Showcase Presents: House of Mystery

Aaahhh!!! October is ending and I'm running out of time! I guess I just have to save some of the other good stuff for next year. With that said, this one made it to the cut of being prioritized to be shared now. Let's get to it.

"Showcase Presents:" is basically DC Comics' answer to Marvel's Essential line, which basically are tomes of black and white comic reprints spotlighting a specific character or title. The beauty with this format, beyond the very affordable cover price they offer for those 500 pages is that this line basically have brought back some really obscure works that would never have seen the light of day again otherwise.

For this particular work I'm featuring, I won't bother you much with a proper review as this is basically a reprint of 21 issues of a monthly anthology. I will just give you a quick briefing of details and why I consider this worthy of recommendation.

First, for basic info: This first volume reprints The House of Mystery issues #174 - 194. Basically the first 21 issues overseen by legendary editor Joe Orlando. Don't expect much on the quality of the stories within because they were all really simplistic which is easily understandable as they were intended to be nothing more than simple disposable entertainment. However, this collection is a veritable treasure chest of great classic comic illustration. Any aspiring artist or people who are just plain appreciative of good art should have this in their collection. I'm not joking, a short list of the artists who contributed here should easily impress you. Okay, from the top of my head that I can recall are: The editor himself Joe Orlando, Carmine Infantino, Mort Meskin, Neal Adams, Sergio Aragones, Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, Jack Sparling, Wally Wood, Bernie Wrightson, Jerry Grandenetti, Alex Toth, Wayne Howard, Al Williamson, Tony DeZuniga, Jim Aparo, Gray Morrow, Russ Heath and Nestor Redondo. Trust me, I'm probably forgetting about a dozen more names from that list, besides that should impress you enough or I'd seriously doubt the quality of your taste anyway.

The only other detail I can add is how amazing the art reproduction of this volume has. The line art are really crisp, way better than basically every Marvel Essential I've ever seen. In fact, the reproduction is so good that a part of me honestly believe that it's presented better now than they were originally published in color, what with those off-registered marks, shoddy seperations, crude and garish limited palette of the obviously inferior printing technology back then.

I seriously urge you to look for this one, more support for this could lend to the immediacy of the release for the second volume, which I believe has even better stuff.