Do re meme

Via Matthew Brady at Warren Peace Sings the Blues, here's how my collection stacks up against Tom Spurgeon's list of 50 Things That Every Comics Collection Truly Needs. Poorly, as it turns out; selections in bold are ones what I gots, italics means I feel I don't have enough or I feel guilty or something.

1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library (The hardcover collection and the collected Jimmy Corrigan and Quimby the Mouse. I was planning on getting into the single issues until I found that some key early chapters of Rusty Brown were already out of print and decided to just wait on the inevitable collected edition.)
2. A Complete Run Of Arcade
3. Any Number Of Mini-Comics (Some Brian Chippendale stuff.)
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 (I'd love to, but they're not easy to come by.)
8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics
9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels (Oh my, yes.)
10. Several Tintin Albums (Just two right now, but I'm working on it.)
11. A Smattering Of Treasury Editions Or Similarly Oversized Books (Brian Chippendale's Ninja, the enormous ACME Novelty Library collection that won't fit on any of my bookshelves, Cages, some Absolute/Omnibus editions, etc. And all two issues of RASL to date, though I don't know why it's in Spurgeon's list; the oversized printing was cancelled and it was released as a normal-sized book.)
12. Several Significant Runs of Alternative Comic Book Series (Sadly, no. I'm a latecomer to buying singles, especially of this kind of thing.)
13. A Few Early Comic Strip Collections To Your Taste (Some Herriman and McCay.)
14. Several "Indy Comics" From Their Heyday (Love and Rockets, Madman, some early pre-insano Cerebus.)
15. At Least One Comic Book From When You First Started Reading Comic Books (Thank god for those ancient Asterix collections from my childhood, otherwise the answer would still be yes, but it would be some fuckawful 90's X-Men comic in a box somewhere.)
16. At Least One Comic That Failed to Finish The Way It Planned To (Big Numbers, which failed to finish, period. Probably some others as well; I'll have to go over the shelves and check it out.)
17. Some Osamu Tezuka (A little Astro Boy, a snippet of Phoenix and a copy of the first Black Jack hardcover that should be in the mail now.)
18. The Entire Run Of At Least One Manga Series (The only series manga I have on my shelves right now are incomplete runs of Tezuka books and a half-set of Dark Horse's Akira trades. The rest are all one-shots and artsy stuff like Tekkon Kinkreet or Yuichi Yokoyama collections.)
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 (Not as such- I'll be the first one to admit that my bookshelf is achingly, boringly tasteful.)
23. At Least One Woodcut Novel
24. As Much Peanuts As You Can Stand (Not sure whether I should be bolding this, because while I have a fair whack of Peanuts it is in fact considerably less than I can stand.)
25. Maus (Yup. Got it in junior high, mind like, blown, man, etc.)
26. A Significant Sample of R. Crumb's Sketchbooks (Nope. Judging by the example in Spurgeon's article, I might not mind, either, but Crumb's comix style and misanthropic worldview have always been huge turn-offs for me.)
27. The original edition of Sick, Sick, Sick. (I love Jules Feiffer but I don't have any of his books, let alone an original edition. Based on Spurgeon's advice I'll have to look for a used copy, because this sounds like exactly my kind of book.)
28. The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics
29. Several copies of MAD (Sadly, MAD sucked when I was in its target demographic. I do have the Spy vs Spy collection and some Al Jaffee paperbacks from my parents.)
30. A stack of Jack Kirby 1970s Comic Books (Do collections count? If so, I've got the Fourth World and OMAC Omnibus collections, and the Devil Dinosaur hardcover.)
31. More than a few Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 1960s Marvel Comic Books (Again, collected editions will have to do- I've got the Omnibus editions of their Fantastic Four run.)
32. A You're-Too-High-To-Tell Amount of Underground Comix (Depends on your definition. Does Vaughn Bode count?)
33. Some Calvin and Hobbes (Oh hells yeah. Watterson is largely responsible for my love of the comics medium to this day, and my brother and I ended up buying the entire run of paperback collections when we were kids. And every few months I get a wild urge to buy the hardcover collection- an urge that becomes harder and harder to fight each time. I know, someday, that I will lose.)
34. Some Love and Rockets (The recent reprints of Jaime's material; I'll get around to Gilbert's eventually.)
35. The Marvel Benefit Issue Of Coober Skeber (No, but it looks thoroughly enticing.)
36. A Few Comics Not In Your Native Tongue (Some Moebius books in French, since for some insane goddamn reason one of the most significant artists in the entire medium is never in print in English. Seriously, the most recent English trades I can think of are those tiny, itty-bitty reprint collections from Dark Horse, and those are long out of print and impossible to find at reasonable prices.)
37. A Nice Stack of Jack Chick Comics (I don't own any hard copies, but I'm proud to say I have read every single tract available on Chick's website. Oddly enough, despite currently living smack in the middle of the Bible Belt, I only ever saw print Chick tracts on benches at bus stops when I lived in Chicago.)
38. A Stack of Comics You Can Hand To Anybody's Kid (Not really, unless you count the Calvin & Hobbes books above, or some Kochalka or Lewis Trondheim books. I've got the Free Comic Book Day issues of Owly and Tiny Titans for some reason, though I hesitate to include Tiny Titans as it's clearly aimed toward 40-year-old fanboys.)
39. At Least A Few Alan Moore Comics ("At least"? "A few"? By gum, that ain't the way to do it! At least an entire shelf!)
40. A Comic You Made Yourself (I can't draw, so I've never tried. I have a few short screenplays, and I tended to lay those out in exhaustive shot-by-shot detail, which is sort of like storyboarding which is sort of like comics, but that's a hell of a stretch.)
41. A Few Comics About Comics
42. A Run Of Yummy Fur (Wouldn't mind having one, but such is not the case.)
43. Some Frank Miller Comics (Yup. No matter how ridiculous he gets, no matter how deeply entrenched his tics are, no matter how much his upcoming Spirit movie looks like it's going to suck, the man is a major talent and his comics are always a blast to read if nothing else.)
44. Several Lee/Ditko/Romita Amazing Spider-Man Comic Books (Not in individual issues as I'm nowhere near old enough to have bought them when they came out or rich enough to buy them now, but I've got the Omnibus and various issues in Marvel Visionaries collections.)
45. A Few Great Comics Short Stories (I think I might have to spin this one off into a separate post, actually.)
46. A Tijuana Bible (Just the fake one in The Black Dossier. Though I suppose I could dash off a quick "Popeye the Sailor Man In: Fellatio Follies" or something and knock off this one and #40 at the same time!)
47. Some Weirdo (Not my thing, really.)
48. An Array Of Comics In Various Non-Superhero Genres (Plenty.)
49. An Editorial Cartoonist's Collection or Two
50. A Few Collections From New Yorker Cartoonists (This category would be totally empty and I would be fine with it if it weren't for Gahan Wilson.)