Incoming Books: 25 November

My employer told us all we could leave at 12:30 yesterday...but the first train after that heading out to my station wasn't for two hours. Now, I could have stuck around the office -- fighting against the tide of those few people who didn't take the day off running out the door right on time (or, I noticed in some cases, slightly earlier than that) -- and tried to get whatever work I could get done in an empty office.

But I realized instead that I could jump onto the PATH subway, have about an hour in Jim Hanley's Universe -- a comics shop in Manhattan with excellent selection that isn't displayed or organized as well as it might be -- and get back in time for the train. And so I did.

I didn't find the books I was most looking for -- The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 2, Popeye Vol. 4: "Plunder Island", B.P.R.D.: The Black Goddess, or Spectrum 16 -- but I did find some good stuff:

Sparky O'Hare, Master Electrician -- a little book (smaller than a mass-market paperback, about the size of those impulse purchases by the cash register) by Mawil (whose Beach Safari I read and liked last year). It's got a main character who looks like the rabbit-man of Beach Safari, so this may be a standard Mawil character...though I hesitate to generalize too much from two books. Sparky is from a British company, Blank Slate, and difficult to physically see on a shelf, so it may be hard to find in the states.

Sundome, Vol. 6, the latest in the creepily intimate teenage sex-comedy series from Kazuto Okada. I've been fascinated with this series from the beginning, and I guess I'll keep reading it as long as it keeps hitting that sweet spot between too-real and too-broad. (I had a short review of the fifth book recently, which links back further to my more detailed thoughts on earlier volumes.)

Jamie Tanner's The Aviary is a 2007 book from AdHouse that happened to catch my eye on the shelf. It looked interesting, it was cheap ($12.95), and I trust AdHouse, so it came home with me.

And last (besides some floppy comics for my sons) was Tom Neely's The Blot, which I heard about when it was published two years ago but which I'd never seen in person. (To forestall the inevitable "but you can buy anything on the Internet" arguments: with a graphic novel, I want to see the art and feel the paper, not to mention get a sense of what the book looks and feels like in person. The format can be so varied, particularly with small-press books, that I want a better sense of what this book is than I can get online.)
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Listening to: Okkervil River - The Velocity of Saul at the Time of his Conversion
via FoxyTunes