Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 18, 2023

I have six books from the library, which I was vaguely thinking about parceling out into multiple weeks to inflate my post count - since the review posts won't go live for around eight weeks, it would be totally invisible to you readers - but I have decided that would be too much bother.

And now I've announced what I'm not doing for no good reason. Oh well. That happens when you type: thoughts fall out, even if they're not well-formed or even coherent.

These are some books my local library got for me:

Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle, the first collection of his "aliens talk about normal Earth things in convoluted language, which is weirdly funny" comics. I read the second one a few months ago, and was ready for another dose.

Maybe an Artist is a comics memoir by Liz Montague, who is pretty young and has been published in The New Yorker. (I want to say she was the first Black woman cartoonist to be published there, but surely I have that wrong? In the 2020s?) Anyway, she's youngish and accomplished and this is her story - I think pitched more at kids as a "follow your dreams" thing than at adults as a "here's the real skinny" thing.

From Lone Mountain is a collection of John Porcellino's King-Cat comics - they appeared in floppy-comics form back from 2003-2007 but were collected into this book in 2018. I've read a little Porcellino at vast intervals - Map of My Heart in 2010 and The Hospital Suite in 2018 - and have a vague sense I want to read more. So this is more, and, interestingly, it seems to be right in between the two books I've already read.

Chivalry is yet another one of those "take a good Neil Gaiman short story and turn it into a standalone graphic novel, since his fans will buy everything" projects. No, seriously, there are already four omnibus editions of that material, each one collecting four GNs, before we even get to this 2022 book. It's a big business. I've read a few of those GNs, and all of the original stories at one point or another. This is the one about an older British lady who buys the Holy Grail in a charity shop, and it was illustrated (and, though the book doesn't say, I'm going to guess also scripted) by Collen Doran.

Animal Stories is a book of comics by Peter and Maria Hoey. I think they're brother and sister, I know I've read good things about this but can't remember details of where and what, so I'm going to read it semi-blind. And that's usually a good thing, I find. 

Last is The Adoption by Zidrou (words) and Arno Monin (pictures), translated from the French by Jeremy Melloul. I've been reading a lot of European comics lately, especially from the big Belgo-French publishing world, and hit two Zidrou-written books in the last year that I liked: The Muse and Lydie. So I grabbed this omnibus edition of two bande dessinees about an old man and his relationship with a new adopted granddaughter.