Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 26, 2026

Three books for this week - one I bought myself (trying to use an old gift card that didn't go through in the end, curse the luck) and two new books from Tachyon. The Tachyon books will be first, according to my usual rules.

Mary G. Thompson has written short fiction and novels for younger readers, but I think Precious Children is her first novel for adults. It's a SFnal horror novel about cloning, of the replacing-loved-ones style, focused on one family who seem to have awful luck in the mortality of their children but luckily are rich enough that those children can be replaced and their existence continued - the question being how closely that existence continues, and what happens to the person previously using the brain that becomes the newest version of their beloved son. It's just been published by Tachyon.

Also from Tachyon, even more recently published if I can trust the metadata, is a new collection of short fiction by the least positive man in Hard SF, Peter Watts. Fold Catastrophes collects eleven stories originally in various anthologies, websites, and magazines, going back to 2013. There's also a new original story at the end.

And last of the three is the book I bought myself. I've gotten behind on Charles Stross's Laundry-verse novels, possibly because they do try to be substantially more depressing and gloom-soaked than the real world, which has been a tricky thing this past decade. I believe Quantum of Nightmares is the second of the "New Management" series, set officially after the apocalypse, and following Dead Lies Dreaming, which I wasn't super-fond of. This one seems to be less "Peter Pan-inspired goofy young people putting on a show," though, so I hope to give it a try. I also already have the sequel to this on the shelf, and want to get to the supposed final actual Laundry novel The Regicide Report. (Which, come to think of it, I could probably just read without hitting the others first - but it looks even gloomier than Standard Stross, which is incredibly gloomy indeed.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 19, 2026

I'm stacking these posts off into the future again; I'm writing this the morning of Saturday, September 5. Why? Because I already have a "Reviewing the Mail" post for tomorrow and one for next week. And the exact timing of my mail really doesn't matter to anyone.

This time I have one book, from the library; it came in much later than the others I requested at the same time. It didn't come from any farther away; the library system is basically just this one county, anyway. Maybe someone already had it checked out. Anyway, it's here now, and I'll probably read it "today" (two weeks ago as you read this.)

Night Stories is a comics-format collection of "Folktales from Latin America," as the subtitle puts it - Latin America is a huge, diverse region, so I'll have to see if it's one tale from here and one from there or a more focused look at a particular area. It was written and drawn by the Argentine cartoonist Liniers, best-known for his daily strip Macanudo. There also seem to be extensive text features, since this is a book aimed at younger readers (and, more so, at their librarians and teachers, as the ones who will spend the money to buy it).

I suppose it's something of a companion to the earlier book The Dragon Slayer by Jaime Hernandez from the same publisher, which also collected folktales in a comics format. I would be somewhat surprised if any of the stories repeated, but I suppose I'll see.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 12, 2026

Hey, remember last week? This is the the rest of that stuff: books from a few authors that I ordered via Alibris, from a whole bunch of used-book stores, for various reading projects. I'll get to all of these over the next year or three, I expect.

So first I have three books from Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder series:

The second in the series, Bank Shot, in which Dormunder and his crew steal (not rob) a bank.

The one that was my favorite the first time through, Drowned Hopes, a big book from 1990 about trying to retrieve a huge cache of valuables left buried thirty years ago - in a town that has since been abandoned, at the bottom of a reservoir.

Third from Westlake is Bad News, the 2001 novel about a casino heist.

I also have two more serious detective novels from Ross Macdonald:

What seems to be a brand-new, printed-on-demand edition of his 1956 novel, The Barbarous Coast, which isn't what I'd expected from a used-book dealer but I'll definitely take it.

The other one is The Blue Hammer, the last book in the series, from 1976. As I recall, the last two in the series are a bit thinner than the rest, but we'll see if I agree this time through.

And last are two books in the "Collector's Wodehouse" series - all of P.G. Wodehouse's roughly one hundred books, in a uniform trade dress, published in the early years of this century, which I half-collected once and lost thirty or forty of them to a flood.

First up is Kid Brady Stories and A Man of Means collects two story-series from very early in Wodehouse's career. I've never read them, and don't expect much, but the point of a complete library is to include weird little-known things like these.

And then last in this batch of books is Wodehouse's 1921 humorous novel A Gentleman of Leisure, which I also don't think I've ever read.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 5, 2026

I ordered a big batch of used books recently, from multiple sellers. (I'm using Alibris these days, as the one not owned yet by a giant hegemonic behemoth.) About half of them have come in as I type this, so that seems like enough to throw into a post. These are mostly from authors I have "reading projects" about - which means I'm reading a series, or their whole body of work, either in order or over time as I get to it.

Projects can be fun things!

Anyway, here's what's reached me so far, and which I will read at some point (if I don't get hit by a bus).

I read Jimmy the Kid, somewhat puckishly, as part of my Starktober project - reading the whole works of Richard Stark - a decade ago. You see, Jimmy is a book by Donald E. Westlake, in the Dormunder funny-caper-novel series, that is inspired by a book that does not actually exist, Child Heist by Richard Stark. (Donald Westlake also wrote under the name Richard Stark, to make the connection clearer.) I got that one from the library, I think, since I didn't have a copy of the book in the house and I used an old hardcover image for the Jimmy post. (I try to use the cover of the actual edition I read, for pernickety personal reasons.) I'm now planning to read all of the Dortmunder books in order, so I need to have this third book available.

I've been reading P.G. Wodehouse in the "Collector's Wodehouse" series from Overlook Press for ages - I started before my 2011 flood, but, since then, I'm only counting the ones I've read since then and have on a specific shelf. (It gives me an excuse to buy and read books again, especially since I don't have any records or a good memory of what I had pre-2011.) I got two of them in this batch of books.

First up is Ring for Jeeves, a 1953 novel - based on a play, I think - that is the only Jeeves story not narrated by or featuring Bertie Wooster at all. I probably read this when I read all of the Jeeves books in the '90s, but I don't remember ever hitting a Jeeves book not in Bertie's voice, so I dunno.

The other Wodehouse book is Blandings Castle, which I do remember reading - I got to the Blandings books right after Jeeves, I think largely on the recommendation of my former boss Ellen Asher. (She thought Jeeves was OK, but Blandings was sublime. These days, I don't disagree but I really love the Bertie Wooster voice, and also might make a dark-horse recommendation for Uncle Fred.) This isn't (I think) the first time Blandings appeared, but it's pretty early - it's a 1935 collection of stories that's about one-third Blandings and two-thirds "Elsewhere." And from right in the middle of Wodehouse's best period, too, which is a bonus.

I'm also reading through Ross Macdonald's mystery novels about detective Lew Archer - I hit the first one, The Moving Target, this summer, and will probably continue roughly quarterly until I get through them all. But I was missing a few, so I just got:

The 1952 novel The Ivory Grin. I read this one, way back when I was getting into mysteries as a youngster, and I couldn't tell you anything at all about the specifics of this one. I have a vague soup of Lew Archer in my head, and it will be interesting to see what came from which book and what was my own confusion in my teen years. (The only one I have any specific memory of is The Underground Man, which I still think of as the peak of the series.)

The other Macdonald was the 1961 novel The Wycherly Woman, for which all of the random blather above is also true. Blogger wants each image to have enough text to wrap around it to keep it away from the next paragraph, so I'm just typing a bit here to reduce the amount of unsightly white space below. (Probably not enough blathering, though. Never is.)

And last is a Library of America book: Writings by S.J. Perelman. I've spent years grumping about the LoA's tendency to do "good parts" versions of writers I wish they'd do "complete editions" of - Lovecraft is worth keeping in multiple volumes; that old fraud Henry James is not - but I'm clearly an outlier. And I guess I've mellowed a bit over time. I still wish they'd do official omnibuses, because I like to read "books" that I can make posts about here and put down in my reading notebook and count as metrics in a pointless, silly exercise. But a nearly 600-page collection of Perelman - wait, only 600? my old Franklin book is twice that size! - is still a good thing, despite my grumbling. Anyway, Perelman is one of the great funny New Yorker writers, and I think the most distinctive and odd of that crew. I haven't read a big chunk of Perelman for a long time, and I lost my shelf of his individual books in the 2011 flood, so this is a nice thing to have.

Next week, I expect there will be a very similar post, with different titles by many of the same writers, as the other books from this order trickle in. Come back to see if I manage to say anything different - or interesting!

Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 29, 2026

I'm on vacation this last week of American summer, so I gathered books from all directions - mostly in time for the actual vacation. This post will list everything I got from the library, which I will definitely read this week. Next week will be a post about all of the used books that are still trickling in - mostly for longer-term reading projects, so probably not for right now anyway.

The third (and, so far, last) book in the graphic-novel series by Hope Larson about young musicians is All My Friends. (The first two books in the series are All Summer Long and All Together Now.) It came out in 2021, and I knew it was coming - I'd mentioned it when I wrote about Together - but it took me five years to remember to get it into my hands. This one seems to be more serious-business than the first two; Bina's interest in making music has led to actual professional opportunities, which is a lot for a thirteen-year-old.

John Hodgman would be the first person to tell you he's had a weird career - in fact, his later career seems to be largely commentary about how weird his initial public-facing career was, which fits solidly in the capacious "memoir" category but is pretty quirky. Medallion Status claims to be the book about what it is like to be John Hodgman, in the years after he was no longer on TV as often as he was initially. (It may be about something slightly different; I grumped a bit about Vacationland, his previous book, because the publishers tried to push it as "it's just really funny; don't worry about the topic" when it actually had a solid hook they could have used.)

On vacation towards the beginning of the summer, I read Martha Wells's recent fantasy novel Witch King.  (No link yet; my post goes live on Wednesday and let's see if I remember to go back and add it.) That book had a sequel last year, Queen Demon, which I think ends the series. I don't think I've gotten to two books in a series that quickly in several years, but it's the plan this time.

I probably saw a review of Kay Sohini's graphic-novel memoir This Beautiful, Ridiculous City somewhere, but I have no idea where that would have been. It came out last year, and is about how she moved to New York (from India - so kind of a big deal), what drove her to that move and what she found there. I'm being vague because my knowledge of the book is vague; I'm going to have to read it to find out what it's really about, which is the best way to read, I think.

And last is Black Arms to Hold You Up, a newish book (also last year) from firebrand graphic-novelist Ben Passmore (author of, most recently I think, Sports Is Hell). I tend to think Passmore goes too far, but, then again, I am exactly the kind of guy (white, middle-aged, suburban, comfortable) who would think someone like Passmore goes too far. So I keep reading his books. This one is subtitled "A History of Black Resistance," as in violent resistance to state oppression, but I think there are two caveats to that: first, that it's all in an American context. And, second, that there's some level of fictionalized frame story, involving a version of Passmore, that tells the historical sections. 

Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 15, 2026

I was out at the library, and vaguely unhappy with the choices I had at home for my next book to read. (Three big bookcases just isn't enough choice, I guess.) So I was poking around the new arrivals shelves there, and came away with one book:

Joshua Kendall's Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography is just what it says it is, a biography of Doonesbury creator G.B. Trudeau. It came out a couple of months ago from Abrams, and is heavily illustrated, which is a big plus for a biography of a cartoonist: Kendall can describe a strip, and then show it. I'm about halfway through right now, and it's pleasant, though I'm realizing Trudeau had a boring life - a major hazard for the lives of creative types, who mostly live in their own heads. So far, Kendall is impressively well-informed, with lots of interviews of all sorts of people (including the publicity-shy Trudeau himself), so I might just be complaining about Trudeau's actual life, not the book about it.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 25, 2026

There's been an impressive flow of new books coming in, so I'm running these posts further out in the future than perhaps the title would imply. (As I type, it is Sunday the 19th, but I already have a Reviewing the Mail going live today, so this one gets bumped out a week.)

The fourth book of the vacation order (covered last week) arrived recently - which is for a specific reading purpose that will probably be obvious - and I also got three books from the library, which I'll list first in a misguided attempt to create tension.

I might have missed a book in the middle, but The Werewolf at Dusk is (the next?) book of comics stories from David Small, author of the highly lauded 2008 graphic memoir Stitches. (I reviewed it for ComicMix at the time.) Werewolf came out in 2024, and has Small's adaptations of three stories - one of which he's credited as the original author, so I'm not sure if he wrote it in prose and it was published somewhere, or just that he plotted and scripted the comics story - which are all about animals in one way or another. Small is a long-time illustrator, most famously of books for young readers, and won the Caldecott among several other awards.

Mike Dawson is a graphic novelist from my home state of New Jersey - I recently backed the kickstarter for a collection of his short comics - and his new book for young readers is The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James, about a tween boy who has trouble speaking up and what happens when he has to be part of a group project in science class. (I read this yesterday and plan to write about it when I'm done with this post, so I'll leave it at that.)

Yes, graphic novels for young readers are still a big deal, and a huge part of the general comics ecosystem. Both of the above books have a slightly cringe "Pow!" sticker on the spine that I suspect is to the current generation what the SF-rocket-ship was to mine. (And I seriously suspect whether Werewolf is actually for young readers; a librarian might have made a mistake or deliberately paid for the Small book out of a budget that is not entirely correct.)

The third library book, though, is very clearly not aimed at kids, and does not sport a Pow! sticker: the most recent Joe Sacco book, The Once and Future Riot. Following his usual modus operandi, Sacco went somewhere people have killed each other recently for stupid reasons and made non-fiction comics about it - this time it's Uttar Pradesh in India and the two groups are Muslims and Hindus. I don't know if this time he's doing the "this group is clearly the right one and is blameless in every aspect" thing that he sometimes drops into; I suppose I'll see. (There's usually plenty of bad faith and random cruelty and murder on both sides of all the locations he writes about, but everyone has their own viewpoint.)

And the book I paid for is Cox's Fragmenta II, edited by Simon Murphy. See my post three years ago on the first one for something like an explanation of the whole deal - basically, some guy in the 18th century kept huge scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, which ended up in the British Library. That's Cox. And another guy - Murphy - edited a small book with a selection of that stuff in the modern day. And then he did a second one, which is this one. It's random and quirky and entirely made up of small snippets, so you can guess what kind of reading that is.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 18, 2026

This is slightly cheating: I'm writing this the morning of Friday, July 10, and the three books below all arrived earlier this week. But I already have a post about new books going up this Sunday, so this one gets bumped back a week. No one cares about the exact timing anyway.

I was on vacation this week - still am, as of the moment I'm typing this - and wanted some things to read. (Because three big bookcases full of stuff clearly wasn't enough, as often is true.) I ordered some things from that retailer we all wish we didn't use as much as we do, and three of the four books I bought came quickly. (One more is still in transit from somewhere more distant; I imagine I'll post about that when it finally arrives.)

Anyway, this is what arrived Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week - in three separate packages on three separate days for maximum environmental impact, I guess.

For a reading project: The Moving Target, the first of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels. I've already read this, and written a post about it, so what else can I say here? Hmmm. I have a suspicion that this book was printed print-on-demand, if that's interesting. It's the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard edition from 1998, but the copyright page doesn't have a listing of what printing it is. Also, the covers curl somewhat more than usual while reading, the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy, and there's a bunch of blank pages at the end. All of that, in my mind, adds up to POD - but there's no bar code at the end of the book block, so I can't be sure. If it is POD, it's very close to a "real" offset-printed book, which is nice.

Because I like to try to read longer books when I have a few days free to dive into them: Witch King, the beginning of a fantasy trilogy from Martha Wells. (I almost said "new" trilogy, but this is from 2023, is already in paperback, and I think the sequel is out or nearly out.) I'm not quite a quarter of the way into this one, and looking at my days of vacation left, I might not manage to finish it off before Monday's return to work. So far, it's a meaty, complex book with two timelines, but, given its trilogy-starter status, I'm trying not to expect an actual ending here. If I do get one, that can be a pleasant surprise.

And, more or less as an alternate choice if I decided I didn't want to read Witch King next, I also got Jack Vance's 1982 novel Suldrun's Garden. I've been working my way through Vance novel-series over the past couple of years, and I think I've gotten to all of the classic Vance that has been collected into omnibuses. So now this fantasy trilogy is probably next, and then I'll have to figure out where to go from there. I did read this, I think, but it was a long, long time ago - probably in the mid to late '80s, having gotten them from the SFBC a decade or so before I went to work there.

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 from Guy 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.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 4, 2026

I was ordering a movie from the library this week - Knives Out, which I just saw six years after everyone else - and I got a book as well. This is it.

Seek You is a 2021 graphic novel by Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This. I have been thinking of it as new, but I guess I've been thinking that for longer than I thought. The subtitle is "A Journey through American Loneliness," which I suppose explains what it covers as well as any longer explanation I could give here.

I'm expecting to read it quickly - that's the deal with library books - so I'll see what I think of it then.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 13, 2026

It was my birthday last week, and I got a couple of book-shaped things as presents - one from myself (who knows me better?) and one from my older child.

I also got two books from Tachyon during the week since that momentous birthday party, and, given the title of this post series, they need to come first.

Meg Elison has a new short novel, Foundling Fathers, officially publishing later this month. (Though what I have in my hands is a final book, so you may be able to get one, too.) It's a SF novel, in which some shadowy right-wing billionaires are raising clones of "Thomas, John, George, and Ben" - exactly the ones you think, from the title - as part of their usual schemes. Apparently a modern smartphone falls into their hands, which leads to various funny complications.

(I am exactly the kind of person who immediately thinks, "wait, isn't Franklin a good thirty years older than the others? How does that work?" But the whole raised-in-secret, isolated-island-plantation thing is so vastly different from their original lives that this is a really silly, minor quibble at best.)

Also from Tachyon (published last month): Ignore all Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann. I should note that I've never been fond of the "this one company owns everything, and they are Evil and Oppressive, and Our Hero will smash them in the course of the book" kind of story, which this seems to be. (Companies that big and evil and oppressive don't get smashed that way; they wither away when something else crops up or change over time.) It's set on Callisto, where the evil oppressive company is Inspiration, which uses GenAI to something something "own everything and [determine] which stories can be told." Have I mentioned that, after my time in the book-mines, I also have a mild allergy to stories about story-tellers, particularly when that story-telling is Important and Foundational to their Very Identities and the Source of All Good Things in the Known Universe? Also that I think most discourse around AI - especially things that use "GenAI" as the stake in the ground, three years later - is stupid and confused and wrong, on both sides?

So I'm afraid I am very unlikely to enjoy this book, or be able to read it without flames on the side of my face, so I will point you to it, note that you are not me and probably have completely different hobby-horses, and say that Ignore has a bunch of glowing quotes and is notably queer-positive.

Bought for myself: Platform Decay by Martha Wells, the most recent novel in the "Murderbot" series. You probably don't need me to tell you about the series, but I will if you're interested. I don't really know what happens in this book, and I don't much care: I'll read it fairly quickly no matter what.

And last is the big present from my child: a big slipcased thing called The Skyrim Library. There are three books in a very handsome case, each collecting a lot of short material and a lot of art that I think was mostly from in-game materials (the game being Skyrim, of course). It is a cool-looking object that I now need to find an appropriate place on a shelf - and, I hope, also find time to read at least parts of the thing.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 6, 2026

I had my annual visit to the eye doctor this week, which means - since she's in Manhattan near Union Square - taking a whole day off work and using that opportunity to do some shopping at the Strand. I still miss the review-copy bonanza that store used to be, but all things decline into the West, I suppose, and it's a big, pretty-good standard indy book store these days.

Here's what I found on this trip:

I am about three decades late starting to read Christopher Brookmyre - is he even still writing these days? - but I've vaguely thought about his stuff pretty much all that time. This trip, I found a copy of his first novel Quite Ugly One Morning, which is a short humorous thriller, and I figured I will have a better chance of reading it if it's on the shelf.

Tom Gauld had a new book of science cartoons late last year: Physics for Cats. I'm a big fan of Gauld; he's one of the few cartoonists whose books I still buy in actual physical form and keep, so take that as a glowing recommendation.

I'm still a couple of books behind on Nick Hornby, but I seem to be catching up: I grabbed a copy of Just Like You, his 2020 novel. I'm pretty sure it's a story about middle-class English people with love trouble: this one is about a fortyish woman who becomes the December in a May-December relationship - I think, from hints in the back-cover copy, that the chap she picks up to be May is also Black, or similarly "clearly unsuitable" for her.

Somehow I also got behind on Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries, which I was reading consistently for twenty-plus years. I think Blonde Faith is the first one I missed - there are several more, including one more I already have - so I may be able to catch up.

I saw the movie made of Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats, way back near when it came out., And I've read several of his other books of reportage. But I never read this one - now I can.

And last is a collection of miscellaneous travel pieces by Paul Theroux: Sunrise with Seamonsters. As far as I can tell, he's had a book like this for roughly each decade of his career - this was the first one, starting with short pieces from the late '60s.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/2/2026

I think these two books actually arrived last Saturday (April 25), but I didn't get time to write about them until now. (Now being the next Saturday. It's all very Spaceballs.)

Anyway, two books came in from Tachyon, both of which were recently published. Here's what I can tell you about them:

A new collection of stories by Samantha Mills: Rabbit Test and Other Stories. I think this is actually her first collection, and it has thirteen stories: one of them original to this collection, the rest reprinted from the usual wide range of outlets from about the past decade. The title story won the Nebula, Locus and Sturgeon awards, and Mills has also won a Compton Crook award. This one hit stores on April 21.

And a debut novel told in a very modern epistolary way (emails, chats, and more exotic postings): Justin Feinstein's Your Behavior Will Be Monitored. This one came out on April 7th, and is a satirical novel about AI, in which a copywriter is training a new bot under pressure, as his company barrels towards an ever-accelerating product release. (There seems to be a bit of John Sladek in the set-up, which I am absolutely here for.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of March 28, 2026

One book this week - it actually arrived in the mail a week ago on Saturday, but I didn't have time to post for last Sunday, and no one cares that much anyway.

The book is the recently Kickstarted collection of Mike Dawson's comics, Fun Time Omnibus, Vol. One, which - like a lot of Kickstarted projects - is probably not actually available generally right now. But I would not be surprised if Dawson has it on a webstore eventually. It collects three issues of his self-published 'zine of the same name, plus (I think) some random other comics from various places. (I've seen Dawson in the NY Times a few times over the past year or two - I think both in that page-two space in the Metropolitan section and in the Book Review - so maybe that material, or short comics from his website, or both, or other things.)

Anyway, this is now a book, I'm going to read it, and you probably can't find it right now if you wanted to - but maybe you'll have a chance later, if you want to make a note.

Also, the final cover is slightly different from the version I have here from the Kickstarter page - all the lettering is hand-drawn and new, with "Fun Time" slightly different and the 3D effect in a darker shade of the purple color.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 28, 2026

I got one book from the library this week, and, continuing the theme from last week, it is physically larger than I expected. I'm getting much more of an upper-body workout from my books lately than expected.

That book is the most recent graphic novel by Peter Kuper: Insectopolis: A Natural History. As best I can tell, it's a pop-science book in comics form telling the history of the vast phylum of Arthropoda. (OK, I'm cheating slightly. I was hoping Insects would have their own Kingdom, but they don't - they're Animalia like most of us. And Arthopodia includes things that aren't insects, who all sit within the Class Insecta. But that isn't nearly as much fun to type out.)

The big deal here, for anyone not aware, is that insects are dying out in vast numbers, due to human activity, over the past few decades. And they are an important base level to a lot of ecosystems, which means the extinction of various insect species is A Bad Sign. Kuper has never been the most positive storyteller - he always seems to gravitate to things that are broken, lost, or horrible in various ways - so I expect this will be depressing in multiple ways.