Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/29

This week saw the first package addressed to me specifically as an Eisner judge -- at work, since people in the publishing business tend to know (or be able to find out) where other companies are. And, as always, I'm happy about that -- there may be a point, some day, when there are more books than I can handle, but I've never hit that level yet.

So: every week I post a list like this, of books that came in for review (or whatever else, when I'm doing something else -- such as being an Eisner judge). I do this because I like books and want to celebrate and write about books, even when I know I won't manage to actually read all of them. This list, then, is made of what I think about books as soon as I see them, as idiosyncratic and odd as those thoughts may be.

There's probably some theory that you need to hear about a consumer product X number of times before you finally pick it up (let alone buy it), but I don't know what that secret number is. I do know that I've been hearing about Lucy Knisley's French Milk for a while, from a variety of places, and that I can't remember exactly when or where any of them were. But French Milk is now in my hands, so I can tell you that it's the graphic story -- told through photographs and drawings, mostly sketchbook style rather than arranged into comics panels -- of Knisley's six-week trip to Paris with her mother in early 2007. It was published by Simon & Schuster's Touchstone imprint, in trade paperback, in October.

I've read a couple of Jeffrey Brown's previous graphic memoirs -- as I recall, Unlikely and Clumsy -- and also his quirky piss-take on his own childhood obsessions, Incredible Change-Bots. But, as far as I can see, I've never written about any of them here. I haven't seen his autobiographical work for a few years, so he may have worked out the aggressively primitivist style he had -- it wasn't just art, but also the way he told the story, almost like a kid going "and then I...and then I...." Anyway, I've got another chance to look at his work with his new collection Little Things, which is also from Touchstone and was published in April.

Ariel Schrag wrote and drew full-length -- the first, shortest one is forty-nine pages! -- autobiographical graphic novels about her high school years, one during each summer after that year. She then printed those books up and sold them around her school, to the very people she wrote about. Some of those books have been available to the general public since then -- Schrag apparently graduated in 1998 -- but Touchstone (yes, them again) is in the process of reprinting all four books. The first two, shorter GNs were reprinted in an oversized trade paperback in April as Awkward and Definition and the second, Potential, came out in May. (The fourth, Likewise, is scheduled for next spring.)

I got my monthly big package of book from Yen Press as well this week. Since they're all later books in series, and all publishing in trade paperback (of various sizes) in December, I'll stick them into a bulleted list:

• Kaze No Hana, Vol. 3 from Ushio Mizta and Akiyoshi Ohta -- contemporary saving-the-world fantasy, with complicated family dynamics, magic swords, and the usual slavering monsters. I reviewed both Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 for ComicMix.
• Judith Park is an object lesson in the international language of comics: she lives in Germany, has Korean ancestry, but makes her comics originally for the Japanese market (and now we're reading them in the US). I'd thought her book Y Square (which I reviewed for ComicMix) was the first in a numbered series, but apparently not -- the sequel is here, and it's titled like a novel: Y Square Plus. The first was a light romance story, with some homoerotic undertones; this second book supposedly pairs up the other boy from the first book.
• I haven't been reading Shin JiSang and Geo's manwha series Chocolat, which has just hit its seventh volume, but I understand that it's another romance-y teenage comic, focused on the world of boy bands and their fan clubs.
• Legend is a fantasy story that's just now hit its fourth volume, and I read (and was confused by) the second volume. That's about all I know.
• Another series I don't know much about is One Thousand and One Nights, by Han SeungHee and Jeon JinSeok. I have the sixth volume of it here, and, despite the Arabian title, it seems to be set in classical Athens. (I use my vast ratiocinative skills to deduce that from characters named Socrates, Alcibiades, and Critias.)
• And then there's Antique Gift Shop, another sixth volume. This one's from Lee Eun, and I can't quite figure out what it's about.

Also from Yen, also in December, also trade paperback -- but in color and by a guy with an American-sounding name ("Jason T. Kruse"), The World of Quest, Vol. 2 is different enough for me to break it out of the bulleted list, just to see if you're paying attention. It's an all-ages story about the spoiled Prince Nestor -- actually, he may be more of just a little thoughtless jerk than actively spoiled -- and his protector, the mightily-thewed (and weirdly superhero-costumed) Quest. I missed the first book, which presumably explained all of this -- I expect there are six-year-olds who have the whole thing down pat, but I'm lost.

And then we dive right back into the bullets, since Norton sent me four books by Will Eisner -- all are just published in paperback, and three of the four of which I reviewed when they appeared in the Norton hardcover omnibus Life, in Pictures last year (all but the last):

• To the Heart of the Storm, the semi-autobiographical story of a soldier much like Eisner, traveling south for basic training in 1942 and remembering his life so far
• The Name of the Game, a multi-generational saga about a family much like that of Eisner's wife Ann, reaching, again, just up to WWII
• The Dreamer, one of Eisner's best-known stories, another thinly fictionalized look at the years before WWII, this time focusing on his early comics career
• and, last, the new The Will Eisner Reader, collecting seven of his best stories for new readers to get a sense of what Eisner did and who he was.

And last this week is Nina Matsumoto's Yokaiden, Vol. 1. It's manga-style, but originated in the West; Matsumoto has been a webcomic creator (Saturnalia) and a fan artist (this famous Simpsons-as-manga-characters piece was widely linked a while back). Yokaiden seems to be her first work created for book form, and tells the story of a Japanese boy, Hamachi, and his adventures with the folkloric yokai spirits. Del Rey published it on November 18th.