Book-A-Day 2010 # 282 (11/12) -- Jack of Fables, Vol. 7 by Willingham Sturges Roberson Braun Akins Marzan Pepoy

Serial comics do have to go on as long as they have an audience, even if the "real" story is over -- as Jack of Fables seemingly wrapped up its over-arching story of Literals and the Fate of the World in the last volume (the combined collection The Great Fables Crossover, which I reviewed as Book-A-Day # 129) -- and so The New Adventures of Jack and Jack, the seventh collection of the Jack of Fables series, follows two so-far-independent stories.

Jack -- aka Jack Horner, or Jack of the Fables, or just about every other Jack you remember from childhood stories -- is back on the road, with his sidekick Gary, who used to be the Literal Pathetic Fallacy, but now, apparently, isn't. (There's also the usual post-Crisis-style "I'm talking about things that I then claim I don't remember, to nudge the reader in the ribs" to establish the new status quo -- though, as I recall, worlds did not live or die, particularly, in the previous Jack of Fables story.) And Jack's son, the vastly younger, more innocent, and more conventionally heroic Jack Frost, is off on his own path, looking for adventure and to do good deeds. (Having recently rewatched the MST3K episode Jack Frost, I couldn't help but be struck by the "I must do good deed" parallels, though this young hero never gets a bear's head or gets into a stomping contest with Baba Yaga.)

So, after a single-issue story written by Chris Roberson and drawn by Tony Akins involving Jack, Lord of the Apes (which may have been a try-out or fill-in of some description, or possibly just a way to give the usual crew a month to catch up), that usual crew -- writers Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges, artist Russ Brawn -- bounces between the separate adventures of our pair of Jacks. Jack the elder finds himself changing in unexpected ways, but does not actually develop an actual story in this volume. (In fact, there's a concluding caption that implies -- in the arch, generally misleading style the series has often used -- that he's been written out of the book entirely, but I entirely doubt that. He may disappear for a story arc or two, but he'll be back, like a bad penny.)

Young Jack Frost takes the inevitable pilgrimage to the seat of the former empire of the Adversary (where his nasty mother is entombed alive along with most of the Big Bads of that empire), renounces enough of her powers to keep his story interesting now that he's not battling someone who can rewrite the universe, and meets his own sidekick (Macduff, a wooden owl carved by you-can-guess-who). Frost and Macduff then have a minor adventure off on a random fable-world, which may or may not set the tone for the next stretch of this series.

It all looks very much like a reboot, substituting a very different protagonist and set of stories in the middle of a series -- but, then again, the original Jack was more the irritating grain of sand at the middle of a pearl than an enticing and engaging hero, so it's not as if we'll entirely miss him. We'll have to see where Jack of Fables goes from here -- I do have my suspicions that this "new direction" will not prove to be deeply enduring -- but getting away from Jack, even for a little while, is just fine.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #274: Jack Of Fables, Vols. 8 & 9 by Willingham, Sturges, Akins, & Pepoy

Calling a comic-book series that ran fifty issues and was entirely collected into book form "failed" is stretching the term to its limits. But Jack of Fables did fail in a number of ways: it never quite found enough for its main character to do, it was often wishy-washy on who that main character was, it relied on charm and slickness to glide over rough patches (much like that main character), and it never really added anything interesting or useful to the world of its progenitor Fables. (The whole Literals thing was confusing, never completely clear, and didn't go anywhere interesting.)

But now it is over, and we can look back at the whole thing: it was amusing, in a silly, frivolous way. It was another Fables book to read for four years, while the main series was quite popular. It probably made decent-sized pots of money for DC Comics. It gave employment to a number of good comics creators for several years. And if its main character was casually sexist -- he was casually dismissive toward everyone, but more so to women -- well, at least no one ended up in a fridge, and several of the female characters had a fair bit of agency and control.

I've reviewed all of the volumes of Jack of Fables along the way, so really devoted readers could dig back into volumes one, two, three, four to six, six and a half, and seven. And now I'm back for the ending: the eighth volume is The Fulminate Blade and the final ninth is The End.

But, actually, the real story of Jack of Fables ended in that "six and a half" volume, the one that wrapped up the Literals plotline. If Jack had managed to run another forty issues, writers Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges would probably have figured out other things to happen, but, as it turned out, volumes seven and eight wander around aimlessly, and the last is an exercise in vamping to gather all of the characters into one place for the big finale. (This is a particularly egregious example of writing for the trade: the entire last plotline really just exists so that it's long enough to be a book called The End; it's all entirely unnecessary and silly.)

Jack of Fables started out about the ne'er-do-well who was "Jack" in all of those fairy stories -- an entitled, slick jerk for whom everything worked out fine in the end and who was the quintessential anti-hero -- but he's sidelined in these last ten issues, as part of something that was probably originally planned as a longer-term plot development. Instead, the title character is his much more boring son, Jack Frost, who is young and naive and optimistic and crusading and dull in Fulminate Blade and old and crafty and optimistic and crusading and dull in The End.

So The Fulminate Blade is a bland epic fantasy adventure of the young Jack Frost, entirely separated from anything that happened earlier in the series. And then The End first bizarrely jumps about two decades into the future -- without visibly aging a single character, changing their relationships, or altering the "real world" in any way -- and then gathers basically every character still left alive. In the end, they all get to the hoard of the original Jack, who was turned into a dragon in volume seven, with various aims in mind. And then -- spoiler alert! -- they all die, in what I suspect Willingham and Sturges meant to be a parody of Walt Simonson's famous all-splash page Ragnarok issue of Thor. To say it doesn't work is to massively understate the case.

(The art -- mostly by the regular series team of penciller Tony Akins and inker Andrew Pepoy -- is sold mainstream-comics storytelling; nothing to get excited about, but always solid and dependable.)

If you never read Jack of Fables, you can safely ignore it. It never lived up to its promise, and almost entirely avoided the picaresque adventures of an amiable rogue that it could have been. If you stopped somewhere in the middle, I don't recommend throwing any more good money after bad. And if you stuck it all the way out to The End, you have my sympathies.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Closing With Three Jacks

If I'd set this post to appear early tomorrow morning, I could have called it opening with three jacks, which would make slightly more sense...but I've got the usual year-end stuff already queued up, so this post will be the last one for 2009 instead.

I recently caught up with the last three collections of the DC/Vertigo Jack of Fables series -- written by Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges, with art primarily by Russ Braun and Tony Akins (plus various inkers and others) -- even though I'd had mixed feelings about the first three volumes. The main problem with the series is that the main character -- the guy who was "Jack" in every traditional story you can think of, one of the "fables"from various parallel worlds -- is a grade-A jerk, as self-centered as it is possible for a human being to be, and not half as smart or savvy as he thinks he is. By definition, he doesn't learn from his mistakes, and is entirely a one-note character. One-note characters can work just fine as part of a larger cast, as Jack did in the parent Fables series, but they're more troublesome at the center of their own stories.

What Willingham and Sturges did to get around that problem was to quickly build a new cast around Jack, primarily from the inmates and warders of the Golden Boughs Retirement Village (created by the fiendish Mr. Revise to leech magical powers from fables and thus slowly turn the world utterly mundane). Thus Jack is the title character, and the central character, but he doesn't have to carry the entire story himself.

And let me digress briefly to poke at Willingham and Sturges's mythology here. Besides "mundanes" -- people like you and me, who are real and have normal lives -- and fables, there are also "literals," who are the personifications of literary techniques. Or something like that; it's not quite clear. To make it more confusing, all of the literals we've met so far are part of one family, which implies that literals are all one family. The oldest member of the family we've met so far -- and this doesn't make much sense, either -- is Gary, the Pathetic Fallacy, who has at least one son, Kevin Thorne. Kevin is possibly the author of all of the fables, or at least of lots of them -- and it's not exactly clear if all of the fables needed Kevin, or someone like him, to write them in the first place. Kevin in turn has at least two sons: Mr. Revise and The Bookburner. There's no explanation as to why the Pathetic Fallacy came first, or why a guy named Kevin would name his sons Revise and Bookburner. There may be a literal world, as there are fable worlds and the mundane world, but we haven't seen that -- and it's hard to picture how it would work, either. If you ask me, there's a definite feeling that W&S are throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and that there's no long-term plan in place.... 

In Vol. 4: Americana, two different groups -- on the one hand, Jack, Gary, Jack's Indian sidekick Raven, and a reconstituted Humpty Dumpty; and on the other, Hillary Page (one of Revise's three beautiful librarian daughters), a shrunken Paul Bunyan and his inevitable blue ox Babe -- hop a train to Americana, the land of American Fables, in search of the lost golden city of Cibola. There they discover the Bookburner, who has a somewhat different approach to librarianship than Hillary does, and find themselves having to team up (and incidentally betraying each other in various permutations, since that's what happens when you team up with your enemies).

Then comes Vol. 5: Turning Pages, which has two three-issue stories -- one a flashback to 1883, with Jack as a pistol-packing outlaw pursued by Bigby Wolf from the main Fables series, and the other split evenly between the history of the three Page sisters (including repeatedly confusing information about who is and is not the father of which of them) and the lead-up to the big confrontation between brothers Revise and Bookburner.

And then, in Vol. 6: The Big Book of War, Bookburner's forces arrive at Golden Boughs and besiege it, with Jack and his companions on the inside. And so there's a big long fight, with escalating nasties on both sides, until Revise is forced to go against his entire purpose (as of course we all expected). In the end, there's not exactly a winner of the battle, but Jack does walk away (with the usual entourage), which counts as a win for him.

I expect the series is heading off in a different direction at this point, since Revise (the original primary villain) and Bookburner (his replacement in these volumes) are both thoroughly neutralized. Presumably Kevin is the new Big Bad, though it may be difficult to show the fiendish trouble caused by a guy named Kevin with a quill pen. And perhaps W&S will explain more about Literals -- or keep throwing more of them in, willy-nilly, and hope that each reader works out a plausible explanation individually.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 129 (6/12) -- The Great Fables Crossover by Willingham, Sturges and a host of artists

The Great Fables Crossover is the lucky 13th collection of Bill Willingham's Fables comics series, about folktale creatures now living in our "mundane" world. It's also effectively Jack of Fables Vol. 6 1/2, collecting three issues of that spin-off series (about the self-absorbed character who was "Jack" in nearly every story you can think of) that fall between the ones collected in last year's Vol. 6 and the upcoming Vol. 7. And it also collects a three-issue spin-off limited series called The Literals.

Sounds complicated? It really isn't. This story might have originally been published under three labels, but it was all one story to begin with, and the labels primarily served to allow it to have extra shelf space in comics shops and to pop out three issues each month -- so as to avoid being damaged by the Wednesday Crowd's notoriously short attention spans. And the whole story didn't really need to wrap back into the parent book (where it's a sideshow, and a distraction from their own plotline), since it's entirely driven by The Literals Problem that writer Bill Willingham (and co-writer for Jack Matthew Sturges) gradually painted himself into in Jack of Fables.

Jack, in his travels in search of fame, fortune, and willing women across America, discovered that not only are there Mundanes (non-magical people like you and me) and Fables (who have abilities mostly due to being part of stories), but that there are also Literals, who embody or create those stories. This inevitably led to a story about a character we might as well call The Writer (though Willingham called him Kevin Thorn -- the only Literal to have a completely Mundane name), who possibly created the whole ball of wax.

But Willingham clearly didn't want his Fables universe to degenerate into metafiction, and he also realized that Kevin Thorn was too powerful to be a useful villain: a character that can do absolutely anything without any trouble can't actually do anything, because he overbalances the story. So the purpose of "The Great Fables Crossover" is to walk the Fables universe back to a pre-Literals status quo, and it takes two hundred pages (amusing pages, but pages that also often feel like added complication for the purpose of complication) to do so.

In the end, Jack is basically where he was at the beginning of his own series, and the cast of the main Fables series gets to go back to their own pressing plotline. The whole thing isn't necessary, I suppose -- even less so than most stories, I mean -- and it's much more of a Jack story than a main Fables story, but it'll do.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Just Read: Jack of Fables Vol. 1: The (Nearly) Great Escape by various

The (Nearly) Great Escape collects the first "arc" of a spin-off of Bill Willingham's Fables series, featuring the adventures of the guy who was "Jack" in every single fairy tale and fable. (Fables being the story of lots of fabular -- fabulous? -- characters in the modern-day world.)

This book is written by Willingham and Matthew Sturges; there's no specific explanation as to how much Willingham contributes (big author/small author spin-offs often imply that the big author has done little more than read the book in question), but the tone, dialogue, and themes are pretty similar to the main book, so Willingham is either strongly involved or Sturges is on the same wavelength enough so that it doesn't matter.

In this story, Jack -- having been kicked out of Hollywood by his former friends of Fabletown and told to make himself incredibly scarce -- runs afoul of a previously unknown player in the supernatural-creature game, who has some unspecified reason for wanting to depower Fables (which he does by incarcerating them until they're forgotten, basically -- this is the old "magical power comes from worshippers" idea, with a slight twist). Jack's just coming off three blockbuster movies about his exploits, so he's about as strong and tough as a Fable can get (and arrogant and self-centered as ditto, but he was that way to begin with), and not an easy man to cage. From the title -- and the fact that a long-running "break out of magical prison" series would probably be redundant and boring -- you can guess, more or less, how it ends.

Jack is more than a bit of a jerk, so I'm not sure how long I'll be able to stand him; if Willingham and Sturges keep his adventures more light-hearted than this one, that will be better. (He's the kind of character who can't support too much drama or seriousness; he needs to glide through life without too much trouble.) I'll be back for the second volume, but I'm not yet convinced that I'll stick around for good. The main series is the serious one, with a large continuing cast, a secret history, and geopolitical parallels. Jack of Fables needs to be something distinctive -- nimble, light, and quick-moving, I'd say -- if it wants to carve its own niche.

Fables, Vol. 14: Witches by Willingham, Buckingham, and others

Fables has seriously overrun its obvious ending at this point, proving  that Bill Willingham wasn't planning to write the story of a glorious victory, but instead to continue the story of how a bunch of rarely-unified people muddled through all of the troubles that the world could throw at them. (Well, a few of them haven't managed to muddle all the way through -- there has been a mild body count along the way -- but the central characters of Fables have mostly been safe, and look to remain so.) And this volume sees Fables returning to its own story after the forced "Great Fables Crossover," which served primarily to drag in the main-series characters in to clean up the tangled plots of the daughter series Jack of Fables.

So Witches begins with what amounts to a gigantic "anyway..." and dives backward into the history of our new Big Bad, the Dark Man, explaining how he was captured by the empire of the previous Big Bad, in a single-issue story, "Boxing Days," with art by Jim Fern and Craig Hamilton. It's a decent story in its own right, but serves primarily to litter crumbs in the path of the main story, explaining where things will be going for the next ten or twenty or fifty issues.

The title story then follows, which originally filled up five issues and has art by the main Fables artist, Mark Buckingham. It moves the ball down the field a healthy amount, and begins to incorporate those bread crumbs from "Boxing Days" as it sets a number of major Fables characters off on new paths (such as "Frau Totenkinder," current head of the Fabletown witches) and brings others in (such as Ozma, future head of those witches). It's all good stuff, but it's all middle at this point, and it will take a while to decide whether this particular hunk of middle is working as well as it should -- probably until we get within hailing distance of an ending, I expect.

And then this collection ends with what was a two-issue story -- "Out to the Ball Game" -- with art by David Lapham, in which King Flycatcher deals with a threat to the peace of his still-new land, far out in the former worlds of the Empire. This is a complete story, but it's one part two-finger-exercise -- aping "Casey at the Bat" -- and six parts boilerplate "it's tough to be the king," so it's pleasant rather than particularly impressive.

All in all, Fables is still chugging along professionally, telling new stories out of the cloth its been weaving for ninety issues now. It's not as exciting and new as it once was, and there is a certain undertone of and-here's-another-damn-thing to it, but it's solidly entertaining and occasionally inventive.

Book-A-Day 2014 #263: Fables, Vols. 15 & 16 by Willingham, Buckingham, et. al.

It's not that I avoided writing about the Fables series for the past three years -- since I covered the fourteenth volume, Witches, in early 2011 -- it's that I haven't actually read any of the Fables books since then, as my flood later that year threw a giant hitch in my reading plans and discombobulated everything. (I've still got the last two collections of Jack of Fables on the shelf, plus a Cinderella collection -- and that's not even counting Fairest, which I haven't gotten around to even picking up in a store.)

But I used to really enjoy this series, and I've been following writer Bill Willingham's work since Elementals back in the 1980s -- and that's a property that's been completely forgotten for some unknown reason; I'd have expected a nice fat collection of it any time in the past eight years -- so I decided to jump back in with both feet, and read the next two collections, Rose Red and Super Team, back to back. As usual, the penciller for most of the stories is Mark Buckingham, who has been with the series since the beginning, and he's mostly inked by Steve Leialoha. But, as usual, the maw of monthly comics publication require fill-ins, and big complicated stories that can range across all of imaginative literature call out for varied visual presentations, so there's also artwork here from Eric Shanower, from Inaki Miranda, and from Terry Moore.

Willingham has always written this series in rather vague arcs, more Claremont X-Men than Gaiman Sandman, with a much larger plot going on overall and the smaller stories -- from a single issue to five or six, twenty pages to about a hundred and fifty -- usually illuminating some piece of backstory for that larger story, or moving it forward just a bit, or providing a bit of color. So there have been about twenty collections of Fables so far, but only two stories to this point, really: the battle against the Adversary, and then the battle against Mister Dark.

The latter story comes to a climax in both of these volumes, seeming finished near the end of Rose Red only to flare up again until what I believe is a more lasting ending in Super Team. But most the pages of these books tell other stories -- a long digression to Rose Red's youth in the first volume, along with a single-issue tour of Mister Dark's ever-more-dangerous and depressing New York; and the second one focuses mostly on an eventually useless (and always silly and comics-fan indulgent) plan to defend the Fables' last home against that Mister Dark, while their salvation happens somewhere else, at someone else's hands.

It's all very periodical comics-style: there's twenty-some pages to fill this month and every month, so there's plenty of time to digress over here and there as long as the audience is still interested. Willingham's building blocks here are always issues; he may have arcs that cover several issues, or issues broken into shorter stories, but the issue is always there, always the core metric of a mainstream comics series. Fables isn't exactly tired by this point -- it's a huge, nearly infinite conceit, with more stories than any creative team could exhaust -- but this particular core cast has a lot of miles behind them, and a shrinking story-space for their future adventures. So knowing that the end of the series is looming isn't a bad thing -- and, after all, there are around eight hundred more pages of Fables to go from this point.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Read in October

I do these monthly lists mostly for my own benefit, and to serve as an index of my reviews (either here or elsewhere). I do scatter a few new capsule reviews into each one, of books that I didn't write about at greater length elsewhere. Links are mostly to those reviews, with a few (the capsule reviews) jumping straight to a certain online bookseller for immediate gratification.

This time out, you'll find short reviews of Top Shelf Under the Big Top, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the Universe, Sundome, Vol. 5, and Naruto, Vol. 37 within the trackless waste of links below.

• P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves (10/1)
  
• Brett Warnock, editor, Top Shelf Under the Big Top (10/2)
  This was both older (from 1999) and more generically indy-comics (deliberately crude and often low-life short stories) than I expected, with a lot of stories that I respected rather than liked and even more that I couldn't bring myself to respect. It does have work by K. Thor Jensen, Dylan Horrocks, Matt Madden, Josh Simmons, and Craig Thompson, but there are no lost gems here -- just decent early comics from people who were still learning the ropes and would later do better work. It's a shame, since I was hoping to be led from this book to cartoonists I haven't read before, but that didn't happen.
  
• Leland Gregory, Idiots at Work (10/2)
  
• Joshua Glenn & Mark Kingwell, The Idler's Glossary (10/3)
  
• Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim vs The Universe (10/4)
  After five months of reading these incredibly entertaining twentysomething-life-as-a-videogame graphic novels, I'm finally caught up...and that means I'll have to wait for the sixth (and last?) book like everyone else. This one only came out in February, so I'd expect at least a six-month wait -- hmm, I probably should have spaced these out more. If you've been avoiding this series because you thought it looked too juvenile, I'd recommend taking another look: I'm about the worst person in the world when it comes to tolerance of dumb behavior by child-men protagonists, and Pilgrim didn't come across that way to me at all -- he's immature, yes, but he's a sweet, realistic kind of immature rather than the usual full-of-himself media-product immature guy. (If that makes any sense.)
  
• Guy Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife (10/6)
  
• Kazuto Okada, Sundome, Vol. 5 (10/7)
  I reviewed the first four volumes of this series for ComicMix -- here's a link to the most recent one, and you can track backwards from there -- but I didn't have anything new to say this time, so I bumped it down to a mention here. It's still a creepy, disconcerting look at obsessive teenage sexuality -- alternately horrifyingly broad in that stylized, templated manga way and cuttingly precise and true -- and just as compulsively readable as ever.
  
• Jack Vance, This Is Me, Jack Vance! (10/7)
  
• Susumu Katsumoto, Red Snow (bound galleys) (10/8)
  
• Shane White, Things Undone (10/9)
  
• Jesse Lonergan, Joe and Azat (10/12)
  
• Matthew Hughes, Template (10/12)
  
• Arvid Nelson, Will Conrad, & Jose Villarrubia, Kull: The Shadow Kingdom (10/13)
  Look for my review in the February issue of Realms of Fantasy.
  
• L. Frank Baum, adapted by Eric Shanower & Skottie Young, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (10/14)
  Look for my review in the February issue of Realms of Fantasy.
  
• Anthony Strong, Chemistry for Beginners (10/15)
  
• David Small, Stitches (10/15)
  
• Lewis Trondheim & Fabrice Parme, Tiny Tyrant, Vol. One: The Ethelbertosaurus (10/16)
  
• James Strurm, Andrew Arnold, & Alexis Frederick-Frost, Adventures in Cartooning (10/19)
  
• Edgar Allan Poe & Gahan Wilson, The Raven and Other Poems (10/20)
  
• Jessica Mitford, Poison Penmanship (10/20)
  
• Shinobu Ohtaka, Sumomomo, Momomo, Vol. 2 (10/21)
  
• JinHo Ko, Jack Frost, Vol. 2 (10/22)
  
• Svetlana Chmakova, Nightschool: The Weirn Books (10/23)
  
• Richard Sala, Cat Burglar Black (10/26)
  
• Jeff VanderMeer, Finch (10/26)
  
• Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim & Christophe Blain, Dungeon: The Early Years, Vol. 2: Innocence Lost (10/27)
  
• Bill Willingham, et. al., Jack of Fables, Vol. 4: Americana (10/28)
  
• Peter Greenberg, Don't Go There! (10/28)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 37 (10/29)
  At this point in a series -- that would be roughly 7400 pages in to a complicated story with a cast of dozens and nearly as many factions, martial arts styles, and secret ninja villages to keep track of as well -- there's really no point in trying to give a synopsis or review; it would only be for the people who are at roughly the same point in reading the series. So I'll just say: after a long time, I finally found the next volume at the library, and I am still trying to keep up with this one. Make of that what you will.
  
• Bill Willingham, et. al., Jack of Fables, Vol. 5: Turning Pages (10/30)
  

Reviewing the Mail, Week of 6/28: Comics

And this is the yin to the previous yang; here I'll list, and try to explicate, all of the things that came into the Hornswoggler home last week that were comics in one way or another.

I'm going to start with things I paid money for, because I wanted to draw particular attention to this first book:

The third collection of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's manga to be translated and published by Drawn & Quarterly is Good-Bye, and it's in stores now. I reviewed it at ComicMix when the galleys circulated, and probably didn't adequately describe how special Tatsumi is. He's one of the greats of world comics, with stories by turns shockingly raw and evocatively quiet. His stories aren't just good for manga, or good for comics -- they're great short stories, period.

Skyscrapers Of The Midwest is a title I don't know much about -- it's by Joshua W. Cotter, published by Adhouse Books, and seems to be a collection of (linked?) anthropomorphic stories. But I've heard good things about it, and my comics shop had it marked down, so I'll give it a whirl.

Lobster Johnson Vol. 1: The Iron Prometheus is another brand extension of the mighty Hellboy empire -- probably the last one to make it into into stores ahead of the new Guillermo de Torro-directed movie -- and it's written by Hellboy and Lobster Johnson creator Mike Mignola, with art by Jason Armstrong. (Actually, the credit reads "story by Mignola," which may mean that Armstrong worked from an outline and acted as his own scripter.) It was published by Dark Horse sometime in the very recent past.

Fables Vol. 10: The Good Prince is the latest in the modern fairy-tale-inspired fantasy series, written as always by Bill Willingham, with art by Mark Buckingham and (mostly) Steve Leialoha. As I remember, the series is still continuing, so this isn't the big finish, but it looks like a major piece of the story of the battle between the Adversary -- who conquered most of the alternate worlds of fairy-tale characters before the series began -- and our main characters in the expatriate community of New York.

In the same world, but with a somewhat different tone, is Jack of Fables, Vol. 3: The Bad Prince. It's about one of the less heroic characters from the main series, off having his own adventures. (I have no idea if the seemingly linked titles mean these two stories have anything to do with each other, though I do expect to find out soon.) The Jack of Fables series is written by Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges, and the pencil art in this book is mostly by Tony Akins, though there are four others credited with part of the pencils and inks. This is also from DC, as one would expect, and it was published within the last month.

PvP Volume 5: PvP Treks On os the yes, fifth collection of the webcomic PvP, which is by Scott Kurtz. Image publishes the webcomic as a monthly comic book, and bills their collected books (like this one) as collections of the comic books, without even mentioning the Internet once. The direct market really is its own little parallel universe, isn't it?

I've been looking at Erotic Comics: A Graphic History from Tijuana Bibles to Undergound Comix the last two or three times I hit the comics shop, and went so far as to pick it up and look through it last time. And this time I finally admitted to myself that I was interested enough in the subject to buy the thing, and so I did. It's by Tim Pilcher, with Gene Kannenberg, Jr., and has a foreword by Aline Kominsky Crumb. Harry N. Abrams, which is a classy, serious publisher of art books and whom I trust has kept the whole proceedings as tasteful as possible (under the circumstances) published Erotic Comics in February. (What I'm hoping is that its as interesting and fun as Bob Adelman's Tijuana Bibles of a few years back.)

And the last thing I picked up at the comics store -- literally, just before I got on line to pay for my huge stack of good stuff -- was the first two volumes of Chica Umino's Honey and Clover manga series. I've already got a copy of the movie that was adapted from this series, and I hope to review the whole package for next week's Manga Friday column for ComicMix.

Now, on to the things that actually did come in the mail:

Nate Powell's Swallow Me Whole, which Top Shelf will publish in September, is a big original graphic novel -- the pages aren't numbered, but I'd estimate it's over 200 pages long -- with some kind of supernatural element in it. There are a lot of bugs, on the cover and throughout. (And I can't help wondering if this Powell pronounces his name the way it's spelled or like Anthony Powell -- if the latter, it would rhyme with the title. These are the kinds of things I think about when I see new books...)

Jeff Lemire's Essex County Volume 3: The Country Nurse is also from Top Shelf, but it's publishing slightly later, in October. As the title probably clued you in, this is the third of his graphic novels to be set in his ficionalized Essex County (of Ontario, Canada), after Tales from the Farm and Ghost Stories. This book follows one day in the life of a traveling nurse in a farm community -- I think I recognize her from Ghost Stories, so perhaps this book is meant to tie together the first two volumes.

CMX Manga -- now as always an imprint of the mighty DC empire -- sent me two sets of photcopies with their usual secrecy. (They never have a cover letter, or even a tip sheet/fact sheet/sell sheet to say when the book is being published and the pertinent information -- even the most professional comics publishers seem to struggle with the things that seem simple in trade publishing.) First is Kikaider: Code 02, Vol. 7 by Ishimori Shotaro and Meimu, a science-fiction story with robots -- giant ones, I think -- and the usual accouterments. It will be published in on July 9th and is marked for Mature readers.

Also from CMX is Suihelibe!, Vol. 1, a title which I'm having the greatest of difficulty in spelling correctly (and consistently). It's by Naomi Azuma and seems to be a combination of a school club story and a cute girl from space story. (And I'm sure there's an official Japanese manga term for both of those things, but I don't know them.) This one is a bit further in the future, coming in late October. As befits a series with characters who seem to be about nine years old, it's rated E for everyone.

Manu Larcenet's Ordinary Victories: What Is Precious, collects what were the third and fourth graphic novels in the "Ordinary Victories" series in France -- the first two were published in the US as just Ordinary Victories in 2005, and ended up on Time magazine's list of the five best graphic novels of the year. It's a semi-autobiographical story about a photographer dealing with family issues, and NBM is publishing it in August.

Also from NBM is Bluesman by Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo, which collects a series originally published in three volumes only a few years ago. It's set in the '20s and about a couple of black musicians in the South -- so I don't expect it will be a terribly happy story. This new complete edition of Bluesman will be published in August.

Vittorio Giardino's No Pasaran!, Vol. 3, is the finale of a trilogy, and the latest book about Giardino's series character Max Friedman, a spy in '30s Europe. NBM will publish it in August.

Slow Storm is the first full-length graphic novel by 2007 Eisner nominee Danica Novgorodoff, a story about tornado season in Kentucky and about a woman firefighter and a Mexican immigrant. It will be published by First Second in September.

And last for this week is the Rick Geary adaptation of H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man, second in the new Papercutz Classics Illustrated series, and publishing in August. This adaptation first saw print in the great, but short-lived CI series from First Comics in the late '80s, but somehow I missed it then (even though I was buying Rick Geary stuff on sight, and most of the First CI books as well).