Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/27

These days, I use this space to list any books that arrived in my hands over the past week, no matter how they appeared. I obsess about making clear the different methods, because I suffer from an excessively tidy mind. But, in my calmer moments, I do realize that hardly anyone cares whether I got a book as part of some publicity effort or because I paid money for it.

(The people who send me books as part of their publicity efforts are probably the only ones who might care. And they probably don't, either, as long as I keep mentioning their books up front prominently.)

Anyway, I have one book this week, which I bought myself. It's Ofelia by Gilbert Hernandez, one of the uniform paperback volumes reprinting the Love & Rockets series Hernandez does in tandem (side-by-side, rather than together) with his brother Jaime. (And, in the past, with another brother, Mario.) I have most of a shelf of Love & Rockets books, and vaguely intend to re-read the whole series once I'm sure I have all of it.

The "having all of it" is the tricky part. There are about a dozen of these uniform paperbacks now, and I have nearly all of them. But L&R was a comics series for twenty-some years, scattered books after that, an annual book-format comic after that, and then another series of pamphlet comics, I think -- and I've probably simplified the whole thing. Someday I will find the obsessive bibliography of L&R that I'm sure exists somewhere, and can use it as a checklist to make sure I have everything up to that date...and then, maybe, I can dive in.

For now, I have this book -- it was published by Fantagraphics in January of 2015 -- and it's going on the shelf with the others.