Incoming Books: 13 March

Somehow, despite the driving rain, I dragged my two sons to two different libraries and a comic-book store -- I may be slightly misrepresenting who was dragging whom part of the time -- today, and picked up a whole bunch of new Book-A-Day fodder. (We also went grocery shopping, to an orthodontist's appointment for Thing 1, and saw a movie at lunchtime -- it was a typically busy Saturday.)

From the libraries, I got:

Joe Hill's second novel Horns, in which an ethically questionable young man finds that he has grown a pair of horns from his forehead overnight, and that the horns bring with them certain abilities. I liked Hill's first novel, Heart-Shaped Box (and wrote up a blurb about it, back when I worked for the SFBC), so I'm willing to read this one -- even though it's a horror novel, and, as I say pretty regularly, I really don't like horror. (It might be a backhanded compliment, but it's definitely a compliment.)

Similarly, I also picked up the first half of Darwyn Cooke's DC: The New Frontier, partly as one of the supposedly best recent superhero comics, partly because of Cooke's recent adaption of Richard Stark's The Hunter, and partially because it was there on the shelf.

Kimmie66 is a graphic novel by Aaron Alexovich from DC's doomed Minx line (originally published in 2007). I don't think I've read it before, and it's short. I've also been reading more YA (both novels and comics) this past year, so it continues that streak. But, most importantly for Book-A-Day, did I mention that it's short?

Alex Robinson's Box Office Poison was one of the major graphic novels of the past decade, but I still haven't read it. (I did read, and review, his Too Cool To Be Forgotten a few years back, and his graphic novel Tricked has been sitting on the read-it-soon pile for about a year now.)

And then I noticed The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, and was both surprised and impressed that the library had bought it. (Being published by such a classy art-book house as Abrams has its definite advantages.)

I fitfully try to keep up with well-received superhero stuff, which is why I grabbed Captain Britain and M13, Vol. 1, despite the fact that it launched out of one of those interminable crossovers ("Secret Invasion," in this case). It was written by Paul Cornell (best known for writing a lot of Doctor Who scripts, these days), with art by Leonard Kirk.

That took care of the libraries; at the comics store (a small, very superhero-focused one in my mother's home town; there's nothing I'd call a decent comics shop anywhere in north Jersey), I got a stack of kids' comics for the boys (to be doled out at random interval, according to my whims) and three books for myself:

Fables, Vol. 13: The Great Fables Crossover, by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, and half a page's worth of people who don't have any ham at the end of their names. This is the book that would screw up the collections of people who were only buying Jack of Fables in trade paperback form -- if there were any such people.

Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba's The Umbrella Academy: Dallas, second in the weird adventure series from the singer of some group. (I can never remember which one, and by saying so I will force, via the inexorable law of the Internets, the very first comment on this post to be a slur on my mental ability and taste that will answer that question along the way.) I wasn't expecting much from the first volume, Apocalypse Suite, because...well, how often is someone famous at doing one form any good at all when he moves to another art form? Think of Don Johnson's singing career, for God's sake. But I was wrong, and Way can really write comics. (I don't have any links, since I read Apocalypse Suite about a year ago as part of my Total Eisner Immersion Experience.)

And last was Powers, Vol. 11: Secret Identity, by Bendis and Oeming. I may complain about this series -- see my recent review of Vol. 10, for example -- but I keep coming back. That must mean something.

----------------
Listening to: State Shirt - This Is Old
via FoxyTunes