Incoming Books: March 4 and thenabouts

Two packages full of books I paid for arrived over the last couple of days -- one because of a sale at what's still more-or-less my "local" comics shop, Midtown; and the other because I was trying to get to the free shipping level on another order at a large river-themed Internet retailer. And, since I love listing books, here they are:

Richard Stark's Parker Book Four: Slayground is the latest in the series of adaptations of the Parker novels by Darwyn Cooke. (I've reviewed all three -- one, two, three -- and liked each one better than the last, which is really rare. I also spent a month re-reading the original novels last year.)

Young Lovecraft,  is by Jose Oliver and Bartolo Torres, and collects a strip-format comic of the same name, originally published in Spain (and in Spanish, naturally). It's about a kid HPL meeting ichorous monsters from beyond space in a gag-a-day format; how could I pass it up?

Escape from "Special" is the first graphic novel by the creator credited as Miss Lasko-Gross; I liked her second book when I saw it a few years back, and I don't think she's done anything big since.

Let Us Be Perfectly Clear is a collection of short Paul Hornschemeier comics -- I'm pretty sure I've read a few of them, but the only solid record I can find here is a review of Mother, Come Home.

What's New with Phil and Dixie was a long-running strip in Dragon magazine that almost exactly matched the time I read Dragon magazine, and was the first Phil Foglio work I ever saw. It was reprinted in three volumes, and I now have number one and number three again, after the flood of '12.

I've gotten behind on reading about the Hellboy-verse, but I have two new books from that world to help get back up to speed: B.P.R.D.: Vampire, by Mike Mignola, Gabriel Ba, and Fabio Moon; and Hellboy: The Midnight Circus by Mignola and Duncan Fegredo. I may do a big chunk of Hellboy books sometime this year as part of Book-A-Day; watch this space for further details.

The Bojeffries Saga by Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse has been reprinted a number of times -- I think I had the early-'90s edition (from A1, or some-such company like that) before the flood. But there's a new edition from Top Shelf, and that's the one I have now.

Ray and Joe: The Story Of A Man And His Dead Friend reprints one of the three great continuing comics from the 1970s National Lampoon (along with Shary Flenniken's Trots and Bonnie -- which still deserves to be reprinted -- and Gahan Wilson's Nuts), from the inimitable Charles Rodriguez.

The Children of Palomar is a newish Love and Rockets-related graphic novel from Gilbert Hernandez, and I'm still assembling material for my massive L&R read/re-read, which may make it into this year.

Shadowland is a major work by the great Kim Deitch; I read it during this blog's first stretch of Book-A-Day back in 2008. And now I have a new copy post-flood.

Similarly, I bought and read Daniel Pinkwater's book of essays Fish Whistleback in 1992, when it was new. But I lost it in the flood, so now I have a new copy, and a good excuse to read it again.

Last is George O'Connor's Aphrodite: Goddess of Love, the sixth in his series of graphic novels about the Olympian gods. I've covered them here: Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon. O'Connor is ostensibly writing for teens and slightly younger kids, but he's got a depth of research-inspired knowledge, a knack for finding the universal in multiple versions of a story, and a strong hand for telling a story with his art. These are great books, and I note that he even managed to balance them: three men, three women. I hope he does more.