Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/13/21

These books all came in from the library, some of them as long as a week and a half ago. And I'm already reading some of them as this post goes live, which is a good thing.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is a graphic novel written by Mariko Tamaki and drawn by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell; it's showed up on a lot of "best of" lists for last year. Tamaki wrote the graphic novels Skim and This One Summer, which I have read, and several Lumberjanes novels, which I have not. (And probably other stuff, too - I don't know that I've paid enough attention and she does this for a living.) I don't know Valero-O'Connell, but I'm always up for a creator with a double-barreled name.

The Hard Tomorrow is the most recent full-length graphic novel from Eleanor Davis, author of You & A Bike & A Road and How to Be Happy and Why Art? I think this one is at least mildly SFnal, or I may be just getting that from the title. Anyway, Davis is excellent, this got good notices, and I finally got my hands on a copy.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 8: My Best Friend's Squirrel is another one on the series of books collecting the series by Ryan North and Eric Henderson, with color by Rico Renzi. (And, as of this book if not earlier, cover credit as well, so I'm making sure to mention him.) I think this series has since ended - this book came out in 2018; I'm running behind - but as far as I've seen SG has not yet been rebooted into a grim & gritty gun-toting pneumatic blonde with a boob window. But it is only a matter of time: Marvel owns her, and Marvel will do something else with her eventually. When it comes to corporate IP, we must always prepare ourselves for the pointless and inevitable disappointment. I've written about the previous collections here over the past few years.

I also got three Giant Days collections -- Volume 11, Volume 13, and Volume 14 -- all of which were written by John Allison and drawn by Max Sarin, with colors by Whitney Cogar. Well, actually, it looks like there are stories in two of the volumes actually drawn by Allison, so give that one an asterisk. This is most of the end of the series; I already have a copy of Vol. 12 on hand, and plan to read them straight through pretty soon. (It has to be "pretty soon," since libraries want their books back in roughly that timeframe.)