Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/7

Every week, I post here to talk about the books that arrived in the mail the week before and to prove that I am not dead.

Well, I'm not dead for another week -- the longest I've ever been not-dead, which is something to be celebrated -- but this week I have a wrinkle. You see, this week I did get one book in the mail, which is awesome. But I also bought one book and got one book from the NYC library. That seems too parallel not to put all together, and so I will.

Mail: A manga volume from Yen Press with the slightly odd name Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, Vol. 1, with art by Ayamegumu, story by Hiro Ainana, and character designs by Shri. This is adapted from a light novel of the same name (by Ainana), which is usually what credits like that mean. The "death march" in this case is at least partially metaphoric: our hero is a programmer working crazy days to finish a game on time, rather than someone actually marching to his death, which would be less suitable for light entertainment. But he takes what he thinks will be a quick nap at work, and wakes up in something very like the game he's working on. And, of course, he can't wake up. (Hey, a new take on the stuck-in-an-MMO idea!)

Bought: From John Allison and Max Sarin, Giant Days, Vol. 3, the third collection of comics stories about Susan, Esther and Daisy, three new best friends in their first year at the mostly fictional British institution of higher learning Sheffield University. Please see my reviews of the first and second books for more of my burbling about why Allison is totally awesome and you should all be reading all of his comics.

Library: The gigantic Drawn and Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels [1] edited by Tom Devlin with the D&Q brain trust (founder Chris Oliveros, Peggy Burns, Tracy Hurren, Julia Pohl-Miranda). This is frankly a bug-crusher: nearly eight hundred pages of comics by a whole bunch of people from around the world. I may end up buying a copy for myself one of these days, but I can read it now if I figure out a way to fit the thing in my commuting bag.


[1] Having all three in the subtitle may seem silly, but there are comics people who will get into knife-fights with each other over whether "graphic novels" are actually a thing or not. Luckily, they're mostly weedy indoor types, so it only rarely leads to actual bloodshed.