Big Books for everybody!

DC looks like a company has been struggling for a new direction for some time, endlessly eating itself with reboots of its superhero multiverse and force feeding the same old shit down the same yawning gullet of fandom.

If I was in charge, I have a simple plan for immediate success - keep doing Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman comics for the nerds, but cancel everything else and publish nothing but Big Books.

The Big Books were a series put out by Paradox Press in the 90s - chunky black and white collections of weird true stories and fables and all sorts of crazy shit, drawn by some of the finest artists in the medium, including Frank Quitely, Sergio Aragonés, Rick Geary, Carlos Ezquerra, Joe Orlando, Hunt Emerson, Marie Severin, Tom Sutton, Kevin o'Neill, Bob Fingerman, Evan Dorkin, Joe Sacco, Roger Langridge and many, many more. Judge Dredd co-creator John Wagner wrote one that was just full of the horribly violent things that happened to martyrs over the centuries. It was great.

 There were big books about death and losers and the great freaks of the world. There were books about conspiracy theories and unexplained esoteric nonsense, before all that got curdled by real world arseholes who took it too seriously.

It's one of the great crimes in the history of comic books that there were so few of them published, because they were endlessly entertaining and endlessly informative, and so easy to hook in new readers who don't give a shit about secret identities.

There should have been a  a hundred of these things. We deserved The Big Book of Morons, or The Big Book of Vikings, or the Big Book of Space, or the Big Book of Trans People, but DC lost their bottle at the unreleased Big Book of Wild Women, and that was that.

I have friends who only ever read the Big Books and showed no other interest in comics, and they stiull hold up incredibly well these days, even if some of them could do with some updating - there have certainly been plenty of losers and thugs in the past 30 years for another 100 pages in those books.

As it is, I'll make do with the 16 books I do have (I've never been able to find the Grimm's Fairy Tales one, but I still have hope.) They're so full of the weird and wonderful, something I don't find much of in DC's other offerings these days.