The Return of 50 Things That Every Comics Collection Truly Needs Meme

WAAAAAAAY back in 2008, Tom Spurgeon posted a good list of "The 50 Things That Every Comics Collection Truly Needs" and, as a follow-up from Stephen Frug, how to play along at home. I responded here at the time, but as that was more than a decade ago, I thought I might revisit the list to see how much I've completed it since then. (Mostly inadvertently since I'd long since forgotten about this actual list.)

Leave Plain = Things I don't have
Make Bold = Things I do have
Italics = I have some but probably not enough
Underline = I don't agree that I need this

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

Regarding the items that I don't think should be on the list, it seems to me that original editions of particularly hard-to-find issues don't make sense. Sure, Jules Feiffer's work is excellent but does it make a difference if you've got the original 1956 printing of Sick, Sick, Sick or a second printing that came out in 1959? Or, for that matter, the Fantagraphics re-issue from 1991? Clipped comics? Yes, it speaks to have a personal connection/love of a creator's work, but how is that even possible any more? Who's even making comics that are intended to connect in that way via a newspaper? If you weren't cutting out strips before Charles Schulz died over two decades ago, you're not going to find anything worth cutting out now, effectively eliminating a generation or two from ever achieving this. As for Crumb and Steinberg? Talented artists, but these listings aren't comics.

The list, of course, was very much based on Spurgeon's subjective opinion and some of his biases are pretty evident in it. There's no mention of webcomics collections, of course; there's only two items referring to manga at all; some items are weirdly specific relative to their (in)significance to the medium as a whole... But I like that it does attempt to say, "Whatever comics you're into? Get some other stuff beyond that." Which is the approach I've tried to take for many years now and is why I'm able to check off a lot more on this list than I could back in 2008. This isn't a list that I think should be followed verbatim, but it does a good job speaking to the approach I think more people should take.

Related Items fandom