#2219: American Splendor Windfall #2 (1995)
At the end of 2017, I donated all of my "comic books", by which I mean standard-sized American comic book pamphlets, to Special Collections in the University of Calgary Library to create the beginnings of a comics collection there. Well, almost all of them. The day before the library staff came to pick them up, I rummaged through them and grabbed every comic book that I owned that also appeared in the What Were Comics? corpus. Disappointingly, it actually wasn't that many. It should have been two per cent, but I think it was probably slightly less. In some ways I felt a bit bad about breaking up runs of some series, but, on the other hand, all of the comics in our corpus will someday also be housed in Special Collections - we're just not finished using them yet.
American Splendor Windfall was one of a series of American Splendor limited series at Dark Horse and Vertigo in the 1990s and 2000s. They are the only American Splendor comics in our sampling frame because the Overstreet Guide, one of our three datasets, does not index the earlier, more valuable and collectible self-published comics. This is the only American Splendor comic to make it into the corpus, and it is one of a fairly small number of "alternative comics" included. It will stand out in other ways, of course, not the least of which being that there are only a few black-and-white comics in the corpus.
This comic book is a weird one for me because it has four artists (Scott A. Gilbert, Josh Neufeld, Joe Sacco, and Frank Stack) and I believe that I've had dinner with three of them (I have never met Stack, and, actually, I never met Harvey Pekar either). My guess is that a lot of people might assume that it will be anomalous in the mid-1990s for being an anthology comic, but having gone through the corpus I'm beginning to think that multi-story titles persist in the comics world a lot longer than generally assumed.