Incoming Books: 22 November

This past Monday was the annual SFWA New York shindig -- affectionately termed the "Mill & Swill," and which I always refer to as the one time in a the year that writers pay for publishers' drinks -- and they're still inviting me, for whatever optimistic or forgetful reason. So I went, even though the venues have greatly fallen from the sublime of fifteen years ago (an indoor/outdoor space at a reasonably swanky hotel on Central Park South) to the ridiculous of now (Planet Hollywood in Times Square).

There's nothing to say about the event itself: I talked with a bunch of people I don't see all that often, mostly shouting over the roar of the crowd, and not talking about anything of consequence. All I could do is name-drop, and that would be silly.

But, on the way to the Mill & Swill, I did have time to stop in at a local comics shop and buy some books -- so let me talk about those instead.

Castle Waiting, Vol. 2 is the second collection of the series by the apparently very modest Linda Medley. (Her name appears in full on the real book -- unlike the image to the left -- only in a copyright notice at the very end of the book, and only otherwise as "L. Medley" on a small sticker on the back cover, just above the bar code. I do wonder if that was on purpose, or if the book-design freight train got too far along before they realized they'd forgotten the author.) I've got several, if not all, of the issues that this reprints sitting in a short stack of comics floppies that accumulated between the point when I stopped reading comics in floppy form and the point when I realized that. Now, perhaps, I can find something else to do with those, and continue moving my comics-consuming habit entirely into squarebound form.

What I Did is another omnibus collection from Jason, after last year's Almost Silent. Three whole books for $25 -- what a bargain! (I was a little late to discover Jason -- which is my way of saying "everyone else who read alt-comics knew and loved his stuff three years before I did" -- but I'm now catching up. I've covered his books as Book-A-Day #s 263, 206, 95, 94, 93, and, before that, as bits of much longer posts that I won't bother to link to.)

And, because life itself is not nearly depressing enough, I got the new 20th issue of ACME Novelty Library by the ever self-effacing Chris Ware. This one has the word "Lint" prominently emblazoned on its cover, so I am tentatively assuming that it's a new standalone graphic novel of that title. (Or perhaps not: Ware is hermetic and gnomic as usual.) (And, by the way, Mr Ware: books where the ISBN only appears on the plastic outer wrapping are the work of the devil, and should be hissed at by all civilized folks everywhere. Just saying.)

On the more punchy-punchy side, there also is a new Hellboy-i-verse book, B.P.R.D.: King of Fear, by the central team of Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Guy Davis. The back cover doesn't actually say that this is the third and last volume of "Scorched Earth," but I think it is.

Similarly punchy-punchy, though in a different style, is Bryan Talbot's Grandville Mon Amour, sequel to last year's Grandville graphic novel. (Which I reviewed as Book-A-Day #23.)

And last is this year's big art annual edited by Cathy and Arnie Fenner, Spectrum 17. I feel compelled every year to point out that I bought these for the book club for the first twelve/thirteen years of their existence, so it still feels wrong to buy it in a store. (Instead of seeing a sample cover over the summer, negotiating quantities and prices, and then finally putting in an order for an office copy from the warehouse.) Well, life does move on, even if we try not to let it.