One of my favorite reads each month is Dark Horse Presents, which was relaunched this past summer after a more than 10 years of being out of print and a few years running as an early digital comics title on MySpace.com. It's an excellent reminder of the value of anthologies and of the rewards (and perils) of sampling material you most likely never would have tried.
I rarely read the original DHP, which had a long run as the publisher's flagship title from 1986-2000. The original series was, as I recall, a normal size black-and-white comic book that helped launch everything from Paul Chadwick's Concrete to Frank Miller's Sin City and John Byrne's Next Men. I did, however, enjoy other anthologies, including the occasional issue of Negative Burn and, being a big 1980s Marvel fan, Marvel Comics Presents, of which i own a complete set of all 175 issues. (And before anyone asks, I somehow completely missed Action Comics Weekly and have yet to read an issue. I've never heard anyone talk about it or recommend anything in it.)The new DHP deviates from the comics anthology norm by being in color — the market for black and white these days appears limited to folks well-established in that format such as Jeff Smith and Terry Moore — and being extra thick, with most issues clocking in at 80 pages. That makes each book nice and thick — you could line up a nice run of these on your bookshelf and they would look pretty cool — and continues the prestige format of the 1980s that I still like quite a bit.
