Monday, July 16, 2018

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/14/18

Earlier this year, I switched up these Reviewing the Mail posts so that they include books that I get from ways other than the mail. The positive side is that there are many fewer "hey, nothing came in the mail this week" posts. Burt the potentially negative side is that I now have to explain where the different books came from.

(Not a particularly major negative, I'll admit.)

So the four books I have this week all came: from the library. And I expect to have more library books next week, since several are already on hold for me in the closed-for-the-weekend library building.

Ms. Marvel Vol. 6: Civil War II looks like a World Cup score (Ms. Marvel advances!), but it's just another superhero crossover. This series -- written by G.Willow Wilson, with art this time out by Adrian Alphona, Takeshi Miyazawa and Mirka Andolpho -- is generally listed as one of the superhero comics of interest to people outside the usual audience. In this case, I think "outside the usual audience" means younger, less WASPy, and more female, and possibly "more liberal" and/or "interested in less cliched stories." I've been reading it in fits and starts, and have not been as impressed as the hype led me to believe. But I'm reading a book a day this year, which means finding more more more to read.

I'm pretty sure I read Formerly Known as the Justice League in floppy-comics form, when it was coming out in 2003, but that was before this blog started and I lost all those old comics in my 2011 flood. And I did like the Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis/Kevin Maguire incarnation of the Justice League, since, frankly, you can't take superheroes all that seriously anyway.

Soonish is a book I thought was comics, but it seems to be mostly prose. So it may not end up getting read before it needs to go back to the library, sadly. It's a nonfiction book about various technologies that don't quite exist yet but probably will soon, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith -- she's a biology professor/researcher, and he's the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

And Imagine Wanting Only This is an autobiographical graphic "novel" by Kristen Radtke, which I've actually already read as I type this. (Book-A-Day makes me get to things quickly.) It's good and distinct and interesting -- look for my post about it on the 27th.

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