Incoming Books: Week of July 26

I ordered a biggish box of comics-style book-shaped objects from the mighty Midtown Comics recently, and that box arrived about a week ago. The resulting stack has been sitting on my desk, waiting for me to turn it into cheap content for this blog, but I finally have a little time this morning. So here's what I just got:

Hectic Planet, Vol. 1: Dim Future -- the first of three volumes reprinting Evan Dorkin's early semi-serious ska space opera Pirate Corp$!, renamed thus when Dorkin got older and (presumably) embarrassed by the original name. Rebuilding after the flood.

Jack the Ripper -- one of the early books in Rick Geary's "Treasury of Victorian Murder" and another case of rebuilding after the flood.

Sweet Tooth Vol. 1: Out of the Deep Woods -- I've liked Jeff Lemire's small-company comics (The Nobody, The Underwater Welder, etc.), but I avoided this Vertigo series of his while it was running for no good reason. (I have a vague sense that Vertigo turned from the "creepy side of the DC Universe," as it was when I was reading most of it in the '90s, to "cable-TV style dark drama with lots of nasty people" more recently, and I'm not a fan of the new style.)

Itty Bitty Hellboy by Art Bathazar and Franco -- I like Hellboy, and I like Bathazar and Franco's various work chibi-izing major comics characters. (The biggest hit, and probably the best, was Tiny Titans, which ran for quite a while.) So I got this as soon as I realized it actually existed in bnook form.

Paul Joins the Scouts -- the latest semi-autobiographical story from Michel Rabagliati, following Paul Has a Summer Job, The Song of Roland, Paul Moves Out, and others. Rabagliati has been consistently wonderful so far, with a lovely UPA-ish flowing line and insightful stories, so I'm glad to see a new book from him.

Spiral-Bound -- the first graphic novel from the creator of The Unsinkable Walker Bean, Aaron Renier. I've been vaguely looking for it for a while -- probably since I read Walker Bean -- and finally broke down and bought it.

Mad Night -- still rebuilding by Richard Sala collection, post flood. This is a big book reprinting his long serial from Evil Eye, back in those heady late-'90s days when every indy cartoonist had to have a continuing series, because otherwise they forget you in the comics shops. (Luckily, the book market was lurking, out there in the fog, to provide a more stable home for long-form stories.)

Grendel Omnibus Vol. 3 -- I now have three of the four bricks reprinting the entire saga by Matt Wagner and various co-conspirators (mostly John K. Snyder, Jay Geldhof, and Tim Sale, this time out), which means I'll probably end up re-reading the whole thing soon. This counts as rebuilding after the flood as well.

And last is Fran, the new book by the incomparable and inexplicable Jim Woodring. I expect this will be as Woodringesque and indescribable as his previous books -- a few years ago, I tried to write words about a previous book, Weathercraft, but I can't say how successful I was.