Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/13/18

This week I have books from Category Two (library) and Category Three (purchased), and here they are:

Category Two:

Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga, Vol. 3 by Jiro Kuwata -- I covered the first two volumes previously in these pages; these books collect Batman stories from Japan in the late '60s created in the wake of (and somewhat in the style of) the 1966 TV show. I think this is the end, and I think that these books -- unlike the hey-look-at-this-crazy-thing Chip Kidd book Bat-Manga that preceded them -- reprint the stories complete and in order, or at least as close to that as could be managed fifty years later.

Captain Marvel: Earth's Mightiest Hero, Vol. 2 by Kelly Sue DeConnick with Jen Van Meter and fourteen different artists, plus colorists and letterers. (See my post on the first volume.) This turns out to be more event-epic than I expected, collecting five issues of Cap's comic, issues of two different Avengers titles, and two Avenging Spider-Mans for good measure. So I expect I will not find this terribly to my tastes -- but I'm trying to read a book a day this year, and it's here, so I'm sure I will read it.

Verax: The True History of Whistleblowers, Drone Warfare, and Mass Surveillance by Pratap Chatterjee and Khalil. Chatterjee is the executive director of CorpWatch and author of two (prose) books on Haliburton and the Iraq war; Khalil is a political cartoonist and illustrator of the graphic novel Zahra's Paradise. It's about drones, to be very reductive -- the ones that spy on people and the ones that kill people.

Category Three:

Look Back and Laugh: Journal Comics by Liz Prince. This is, um, journal comics by Liz Prince, who has previously done books like Tomboy and Alone Forever and Delayed Replays.

3 Story is a new expanded edition of Matt Kindt's 2009 graphic novel, which I covered here not too long afterward.

Strong Female Protagonist, Book Two continues the story of Alison Green, former teen superhero, collecting another batch of strips from the webcomic. As with the first volume, it's written by Brennan Lee Mulligan and drawn by Molly Ostertag. I seem to only read this in print; the webcomics I read online I mostly don't buy print collections for. (I don't understand it; all I can do is try to describe it.)

Nexus Omnibus, Vol. 5 collects issues 53 to 65 of the '80s-'90s First series, plus issues 2-4 of the related Next Nexus series from the same time period. The book is credited to Mike Baron and Steve Rude, though a lot of the art inside isn't by Rude -- this is the period when he started to take longer and longer breaks from Nexus to do other work. (I recently covered the first nine Nexus Archives books -- a separate and slightly earlier reprint series -- and that made me want to get the back half of Nexus and read that through, too.)

Beanworld Omnibus, Vol. 1 is a giant slab of Larry Marder's quirky comic, collecting the first twenty-one issues of the Tales of the Beanworld comic, originally published from 1984 to 1993. I've heard about Beanworld since the mid-80s, but I've never actually read it -- it looks like the kind of thing I would like, so I don't have a good reason why it's taken so long to give it a chance. Well, except that the world is huge and full of more things than we can ever experience, no matter how much we want to.

Kaijumax, Season Three: King of the Monstas is, obviously, the third collection of Zander Cannon's kaiju-in-prison saga. You could check out my posts on the first two volumes, if you wanted to.

Memoirs of a Very Stable Genius is a collection of personal comics -- both multi-page comics-format stories and single panels -- by cartoonist Shannon Wheeler. It has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do directly with that other person who insists he is a very stable genius.

The Swords of Heaven, The Flowers of Hell is a 1979 graphic novel primarily by Howard Chaykin, from a Michael Moorcock outline, set in the world of Moorcock's Eternal Champion Cycle, subseries Erekose. I don't think I've ever read it, so this recent reprint was a good excuse to take a look.

And last is Dork by Evan Dorkin, a big fat collection of all of the comics from his miscellaneous comics series of the same name, which has had scattered issues for the last twenty-five (maybe more) years.