Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/19/22

This is needlessly complicated, and explaining it serves no purpose, but....

So I was buying some books online recently, taking advantage of a sale at a comics-shop's online presence. Those books take a while to get packed and shipped, so I haven't seen them yet. But there were a couple of things that I couldn't get from that shop, which are holding up me reading other things for position-in-the-series reasons.

So I ordered these two books from the massive hegemonic retailer - yes, you know the one - because they were in stock and I could get them quickly. And, yes, they arrived before the other books, which I'll list here eventually, once the box shows up.

So these are books I bought so I can read them before other books I bought to read. Simple as mud, right?

Trese 2: Unreported Murders by Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldismo is, as the title subtly indicates, the second in a great urban-fantasy series of comics stories. I saw the original Philippine edition of the first three books in the series over a decade ago, and raved about them then. (See my post for ComicMix partially about the first two Trese books.) I lost my copies of the original editions in a 2011 flood, but they're finally getting published on this end of the Pacific: see my new post on the first book from last year. There's also a Netflix series, so all your friends might be talking about this soon. (Or "they" might "ruin" it: you never know with adaptations and fan reactions.) Anyway, these are great urban fantasy stories: taut, dangerous, with gloriously inky art from Baldismo. Read 'em.

Steeple collects the first series of comics of that name - there's since been a second one, and I think at least one further online story yet uncollected - by John Allison. I also think this is set in his common universe, along with Giant Days and Bad Machinery and Scarygoround and Bobbins, though this seems to be a "stuff going on over there, not in Tackleford" story, like Giant Days. I've had the second book for a while, but had a hard time finding this one, and have been avoiding reading the online comics until I could start from the beginning.

And that has been painful, because Allison is one of my favorite comics creators, and I see his stuff (whatever it is at the moment; right now he has a goofy Giant Days/Batman crossover running which is wonderful but makes me wonder if the Warner lawyers will come knocking) in my RSS feeds pretty much daily.