Reviewing the Mail, Week of 10/18, Part Two: Comics

See my earlier post this morning for the explanation of "Reviewing the Mail;" this post includes all of the comics and similar stuff that I saw last week. Most of it is from Dark Horse, because they sent a big box to me last week.

I'll lead off with B.P.R.D. Vol. 9: 1946, which is coming in November. It's from Dark Horse -- actually, only one book this week isn't from Dark Horse, so I'll stop saying Dark Horse darkhorse darkhorse now -- and is the most recent collection of the spin-off from Mike Mignola's Hellboy series (though it's set earlier in time than any of the previous B.P.R.D. or Hellboy stories). It has a quite different creative team than the recent B.P.R.D. stories -- Joshua Dystart is co-writing with Mignola (instead of John Arcudi) and the art is by Paul Azaceta (instead of Guy Davis).

The company I'm not naming also sent me Gantz, Vol. 2, the second -- though you probably figured that out by now -- book in a dark, adult manga series by Hiroya Oku. It's a bloody SF story, with aliens and virtual reality, and I see that it's also already been turned into an anime series, so some of you probably already know much more about it than I do. The second volume of Gantz was published in October.

For something a little different, there's Jess Reklaw's The Night of Your Life, a collection of single-page comics based on other people's dreams. The copyright page credits these strips as originally appearing in a wide variety of publications, but it also seems to be a webcomic called Slow Wave. It's slightly confusing, but I bet it'll all make sense once I actually read the book. Night of Your Life was published in September.

The Venice Chronicles, by Enrico Casarosa, was sent to me by AdHouse, thought the book itself says it was published by Atelier Fio. (Which means -- and the copyright page confirms this -- that AdHouse distributes Atelier Fio.) It's the autobiographical story of a trip to Venice by an animation artist; Casarosa currently does storyboards for Pixar and has worked in the field for ten years. Venice Chronicles will be published in November.

And now we get into things that I could have read, but haven't, organized by the length of time that I've been avoiding it. I have read Conan comics in my day -- I've got the Dark Horse reprints of the Barry Smith (as was) stories from the early days of the Marvel series, and my brother collected the late days of the Marvel Conan in the '80s, so I'm glancingly familiar with that as well. (And, of course, I've read Howard's original stories -- actually, I grew up on the badly re-edited and pieced-together twelve-volume Conan set of the '780s, which still causes many people my age to curse the name of Lin Carter.) But I haven't been reading the new Conan series, so Conan Vol. 6: The Hand of Nergal -- by Timothy Truman and Tomas Giorello -- will be the first I've seen of it. I like Truman's work, though, so it will be interesting to see what he does with the ol' sword-swinging Cimmerian. Hand of Nergal was published in October.

Not only have I never read any "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" comics, I've never seen the TV show -- or the movie it spawned from, or the Spike spin-off show. Nor have I played any Buffy card games, fondled the increasing number of Spike muppet-y creatures, written BtVS fan-fiction, or attended Buffy-centric conventions. (I've spent my time on the Internet instead, which made me the man I am today!) But I now have in front of me Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vol. 3: Wolves at the Gate, a collection of the "Season Eight" comic written (one issue) by Joss Whedon and (four issues) Drew Goddard, and illustrated by Georges Jeanty. It might be fun to read it and see if any of it makes sense, or if I care at all what's going on -- let's see if I can get to it. Wolves at the Gate will publish on October 29.

And, lastly, I haven't been reading the comics featuring the ACG hero Nemesis since 1965, when he debuted in Adventures Into the Unknown. (I had a small excuse: I wasn't born until 1969, and didn't start to read until a couple of years later.) But I can remedy that with Nemesis Archives, Vol. 1, cover-crediting Richard Hughes, Peter Costanza, and Chic Stone, which the comic company I promised not to mention again published in September.