Incoming Books: Week of 9/25

My longtime "local" comics shop -- and I actually work about two blocks from one of their locations these days, so they are physically local once again -- Midtown was having a big sale about a week ago. (And if I was more organized, I would have mentioned it then, so other people could take advantage of it. If I was more organized, I would have managed to buy the Gaiman Humble Bundle, too -- now I have to keep searching for that rare expensive copy of Ghastly Beyond Belief.)

Anyway, this is what I bought, and it's what arrived, in the usual packed-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life box, on Thursday. (The Wife and I have noted repeatedly that no one in the world packs things as obsessively as a comics shop does. Well, maybe the people who ship fine ceramics, but I have no experience there.)

Berkley Breathed's Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 2: 1982-1984. I actually reviewed this (and volume one) from the library a few years back. I probably won't re-read it, but this does mean I can now buy Volume Three and continue on. (Note: I am not actually that OCD. Well, not exactly.)

The People Inside by Ray Fawkes -- a brilliant, wonderful graphic novel from the creator of One Soul, and another book that I've already read and reviewed. (But I saw it digitally in that case, so this is really completely different, he said, trying to convince himself.)

Popeye: The Classic Newspaper Comics, Vol. 1 (1986-1989) by Bobby London -- I've seen London's comics here and there (probably most often in Playboy, over the years), and I think I've read bits of this when it was reprinted before. London is an energetic cartoonist, and I'm very fond of E.C. Segar's original Popeye stories, so I thought I should check this out.

Hellboy and the B.P.R.D: 1952 by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Alex Maleev -- Hey, more Hellboy stuff! I'm still along for this ride; there hasn't been anything that wasn't at least entertaining yet.

The Complete Peanuts 1993-1994 -- We're nearly to the end now, so I won't link to all of my reviews of earlier volumes. (Search for "Peanuts" or "Schulz" if you're interested, or looking to waste some time.) I'm hoping to be slightly less far behind Fantagraphics when they do hit the end, so I've got a year or so to catch up in my reading.

And last was Zenith: Phase Four from Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, the end of the one of the original piss-takes on the superhero world, from 2000 AD back in the halcyon 1980s. As I recall, this end of the story has never made it over to my side of the Atlantic before -- I know I've never read it -- so I'm looking forward to running through all four volumes sometime soon.