Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/11

I usually have a long, tedious explanation of the point of the "Reviewing the Mail" posts here, but it feels silly to do so this week, since the mail brought just one book. I still do have to admit that I haven't read this book yet, which is slightly embarrassing -- it's only one book, and a graphic novel at that! -- but I should point out that the pre-existing stack of books to be read is quite large, and I picked up five books from the library this week as well. Anyway, the one book that arrived in the mail this week is...

The new book by French cartoonist Nicolas De Crecy, author of Glacial Period -- it's the first in a series, called Salvatore, Vol. 1: Transports of Love. NBM will publish this in trade paperback in January, and, as usual for things coming over from France, it actually collects the first two European Salvatore albums. Salvatore himself is a "crack mechanic dog," who is trying to build a magnificent vehicle so he can go visit his lost love after she moved to South America. (Comics are full of people who never think of saving up to buy a ticket, so I feel right at home with that premise.) It looks cute and quirky in about equal measure, but that's from a very fast glance -- I do expect to review this one soon.

I did get things that weren't books in the mail, and I could mention one of them here: a little pre-publication pamphlet (not sure if the publisher is calling this a "teaser" or a "blad") for Doug Savage's Savage Chickens, coming as a trade paperback in March 2011 from Perigee. From what I can see here, it's a book of cartoons about chickens in office situations, and it's pretty funny in an early-Dilbert way. (If you want to check our Savage's cartoons, they were, as nearly everything is these days, published first for free on these very Interwebs.)