories gets a nice hardcover edition collecting the first 12 issues in the Morning Glories Deluxe Collection volume 1. The series has been a massive hit with critics and readers, so I’m expecting this to do pretty well – even if you can already buy the same stories in regular TPB form for around half the price.

Changing gears a little, I’m always interested to see what older books publishers decide to pull out of their archives to reprint, and this week Marvel have chosen to bestow upon us a collection of Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s Marvel Team-Up #59-70 and #75 under the title of Spider-Man Marvel Team-Up By Chris Claremont & John Byrne. If there’s a huge demand for this material, I’m not aware of it, but I guess the enduring popularity of their X-Men run together isn’t going to hurt its chances.

Finally, a couple of non-fiction titles struck me as likely to generate a bit of interest.

The first is the Dynamite Art of Alex Ross hardcover, which collects all of the artist’s covers and interior work for the company in a single volume, apparently with commentary from Ross and some other extras too. The artist’s name alone has proven a big enough draw to sell coffee-table art-books based around his DC work, and even with the relative obscurity of these characters, I imagine there’ll be a fair few of his fans clamouring to get hold of this.

Secondly, a book called Tintin: The Complete Companion from publisher Last Gasp sounds pretty intriguing. Apparently it collects many of Hergé’s sketches, along with reference materials for the locations and details that appeared in the Tintin series. It might be something that’ll only appeal to the most dedicated Tintin fans, but with the raised profile of the character thanks to the recent movie, this could get a bit of a boost.

Reviews

Absolute Sandman v.5

I wasn’t lying when I said earlier that I was a fan of DC’s Absolute editions. And just a few weeks ago, the company released the fifth (and presumably final) volume of Absolute Sandman. With the first four volumes having collected the main series in its entirety, this fifth book rounds up the other material that didn’t find its way into those earlier hardcovers. Notably, this means we get both versions of the Dream Hunters story – Neil Gaiman’s original illustrated prose, and P. Craig Russell’s comics adaptation – as well as the full Endless Nights graphic novel, which features a host of great artists (including such luminaries as Milo Manara and Frank Quitely) each contributing a vignette about a member of the Endless. In all their deluxe oversized hardcover glory.

Alongside those core components, there’s “The Last Sandman Story” (an interesting short story by Gaiman and Dave McKean that’s as much about the writer as it is about the Sandman characters), as well as the Sandman Midnight Theatre issue by Gaiman and Matt Wagner that many fans had been disappointed to see missed from the earlier Absolutes. There are also a couple of afterwords by Gaiman, along with his script for the “Dream” section of Endless Nights, which is as entertaining and revealing as you’d expect.

Oh, and there’s the by-now-traditional catalogue of merchandise that helps to remind you just how much money the franchise has made for DC. Still, I don’t begrudge them a little bit more for a final collection that’s this comprehensive.

Neonomicon TPB & hardcover

Avatar recently collected Alan Moore’s controversial Lovecraftian horror thriller in both TPB and hardcover form, and they’ve put together a pretty attractive package by also including the two-issue comics version of Moore’s related short story, The Courtyard (which was adapted by Neonomicon artist Jacen Burrows).

Reading Neonomicon in one sitting – rather than in single issues that came out several months apart – some of the unevenness and pacing problems that some readers had with the series are smoothed out. For example, the brutal and explicit sexual scenes that come at the end of issue #2 are balanced out by the shift in tone that occurs towards the start of issue #3, and the opening chapter functions better as a gradual scene-setter than something that’s meant to grab your attention immediately. The four-issue miniseries as a whole is also lent greater context by reading The Courtyard immediately before it, and some of the details of that earlier story are pretty essential to grasp if you’re to fully comprehend what’s going on in Neonomicon.

It might not be Moore’s best work, but it’s still pretty good stuff, and it’s certainly one of the most accomplished and genuinely disturbing horror comics I’ve read. And Burrows’ artwork is very impressive, proving to be up to the task of carrying much of the story, with a style that feels like a cross between Frank Quitely and Steve Dillon.

Trades wishlist:

OK, so that’s all for this first Tradewaiting column. But I want to end by asking you to post suggestions in the discussion thread below detailing what uncollected material you think deserves to be given a TPB or hardcover collection, as well as what out-of-print or difficult-to-obtain volumes you’d like to see reprinted.