Man, I loved Scooby and the gang.
Still do, really.
Scooby-Doo was massively influential on most kids of the 70s and 80s, and I was no exception. The original series (Scooby-Doo, Where are You?) was filled with gorgeous backgrounds and fantastically creepy character design, making it a gateway to other tales of ghosts and ghouls.
I was hooked on Scooby as soon as I saw the show, and my mom fed my Scooby-mania the same way she always did: with books.
We had a few Scooby-related books, but the one that I read the most was Favorite Scooby-Doo Adventures. This oversized book was a collection of short stories, with a number of different writers and illustrators.
And that blew my tiny little mind.
All of the stories are fun, and they touched on some of my other early favorites, like prehistoric animals and the headless horseman.
But the thing that pushes it from being a beloved collection of stories to a book that shaped me as a person and a storyteller was that it was an anthology. The collection of styles was one of the first times I realized that multiple artists could interpret the same characters in multiple ways. (The other thing that opened my eyes to this were the Tolkien wall calendars.)
In addition, the range of art styles challenged me — I had a very distinct mental image of Mystery Incorporated, and seeing them represented in a different art style was a little confusing and, if I’m being honest, scary.
But that same disquiet is also what drew me back to the book, even as a very small kid. The original show had safe scares that drew me in, and Favorite Scooby-Doo Stories was scary in a meta way. It pushed my earliest concepts of narrative, and got me thinking about how different storytellers could approach the same material.
Plus, you know, it had ghosts.
