Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/4/21

I got some stuff from the library this week, so I might as well tell you folks about those books, right? Here's what I have on hand right now:

Asadora!, Vol. 2 by Naoki Urasawa - I've read the first volume, and written a post about it. (Nearly a month ago, in fact.) But that hasn't gone live yet: you'll see it in another ten days or so. This book has absolutely no descriptive copy about the story at all; the flaps natter on at length about Urasawa, but that's it. From a quick glance, it seems to follow immediately from the first volume, though the first chapter seems to have a completely new viewpoint character. My understanding is still that the series as a whole covers a few discrete moments in this girl's life, so there will be big time-jumps....but I think that won't be until after the end of this book at the earliest.

Black Hammer: The Quantum Age by Jeff Lemire and Wilfredo Torres - But, Andy! you say: I'm pretty sure you haven't really liked any of the Black Hammer books you've read so far. Why are you keeping on with the series?

Well, it's a good question. The library has the books, they're in a specific order, and I don't hate them, I suppose: the series annoys me in ways that make me think about modern superhero comics, and has the bonus of doing that without having to read or buy anything owned by a giant multinational corporation. So I'm not anticipating exactly a hate-read: I try to be emotionally healthier than that. But there will be elements to hate, I'm pretty sure.

This also is the "Marvel 2099" of the series, which promises even more opportunities for me to dunk on silly concepts, so...how could I resist?

The Adventures of Tintin, Reporter for "Le Petit Vingeieme," in the Land of the Soviets by Herge - It's the first book in the boys-adventure series, and I've read all of the non-suppressed books at this point. This one is much longer, at nearly 150 pages. The art is much simpler - I might say "cruder," but I think a lot of the difference is that this book was drawn to reproduce in a newspaper. And I'm given to understand that it's much more right-wing propaganda than the later books, which I'm interested in examining. But there also seem to be lots of pages of our boy reporter running around, in grave danger, pursued by various nefarious personages. So I'm interested to see how this is different from the mature Tintin books, and just how lousy it actually is.

(The second Tintin book, Tintin in the Congo, is the racist one: it seems to be basically unavailable in any form right now.)