Hi there! I seem to post here once or twice a year, showing off a bunch of oversized comics with good art in languages I can only read with difficulty. This time I ended up with unusually many classic comic strips:

There's Segar's **Popeye** and its precursor **Thimble Theatre**, **Connie** (the earliest female adventure hero that I'm aware of), **Modesty Blaise** (someone wrote that the German editions were good, so I bought the first one), eight **Peanuts**\-related books, two **Calvin & Hobbes** books, and all of Tove Jansson's **Moomin** comics.

I've written brief comments in the captions, but they only allow 180 characters, so here are some random rambling notes on the first half of Segar's strips:

**Thimble Theatre** has its charm, but once **Popeye** shows up his personality quickly overshadows the original characters. He is often described as extremely ugly, he's very afraid of evil spiriks, he's a friend of children everywhere, he occasionally won't mind slavery or spanking women, and his interests are fighting and playing craps. Any money he earns will very quickly disappear towards gambling or people in need. If he doesn't like someone's looks, he will introduce himself by punching their face. It takes a couple of years before spinach is mentioned. Wimpy started out as a boxing referee. Olive Oyl is a surprisingly good fighter.  
  
Regarding the **nostalgic Marvel books**: As a kid, I had those **Hulk** comics in a pocket-sized edition whose tiny size required every character to talk like the Hulk, so it will be interesting to read it at full size, although in Spanish this time. Leafing through the **Amazing Spider-Man** omnibus really reinforced my view that Gil Kane's art looks a lot more dynamic than Romita's, although Romita was better at the surface details while Kane could be sloppy – the Spider-Man in the bottom right corner doesn't even have a spider symbol on his back!

I really liked the format of **The Art of Fantastic Four** – it's in between the absurdly large artist's editions and the *not really much larger than a regular comic book* artisan editions, and contains a nice selection of Kirby art from his best period. This feels like the book to get if you want just one book with photos of original Kirby art.

The **Sin City Curator's Collection** is absurdly large, but I love how Miller's art has a very personal, hand-made quality to it. I often like inking that *looks* like ink on paper, if that makes sense. Also, it's easy to see the similarities between how Miller draws Marv and the Alack Sinner cover in one of my images.

Regarding the manga/manhwa: I got **Lovers of the Empire** in Portuguese, but it will be published in English this summer. **おさまる家 ("A Harmonious Home"**?) has some really pretty art.  
  
Also – apparently there's a 20 image limit, so [here's an Imgur page with all of the interior art I intended to include in my post](https://imgur.com/a/ApW9Hv1).  
  
If you have questions or want me to post art from some particular book, then ask!

80 books that I've bought since last summer