Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/4/18

This week, I have five books to talk about -- all of them from the library, and two of them things I used to own in one form or another. So let me dive right into it...

The Dragon Slayer: Folktales from Latin America is the first book for young readers from Jaime (Love and Rockets) Hernandez, who seems to be using a slightly more simplified, cartoony version of his usual clean-line style here. It retells three tales in comics form, with an introduction by a folklorist and some backmatter (sources, explanations, further reading) that might also be written by someone else. This is also available, for obvious reasons, in a Spanish edition as La Matadragones.

Castle Waiting is the 2006 first collection of Linda Medley's gentle take on folktales; before my flood, I had all of the comics and I think this book. There's been one more volume of the series since then, but I think it went on hiatus and hasn't come back yet -- though it was on and off hiatus a lot during it's first decade, too.

The Fun Family is the first graphic novel by Benjamin Frisch, pretty clearly a fictional take on "the Family Circus." It's from Top Shelf, which reminds me I used to buy a lot directly from them before they were bought by IDW: they'd have a big sale about twice a year and I'd grab things by cartoonists I'd never heard of, just because they were on sale. (It might not have been sustainable; all I'm saying is that as a gimmick, it worked well on me.)

I Can't Believe It's Not the Justice League collects the second JLI "reunion" story by Keith Giffen, J.D. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire, and Joe Rubinstein from 2005, following up on the story collected as Formerly Known as the Justice League. It was a brave rear-guard action against the spread of all-gritty-all-the-time, but of course doomed to fail.

And Sick is a book by Gabby Schulz (sometimes known as Ken Dahl, though I still don't know what the difference is between the two) about one time he was really, really sick. I think this is about a specific immediate illness, rather than his ongoing battle with herpes, the subject of his earlier Monsters. It looks really visuaully inventive, like that previous book, and probably just as icky.