#honestly i love my little wirt on the spine he looks so dumb its so cute

[cosmicpines]

OTGW collection update :)

Through a series of just wild luck, I ended up getting my hands on Tome of the Unknown and volumes 1-4 of the trade paperback versions of the ongoing comics all in a few weeks. I'm only missing volume 5 now, which I saw in a store a few months ago when i was on a road trip. I didn't buy it at the time because I assumed I'd never get the rest and volume 5 is by far the worst. We might end up going back that way, so I can pray it's still there...

Volumes 1-3 I got from someone's personal collection, so they're all high quality and well taken care of. One thing I didn't know is that the trade paperbacks collate the stories together. In the comics, you would get a Greg/Wirt story followed by a Anna or a school story, but in the paperbacks, all the Greg/Wirt ones are put together and then the other ones are. (great! I never need to read about that stupid elephant again -- I mean--)

Volume 4 is a former library copy, and it definitely shows. You can see the spine is bent in the side picture, but it also naturally opens to a random page in the middle. There were a ton of stickers on it which were a huge pain to get off, but I managed without damaging it. Also UGHH why is the spine different than the others in the series?! I can see in pictures online that Volume 5 is the same as Volumes 1-3!! WHY!!!

Okay, so! Tome. Most expensive and hardest to find one -- I nabbed it for about $30 from a completely random ebay listing that was super undetailed and called it "volume 1," which was weird. I knew that Tome didn't actually have a name on the cover and that was just what it was sold as online, but "volume 1" was bizarre.

But it came in and there is a big one on the spine, and also a tiny Wirt face, and also no Kaboom logo. I can confirm from another ebay listing that those are usually there:

(ebay listing on top, mine on bottom)

The book itself also smells terrible, which is, you know, exactly what you want in a book. Yay. But yeah, the answer to the mystery of why it's weird is pretty clear when you look at the back -- this is the British copy.

Confirmed from the inside, where there's a library stamp (that the seller DIDN'T MENTION mumble grumble) that identifies it as a former library book of Herfordshire, the publishing info says it's from Titan Comics and lists a London address, and the Cartoon Network ad at the back tells you to go to cartoonnetwork.co.uk.

So, that's neat! There doesn't seem to be a discernible difference to the content in the book, but I haven't read it all the way through.

That just leaves volume 5, then I'll have all the published books. That plus the Beatrice Titan figure are my last major goals for the collection, with getting more comic printings as a sort of perpetual stretch goal.

Oh, also, in sleuthing a bit online for more information, I can tragically report they're still making Sherlock manga in the year 2023. I learned this information against my will and now you have to know too.

#mary blabs #collecting is fun :) #honestly i love my little wirt on the spine he looks so dumb its so cute #over the garden wall