What's the best way to read the collected tales of Hondo City, Shimura, Inspector Inaba and all that?
Should I try to get hold of the two recent Mega Collection volumes, or should I plump for the Rebellion Hondo City Law / Hondo City Justice volumes - or, sacrilege, even the old DC Shimura trade paperback? Is there an accepted reading order?
Or am I in fact better off just looking in the original Megs and not worrying about reading it all in one go? I've a feeling I like the art and the ideas significantly better than the actual stories...
The first DC Shimura collection collects a bunch of stuff not collected in Hondo City Law. Unfortunately even with both collections there seem to be on strip never reprinted; Scary Monsters. Which was a one-off in Meg 3.35. But all three Shimura/Hondo-City collections are needed to cover 99% of the material.
No idea how the Mega Collections are going to handle the material.
I'd say go for the two Mega Collection volumes as they're easy to get, good value for money and only miss out two short Inaba stories:
Warriors (which I think is actually a Dredd story and may well find a place in a future Dredd volume of the collection).
Big Lix and Flying Kicks (I've never read this one and don't know where it would fit, I assume it was left out due to space and lack of relevance to the main plot threads, but I wouldnt mind getting a summary of this story to confirm this).
The one other thing that I found a little odd was the choice of stories split between the Hondo City justice and Shimura books...I found it quite confusing as someone who had never read them before. But I found that as the Shimura volume is set during the MCJ volume, reading them both together and swapping between them at appropriate points really helped :)
Still taken together they made for two bloody fantastic books...
In case anyone was curious, I ended up buying the two Mega Collection trades off ebay and I'm very happy. They've got the best production values and include, between them, basically a complete set of all Shimura / Hondo City tales.
Quote from: AlexF on 03 August, 2015, 04:25:46 PM
I've a feeling I like the art and the ideas significantly better than the actual stories...
well put