Incoming Books: July 31st

I've whined far too much here about the flood that hit my house last year, but I've finally found something good to say about it.

You see, when most of your books get destroyed suddenly, that's a great excuse to start buying books at a faster clip -- after all, you have to replace the stuff you lost, right? (And there's all that empty space where books used to be - it'd be a shame to leave that all airy and uncluttered, wouldn't it?)

So I'm looking to replace a lot of the books I used to have, but I want to do it cheaply whenever possible. I'm not entirely sure how I got linked to mycomicshop.com (the Internet outpost of Buddy Saunders's famous Lone Star Comics mini-chain), but they've got a massive database of graphic novels (and floppy comics, and various other permutations of words-and-pictures-on-paper), and a lot of the stuff there is priced to move.

Well, I'm not made of stone, am I? I had to place an order. And, yesterday, it arrived -- a few comics for my sons, and a big stack of graphic novels (most of them replacements for lost stuff) for me:

Gumby's Spring Specials -- I wasn't sure this had actually been published; it collects two great odd comics featuring that little clay boy: the Summer Special, written by Bob (Flaming Carrot) Burden, and the Winter Special, written by Steve (Sam & Max) Purcell. Both comics have great art from Art Adams -- in fact, this was originally solicited with Adams's name in the title, which apparently caused trouble, since the book has stickers over the title in several places to obscure his name.

Geisha and The Complete Samurai Jam -- I lost all of my Andi Watson comics, and I couldn't leave my shelf empty like that for too long.

Isaac the Pirate, Vol. 1: To Exotic Lands -- this is an early graphic novel by the French creator Christophe Blain -- I reviewed his Gus & His Gang for ComicMix a few years back, and have wanted to read more by him since then.

Two more Love & Rockets collections -- Penny Century and Beyond Palomar -- since I am going to rebuild that shelf and then read the whole thing straight through again. (I read it all straight through once, but that was about ten years ago, so there was less of it then. Come to think of it, it might have been more than ten years ago, since I think it was right after the end of Volume One that I decided to do it.)

I'm still catching up on the work of Jason, that laconic Norwegian-French cartoonist, so I got his The Left Bank Gang, about all those American expatriate writers in 1920s Paris.

It doesn't make much sense to say that Zander Cannon is one of my favorite creators, since I'm not sure what he's doing now, but I did love his early stuff, and I keep hoping he'll have a chance to go back to doing his own stories one of these days. So I got The Replacement God trade paperback, and a big fat stapled comic edition of his four Chainsaw Vigilante issues.

I don't think I ever had a copy of Richard Sala's Black Cat Crossing, so that doesn't count as a replacement.

I also never had a copy of The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius -- and I do know that I'm getting to this Judd Winick comic a good decade late -- but it kept sounding like something I'd enjoy, so I finally picked it up.

And last was Housebound With Rick Geary, because I love his early quirky work to bits. Someone should do a big Geary collection of all that '70s and '80s stuff -- before he really dove into the "Treasury of Victorian Murder" series and did lots of shorter stories.

All of that was cheaper than you'd expect; mycomicshop.com had really good prices. (And, also, I picked through a much larger list of stuff I wanted to find the ones that had great prices.)