Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/7/20

This week a good-sized stack of graphic novels showed up for me at the library....because I requested them, of course.

I'd accept a lot of the horrible things about this world more easily if books I wanted to read were automatically flagged and held for me by my library...don't think that says much about me as a person, but oh well.

All these need to go back quickly, as is the nature of libraries, so I hope to read them all in the next week or so.

A Fire Story by Brian Fies -- the expanded graphic novel version of the twenty pages of comics that he made right after his house burned down in the 2017 wildfires in Northern California. As I type these words, I've just finished my actual post on the book, which will go live later this week. So I don't think it makes sense to say much more here other than: this is a major GN that I have to imagine everyone involved (from author to editor to reader) wishes never happened.

Nobody's Fool by Bill Griffith -- a biography of Schlitze the Pinhead, in comics form. Schlitzie is most famous for appearing in the 1932 movie Freaks (which I have to admit I have never seen), but had a long sideshow, carnival, and random bizarre-showbiz career before and after that. Griffith is most famous for his long-running comic strip Zippy the Pinhead, and that's probably why he was interested in this story -- he's been putting words into the voice of a fictional pinhead for decades, so why not tackle the real story of the most famous real-world pinhead?

(This makes me wonder why "pinhead" isn't considered hate speech of one kind or another -- sure, they're not a race, but it's clearly a visible disability, and we generally don't like terms that are so obviously derogatory. Maybe because it's not really a thing anymore, and only used historically or metaphorically?)

Giant Days, Vol. 7 by John Allison, Max Sarin & Liz Fleming -- I have given up waiting for a fourth Not on the Test Edition book; my patience only extends so far. So I'm now expecting to read the back two-thirds of this comics series from the library, because I still want my shelves to match, and it's better not to have a book at all than to have one that doesn't match.

(Note that I do not actually believe this, but it's a nice way to flounce off, isn't it?)

But, seriously, this is a good series, and I've been waiting to get to it while Boom was criminally failing to keep publishing it in hardcover format for about three years now.

Paper Girls, Vol. 6 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang -- I think this is actually the end of the story, which I was almost-but-not-quite hate-reading from 2016 to 2019, so I'm going to see if I remember anything of the convoluted time-travel plot and decide if I think this wraps it all up neatly. (My guess: no and no, but I'll pretend I have an open mind!) My sense of the earlier books is that writer Vaughan kept throwing in complications because he's a guy who loves complications better than answers -- I will agree that they are more fun, but a good story has to end well -- and artist Chiang did awesome work drawing every last damn thing Vaughan could think of. A lot of people like that model of comic, but I'm much more of a story purist, I'm afraid.

But I am interested enough to want to read it, which is not nothing.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Vol. 2 by Michael Kupperman -- This is the second collection of comics from Kupperman's 2009-2012 series, which I am coming to very, very late. I think the first thing I read of Kupperman's was All the Answers, a serious, later work, but that reminded me that I had Thrizzle Vol. 1 sitting in electronic form on my tablet, so I read that not long afterward. But even that was in 2018, so I'm still catching up.

As I recall, Thrizzle is full of really weird stuff, and Kupperman had an aggressively artificial art style at the time -- see the cover for an example. That's all good for me: I've spent enough years in the content mills that I prefer the really goofy, outlandish stuff. And I think I have some high-quality weirdness here.

The Unsinkable Walker Bean and the Knights of the Waxing Moon by Aaron Renier -- The original Unsinkable Walker Bean graphic novel -- there's no connection whatsoever to Molly Brown as far as I can tell; Walker is a boy in a slightly fantasy/historical version of our world who serves on a naval ship, so "unsinkable" is a claim or hope -- was published a decade ago, and I read and enjoyed it then. This sequel came out two years ago, which is recent enough that I still think of it as having just emerged.

I have no unaided memory of the story of the first book, so it will be interesting to read the new one -- I can remember some of the art (Renier had some very impressive splash pages), but that's about it.

I Know What I Am by Gina Siciliano -- A graphic novel biography of the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi, about whom I don't know very much, by an Italian graphic novelist about whom I know even less.

I'm reading this because I saw a good review/note somewhere that I can no longer remember, and perhaps partially because it's being published by Fantagraphics, and I trust them on classy Eurocomics like this. 

And that's about all I have to say, but I'm adding another line or two here because the new Blogger template looks ugly if the text doesn't run as long as the image. (Again, things only get worse in this worst of all possible worlds: all falls to rack and ruin.)

I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB -- My Return Home by Jacques Tardi -- This is the second part of Jacques Tardi's multi-volume graphic novel about his father's experiences during and right after WW II. I read and reviewed the first one last year, and just noticed that there's a third volume, set after the war, coming out in just a few days.

Tardi's one of the greats of world comics, though the French tropism for single-named creators is confusing when he turns to family stories like this. "I, Rene Tardi -- who is not the person actually making this book, but never mind that...."