Reviewing the Mail: Week of 6/16/18

Back again for another week!

This time out, I have the contents of a box of graphic novels -- a store I buy from regularly was having a "nearly everything is 40% off" sales, and, well, I'm only human. So these are things I paid money for, in case you care.

Hostage is the most recent book by French cartoonist Guy Delisle, and it's yet another departure for him. First Delisle did a couple of short alphabetical books about sex (more or less), then did a clutch of longer autobiographical books about particular, generally-authoritarian places that he'd lived, and then did a few short zippy books about how to badly parent young children. This one is back to nonfiction, and it's related to Medicins Sans Frontiers -- Delisle's wife works for them, and that's been an important element of his autobiographical books -- but it's the story of someone else, who was a hostage in Chechnya in 1997.

Mage: The Hero Discovered: Book One: Vol. 2 has about the most confusing possible way to indicate that it reprints the second half (vol. 2) of Matt Wagner's first major story (book one) about Kevin Matchstick, who is more or less the modern incarnation of King Arthur. Apparently the current reprinting of this series goes Book One Vol. 1, Book One Vol. 2, Book Two Vol. 3, and so on -- the third book is coming out in comics form right now, and will be reprinted matching this scheme pretty soon now. I expect to get the new one, once it's an actual book, so I want to re-read the old stuff first.

Royal City, Vol. 2 is the second collection of the comics series by Jeff Lemire -- see my post on the first one.

Nexus Archives, Vol. 7 is another book collecting the '80s SF series by Mike Baron and Steve Rude. I've been gathering these very slowly for quite some time, which is not the best idea: they're not going to be available forever, if they're even still findable now. But they're big and expensive, and buying a half-dozen fifty-dollar books at once isn't something I can see myself doing.

Grass Kings, Vol. 1 is a collection by Matt Kindt and Tyler Jenkins -- I think this is an ongoing comics series, but I don't know much about it. I like Kindt's work, so I figured I'd take a flyer on it.

Fog Over Tolbiac Bridge is another Jacques Tardi adaptation of a detective story -- this one by Leo Malet. Malet had a complicated series about detective Nestor Burma: there were thirty-some novels total, but eighteen of them were a sub-series, with each one focusing on a specific district of Paris. Tardi adapted five of those books, starting in the '80s with this one, set in the "Left Bank," the XIIIth arrondissement.

And last is a book I came across randomly: Mickey's Craziest Adventures, written by Lewis Trondheim and drawn by Keramidis. It's some kind of super-wacky Mickey Mouse adventure -- Trondheim is good at kids' comics, and good at wacky adventure, so I figured I'd give it a shot.