Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/21/18

Welcome back to Monday! Every week, I have a list here of books that are new in my house -- sometimes because they're newly-published and sent by hard-working publicists, sometimes because I've bought them, and sometimes because I got them from the library.

This week I have ten books, all of which came from the library. (Have I mentioned recently how great it is that libraries collect graphic novels these days?)

Hermes is the tenth book in George O'Connor's Olympians series -- all graphic novels about various Greek gods, aimed at younger readers but great for those of us who haven't seen the inside of a middle-school for several decades.

Michael Chabon's The Escapist: Amazing Adventures collects some fraction of the 2003 Dark Horse series of basically the same name; it seems to be an amalgamation of the original first two trade paperback reprints of that series. (There seems to be another book of about this size, plus a Brian K. Vaughan-written miniseries in its own volume.) I think I've read some Escapist stories before -- despite still having Chabon's Kavalier and Clay novel on my to-be-read shelves a decade-plus later -- but it was a while ago, and I don't remember much.

The Creeps is the second collection from Fran Krause's excellent crowd-sourced webcomic Deep Dark Fears; each page is Krause illustrating one person's fear, usually submitted anonymously on that website. People aren't generally afraid of things for logical or consistent reasons, so it's an often-creepy look into other people's worries.

Why Art? is a new book by Eleanor Davis, creator of How to Be Happy and You & a Bike & A Road. I think it's one of those quirky books that's not quite fiction and not quite non-fiction, about why people create art and what good it is.

Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World is a collection of comics about great women in history who were not overly deferential to men by Penelope Bagieu, whose Exquisite Corpse I read a long time ago.

Delilah Dirk and the King's Shilling is -- I think -- the second in Tony Cliff's historical adventure series, after ...and the Turkish Lieutenant, which I saw a few years back. (But it's been long enough that I could easily have missed a book or two.)

Speaking of my assumptions, and of historical adventure stories, I'm pretty sure Knife's Edge, by Hope Larson and Rebecca Mock, is the second half of the story that started in Compass South -- it's a story about twins, and they have two important items, which are named in the two book titles. All that says to me "this is not a trilogy." But the draw of trilogy is so strong I may well be wrong; I'll find out if this one ends when I read it.

Lumberjanes, Vol. 4: Out of Time is another collection of the comics series by Noelle Stevenson, Shannon Watters, and Brooke Allen, and I expect to continue to enjoy it despite feeling like I'm the opposite of the target audience. (And that's just fine: a reasonable world is filled with things that have nothing to do with me.)

And I'm up to The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 5: Like I'm The Only Squirrel in the World, my longest title of the week by far. (With Book-A-Day this year, I might even catch up on some of these series I get from the library.) This one, like the previous volumes, is mostly written by Ryan North and drawn by Erica Henderson, with some scripting on one sequence by Will Murray.

Last is Monstress, Vol. 2: The Blood by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, continuing the epic fantasy in comics form. (See my post on the first book, if you like.)