Incoming Books: 14 October

I had a lunch date in NYC on Thursday, so I took the opportunity to work out of my company's tiny midtown office that afternoon (where I was, once again, the only person there) and then do some comics-shopping on the way home.

Speaking of once again, I still love the selection at Jim Hanley's Universe, but it's very difficult to find anything specific there without running through all of the shelves -- and, even then, it's not easy. (There's a big section of bookcases for graphic novels, which is alphabetical mostly by title, but sometimes by author -- and some things aren't there at all, because they're elsewhere. There's also a main run of comics and books, which is also alphabetical mostly by title, but sometimes by author, and occasionally broken out into endcaps devoted to an author or character, or sometimes in a special section by publisher, or sometimes over in the children's section, or sometimes not. It's clearly a Topsy-ized system -- it just grew -- but it needs to be re-thought, and I suspect the great experiment of racking books and floppy comics together is not a success.)

Anyway, this is what I got:

Darwyn Cooke's second adaptation from a great series of crime novels, Richard Stark's Parker: The Outfit, which I gather adapts bits of the second book (The Man with the Getaway Face), but mostly the third one.

Hellboy: Masks and Monsters, an odds-and-sods collection of the mid-'90s crossover stories (Batman & Starman from DC-land, Ghost from Dark Horse's long-forgotten superhero universe) that Mike Mignola's big red monster-hunter got caught up in over the years. I'm not sure if I ever read the Batman/Starman/Hellboy story, so it should seem new, for a while, at least.

Marvel's Strange Tales collection, with odd superhero stories from a wide array of "alt-comics" names: Peter Bagge, Jason, Becky Cloonan, Paul Hornschemeier, Nicholas Gurewitch, James Kochalka, Paul Pope, Johnny Ryan, Dash Shaw, Tony Millionaire, Jeffrey Brown, Michael Kupperman, and others. I'm pretty sure Marvel's purpose in doing this isn't to give their Zombies a taste of more interesting comics, in the hopes that they'll start reading non-extruded corporate crap -- and I doubt that'll be the result for more than a handful of people, anyway -- but it's the way I like to think these stories will operate.

Jason's newish graphic novel Werewolves of Montpellier, because it's Jason.

And last is Matt Kindt's original graphic novel Revolver, published by DC a few months ago. Thursday was the first time I actually saw it in person; for whatever oddity of timing and distribution, I found his Top Shelf books much more quickly and easily than the book from a supposedly big and connected publisher. (Which may say something about distribution channels right now, and can be a lesson for all of us.) This is a more science-fictiony story than Kindt has previously done, which looks intriguing -- it's got a clear Philip K. Dick influence to its story of a man living alternate days in two very different worlds.

(And what I didn't find -- in two different stores -- was the new Love and Rockets, so I've broken down and just ordered the darn thing online. I'm sure I'll mention it when it arrives, since this blog is primarily obsessive lists of books anyway.)