Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 11, 2022

This week, I got a few books from the library, which means, of course, that they're things I not only wanted, but specifically asked for. And also that I don't own them; they will need to go back in a few weeks, so other people can read them in turn.

But they're in my hands right now; this is what they are:

Billionaires is a graphic novel - or maybe a collection of shorter graphic stories, I guess - by Darryl Cunningham. Cunningham is British, he seems to have been doing non-fiction comics for some number of years now, he got this book published by Drawn & Quarterly, and I was about to say "I've never read his books before." But I've gotten cagey in my middle age, so I checked this blog's back numbers, and found I did read a previous Cunningham joint: How to Fake a Moon Landing, which I quite liked back in 2014. This new book provides sketches of the lives of Jeff Bezos, the Koch brothers, and Rupert Murdoch, and I suspect Cunningham may not be totally in favor of all the things those grab-handing pasty bastards have done.

Tunnels was Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan's new book for 2021; I'm amused to see it was also from D&Q. Modan's previous books include The Property and Exit Wounds and Jamili and Other Stories. (As I add them, two of those links are currently not working correctly; the ComicMix domain seems to have been hijacked by someone. I live in hope that my old mediocre reviews will return, someday.) The back cover has quotes rather than a description, but there's an explainer about the Ark of the Covenant on the first few pages, and it seems to be about archeology. I would not be hugely surprised if the other kind of "tunnels" - the ones Palestinians make to smuggle themselves or weapons or food or whatever underneath their tight Israeli-controlled borders - are also in the mix somehow.