Man,
this reminded me of how badly I wish I had a way to share some of my rarer comics with you guys.
They're too big to scan (even if I had time to scan hundreds of pages and didn't care about wrecking the spines) and too rare and valuable to just get extra copies to mail around or give away.
There's some really great stuff that's pretty important to the development of comics that a lot of people have never seen just because it's reprinted so infrequently (and is very pricey when it is reprinted), not to mention some fantastic stories and beautiful artwork.
Even just little things... To cite Moebius again, there's his short story "The Long Tomorrow", which pioneered the sci-fi gumshoe genre and was almost certainly the first ever instance of the vertical city dug into a shaft in the ground. It's a lean, tight story, full of action, fun, and great damn writing. Or, the aforementioned "Airtight Garage" and "The Man From the Ciguri", which basically started out as a bizarre experiment* but became something that has yet to be duplicated. Or "Arzach", which was a seminal event in both art quality and in textless comics.
It's not just Moebius, there's other European stuff, lots of little one-offs by names you've probably never heard of like Gipi, Cyril Pederosa, Alain Guibert, Chris Blain, Jason... (all in Engish by the way). I mean there's a perception that independent comics often means "biographical or self-referential navel-gazing", but it's not all like that.
There's an INCREDIBLE noir mystery set in nazi-occupied France called 'The Bloody Streets Of Paris', that I have here by Jaques Tardi (also in English), and it just blows me away every time. The only person I know who's read it is my damned roommate and even that took three years to get him to try it. When he finally read it he pronounced it amazing.
There's NIL by Toronto artist James Turner, the book that convinced me Satire wasn't dead after all (I actually spoke to James recently and tried to convince him to put the book up online as a promotional thing for his much newer work... the jury's still out on that one).
I mean, at least some of you have access to the Manga stuff, but the European stuff kills me. It's all here on my shelf and once in a while I re-read a volume, but that's about it. No-one I know knows about this stuff, let alone reads or collects it.
It's frustrating is all. I really could give two shits about being some elitist asshole with a monstrous collection of amazing comics no one has ever read.
*
Basically, Moebius started writing a new multidimensional sci-fi story. He did three pages and then misplaced them. Unable to find the first three pages, he then started all over again from a totally different angle. When he found the first three pages, he set himself a challenge: write three more pages that linked the first two groups. From that point, he basically made it into a crazy exercise. Each three-page bundle had to unify the previous bundles, while ALSO completely destroying any continuity he had carefully constructed so far in the story. The resulting story is a hell of a mindfuck, but is still entertaining and well worth a look at the very least.
