Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/13, Part Two: Comics

Every week I list the books that came in for review on Monday -- but, some weeks, there's so much that I chop it into smaller pieces to make the posts more manageable. This is one of those weeks; the first half was posted previously, and this half will list the comics, manga, graphic novels, or whatever we're calling these things today.

And now that we're back from that brief commercial break, let's go right into...

Holy Sh*t!: The World's Weirdest Comic Books is pretty much what it says it is: a collection of some of the oddest covers in comics history (plus some interior panels), arranged one to a spread with commentary and background by the authors, Paul Gravette and Peter Stansbury. It leads off with double-entendre-filled issue of Teen-Age Romance from the '50s and ends up with the sublimely ridiculous Reagan's Raiders. St. Martin's Press will publish this on October 19th -- though the book itself says it publishes in February, which implies that its press time got moved up, or something else interesting happened. I have a finished book, so it might be getting into some sales channels even quicker than that.

My friends at Aurora have sent along their most recent yaoi manga (sex-filled boy-boy romances for a female readership), for my intense embarrassment. All three of these have just published, and are from Aurora's yaoi imprint, Deux:

• Future Lovers, by Saika Kunieda, in which a man who thinks he's "normal" falls in love with a gay man after a night of wild sex. (In a culture where people drink as much as Japan, this is totally plausible.)
  
• Yakuza In Love, Vol. 3, continuing the yaoi series with one of my favorite titles ever, as always by Shiuko Kano. I reviewed the first one for ComicMix, and came away confused. This is the big conclusion; if you're interested in a gay romance among Japanese gangsters, you only need to grab three volumes to get the whole story -- how often can you say that about any manga story?
  
• And then there's I Shall Never Return, Vol. 4, which features a cover in which the male lovers appear to be trying to stab each other with the pointy parts of their faces. It's by Kazuna Uchida, and apparently it's a yaoi classic, five volumes in all. (So #5 will be coming along soon.)

Aurora also sent me a book from their LuvLuv imprint, which is also for sexy adult romance stories -- but LuvLuv features heterosexual couples. (From what I've seen, these are much less popular among young female readers -- both here in the States and back in Japan -- than yaoi is. Ah, the power of fantasy!) This month's book is Make Love & Peace, by Takane Yunetani, which doesn't have a volume number on it, so I'm assuming it's a stand-alone.

Also on the sexy side is the third volume of Kazuto Okada's Sundome, which Yen Press will publish on September 30th. (I reviewed the first and second volumes for ComicMix.) It's a story of high school sexual torment -- so much is universal -- but it's quite Japanese in its particulars.

Continuing with Yen Press titles, there's the fifth and final book of Park KangHo and Lee HaNa's Heavenly Executioner Chiwoo. The art is often stylized and has less of the smooth finish I've come to expect from manga -- perhaps because this is actually manwha, from Korea. Otherwise, it looks like a book with a lot of fighting, and it seems to be historical -- obviously, by volume five of a series, the back cover copy isn't all that helpful, since it's talking about the established characters and what they're doing. This is another September book.

Also from Yen in September is Moon Boy, Vol. 4, a series I haven't seen before and which immediately confuses me by having a girl in a school uniform on the cover. (Surely she's not the Moon Boy?) It's by Lee YoungYou, and the back cover makes it sound like some kind of high-school drama -- except with fighting and alternate worlds. (There's also something about the battle between the not-quite human Rabbit and Fox tribes for control of the entire universe, or the high school, or something.)

Another Yen Press title from September is Han SeungHee & Jeon JinSeok's One Thousand and One Nights, which hits its fifth volume. It's set in the Muslim world -- probably about a thousand years ago -- and the overarching story looks to be a male-male romance. But there also seems to be a Sheherezade-esque sense of stories within stories here.

I also have here the second volume of You're So Cool by YoungHee Lee -- I reviewed the first volume for ComicMix -- a high-school story from Korea about a girl who gets to date the most popular, best-looking boy in the school and only then learns that he's actually, secretly, an utter bastard. Presumably, things get worse for her in this book.

And then there's Chocolat, Vol. 6, which is by Shin JiSang and Geo, another high school story from Korea. I find it hard to take seriously any story whose description includes the phrase "her former nemesis Barbie," but I'm sure this series has its fans. (Coming soon from Mattel! Nemesis Barbie! With kung-fu action grip and the skills to kill a man silently in thirty-seven different ways!)

Yen Press is publishing the second volume of Satoko Kiyuduki's Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro in October, and I have to admit that the first volume confused me a bit. (Partly because of the format -- 4-panel with a lot of color sections and many half-page panels interspersed -- and partly because the premise was still obscure by the end of that book.) The girl dressed as a boy carrying a coffin and traveling with a talking bat is back, so I hope this one will make more sense to me. (Though it seems that, just as I've figured out how to read "normal" right-to-left manga, the world throws curveballs like Korean left-to-right manwha and these 4-panel stories at me.)

Last from Yen is the third issue of their monthly manga magazine, Yen+. This is the October issue -- I somehow missed September, though I have August. (And I think this will be my "Manga Friday" column this week -- I haven't covered any magazines yet, and it'll be something different.

Last overall is a big collection of comics by David Heatley, My Brain is Hanging Upside Down. (It's subtitled "A Graphic Memoir," but I think that's marketing-speak for "a whole bunch of mostly previously published comics put into a single volume and organized into several thematic categories.") I've only seen Heatley's work once or twice before, and it hasn't entirely worked for me -- but maybe a bigger dose will be the trick. And I'm favorably disposed towards anyone who uses a Ramones reference for his title. My Brain will be published as a large-format hardcover by Pantheon on September 30th.