The Near Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus [Paperback]

Fred Hembeck (Author, Artist)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 10, 2008

The Near Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus is a massive collection covering cartoonist Fred Hembeck's past three decades of work. All seven of his early eighties collections - Bah, Hembeck, The Hembeck Files, et al - are included, as well as rarely seen strips, personal commissions, online pieces, holiday cards, assorted oddities, and over a dozen stories ranging up to ten pages in length! A massive collection featuring the superhero industry's most revered humorist! Foreword by industry legend and creator of Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee!

Product Details

• Paperback: 900 pages
• Publisher: Image Comics (June 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582408726
• ISBN-13: 978-1582408729
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.9 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,383,357 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great comics that stand up to lousy production choices, June 19, 2008

By 

Michael Grabowski "grabbag" (Lake Forest, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Near Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus (Paperback)

Dave Sim was the first to collect massive amounts of his comics (Cerebus) into modestly produced black & white newsprint paperbacks. Those were affectionately called "phonebooks." In the last ten years or so, Marvel copied that design for its Essentials series, and more recently DC has followed suit with its Showcase volumes. This Hembeck collection, though, is the first one that most closely resembles a phonebook, in both dimensions and number of pages.

If you don't know what you're getting, the main event here is that Fred Hembeck draws himself as comics character interviewing other comics characters. Sort of like Larry King. His encyclopedic knowlegdge of characters, creators, even specific issues informs every page, every gag, but he never comes across as pedantic or condescending. Before the "Official Handbooks" and "Who's Who's" from Marvel and DC, Hembeck was and still is the best guide to comics history for readers of a certain era. It's all done with love and affection for the medium and for the superhero genre, with a sensibility that never puts you down for once having had love and affection for the superhero genre. I also love the way he writes his characters as aware of themselves as comics creations but also alive in their own universes. Aware of the ridiculousness of their adventures, but still accepting them as experiences. It's a light-heartedness that genre comics these days is sorely missing.

Like a phonebook, this one has several distinct sections.

1. A brief section of comparatively recent auto-biographical pages telling the "origin" of Fred Hembeck, comics reader.

2. A complete reprinting, covers and all, of the early 80's "Hembeck" books published by Fantaco and Eclipse, which themselves largely reprinted his weekly one-page strips for The Comics Buyers Guide.

3. A complete collection of those 70's-80's era weekly strips that didn't make it in the original collections.

4. Obscure and little-seen fanzine work and illustrations

5. More obscure and little-seen actual stories, some previously published, some not.

6. His modern Dateline strips.

7. Some more recent work.

And in one of the sections, I forget which, there are some great superhero swimsuit gags!

The phonebook-like nature is both good and bad. At $25 minus the usual Amazon discount for 900 pages, there's no arguing about the reading value for your dollar. On the other hand, as others have noted, the print quality leaves something to be desired. The newsprint is barely thick enough to prevent the heavy black ink from bleeding through one side of the page to obscure what you're reading on the other. What's more, many of these pages are text-laden in Hembeck's hand-lettered style, but were originally printed at larger size. Here, far too many of those pages suffer from just enough dimension compression that the text is pretty small, and the denser text portions are difficult to read. Add to that some problems with ink bleeding or smearing, and some pages may be all but unreadable. What is "too many" of these pages will vary by reader; a quick skim of this whole book suggests probably a few dozen that will frustrate me.

A further difficulty is that, at 900 pages, many of them dealing with a different subject on each page, this book virtually requires an index. Instead, it doesn't even have page numbers. At the very least, a Table of Contents would help to identify the 7 different sections and multiple subsections. This is a book that invites casual reference over linear reading, except that these omissions render casual reference all but impossible. One might consider using small Post-its to flag favorite pages, but these might rip the newsprint. If a second edition is produced that includes either an index or a TOC (and page numbers of course) and no other improvement, I'd probably buy that upgrade and recycle this one.

Overall, this Omnibus is a great collection of nearly all things Hembeck. Hopefully its appearance will encourage Marvel and DC to rerelease in some form the work he did for those companies. In the meantime, this one ought to keep you busy enough.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hembeck Rules, August 17, 2008

By 

Bennet Pomerantz "Bennet Pomerantz, AUDIOWORLD" (College Park, Maryland) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Near Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus (Paperback)

One thing I have to say first...Hembeck Rules

NOW There are only two problems I have with this 900 page volume of strip reprints. Problem one is this book does not include such books like Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe #1 July 1989, Fred Hembeck Sells the Marvel Universe #1 October 1990, The Spiderman book Fred did for Marvel and DC books as well. Problem two is the book is the size of the Manhattan phone book, so it is hard to carry around on long travel trip and takes up too much shelve space! ..OTHERWISE, I would not change a thing

This collection is a love song to comics and animation. This overstuffed volume reprints the seven books Hembeck did for Fantaco, The Dateline stuff from the Comic Buyers Guide and assorted other ideas and stories he has done over the years. His knowledge of Comic and media is an amazing feat. He acts like a comic pro in a fan's body. His encloypedic memory of comics long gone by as well as modern comics is a tresure why he has had a career for over 30 Years. And his Hembeck show should be revised and put in comics today for every comic fans to enjoy. I would think he would have much to poke fun at (the Fantastic Four Movie, Captain America's death, The anime style of Archies and even The Dark Knight)

He peppers his comic and media knowledge with a satire slap and a wicked wit unseen in a medium which needs a good poking every once and a while. He is the comic;s toastmaster general in my humble opinion. His love of comics, the artists and their work is one of those special gifts he shares with every comic he talks about or industry person poke or kids with. You cant hate his wit, just makes you want to get the books he pokes fun at.

With a short Intro by Stan "The Man" Lee (I say the greatest comic writer in the business), he makes the reader have another Merry Marvel Marching Society drive with his Stan's Soapbox. Stan himself did a FRED HEMBECK a year or so ago when he appears with a few of his own characters Stan Lee Meets the Marvel Universe, The Afterward by editor Al Gordon is a tribute to Hembeck appeal to a mass audience

Those fans of the DC Showcase books, the comic mini series Fanboy, or Marvel Essential volumes should be truly at home with this black and white strip reprint collection. Fred, I have a few Comic Buyer Guide strips pages of your work framed on my wall... nothing is changed. It is like a TIME WARP...So Lets do the Time Warp again!

For those on My space, look up Mr Hembeck and tell his you read my review! I will tell him myself one day, I hope it will make him smile

Many older comic book fans (Hell I am almost 50) will love being younger fanboys again when reading these Hembeck's strips. So Fred, PLEASE tell Marvel and DC to cough up the old books you did with them and get Image publishing to help you get another volume out!

With a pardon to Stan, EXCELSIOR FRED!

Bennet Pomerantz Audioworld

(Note you can view me on MY SPACE too)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nearly all your complete Hembecking needs! Also you can kill a mouse with it., June 9, 2008

By 

Everheart "I was born in the wagon of a trave... (Sunnydale, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Near Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus (Paperback)

If you're a Hembeck fan, you already know what he does, and you'll want this.

If you've never read him, he's the spiritual granddaddy of every snarky, funny comics blog on the web. But he snarks with love, celebrating the classic (Steve Englehart's Batman), the not so classic (Batman and Superman team up to humiliate Lois Lane at the altar), the nutso (pretty much any Jimmy Olsen strip), the obscure (Black Orchid before Neil Gaiman revived her), and the frankly insane (the super-hero version of Dracula, and no, I'm not making that up).

You may be a bit lost if you're unfamiliar with pre-Crisis DC Comics. On the other hand, if you're a fan of current DC, it'll explain more than a few obscurities, including the company's bewildering gorilla fixation.

Two caveats: First, as noted in the other reviews, this is missing Fred's Marvel and DC work -- the latter omission being a bit weird, since it's published by DC's Image imprint. Second, the smallest lettering is, as reproduced in this format, pretty much unreadable, and that's a danged shame. Not to mention physically painful. It's what stops me giving the book five stars.