Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/5/20

This is the week where a nice librarian called the house and The Wife thought she said "none of the books Andy reserved are available." And that confused her momentarily, since why bother to call? [1] But the real number was nine, and here are those nine library books (all of which I hope to read by the end of the year, and maybe even get posts up for many of them by then):

H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, The First Volume by Gou Tanabe -- As far as I can tell, I've never read any of the manga created by Tanabe. But I do have an interest in Lovecraftian stories, and reviewed one book-length comics adaptation of Mountains of Madness (by I.N.J. Culbard) a few years back. This particular adaptation is longer than one volume -- one more is already published, and I'm not sure if that's the end to begin with.

It also looks like Manga Alan Moore is staring out of the cover at the upper right, daring me to read this, and who am I to gainsay Manga Alan Moore?

Are You Listening? by Tillie Walden -- Walden burst out a couple of years ago with a really strong memoir, Spinning, about her childhood as a competitive skater (among other things; that was the big through-line). She had a couple of shorter books before that which I haven't managed to track down yet, and followed it up with On a Sunbeam, an idiosyncratic and deep SFnal story originally published on the web. This book, if I have the sequence right, was the official follow-up to Spinning: Walden's next big book conceived and produced as a book, set in the modern world.

But that may be me still talking like a publishing person: for actual readers, creators make books and we read them. Some of the books might be exactly what we want, some not quite, and some much too far away -- I imagine Sunbeam's SF might have been too much for some readers who wanted more real queer girls in a real queer world. (Though the world of Sunbeam is very queer, in several overlapping senses of the word.) Listening is clearly that follow-up, about two young women -- I think upper teens, maybe not -- who meet each other on the run in what mostly seems to be our America.

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 4 by Herge -- I have to admit, once again, that I never read Tintin as a kid. The books were available in the US, and I'm pretty sure I saw them here and there, but I wasn't really a comics reader as a kid to begin with. I wanted real books, with lots of words, and in particular I wanted the ones on the other side of the library, in the adult section. (Admittedly, mostly the Mystery and SF sections, for those who deduct points for genre, but sucks to those people anyway.)

So comics for kids were not on the radar after the age of, oh I don't know, seven or eight?

I started Herge's famous series a few years back, and plan to read the official omnibus reprints and then hit the two semi-expunged scandalous books (due to racism or tedious didacticism) last. We'll see if that actually happens, but I have already hit omnibuses one, two, and three. And now I'm up to the fourth one, with stories from the end of WWII and soon afterward.

The Arab of the Future, Vol. 3 by Riad Sattouf -- On the one hand, I do think there should be a limit as to how much any one person can string out retelling his own childhood for profit. But on the other, I have to admire someone so devoted to building a career entirely out of telling the story of his own life in smaller and smaller chunks for each book. (See the first volume, covering Sattouf's life to age six, and the second, covering roughly his first year of school.)

I say this in part because I know there already is an Arab of the Future 4 lurking out there, and in part because I know enough about publishing to assume that 5 is either in process or the subject of intense discussions among Sattouf, his agents, and his publishers.

And in part so I can quote myself about the second book:

one can hope that he's not going full A la Recherche du Temps Perdu on us here, with successive books of memoir covering every-shorter periods of time in his ever-more scrutinized childhood.

On the other hand, maybe that would be pretty cool. So we might be in for The Arab of the Future 25, covering the hours from noon to seven PM of May 23, 1991, around 2040 or so.

Giant Days, Vol. 8 by John Allison, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming & Whitney Cogar -- Now here we see my biggest problem with the current Blogger format (and it's not the crazy line-spacing, although that is both horrible and apparently completely uncontrollable within the laughingly named WYSIWYG editor). Realistically, what I have to say here is "coming back to this series, which I love," and probably tossing in links to the earlier books, since I'm compulsive like that.

But that will leave a big chunk of white space, which is even worse than the horribly crazy line-spacing, and I just cannot deal with both of those things going wrong in one post. (And moving to Wordpress at this stage in the life of blogs, particularly this blog, would be utterly stupid. I mean, I haven't even bothered to tweak the template or clean up the ridiculously outdated blogroll for more than a decade, and I'm going to migrate the whole thing? Please. I know me better than that.)

So, anyway, instead I'll just rant about something I'm getting free on the Internet, since that's what we do in the 21st century. Thanks for your time. Here's some stuff I wrote before about Giant Days.

By Night, Vol. 2 by John Allison, Christine Larsen, & Sarah Stern -- And here's the same problem, but even more so. I like Allison's work, and I realized the library has the second and third volumes collecting this series. Since I enjoyed the first book but didn't love it, buying the others was lower on my priority list -- but now I can still read them relatively quickly and maybe change my mind about the series.

And that's all I had to say.

But that will leave that horrible white gap. And I actually can do something about the white gap, as I cannot about the line-spacing. (Which, honestly, bothers me even more, particularly since there's nothing I can do to fix it.)

So I have inserted the image, and I am typing here until I fill up the space with lines of text. It's not the point of blogging, but does blogging even have a point in 2020? (all work and no play makes johnny a dull boy allworkandnoplaymakesjohnnyadullboy) That should just about do it. Maybe one more line just to be sure, as a vamp to fill up space with things that look like meaning. My apologies to those who are actually reading this.

Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, Vol. 1 by Jon Rivera, Gerard Way, Michael Avon Oeming, & Nick Filardi -- I am a cynical old man, so I didn't really read any of the "Young Animal" books as they were coming out. (Well, also, I stopped reading floppy comics around a decade ago -- had mostly stopped to begin with, and when my 2011 flood destroyed every last comic I'd ever bought, I took that as a clear end.) In fact, I'm pretty sure the imprint petered out, but I'm not totally sure it's not running now, or "not officially dead," even if nothing is currently being published.

But I am also old enough to be vaguely interested in "DC dusts off a stupid old character and lets new creators do crazy stuff with him," since that worked really well for the proto-Vertigo books in the '80s and a lot of Vertigo in the '90s. (And I am, as noted, old enough to remember that.)

So: I have no personal interest in Cave Carson, or Gerard Way, who I keep wanting to define as "in some sort of Pop Band" as if I were several decades older than I actually am. But I'm willing to check out crazy pseudo-Vertigo stuff on occasion, and I guess this counts as an occasion.

Shade the Changing Girl, Vol. 2 by Cecil Castellucci, Marley Zarcone, Ande Parks, Marguerite Sauvage, & Kelly Fitzpatrick -- More Animals Which Are Young! I read the first collection of this series a couple of years ago, since I was doing a Book-A-Day run, and that always gets me diving into odder and less likely things. (Which, you might realize, is one of the reasons I do it.)

The Castellucci Shade is a reboot of the '90s Shade, mostly written by Peter Milligan and drawn by Chris Bachalo (and which I also re-read part of two years ago), which was itself a comprehensive reboot of the original series from the '60s by Steve Ditko (which I have never read, and which I doubt anyone younger than me has read for pleasure any time in the past forty years).

That's a lot of boots up the ass of a comic about a wacky guy in a silly costume fighting crime, but, hey, corporate comics, amirite? If you own an asset, you want to leverage that asset every last chance you can get. And so as long as there's a thing called DC Comics -- and don't think I'm claiming that's necessarily all that much longer; I can read tea-leaves as well as anyone -- they will keep pumping out books like this, in hopes some old crap they own will make them some new money.

And it may be good, who knows! I liked a lot of things about the first volume of the Castellucci Shade.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7 by Ryan North, Erica Henderson, & Rico Renzi -- And last for this week is a series that ran a long time, and has finally ended, and which I enjoyed but read substantially after publication. So I'm still somewhere in the middle -- I think there are fourteen volumes, so maybe exactly in the middle -- but maybe this renewed burst of reading will see me through to the end of the stories about Doreen Green and her furry pals.

If not, not.

Anyway, here's what I wrote about the earlier books: one, two, three, four, five, six, and the obligatory OGN. (And I keep wanting to turn "OGN" into some early-90s rap thing, but I am far too white and suburban to even make a decent joke in that direction.)

[1] It was also the week where The Wife accidentally applied for a job at Chic-Fil-A and then thought the manager was from "Triple A" when he called, so it's more than normally sitcom-wacky in my household the past few days.

No, seriously: both of those are things that happened in the last few days right in front of me. If I start hearing a laugh track, it won't even surprise me.