Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 11, 2026

I ordered a batch of book-shaped comics recently - I'd gotten a coupon from the shop that I suppose is my "regular" these years, and hey, a deal is a deal - and they arrived early in the week I was off. That was great timing, since I can now read them during those days off.

(And I say "can now," since I'm writing this on Wednesday, but by the time the post goes live on Sunday, I probably will have already read all of them. Such is the miracle of scheduled posts.)

Anyway, these did come in the mail, but I paid for them:

John Porcellino's coming-of-age memoir Perfect Example. I've read a couple of collections of Porcellino's King-Cat Comics, which are lovely minimalist slice-of-life stories, but somehow I'd missed this one when it was published a few years ago.

The most recent "movie book" from Gilbert Hernandez, Proof That the Devil Loves You. It's part of a long, weirdly metafictional side-series of mostly short GNs that are meant to be movies - bad ones, most of the time - that one of his main characters in his regular stories starred in in her fictional world. Like a lot of things with Hernandez, it's weirdly overcomplicated for reasons that I suspect are deeply important to him but don't necessarily come through to the reader. But that weirdness, even if I don't quite get it, is fascinating.

A newish graphic novel bfromGuy Delisle, Muybridge. I guess this follows Hostage in seeing Delisle making stories about non-fictional things that aren't part of his own life. Previously, his work mostly fell into two buckets: the short books about "Bad Parenting" and the longer memoirs about various things in his life, first the foreign cities he lived in and then Factory Summers a few years ago. This one looks like a biography-in-comics-form of the pioneering 19th century photographer Eadwaerd Muybridge.

I probably got John Cuneo's Good Intentions out of pure prurient interest. Cuneo is an illustrator - maybe also a cartoonist, if you want to argue that captioned drawings automatically put him into that category - whose material tends to the fleshy and uncomfortable. His people are lumpy and middle-aged, their circumstances boring but odd, and this book collects a hundred or so illustrations (some captioned, some not) that I think were all sketchbook work rather than meant for a particular publication.

And last - because I already read it yesterday - is the most recent book by Kim Deitch, How I Make Comics. I'm about to write a full post about it next, so I'll leave it at that here.