Amazon has (finally!) started listing the Near Complete Essential Fred Hembeck Omnibus, a tome that offers nearly nine hundred pages of creamy comic book goodness for only $16.50. Anyone who read Marvel and DC comics back in the ’80s will remember Hembeck’s spoofs of their characters with much affection. For some reason, Hembeck had dispensation to use any and all of the company’s characters in both his one page strips for various comic-oriented periodicals, as well as his occasional magazine-format specials like Bah! Hembeck and The Hembeck files. In many ways, Hembeck was the first comics blogger, and his snarky but affectionate take on comics has had a definite mass legacy on the Web.
If you’re looking for that second item to bump up to the free shipping, let me again suggest the staggering ineptitude of I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets, a collection of comics from the ’40s by the clearly but fascinatingly insane Fletcher Hanks. All I can say is that I literally cried at one point, I was laughing so hard.
