Incoming Books: January 3

So, I screwed up on the last day of my holiday break, a week ago today. I thought I had tickets for a 2 PM show at the New Victory theater in NYC that day, so I packed up my two boys -- well, they're fifteen and seventeen now, so they pack themselves -- and we headed in. We had a great lunch at Schnipper's, as usual, when it happened.

I looked at the tickets, and they were for Saturday, January 2nd. (For those of you counting on your toes, that's the day before.)

So we rushed over to the theater, to see if we could do an exchange, and found they'd be happy to accommodate us...but the matinee on Sunday was at noon, and it was nearly over. The late show was at five, over four hours later. Instead, we went to the local comics shop, and then went home much earlier than expected.

And I didn't find much of what I was looking for there (Step Aside, Pops!, Killing and Dying, Owner's Manual To Terrible Parenting, Louise Brooks, Two Brothers -- I couldn't even find Sandman Overture, which I'm sure was there someplace) , but I did get a couple of things. These are they -- one new thing and two from the clearance shelf.

Our Expanding Universe, the new graphic novel by Alex Robinson and (I think) something of a follow-up to Box Office Poison. (I've reviewed Robinson's previous books Tricked, Box Office Poison, and Too Cool To Be Forgotten here and elsewhere.)

I recall Grendel Tales: Devils and Deaths being probably the best of the line-extension Grendel comics that Matt Wagner allowed in the '90s -- he ran the main story to a point where "Grendel" was running the world, and "Grendel" was a title or job-function, something like a bureaucratic samurai, and then let others create mini-series set in that world for several years. This one is by the Eastern European team of Darko Macan and Edvin Biukovic -- I know Biukovic was Croatian, and saw the Yugoslav successor wars from the inside, but I'm not as sure about exactly where Macan came from -- and, as I recall, it understood violence from the inside out, which wasn't always the case for Grendel stories. Anyway, it was cheap, and now I have a chance to read it again.

And then there's Popeye, Vol. 2, collecting the second half of the Bobby London run from the late '80s through 1992. I know London best for Dirty Duck, which is probably true for anyone who knows who London is. So he was always an odd choice to take over the Popeye newspaper strip, but I gather it wasn't doing well, and the syndicate wanted to take a chance. I still haven't read the first book of London's run, but now I have the whole thing after finding this slightly battered and shelf-worn copy, and I'll get to them probably later this year.