Allowable Prejudices

A biff on the conk to Elizabeth Blachner, who committed this sentence:

If you’re going to be so self-actualized as to try to create a loving, honest, authentic life, why would you do it in the suburbs?

during a BookSlut review.

That's it: don't bother to actually make arguments; just assert things. It makes intellectual life much easier.

I'm glad to hear than "honesty" and "authenticity" are the unique qualities of wherever the fuck Blachner happens to live.

(The rest of the review veers between similar unreasoning prejudices of people who happen to be a sigma closer to the norm and some actual insights.)

Wiley Road Show, Take 1

You know you're in a third-rate American city when...

on the way from the airport, you pass a building named Municipal Auditorium.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/3

The gods of publicity are turning their back on me, I know it. Only two things arrived this week, so I'll have to stick some things I bought onto the end to bulk this out. But, first, here's what those few wonderful publicists did send to me this week:

From Del Rey Manga, the first volume of a new series called Toto! by Yuko Osada. I have no idea if "Toto" is the name of the dog -- though that's quite possible -- but the boy whose shoulder he's on is named Kakashi. From a very, very cursory poke through the pages, I think I can detect the influence of both Masashi (Naruto) Kishimoto and Hayao (Princess Mononoke) Miyazaki, but I could simply be fixated on airships and the main character's goggles. This will be published on May 13th.

A new series of Dungeon books is starting from NBM, under the umbrella title "Monstres" and featuring stories written by series creators Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim but illustrated by other French comics artists. Volume 1: The Crying Giant has two stories: one illustrated by Jean-Cristophe Menu, head of the comics publisher L'Association; and one illustrated by an artist known as Mazan. (The Crying Giant also has a useful graphic to show how all of the various Dungeon series are connected -- and that's something I've been wondering myself.) The Crying Giant will be published in June.

And then here are some of the things that I picked up on trips to comic shops this week. (It was Free Comic Book day on Saturday, which I see I neglected to mention ahead of time.) I paid my own money for them, so no publicists will get their wings if I review them:

Path of the Assassin Volume 10: Battle for Power Part 2 from Dark Horse sees Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima adding another three hundred-odd pages to their long, engrossing sagas of samurai battles in pre-modern Japan. At least, I think it does: I haven't actually opened the shrink-wrap yet.

Fantagraphics has published the latest book in their Complete Peanuts series, including all of the strips from 1967 and 1968, wrapped up in an elegant design from Seth. We all know that this is one of the very few indispensable comics projects currently being published, right?

I also got the next (for me) collection of the Brian Michael Bendis/Mike Avon Oeming Powers comic -- the one about cops in a world of superheroes. It was volume 9, Psychotic, and I see that, with this, I'm only two books behind. I expect more mayhem and unfinished sentences, and probably creeping superheroism. (And I will say that reading these does not make we want to start picking up Bendis's mainstream superheroes. Of course, I have minimal interest in anybody's mainstream superheroes, so that doesn't mean much.)

The big collection of Matt Wagner's two Batman Grendel stories finally came out, so I got that as well. Though I do wish Wagner would actually move forward with something new -- the third Mage series, stories about a Grendel who isn't that psychotic asshole Hunter Rose, anything but more Batcrap. Though I guess Batcrap generally pays better than creator-owned stuff, and I don't begrudge Wagner making a living. He's just too good to be wasting his time doing Year 1.5 bullshit all the time. (Long-winded complaint about corporate-owned long-underwear characters deleted here.) I will note that this was solicited as Batman/Grendel -- note well that particular bit of punctuation -- and that the cover on BN.com calls it Batman Vs. Grendel, but the book itself refuses all punctuation or explanation to call itself merely Batman Grendel, as if it were a law firm.

The next collection of the Hellboy sidebar series B.P.R.D. follows only a couple of months after the last one, which is weird. Still, I saw Killing Ground (as usual, written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and John Arcudi and illustrated by Guy Davis), and I grabbed it.

On the other side, there's the long-delayed graphic novel The Facts In The Case Of The Departure Of Miss Finch, illustrated by Michael Zulli from Neil Gaiman's original short story. The book doesn't say, exactly, who adapted the story into a comics script, which my cynicism takes as an indication that it was Zulli -- Dark Horse would probably have made it clear if Gaiman had done a new script.

And last for this week is The Education of Hopey Glass, the newest collection of the Jaime Hernandez half of Love & Rockets.

Another Promoted Comment

Step 1: some people start an online Harry Potter RPG about a repressive government in 1985 and call it Hexennacht. [Edit: originally named "Kristallnacht," changed to Hexennacht quietly on that page without making reference to the change.]

Step 2: James Nicoll links to it, not explicitly saying anything but implying that we should all disapprove.

And then I got grumpy, as I am wont to do, and commented thus at James's LJ. I'm rerunning it here because, as always, I agree with myself:

I'm not Johan, but my reaction was very similar to his -- that's why they named it what they did, because it's supposed to immediately invoke those feelings. (Their timing may have been unfortunate, but that's a side issue.)

Are we now saying that no forms of art can use names in any way derived from nasty historical events? Or that only those events that are within recent memory are forbidden? Or maybe only those events with large, organized groups who will complain loudly?

Or is it that an RPG isn't "art" enough to be worthy? There have been novels, plays, paintings and plenty of other artistic interpretations of kristallnacht, and I've never seen an attack like this on them. I suspect this is mostly a high art/low art snobbery -- that games aren't "important" enough to address issues like this, or that they're too tainted by commerce, or something similar.

Just a few days ago, I read a manga story called "Hell," by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, from 1971, about a photographer sent to Hiroshima right after the blast. It's a damn powerful story, but it's also low art about a major, horrible, recent historical event. Is that impermissible? Is it worse because that was much closer to the event, or acceptable because it was by a Japanese man?

Would "Hexennacht" be OK if the organizers were Jewish and explicitly linked it to the Holocaust? Would it be better or worse if it were a reference to the Armenian genocide?

Personally, if there was a similar game involving evil wizards flying dragons into buildings in NYC to kill massive numbers of Muggles, I'd still have no problem with it.

Art is how humanity turns life into memory, and memory into history. The response "you can't say that" is never appropriate for a work of art. This kind of whiny nudnik-ism does no one any good.


Also, James, if you're going to do these "oh, look at these horrible people; let's all cluck behind our hands and show how morally superior we all are" posts, at least get the facts right -- the game is called Hexennacht (or was), not kristallnacht. It's a small but telling error.

And, as a final point, there are at least 32,000 Google hits for "hexennacht;" it appears to already exist as a word. So, all you offended ones, go forth and complain everywhere you can find it.

I am surprised to note how much I have internalized the Scott McCloud theory of art, but there it is.


Edit, early in the morning: Well, it was called "Kristallnacht" at first, which is slightly more tone-deaf than I'd thought, but doesn't change my essential point. (Except for the point at the end, where I was just wrong.) So I commented again:

From the comments here and elsewhere, it looks like this was originally called "Kristallnacht," thought the linked page doesn't make any reference to that now. (I wonder why?)

I apologize for missing that the first time through...but, James, I do think you're doing a lot of throwing raw meat out these days, and I wonder why.

I also think the dinks running the game have a bad case of tone-deafness, and are rude to boot, but that doesn't particularly matter. The bleating against them is mostly "but you're hurting and offending people," as if that were some sort of Stop-Everything card. People get offended; people get their feelings hurt. If that's the worst thing that happens to you today, stand up and cheer.

Again, I think the Internet is far too prone to dogpile onto things because some group -- and those groups are many and varied -- doesn't like them. And the reply of "you've offended me, so now you have to change" is appalling. If you're that easily offended, you probably shouldn't be on the Internet in the first place, where far worse things are lurking.

My Weird Weekend

I'm writing this from a hotel room high in the Ritz-Carlton Sarasota, a room that came complete with a balcony from which I can see the water (without even stretching around a corner). Yesterday I was running about with Thing 2 while The Wife and Thing 1 roughed it in the woods; it's been an eventful few days.

Perhaps I should back up and take this straight through.

Friday was an only slightly frenzied day at work, given that it was the last working day before Sales Meeting. (Which every other publisher calls Sales Conference; Wiley doesn't do anything just because everyone else does.) There are two possibilities for why I wasn't run ragged. Either, as I hope, I got what I needed to do early, and my line of books isn't big and flashy and trade-y to begin with. Or -- and this is what I'm pretty sure isn't the case, since I've rechecked the schedule of meetings a dozen times over the last week -- I've forgotten something of massive importance. Well, we'll see.

We also had a department lunch out for a colleague who's going to be going on maternity leave soon, which was the usual fun. (It's a nice group to begin with, and who doesn't like gala luncheons?) Partway through, I realized that I was the only one of the bunch who already has kids, which made me feel old.

Then I had to hit my comics shop, which is no longer "local" in any sense, but I can't quite give it up. (Midtown Comics by the Port Authority -- if there was a comparable store anywhere reasonable in Jersey, I'd switch in a minute, but there isn't.) And going to the comics shop generally means taking a bus back out into Jersey, and...I've been spoiled by trains now. I take the train every day, and it has absolutely spoiled me.

See, on a train you go smoothly, usually through interesting scenery (either through bits of nature or the backs of industrial areas, both of which have stuff to look at and think about if you feel like it), with a more comfortable ride, with more space, and all by yourself on the track. On a bus, you're stuck on the road with ten thousand idiots riding one to a SUV, in a herky-jerky stop-and-go motion, and crammed up against someone who doesn't like you either.

Once you go to a train, you just can't go back. It's like being cast out of Eden. I have the knowledge of good and evil now...

Eventually, I got home, grabbed dinner, and drove by the house -- I thought I was going to Thing 2's baseball game -- and stopped, because my mother-in-law's car was there. She was watching my younger son, and hadn't taken him to the game because my wife had been all morose about the weather and talked her out of it.

(The Wife had headed off, during the day, to a Cub Scout Weebelo campout for Thing 1, after waiting for the guys to deliver and install our new washing machine -- which I needed to do laundry so I could go on this trip. My family for the last three days has been like an intricate meshing of gears, where any misstep would cause calamity.)

So mother-in-law went home, and Thing 2 and I settled into our boy-dad time together. We stayed up late (late for him, at least) playing videogames, and then I put him to bed.

Yesterday, he slept late, so I did, too. (Until 8! That's late for me these days.) I let him have a lazy couple of videogame hours -- why not? -- and then set off on our errands. First was a birthday party at a horse ranch fifteen minutes up the road -- I never cease to be amazed at how rural it gets so quickly when I head north from where I live; it's rod-and-gun country almost immediately -- which was cold and damp and foggy but not actually raining. (And that was very good, since real rain would have sent us all to move the festivities into the barn. It's not a cute picturesque red barn, either, but a real, modern, concrete working barn full of horse stalls and other indications that horses frequent that vicinity.) The kids got to go on a hayride and ride ponies, but what they liked best, inevitably, was running up the hillside above the party area, where there was a huge exposed rock that they could play around on.

After that, Thing 2 and I went off for the possibly even more important festivities: Free Comic Book Day! (I've had to miss it once or twice in recent years, due to the Nebula Awards, so I guess there's one bright point to losing my skiffy job.) We went to Joker's Child in Fair Lawn, a decent (if very superhero-focused) shop that I only seem to make it to once a year for FCBD. But I actually spent some money, so that should be OK.

One of the things I bought -- Franklin Richards: Collected Chaos Digest -- was for the boys, and it was a great thing to get, since Thing 2 read it in the car during our next leg of the drive, read it while I was getting a haircut (I desperately needed one), and read it while I was buying some new clothes for Sales Meeting (yes, it's officially casual dress, but I'd prefer clothes that don't make me look like a bum while I'm trying to convince them of the merits of Wiley GAAP 2009). So I don't want to hear anybody complaining about how Franklin Richards is just a Calvin & Hobbes rip-off -- which, by the way, Thing 2 has been also reading a lot of lately, though he still likes Garfield best (what can you do? he's seven) -- when it can keep an antsy boy's attention like that for more than an hour. Sumerak and Eliopolus, I salute you.

Then we collapsed in exhaustion at my mother's house for our weekly dinner -- well, I wanted to collapse, but we ended up playing a complicated tag game with a Chinese Yo-yo, so we kept busy. Then we finally went home, and, as we were thinking about bed, The Wife and Thing 2 came home, having given up on a second night in the woods after the first one was just Too Damn Cold. So there was a flurry of laundry and showers -- me doing their laundry, to get the campfire smell and we-really-hope-not-bugs out of everything; them showering to warm up -- and then off to bed. Even The Wife collapsed early, since she hadn't slept the night before.

Then this morning was more laundry, more packing, trying to work on some ComicMix reviews (without much luck, though I hope there will be one tomorrow), and then running off to the airport. I have learned to park in the big structure right by the terminals instead of the "economy" lots out in Upper Lower Slobbovia, which made the whole process much nicer. I also managed to only have carry-ons this time, which somewhat mitigated the fact that I was in the back-row window seat, and hence almost precisely the last person off the plane.

I rode to the Ritz-Carlton in one of the designated Wiley cars with someone much more important in the company than I am, and made some light chatter on the way. Then I was overawed by the hotel, which is really too fancy for someone like me. But I'll take it.

Tomorrow is a light day, so I might get out into the city of Sarasota to poke around -- I've been in Florida many times, but never over on this coast. And then Tuesday is wall-to-wall meetings, with a somewhat saner schedule on Wednesday and Thursday.

So, if I'm posting long things this week, it's because I'm spending too damn much time up in my room, instead of enjoying a fancy hotel down in the sub-tropics. I hope not to.

Is This the Pill That Makes You Larger?

I've been quiet here all day -- I might have a what-I've-been-doing post tomorrow morning to explain that, if I have time -- but over at ComicMix I reviewed Frederik Peeters's graphic novel Blue Pills, which isn't about either Viagra or The Matrix.

Oh, I Know Something...

This week's "Manga Friday" at ComicMix features me (as always) going on and on about how amazing Yoshihiro Tatsumi is, in particular his upcoming book Good-Bye.

Small Favor by Jim Butcher

Small Favor is the tenth novel in Butcher's contemporary fantasy series "The Dresden Files," about Chicagoland's only consulting wizard. (Though the "consulting" part has been pushed far into the background for the last half-a-dozen books or so; I can't honestly remember if any of the books show him taking an walk-in case.) It was turned, briefly, into a bad TV show a couple of years back, and Small Favor is currently riding high on the New York Times bestseller list. So you might have heard of this.

Which is good, because explaining all of the backstory necessary for this book might be difficult. I bet it would all make sense if you actually read the book -- it's not like I have an encyclopedic memory; I'd forgotten most of the previous nine books long ago -- but cramming it all down into a paragraph or so is something else.

Oh, OK. Let's try. In Harry Dresden's world, like most Type II urban fantasy, every kind of supernatural entity you can think of is real, and a bewildering array of powers, entities, and factions have been introduced in the earlier books. (There are at least four kinds of vampires, for example -- Red Court, Black Court, White Court, and Jade Court.) In this book, the important supernatural players are the two courts of Faerie (Winter and Summer) -- each of which has a maiden-mother-crone queen system, to boot -- three knights who carry holy swords (each built around a nail from the crucifixion), and the knights' opposite number, an order of human-possessing demons each linked to one of Judas's thirty pieces of silver.

Harry's own White Council of Wizards is, by comparison, unimportant in Small Favor, and the local mafioso who's become aware of the supernatural world, Johnny Marcone, is little more than a Maguffin, just someone Harry is trying to find for most of the book. The werewolves are completely offstage, and the rumored "Black Council" doesn't show up, either. And the only vampire who shows up is Dresden's half-brother Thomas, who's a good guy at this point, anyway. (So it's not nearly as complicated as it could have been.)

Does any of that make sense?


Anyway, this is the kind of mystery where the events that drag the detective into the case don't necessarily have much to do with what's really going on -- Small Favor starts out looking like it'll be about a battle between the Winter and Summer courts of Faerie, as Summer sends increasingly-more-deadly assassins after Harry, and Harry is forced by Queen Mab of Winter to act as her emissary in the second of his three long-promised services to her. But Small Favor ends up being about the conflict between the Order of the Blackened Denarius (the demons in coins) and the Knights of the Cross (the sword-nail dudes).

In the grand urban fantasy style, it all ends up with a big battle scene, during which lots of things blow up, are shot at, or otherwise get knocked about. (None of which I'll actually describe here, since there's four hundred pages of other stuff to set it all up that I don't have the energy to go through in detail.)

I've seen people complaining that Dresden is getting too powerful, so the series should start winding down, but I don't see that, myself. He lost an important piece of power in the previous book, and his major magical strategy is, as he admits himself, just blasting away at things. His raw power is decent, but his finesse is horrible; he survives, like so many hardboiled heroes, on backtalk, attitude, and pure will rather than by any specific skills. The cliche to watch out for at this point is when the more powerful whoositzes keep saying "I won't kill you this time, because you're still useful to me." The way Dresden has been pissing off magical personages, he's going to need more than that to remain alive in the future.

Small Favor stands decently well on its own, but the meta-plot is becoming more and more important, and the usual fantasy escalation of danger is gripping ever more tightly. At this point, I'd prefer a book or three about cases that didn't involve Faerie or vampire Courts, that were just supernatural mystery stories. It's not so much that Dresden is becoming superpowerful as that he's saving the world far too much for a noir series. In noir, the world cannot be saved; it can only be endured. Dresden is getting too shiny and good-two-shoes; I'd like to see him have to make a decision between two unpleasant choices rather than winning all the time.


(But in general I'd like to see Type II urban fantasy move more towards mystery-novel structures and away from the swamps of high fantasy, so this is only a specific version of a general argument.)

All in all, Small Favor is a dependably entertaining entry in a quite enjoyable series. And Harry's whining about "people" possibly getting "hurt" has almost entirely disappeared, of which I completely approve.

The Difference Between Mysteries and SFF

Well, one of the differences, as I noticed when looking at the various reports about the Edgar Banquet last night. (Here's one from PW for you to chew on.)

The outgoing and incoming Mystery Writers of America Presidents: massive bestsellers Nelson DeMille and Harlan Coben.

The outgoing and incoming SFWA Presidents: Michael Capobianco and Russell Davis.

No offense to Capobianco or Davis, but there's just no comparison. And there was a day when the DeMille and Coben-level writers in our field were routinely serving SFWA as Presidents and other officers. I'm not a member, so I don't know what went wrong, but it's very clear something did.

Nick Mamatas Sets the Record Straight

I read Richard K. Morgan's recent call for more happiness and hand-holding in SFF (among writers, I mean -- he still apparently wants the books to be all dreary sad slogs), scoffed at his claim that "crime writers" never fight with each other, but instead sing Kumbaya together around the campfires of their discarded low-denomination bills.

And I knew he was wrong -- badly, ridiculously wrong, as anyone who's ever heard of the cozy-hardboiled split would know -- but other things got in the way, and I didn't climb into high dudgeon to lambaste him.

And it's a good thing, since Nick Mamatas has just done it for me, and for all of us. Better than I probably would have, too.

On the Subject of Negative Reviews

Have I linked to OH JOHN RINGO NO yet? It's a great -- if very long -- review of a series of books by John Ringo that are repellently fascinating. It's a wonderful example of how to review something that has aspects you absolutely can't stand without attacking the author or backing down from your criticisms.

No Pants Day Is Back Again!

I'm not celebrating myself -- and my colleagues at Wiley, I'm sure, thank me for that -- but don't let that stop the rest of you.

Remember: the first Friday of May is always No Pants Day!

Quote of the Week

"A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land -- an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man, far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For though it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at times seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations."
- Daniel Mendelsohn, p.78 of the 4/28/08 New Yorker, describing the Persian Wars in the course of reviewing a new edition of Herodotus's Histories

Poor Widdle "Jim" Patterson

He "doesn’t like it when you tease him about his success, or suggest that many of his books are written by assistants (they’re not, he insists: he deals with absolutely every plot twist and detail, even if he doesn’t write every word)," says Publishers Weekly's Sara Nelson.

Not to be pedantic about it, but writing every word is what writers do. Someone who "deals with absolutely every plot twist and detail" is generally called an editor.

Suck it up, Patterson. If your books are actually written by your assistants, it's crazy to be annoyed that people believe that they are. Either write every word, or take that time to count your money, but don't whine about it. If you want to write more, there's nobody stopping you.

Read in April

April was another big month for me; I was trying to read a graphic novel (comic, manga -- whatever the heck you call something with words and pictures and a binding) every day, and succeeded most of the time. In fact, I probably read more books this month (47) than any time in the past ten years. And what did I read? Well...

• Lewis Trondheim with Eric Cartier, Kaput & Zosky (4/1)
• Charles Dickens, adapted by Rick Geary, Great Expectations (4/2)
• Greg Keyes, The Born Queen (4/3)
• Brian K. Vaughan, et. al., Ex Machina, Vol. 6: Power Down (4/3)
• Osamu Tezuka, Dororo, Vol. 1 (4/3)
• Greg Rucka & Chris Samnee, Queen & Country, Vol. 8: Operation: Red Panda (4/4)
• Michel Rabagliati, Paul Goes Fishing (4/5)
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 6 (4/6)
  School days are tough when you're a ninja, and tests doubly so -- this volume is right in the middle of a long storyline about the series of tests Naruto and his friends (along with a large cast of other young ninjas) are taking in their attempt to progress from apprentices to journeymen. This particular part of the test is what you might call the practical section: running around a large, dangerous, fenced-in forest, fighting the other teams for scrolls. It's a pretty nasty case of grading on a curve -- at best, only one-half of the teams can pass. Naruto is demonstrably better than the other manga series in the same, post-Toriyama style; Kishimoto has not just a great sense of story and character (I can usually remember and tell apart his cast of dozens), but also a expressive style that's just Westernized enough to read easily around the world. Guess I'll keep reading these.
• Bob Burden, Rick Geary, & Steve Oliff, Gumby Collected #1 (4/6)
• Emmanuel Guibert, Sardine in Outer Space 5: My Cousin Manga and Other Stories (4/7)
• P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves (4/7)
• Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, & Guy Davis, B.P.R.D., Vol. 7: Garden of Souls (4/7)
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 7 (4/7)
  See above; only at the very end of this volume do Naruto and his teammates get out of the Forest of Death. (Manga rivals epic fantasy in its portentious names, but Kishimoto generally makes his places live up to their monikers.)
• Joann Sfar, Little Vampire (4/8)
• Yukako Kabei & Shiori Teshirogi, Kieli, Vol. 1 (4/9)
• Kyo Shirodaira & Eta Mizuno, Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, Vol. 3 (4/10)
• Paul Melko, Singularity's Ring (4/10)
• Heather McHugh & David Lehman, editors, The Best American Poetry: 2007 (4/11)
• Jessica Abel, Gabe Soria, & Warren Pleece, Life Sucks (4/11)
• Rick Geary, J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography (4/12)
• Ushio Mizta & Akiyoshi Ohta, Kaze no Hana, Vol. 1 (4/14)
• Jim Steinmeyer, Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural (4/16)
• Tom Pomplun, editor, Fantasy Classics: Graphic Classics Vol. 15 (4/16)
• Jim Salicrup, editor, Tales from the Crypt, No. 1: Ghouls Gone Wild (4/16)
• Ai Morinaga, My Heavenly Hockey Club, Vol. 3 (4/17)
• Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming, Powers, Vol. 8: Legends (4/18)
• Cory Doctorow, Little Brother (4/18)
• Chris Ware, The ACME Novelty Library, Vol. 18 (4/19)
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 8 (4/20)
  The next phase of the ninja promotion test begins in this volume...or, rather, the battles to see who actually gets to take part three of the ninja promotion test. Naruto could be taught as a lesson of how to extend a story to great length and still keep it compelling; Kishimoto's emphasis on his huge cast in the previous few volumes gives him a lot of scope for many different conflicts here (and in Vol. 9), so they all mean something. On the other hand, I am beginning to wonder how much of the series is taken up with this one series of tests -- it's more than half the length of the series to date at this point, with no sign of the end. Those Japanese audiences are evidently very patient...
• James Sturm & Rich Tommaso, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow (4/20)

Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 9 (4/21)
Yet more tests. And, of the ten pre-phase ten single combats that we'll get, there are still two left to go...as I said, Kishimoto is working at his own pace here. But I'm sure Naruto is one of the things manga-haters are thinking about when they talk about stories that go on forever. (As opposed to, say, Spider-Man battling Doc Ock, which he's been doing since about 1965...)
Bob Sehlinger with Len Testa, The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2008 (4/21)
I'm hoping to drag the family down to see "the Mouse" this fall, so this was research. (And it was research, a few pages a day, for the last three months.) So far, the range of choices is bewildering, though I think I've basically decided on an airport and airline.

• Frederik Peeters, Blue Pills (4/22)
• Satoko Kiyuduki, Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, Vol. 1 (4/23)
• Jim Butcher, Small Favor (4/23)
• Liza Donelly, editor, Sex and Sensibility (4/23)
• Jeff Lemire, Ghost Stories: Essex County, Vol. 2 (4/24)
• Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (4/24)
• Michel Rabagliati, Paul Moves Out (4/24)
• Adam Warren, Empowered, Vol. 1 (4/25)
  I'm not going to say much about this superhero bondage spoof, since I still have hopes Dark Horse will send me volumes 2 and 3 -- they sent this one, after all -- so I can review them all together at ComicMix. But so far: not as offensive as you might expect, but not for the faint-hearted.
• Alex Robinson, Too Cool To Be Forgotten (4/26)
• Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulik, Penny Arcade, Vol. 1: Attack of the Bacon Robots (4/26)
• Eddie Campbell & Dan Best, The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard (4/27)
• Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Good-Bye (4/28)
• James Turner, Rex Libris, Vol. 1: I, Librarian (4/29)
• Megan Kelso, The Squirrel Mother: Stories (4/30)
• Jack O'Connell, The Resurrectionist (4/30)

That's a lot of comics, but also ten "real" books, which I think is decent for a month for anybody. Still, the pile isn't getting any smaller -- but I do have hopes of getting into (if not through) one or two big fat books next week, when I'm down in Florida for Sales Conference and away from my usual distractions. (Although I'm sure there will be some new and different distractions there.)