Incoming Books: July 22

These are all comics -- bought by mail from one of this nation's finer such sellers (and, as usual, packed to within an inch of their lives, because comics shops are hardcore about that shit), and mostly to replace books I had before the flood.

So these are pretty much all things I think worthy buying at least twice, which is a pretty good recommendation, I think.

(And they did arrive on Monday, but it took me until tonight to write about them, due to a big semi-off-site meeting at work Tuesday-Wednesday. Life is too damn busy, and it's too damn busy with the wrong things.)

It's Science with Dr. Radium, Vol. 3 by Scott Saavedra -- Saavedra doesn't seem to have done much cartooning over the past decade or so, or, at least, not things I've noticed. (Please tip me off if there's some great body of recent Saavedra stuff.) But his '80s and '90s work on Dr. Radium was inspired nuttiness, the kind of thing I'm surprised in retrospect didn't become a short-lived cartoon around about 1994. With this book, I've re-acquired the whole series, such as it is. It's not high art, but it is high fun, and mad science, and a lot of other wonderful things.

Paris by Andi Watson and Simon Gane -- see my review of it back in 2008. Rebuilding the Andi Watson shelf, even if this is pretty minor Watson.

The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 1 by John Ostrander and Tim Truman -- here we see my comics OCD in full force; I do have most of the books in this series (re-acquired post-flood), but I have the later omnibus instead of volumes 1 & 2, and so I'm fixing that, so all of the books line up nicely in the shelf.

Flaming Carrot's Greatest Hits: Collected Album No. 3 by Bob Burden -- My sons have never read Flaming Carrot comics. Do you believe that? I have to fix this.

Thor Visionaries: Walt Simonson, Vol. 1 -- I lost the first three of these to the flood, and am re-acquiring. Again, I think both my boys will love these stories, so I can count this as a cultural enrichment process for my family.

Two Love & Rockets collections -- Heartbreak Soup and Amor Y Cohetes-- by Los Bros Hernandez, as I inch closer to getting the whole thing again for a massive re-read. (Not as big an inch as hoped, since my long-delayed and half-forgotten Fantagraphics order, which arrived last week, also had Heartbreak Soup in it. I'll have to figure out how to deal with that.)

And last is Skin Deep, a collection of Charles Burns's "Dog Boy" stories from the '80s. In this case, I didn't have a copy of this book before the flood, though I think I had all of the stories in other things (probably comic-shaped stapled collections of paper) that were drowned.