Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/6

Hi there! In keeping my my new simplified Reviewing the Mail policy that Everything Counts®, this week's post will include both books that came unexpectedly from purveyors of publicity and books I bought myself because a comic shop was having a great sale.

First, the former:


(It was a quiet week.)

Then, the latter:

Fire!! by Peter Bagge -- this is a comics biography of Zora Neale Hurston, who is, if not the last person I'd expect Bagge to focus on (I'd put Anthony Trollope or Marcel Proust even further down the list), at least pretty far down. I've only ever read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston, like a lot of other people, but she always seemed like an interesting, larger-than-life character, so maybe that's it. Anyway, an interesting choice for Bagge, and I want to see what he did with it.

King David by Kyle Baker -- One of his more obscure books, in that animation-derived style that's not my favorite thing in the world. But I'm trying to catch up on the Baker stuff I missed, since he does good stuff and does change up his style and matter, and I never actually read this one as far as I can remember.

Nexus Archives Vol. 2 by Mike Baron and Steve Rude -- I'm trying to collect these, more slowly than I probably should, with the aim of reading all or a big chunk of Nexus sometime in the future. This one gets me to a full run of volumes 1-5, so that could happen if I want it to.

Sex Criminals, Vol. 4: Fourgy! by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky -- The book collections of this series come out irregularly enough, and the premise has been getting continuously more complex, that I'm not confident I remember what was happening for the cliffhanger at the end of #3. Well, let's see if I can pick it up from context.

Prison Island by Colleen Frakes -- Some manner of memoir, I think about a family member in some hard-to-get-to-prison. (I have the book in front of me, so I'm deliberately not checking it, so I can record the vague impressions that got me to spend money, quirky as they may be.)

Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden -- A big reported book about various journeys in the Middle East. I know I've seen good reviews of this, though I think it's over a year old at this point.

The Iron Duchess by Roger Langridge -- Langridge serialized this on his website, though I think I came in somewhere in the middle and never bothered to go back to the beginning. (I find reading narrative in comics pages online is vaguely annoying, so I tend not to do it.) This is another Fred the Clown story.

Royal City, Vol. 1: Next of Kin by Jeff Lemire -- I'm a little behind on Lemire, since I still have his big book Roughneck sitting on the shelf, but this is the beginning of what should be a longer series, and it was cheap. And Lemire is dependably good when he's drawing his own stuff -- and maybe even dependably good when he's not writing about people who wear their underwear on the outside.

The Customer Is Always Wrong by Mimi Pond -- Another big memoir-ish book of comics from Pond! Only a couple of years after the equally-large and impressive Over Easy! It's great to see her back, so I hope this is a huge success and she has a big book every second or third year for a couple of decades to come.

Paul Has a Summer Job by Michel Rabagliati -- I seem to be re-buying and re-reading all of the books in this semi-autobiographical series without really meaning to. Well, they're all good, so why not?

And last is Sh*t My President Says by Shannon Wheeler, in which my fellow Wheeler illustrates some of the more appalling Tweets of the guy who didn't expect to be President and is determined to prove that he shouldn't have been.