Incoming Books: 10 August

This is belated; it's been a hectic week. But I was in the city on Tuesday -- attending a trade show for work -- so I got over to a comics shop and bought some new books, and these are they:

The Playwright is a short, standalone graphic novel in an odd format -- each page looks something like a single newspaper daily strip, in color -- from Eddie Campbell (though it's written by his sometime collaborator Darren White). The back cover says that it's "a dark comedy about the sex life of a celibate middle-aged man," which is solidly in Campbell's wheelhouse.

Miss Don't Touch Me is a French dramedy -- somewhat sexy, I believe, since it's mostly set in a brothel at the last turn of the century -- by Hubert and Kerascoet. I've picked it up a couple of times, and finally bought it this time -- maybe because a sequel is coming this fall, and maybe because it's from NBM, which has great taste in books (meaning that their taste closely matches my own).

B.P.R.D.: 1947 is the lucky 13th collection of the Hellboy spin-off series. This one is presumably something of a sequel to the 1946 story from a year or so ago, and was written by Mike Mignola and Joshua Dysart, with art by the fabulous Brazilian brothers Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon.

Ex Machina, Vol. 9: Ring Out the Old is the penultimate collection of the post-9/11 comics series by Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris -- I've thought the last couple of collections were unnecessary middle and wheel-spinning, so I hope these stories see it settling down to tell it's big story and end it right.

Nexus: Space Opera is the collection of the recent miniseries about the space vigilante (and that's a horribly oversimplifying phrase) by his creators Mike Baron and Steve Rude. The book was published nearly a year ago, but I only just finally found it on a shelf -- and I remember hearing that the series was plagued with delays and distribution problems, which is too bad. Nexus was a fine, long-running adventure series with a serious core, and it would be nice to think that its strengths would still be appreciated.

Beasts of Burden was a widely acclaimed miniseries written by Even Dorkin with art by Jill Thompson -- both fine creators whose work I've enjoyed in the past -- so I made sure to find the collection. It's another supernatural-detective story, featuring a small band of intrepid adventurers, who are the only ones to know the true threat from the nasty things in the shadows -- only, this time, those adventurers are all domestic animals (mostly dogs, with one cat).

And last is Lewis Trondheim's Mister O, a slim album-sized collection of single-page pantomime stories about a round guy trying (and repeatedly failing) to get across a chasm. Trondheim is excellent, and this looks like a lot of fun.