Incoming Books: Last Couple of Days

A bunch of new books are sitting on my desk, and, as usual, I'm arrogant to think that if they're good enough for me, then clearly everyone else needs to know about them. So, counting three books I got from the library this morning, three collections of a webcomic I bought from the creator directly, and a comics collection I got from that gigantic conglomerate online store, here's what's new:

Pogo, Vol. 2: Bona Fide Balderdash by Walt Kelly -- I came late to the Pogo bandwagon; I've heard about it my entire comic-reading life (which only slightly trailed my breathing-and-pooping life), and seen snippets of Kelly's great comic strip a number of times, but I never pulled the trigger and actually read the thing. Until, that is, last year, when the first volume of this new series collecting the entire newspaper strip -- Through the Wild Blue Yonder -- showed up in my library, so I had to give it a try. Long story short: I'm a convert, and I expect to be waiting eagerly for the rest of the projected twelve volumes reprinting Pogo as they come out annually.

Ménage à 3 by Gisèle Lagacé & David Lumsdon -- I bought the first three annual collections of this funny, sexy webcomic because one of the rules I try to live by is that if I really enjoy something that's provided for free, I need to find a way to pay for it once in a while. (Because, otherwise, it will go away, and I certainly don't want that.)

How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You, the second collection of the not-really-a-webcomic The Oatmeal, by Matthew Inman, who makes his name difficult to find on his work (though for apparently different reasons than Cris Ware does the same) -- I got the first Oatmeal collection during the death throes of Borders, and mostly enjoyed it, and my older son (Thing 1) more recently really liked it. If that's not worth a library check-out, I don't know what is.

Sailor Twain by Mark Siegel -- This graphic novel got a lot of attention when it was published a few month back, but that was at a time when I was being flakier than usual with my reviews here and my relationships with publishers (I'm unabashedly amateur at Antick Musings; I'm serious about what I do but can be lackadaisical due to the general lack of remuneration), so I didn't get a copy of it, even though it probably wouldn't have been difficult at the time. But it was in the library, as I figured it would be eventually, and so now I can read it.

And last is Ellen Forney's recent graphic memoir Marbles, which you may have heard of -- it's been kind of a big deal. I've reviewed Forney's work here -- her cute, memorable, smart what-it-was-like-to-be-me-as-a-kid strip Monkey Food and her utterly different illustrated-sex-personals book Lust -- and liked all of what I've seen of it, despite (or because?) how widely divergent they were.