Incoming Books: April 4th

My sons and I were in Manhattan on Saturday to see Catch Me, a great cirque [1] show at the New Victory theater, and, as usual, we made a very minor detour to hit a nearby comic shop while we were in the neighborhood.

(The show was great, by the way, and it's running for another two weeks. It's from the Flip FabriQue group, from Quebec and it's about friendship -- as much as a collection of thinly connected stunts and bits can be "about" anything.)

My older son -- whom I should probably stop calling Thing 1 here, now that he's seventeen and eligible to drive if he ever bothers to take the written exam -- got a book for himself, his younger brother just vaguely moped in the way only a fourteen-year-old can, and I found these swell things:

Sex Criminals, Vol. 2 by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky -- it continues the story that began in Vol. 1, obviously, about two twentysomethings who each think they're the only ones for whom time literally stops when they have an orgasm. But they met and achieved simultaneity in the first book, so what's new this time? I presume the shocking discovery that anything that can happen to two people has probably happened to more than two people.

Nemo: River of Ghosts is the third in a sidebar series to the "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" graphic novels, by the same creative team: Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. I'm planning to read all three straight through sometime soon, partially because I found the least League story a bit deflating.

Sam Zabel And The Magic Pen is a big new graphic novel from Dylan Horrocks, with some autobio stuff (former indy graphic novelist now hacking out monthly stories for a stupid superhero comic and hating himself for it) and then a serious left turn into fantasy. Horrocks was posting this online for a while, and that got me interested.  (Hm -- the entire book looks to still be up there right now, either on purpose or not.)

Calculus Cat collects all of the stories by Hunt Emerson about the title character -- basically, the old Death to Television! book plus odds and ends and some new stuff. I wonder if the current generation will even get the significance of TV to the cat -- it's not what it was, culturally, two decades ago.

Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists a collection of webcomics and similar stuff from about ten years ago edited by Ted Rall. I found it really cheap on a discount shelf, but I might have bought it anyway: I like strip cartoons, wherever they appear, and I'm also particularly fond of weird bits of pop-culture history.

And last was the big one, which was also on that discount shelf, for a price that was basically a steal: What Fools These Mortals Be!: The Story of Puck, by Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West. It might seem familiar, because I reviewed it from a PDF several months ago. It's true: reviewers often do spend their own money on books they've already read and reviewed!



[1] "Cirque" is basically the same as "circus," only trendier and with more savoir faire. Or, maybe, it's a small collections of performers -- jugglers, tumblers, and similar acts -- that perform vaguely circus-y shows without animals or the big props of traditional American ballyhoo-style circus.