Gerber's Comics Photo-Journals
   The Photo-Journal Guide To Comic Books vol.1
   The Photo-Journal Guide To Comic Books vol.2
   The Photo-Journal Guide To Marvel Comics (A-J)
   The Photo-Journal Guide To Marvel Comics (K-Z)                                                                   (1989 / 1990 / 1991 - Gerber Publishing)

The Photo-Journal Guide To Comic Books vols. 1 & 2 (1989 / 1990) (compiled by Ernst & Mary Gerber) I can only say *whoah*. 13.5-by-10-inch tomes are unwieldy enough without then making them nearly 2 times thicker than the ceiling I've set. Between the two, there are 856 pages to display 21,700 comic book covers in full-color. Let me spell that out - twenty-one-thousand-seven-hundred images. Ernie Gerber and his wife, Mary, set out to singlehandedly record all of comic-dom's early history and this labor of love is the result. vol.1 is A-1 COMICS thru KATHY (the teenage tornado) and vol.2 is KATY KEENE thru ZOOT COMICS. It was meant as a reference guide, not an artbook. They are indeed just too damn heavy to really enjoy paging through them. Just looking at several pages is to examine a couple of hundred images and then you have to put your book down. I can tell you, it takes a long while to work through 803 pages of art like that. Nothing gets full-page treatment - the largest images are those on the pages that only 20 images fill and there's not that many of those, most of the pages displaying 36 covers. Scattered throughout this parade of color are short guides to the comic titles being shown, including some information about the publishing dates and artists involved with each issue of the books and any major milestones worth noting. The indexed information about these ephemeral products can be pretty sketchy, so there are lots of instances where you cannot identify the artist of the cover you are admiring. In the first book, there is an alphabetical index of the comic titles collected in the set and the rest of the text pages are explications of the phenomenon of collecting classic comics, the physics of their quick deterioration and the system of organization the authors created to try and make sense of the arcane complexity of periodical publishing & distribution. In the second one, there is a two-page index of the artists who are detailed as contributing art to either the covers or the insides of the comic titles collected here, a comic character index and the rest of the text pages are explications of the passing popularity of comic genres, their social impact and the vagaries of collecting them. There will be plenty of art not to your taste, needing to be quickly passed over and, sure, this is not how one would wish all the 'good stuff' to be displayed, but there simply are no other publications like this one and it has to be celebrated for the accomplishment it is.

The Photo-Journal Guide To Marvel Comics (A-J) & (K-Z) (1991) (compiled by Ernst & Mary Gerber) Note that these two books are additionally identified as vols.3 & 4 of the set of Photo-Journals. The pair was indeed a follow-up to the earlier tomes, attempting to apply the same process to the huge library of titles produced by Marvel Comics from 1961 through 1985 (along with a sampling of some their releases into the 1990s). They did decide to include only a handful of those considered 'teen' books, restrict the number of Western examples, and turn their back completely on romance titles. They also made a point of not including Marvel magazines or foreign editions - the second book has two pages showing some samples of both. Because they are each half as thick as the first pair, they are superior volumes, scoring near ideal manageability for this large 13.5-by-10-inch size. Anyway, you'll find 170 pages of cover reproductions in the first book and 158 in the second. One improvement you will find in these two is that some of the pages display their covers as large as to allow only 16 on a page. The introductory pages here are again a lot of information about their 'system' and aspects of collecting, but speaking directly to what they have perceived Marvel as pioneering in their storytelling approach. The second book has an artist index that one will find useful, but know that nearly 30 years ago the data about cover artists was clearly not as extensive as it is now. The arcane nature of the development of Marvel's production logistics lends itself to confusion - for example, the covers of the Thor series is *not* in the second book, but rather in the first, because it started within a series entitled Journey Into Mystery and then took it over, continuing its numbering without a break. In these newer books, the quality of the reproduction continues, even in the images as small as to be 36 to a page. (We've duplicated this entry onto the Marvel page.)