There are some folk out there just plain hate anthologies–any anthologies and all anthologies. That ain’t me. I love a good anthology. In fact, I even like anthologies that aren’t<\/em> good as long as they’re cheap. I also think that the anthology format tends to work best when the stories therein don’t attempt to be profound meditations on ennui or whatever. The 2-8 page format just isn’t well-suited to it. (Something like Mome<\/em>, where the stories continue each issue, gets around this, though, but certainly it’s an exception among non-Manga anthologies.) I also feel strongly that price-point is a really important factor. To the extent that an anthology serves to introduce new talent–one of the things I most enjoy about them myself–the book needs to be a something that doesn’t represent a huge financial outlay. An anthology like this is a gamble; the stakes shouldn’t be high. Anyway, here are two that I stumbled on in the first longbox I’ve been going through:<\/p>\n Oni Double Feature (Pub. Oni, obviously) I’m not sure how long this ran, but I’ve got the first nine issues I think. I remember really looking forward to each issue of this. As the name implies, each issue had two feature stories, along with occasional one-page strips on the inside covers. Here’re some folks featured in the issues I flipped through: Troy Nixey, P. Craig Russell, Dave Cooper, Tom Hart, Peter Bagge, Neil Gaiman and Jim Mahfood.<\/p>\n Not a bad lineup, eh? What I like about this lineup, and this book came out about ten years ago, is that it’s a nice mix of funny-ish indy folks, and more mainstream-ish artists doing non-superhero genre stuff. For me it was also a good mix of people whose work I knew (Bagge, Gaiman, etc.) and some who I didn’t know so well (Tom Hart, Dave Cooper) and at lest one I ‘d never heard of, but whose work I’ve liked ever since (Troy Nixey). Would the Oni Quintuple Feature<\/em> work as a digest-sized quarterly anthology? I’d sure buy it.<\/p>\n I also came across:<\/p>\n Reveal (Pub. Dark Horse)<\/strong><\/p>\n Here’s another one from roughly the same era (2002). I really enjoyed Reveal<\/em>, and wish it had caught on. It was a notch up as far as production values go, but still within a reasonable price rang–the cover on issue one is $6.95. It’s all color interior and squarebound, rather than saddle-stitched. With a higher page-count and more emphasis on articles, this could have been the theoretical comics magazine that I’ve always thought would do well: editorially somewhere between Wizard<\/em> and The Comics Journal<\/em>, and with lots of actual comics in it. Alas, it was not to be.<\/p>\n This issue has stories by folks like Craig Thompson, Peter David, Scott Lobdel and Sean Phillips. Also, though, it’s got a centerfold featuring a Picasso etching that’s read panel-to-panel, as well as an interview with Mike Mignola and Guillermo del Toro about the then-upcoming Hellboy<\/em> movie. Am I alone in thinking that something like this might have a better chance of catching on in today’s more indy\/graphic novel-friendly environment, where it might get some shelf space at the local Borders? There’s a British magazine called Redeye<\/a><\/em> all about the U.K. comics scene that looks like it’s maybe having a go at something similar to Reveal<\/em>. Let’s hope it works and someone in the U.S. maybe takes note.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t know how many of these I’ll have time for, and with what frequency I’ll wind up posting them, (I do have a baby due any day now, you know) but… With the eminent arrival of the above-mentioned “infink,” I’ve had to clear out what was previously an extra room here in the Crackhouse. … <\/p>\n
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