Kate Beaton for the Win

Canada's favorite humorous historical cartoonist -- well, who else would you suggest? -- explains, through only her own native wit and a few well-chosen old political cartoons, that the USA really wants to screw Canada.

Heading off to San Francisco

I'm flying off to San Francisco on Saturday -- losing half of my holiday weekend, of course, but that's the life of an accounting-book marketer -- to attend the annual meeting of those hard-living, two-fisted types of the Institute of Internal Auditors. This time, I'll only be there with one colleague, and I think my evenings won't be stolen by obligatory receptions in the exhibit hall.

So I'm hoping there are some people out there who know me (and I know them) who might be interested in getting together for dinners and suchlike. If you fit that description, drop me an e-mail. (It looks like I'm free every night I'm in town, Saturday through Tuesday.)

If you don't, well...any recommendations for good restaurants or things to do in SF would be welcome, too -- I'll be in the Moscone Center area.

Thanks, and hope to see someone-or-other while I'm out there.

I Only Have a Mild Case

Today's quiz is called "How Geeky Are You?" and my score is...

63% Geek

Created by OnePlusYou

I got it from Ellen Gerstein, who is substantially geekier than I am. (If I was hands-on with computers at all, my numbers would have shot up, but computers are mostly just tools for me.)

Kodansha Picks Up Its Toys and Comes Here

The Japanese media giant Kodansha, best known for its manga, announced yesterday that it was creating a US subsidiary and transferring many of its copyrights to the new Kodansha USA.

Kodansha previously licensed its works -- an extensive series of licenses with Tokyopop, now somewhat diminished; a few, mostly more mature titles with Dark Horse; and a current extensive relationship with Random House's Del Rey Manga imprint -- but will now also publish some works directly.

Early reports indicate that existing licenses are expected to stay with their current US publishers, perhaps indicating that Kodansha wants to leverage its huge library of titles in Japan. They may perhaps be aiming at a somewhat different market than Del Rey and Tokyopop, though those imprints mostly do shonen and shojo titles, which are the largest market segments here as well as in Japan.

And, as always when something happens in the SF/comics world, io9 is there to misunderstand the story and comment confusedly -- clapping their hands in glee as if this heralded a massive new OEL program. Pity the clueless, for they will walk into many walls in their time.

"Why Am I Talking to You? You're Not Important."

Editorial Ass writes a post that every author -- particularly wanna-bes, but everyone could take a lesson from it -- should print out, post up somewhere prominent, and memorize.

Bottom line: be very, very careful when you begin to trade on your own self-importance.

(Oh, and this applies equally to folks who work for a publishing company: being polite and respecting the people you're actually working and dealing with is always the best policy.)

The Resurrectionist by Jack O'Connell

I wanted to like The Resurrectionist; I really did. It's a noirish novel with fantasy elements, in which a comic book is important, about a father and his son, set mostly in a creepy hospital in the fictional old mill town of Quinsigamond, Massachusets. It even has psychotic bikers and guys with anger management issues! It sounded like just my kind of thing.

As it turned out, though, The Resurrectionist -- though undeniably well-written, and full of wonderful sentences and paragraphs -- consistently chose a tone and a sequence of events that set my teeth on edge. It may be a better novel than this review would seem to indicate, but it was not the novel I wanted to love.

While reading it, I kept going back to the publicity materials to figure out O'Connell's intentions, since he repeatedly headed off in directions that annoyed and perplexed me. (Bringing in a stereotypical biker gang, having a very obvious virgin/whore dichotomy, and introducing many interesting characters only to have them wander off and have nothing to do with the story.) I came back several times to one Q&A, where O'Connell said that his original idea was to write a short, direct noir novel, the kind you'd find in a Montana bus stop in 1959. (I don't have his exact wording in front of me.) I eventually came to realize what he meant by that -- he wanted a novel that moved quickly and inevitably down a dangerous path.

But that quick inevitable journey became what a gamer would call a railroad -- a series of events that occur in sequence to a group of people, not arising out of their actions, but happening because the author has his thumb pressed heavily on the scales and is forcing it all to happen the way he wants it.

The main character is Sweeney -- if O'Connell ever snuck in the description "apeneck," I missed it, and I was watching for it -- a pharmacist from Cleveland whose son Danny is in a coma. Sweeney has transferred Danny to the Peck Clinic, in Quinsigamond, Massachussets, and taken a job as the night pharmacist there himself, because the brilliant Doctors Peck, father and daughter, have "cured" a handful of patients from long-term comas. Sweeney, we're told, has anger-management issues, but we only ever see him get angry at inanimate objects. When things get very nasty and frustrating for him later in the book, he never lashes out -- mostly because O'Connell never gives him a moment when he could even try. (There's that railroad again -- the anger issues serve to create tension for the reader, but O'Connell never had any intention of firing that particular Chekov Gun.)

The Peck Clinic is large and creepy and old, full of corridors that go unexpected places -- such as the attached home of the Peck family -- and odd characters who talk around things. It's very close to being a parody of the "nasty hospital" or of an insane asylum from a pulpy '50s novel. But O'Connell wants us to take it seriously -- he needs us to take it seriously. The biker gang has similar issues -- it's clearly over the top, but needs to be grounded and real.

Sweeney obsessively collects and re-reads the few issues Limbo Comics, a series that his son loved before his accident, as a way of trying to make a connection to the now-comatose boy. And the narrative of Limbo Comics becomes part of The Resurrectionist -- about every third or fourth chapter retells an issue of Limbo.

Retells. In prose. In prose that is clearly not Sweeney's voice, nor is it (obviously) the original script for the comic, nor can it be the comic itself. O'Connell is a novelist, so he thinks in terms of words, but he's trying to tell a story of a comic based on a TV show, without describing anything of the comic itself. There's not one single description of a panel or a drawing; the Limbo Comics chapters tell the story as if it were prose.

If those chapters had been in the voice of someone -- Sweeney, his son, anyone -- or had been descriptions of the TV show (which they feel more like), they could have worked as O'Connell wanted them to. But, as it is, they're weirdly translated out of what should have been their true form into a flat description of the story of a comic without any reference to how that comic looks. O'Connell is calling this a comic book, but not relating anything about it that makes it comics; he's grabbing hipness by proxy, but not understanding what makes a comic different from another medium.

My other major problem with The Resurrectionist, without getting too specific, is that the lesson at the end is that violence and wishful thinking will make everything better. I don't insist that novels have positive morals, or any morals at all, but I do ask that they not have stupid, counterproductive morals.

The title presumably is meant to resonate with the elder Dr. Peck -- who is in this novel very little -- but it's a direct reference to a late event in the Limbo Comics chapters.

I might well come back to another novel of O'Connell's; his writing is evocative and muscular, with an ear for strangeness, especially in the Limbo Comics chapters. But this particular book is half-baked; it's clear that, as he wrote it, O'Connell kept increasing the scope and importance of the Limbo Comics chapters, but it doesn't appear as if he ever went back and rethought the Sweeney main plot to accommodate it. The two plot lines have thematic connections, but nothing more solid than that, and that just wasn't enough for me by the end. I would have preferred to have read a Limbo novel, honestly -- those were the strongest, most distinctive parts of this novel.

100 Famous And/Or Great Books

Yet another meme; I got this one from Keith R.A. DeCandido. I think I've done something very similar at least once.

Update: Oops, pardon me, time to revise history -- I'm actually doing this meme because John Klima tagged me. Yeah. That's the ticket.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read six and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (only The Golden Compass so far)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I've read seven or eight of the plays, I think, but I'd like to read more)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (in a very bad translation, back in high school, so I'm not sure it counts)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis (this would be the version of Lion, Witch & Wardrobe that isn't part of the "Chronicles of Narnia"?)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel (I read about half of it, but gave up because it was boring me)
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (I know I read one Austen book, and I'm pretty sure this was it)
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac (Way back in high school,so I barely remember it at all)
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A.S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (Does it count if I saw the musical? How about if my wife read it?)

I've read 52, and have absolutely no intention of reading a lot of the others -- Enid Blyton? Dan Brown? Mitch Albom? phooey! -- so I'm feeling moderately smug right now.

In Which I Probably Annoy a Whole Lot of People

The latest "Mind Meld" at SF Signal asked the question Gender imbalance in genre fiction publishing is an ongoing point of discussion in the blogosphere. Is there an issue here? If so, then what are possible solutions? What can readers, writers, editors and publishers do to rectify the situation?

I was one of the folks asked to answer it, and I have to admit I'm not particularly worried about this particular problem, so my answer may not be as diplomatic or constructive as those of others. (I haven't yet read the post to see what other people said.)

Among the folks answering this question are Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Hal Duncan, John C. Wright, Jeff VanderMeer, and several others.

Neither the Duke of Earl nor the Queen of Hearts

But Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel.

That's what I reviewed today at ComicMix.

Have a Happy Bikini Month

I learned that this is Bikini Month from Gawker, who were linking to Entertainment Weekly's list of the 18 most iconic bikinis of all time. That's an...interesting...use of the word "iconic," there.

And, to utterly lose what little credibility I may have as a modern, sensitive guy, here are some more examples of what we're celebrating this month:

Reviewing the Mail, Week of 6/21: Prose

This week saw enough of a flood that it will take two posts to list it all -- this one will have the books with just words in them, and the second post (later today) will include books that also have pictures.
Lord of Bones by Justine Musk is a contemporary fantasy and the sequel to BloodAngel. It's coming from Roc in July. I haven't read the earlier book, I'm afraid. I do read Musk's LiveJournal, which is very distinctive and un-typical for a writer's blog: it's mostly about her life in LA as an outsider-ish member of a very, very priviledged set. On that basis, I can say that she's a thoughtful writer with an eye for other people's behavior, which implies good things for her fiction.

The Dimension Next Door is the anthology-of-the-month from DAW for July, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Kerrie Hughes, and contains thirteen original stories about other dimensions from pretty much the same crew that contributes to every Greenberg DAW anthology. I can't remember the last time I read one of these books, but it's terribly comforting to know that they continue to be published like clockwork; some things in this world need to be utterly dependable like that.

If you're on the Internet -- and how are you reading this if you're not? -- you've probably heard that John Scalzi has a new novel coming up, and Zoe's Tale is it. Tor will publish it in August. Scalzi is one of the very few current writers where I've read all of his novels, and I see no reason to break my streak -- he's always very readable, and tells good stories. Zoe's Tale is the fourth novel in what was supposed to be the "Old Man's War trilogy," so we'll all have to see how he opens back up the box that he supposedly closed at the end of the last book. This one also reportedly has Young Adult elements, or is not inappropriate for that audience, or something like that.

Ink and Steel, the third "Promethean Age" novel from Elizabeth Bear, will be published by Roc in July. (And the direct sequel, Hell and Earth, is coming a month later.) I read a bit of the first book, Blood and Iron, when I had hopes of snagging a job at Ace/Roc, but I didn't get back to it. Bear has been writing novels frighteningly quickly the past few years, and I don't think I've read any of them -- some have sounded like not my sort of thing, and a lot of them have been mass-market originals (and I dislike that format). But I definitely need to read me something-or-other by her at this point.

I've also just gotten The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, a novel which could be called science fiction (though Knopf, the publisher, is very carefully not doing so, billing it as "An electrifying tale of love, friendship and the apocalypse"). It has both pirates and ninjas in it, is supposed to be both funny and full of high adventure, and is coming in September.

E.E. Knight's Fall with Honor is the latest in his "Vampire Earth" series. (The book doesn't say anywhere how many previous books there have been in the series, nor any of their names -- presumably not to scare away any new readers. I find this terribly annoying, but I've long been an advocate for detailed card and permissions pages and even strong penalties for the lack of same.) I don't think I've read any of these, but they seem to be set in a future where...the earth is dominated by vampires! (But I bet you could have worked that last bit out without my help.)

Sherwood Smith's King's Shield is the third in the series including Inda and The Fox, which tells me time is passing at high speed -- in the back of my head, Inda is still on the shelf of my old office, a book I still might get a chance to read sometime soon. Since it's not my office anymore -- and that company has moved itself since then -- I bet that particular stack of paper has been recycled by now. And Inda is now a three-book-long series, of fattish books. DAW is publishing King's Shield on July 1st.

I'm not entirely sure if the Howard Waldrop collection Other Worlds, Better Lives was supposed to come to me -- there was a handwritten label with someone else's name on it under the printed label addressed to me -- but I've got it now, and we all know what possession is. (Besides grounds for a twenty-year stint at Leavenworth.) It's from Old Earth Books, will be published in September (simultaneously in paperback and hardcover), and collects seven of Waldrop's better novellas.

And last this week is the fortieth anniversary edition of Peter S. Beagle's classic novel The Last Unicorn, which is one of those books which I can't remember if I ever read or not. (Or maybe what I can't remember is when I read it.) Oddly, the cover on the actual book that came in the mail -- supposedly publishing in July -- just says "Special Anniversary Edition," and doesn't look as nice and fancy and 40th-Anniversary-esque as this other cover I found online. I may have gotten a stray copy of the last printing -- the ISBN's are the same -- or perhaps that fancy new cover didn't exactly happen. The very nice online cover is to the left; the book I actually got is below. Check your local purveyor of fiction if you have a strong preference for one or the other...

Edit, a week later: I've learned that the copy of The Last Unicorn I got was one of a few left lying around the warehouse, as I'd suspected -- the new edition does have the snazzy new cover, plus it has the author's definitive text. So if you don't have a copy of The Last Unicorn -- or if you have one that's gotten a bit ratty -- this is definitely the time to splurge.

What Romance Novels Are Up To These Days

In the tradition of "Oh John Ringo No," but with more anal sex and less gratuitous violence and rape, I give you Smart Bitches, Trashy Books's review of Shayla Black's romance novel Decadent.

Money quote, slightly abridged but otherwise directly from the novel:

Kimber drew in a great, shocked gasp, her hazel eyes wide. “Deke?”
“What the hell are you doing?” Luc barked.
...Deke could barely form a word. “Fucking her ass. Saving her life.”

I first started reading Smart Bitches over a year ago, but stopped for a long time. "I don't read romance novels," I said to myself, "so why would I want to read reviews of them?" Because Smart Bitches is made of awesome, that's why.

On a Lighter Note

Happy Birthday to Canada!

More About Boing Boing

As of last night -- I haven't been connected long enough to see anything this morning -- there was still no statement from Boing Boing about why nearly all references to Violet Blue were deleted from that blog recently. There's no requirement for them to make any statement, of course, just like there's no requirement for a political candidate to issue a statement when someone close to him says something unpleasant -- but it's a good idea in both cases.

The closest thing to any official word from Boing Boing came yesterday afternoon when Patrick Nielsen Hayden -- who has no direct connection to Boing Boing, but is married to Boing Boing's moderator and is the book editor of Boing Boing member Cory Doctorow -- posted an elliptical reference to the kerfuffle at his blog Making Light. A long comment thread quickly sprung up, which is common for Making Light, but it became heated, which is less common there. (The thread is now closed, which is vanishingly rare for Making Light.) I jumped in late in the evening, trying not to make trouble, but probably failing:

In the interest of determining what may be considered a fair view of Boing Boing's opinion on similar matters, here's one possible parallel:

Cory Doctorow, at Boing Boing, posts, approvingly but without commenting himself, a message from "JFarber" complaining about The New York Times, a privately owned media company, changing their web archives without notice or explanation.

Boing Boing is a privately owned media company which has just changed its web archives without notice or explanation.

To quote "JFarber" from that post: "Is it common journalistic practice to change old articles like that?"

The way I'd frame this is to say: if Boing Boing wants to operate as a media watchdog, they need to be careful about not doing the same things that they complain about when other media outlets do it. They are a company that puts out a regular media product: yes, it is free (but so is The Village Voice), and yes, it is on the web (but so is Slate). A lot of people, Boing Boing's principals among them, have been arguing for a decade that "blogs" can be just as serious and just as professional as any other media outlet, so hiding under the skirts of "it's just a blog" at this point is, at best, disingenuous.

To quote Teresa Nielsen Hayden (as mentioned first by #22):

"...a section about dealing with internet scandals and other PR disasters. A rudimentary notion of it:

(1.) Get out there and say something, fast.

(2.) Acknowledge that there have been screwups. Avoid passive constructions.

(3.) Explain what you’re doing to help fix the problem. Be telling the truth when you do it.

(4.) Give up all hope of sneaking anything past your listeners. You’ve screwed up, the internet is watching, and behind each and every pair of eyes out there is a person who knows how to Google.

(5.) Corporate-speak will do you more harm than good. Instead, speak frankly about what’s going on. React like a human being. Talk like one, too."

That's good advice. Will Boing Boing follow it?

And then I was thinking about this issue even more this morning. Obviously, Boing Boing is under no obligation to anyone in this matter -- they can change their archives daily, eliminate everything but the most recent post, or quietly edit every word of their blog whenever they want. They own that work; it's theirs and they have the right to do whatever they want with it.

However, if they want to continue as a popular and important media outlet -- if they want to keep the audience they've built up over the years -- they need to be concerned about how that audience will react when they do something major or unexpected.

To be blunt: this is purely a public relations matter, and Boing Boing has badly dropped the ball on the PR front by refusing to even admit that they did anything.

A side note is that "blogs" are not all the same thing just as "TV" is not all the same thing -- there's ABC on the one hand, and Akron Public Access on the other. The standards of professionalism in media fields can be murky and prone to major shifts, but there are still some standards. Boing Boing has been a major setter of standards for the blog world, both in their own actions and by what they choose to cover, and a large fraction of blog-readers do think that this action by Boing Boing is against their (stated and unstated) principles.

Again, this is a minor scandal at best -- the kind of thing the Internet loves to get all worked up about, particularly because this one is on the Internet. I'm not interested in placing a flag and claiming I have all the answers, but I do think that Boing Boing should have expected a reaction like this.

I also think that a number of the people currently supporting Boing Boing are doing so mostly because they like the Boing Boing crew personally and don't want to see those people being attacked nastily on the Internet. They seem like swell people to me, too, but that doesn't mean that they've never done anything wrong -- I, personally, consider myself about as swell as a human being can be, and yet my wife could give you a list of at least a dozen things I've done wrong this week alone. We all make mistakes; the best of us admit to those mistakes and learn from them.

Update: Boing Boing has finally published their official version -- only on the Internet can waiting for three days seem like forever, but it does -- as written by Teresa Nielsen Hayden. (Who, if the timeline she presents is correct, had either just barely started working for Boing Boing or didn't work for them at all at the time this purge happened -- her first announcement of her connection to them came at the end of last August.)

The situation is pretty much what the less-insane commenters thought: the Boing Boing brain trust decided that "Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her," and so they pulled every mention of her from their site.

It's still a weird reason, since references to scores of organizations and people that Boing Boing clearly disliked -- rapacious Canadian PMs, DRM-creating record companies, ukulele-haters, and others -- have not been similarly purged. No one in the known universe thinks that any blog only mentions the name of persons that the individual blogger wants to "lend credibility or associate with."

But there's no enemy like an ex-friend, and so Violet Blue has been made a non-person at Boing Boing. If Ms. Blue's version of the story is correct -- and the Boing Boing gang don't say it isn't -- they didn't even bother to give her the "you know what you've done!" treatment.

I still think this was a dumb thing to do, for a dumb reason, and shows that Boing Boing does not comport itself like a media organization made up of professionals. (Has even Sam Zell woken up one morning and decided he wanted to purge someone's very existence from the L.A. Times?) But, as I said before, they can do what they want, and the rest of us are free to think and say what we want about them, and to pay attention to them (or not) as we want to.

But, hoo boy, this week has been an object lesson in what the Internet expects. And it definitely does not expect old webpages to suddenly disappear or be altered silently. Take note of that, all of you who have responsibility for old webpages.

Read in June

Reaper's Gale stole nearly half this month -- thank Ghu for comics, which will keep this list from being really short. It also looks like nearly everything this month ended up at ComicMix rather than here.

• Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo, Hellboy, Vol. 8: Darkness Calls (6/1)
  
• Anonymous, editor, Out of Picture 2 (6/1)
  
• Diana Schutz, Tim Sale, & Teddy Kristiansen, Grendel: Devil Child (6/2)
  
• Matt Wagner, Grendel: Devil Quest (6/3)
  
• KwangHyun Seo & Jin HoKo, Croquis Pop, Vol. 1 (6/4)
  
• Kim MiHyung, 11th Cat Special (6/5)
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 12 (6/6)
  I'm going to pretend that I'll just catch up with the plot in the volumes I read later in the month, but the truth is that this one (and Vol. 13) went back to the library before I remembered to scribble down any notes about what happened in them. I think this volume had the beginning of the finals of the ninja advancement trials, but all hell hadn't quite broken loose yet.
  
• Andi Watson, Princess at Midnight (6/8)
  A cute little book by Watson about a homeschooled British girl who, on special nights, wakes up as the Princess of Waxing Castle and does battle with the evil forces of the neighboring Horde. It's small, and clearly appropriate for younger readers if not completely meant for them. It's not one of Watson's best works, but it's fine for what it is, and his art is always appealing.
  
• Will Eisner, The Best of The Spirit (6/8)
  
• Yi DongEun & Yu Chung, Freak: Legend of the Nonblonds, Vol. 3 (6/9)
  
• Park KangHo & Lee HaNa, Heavenly Executioner Chiwoo, Vol. 4 (6/10)
  
• Osamu Tezuka, Dororo, Vol. 2 (6/11)
  

Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 13 (6/12)
And this volume is where the shit really hits the fan, if I remember right. If you read this series -- and you probably didn't -- you'll recall that this comes at the end of a long sequence of stories about the ninja advancement exams, in which a whole lot of characters were seen sparring with each other and the reader learned a lot about their abilities, and some about their schemes and plans. Well, here all that becomes important, as a major villain attacks and everyone else scatters -- some chasing each other, some chasing the people chasing, and so on. It's pretty impressive; Kishimoto has a way with action scenes, and he's really punching forward on all cylinders here. (I think I've given up any pretense of reading this for any reason other than that I'm really enjoying it.)

• Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale (6/13)
  
• E.C. Segar's Popeye, Vol. 1: "I Yam What I Yam!" (6/14)
  
• Queenie Chan and Dean Koontz, In Odd We Trust (6/15)
  
• Frank Warren, editor, A Lifetime of Secrets (6/15)
  This was the fourth book collecting postcards from the PostSecret project, loosely organized in the order of a life (from young to old). As always, some of these are very touching, and some are just bland -- I guess some people just have more interesting personal lives than others. I like this for the sense of connection, and, also, as a grumpy, depressive bastard, because it reminds me that lots and lots of people have it much worse than I do.
  
• Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends (6/17)
• Igura Sugimoto, Variante, Vol. 4 (6/18)
• Sanae Kana, Classical Medley, Vol. 1 (6/19)
  
• Yasutaka Tsutsui and Gaku Tsugano, The Girl Who Runs Through Time (6/19)
  
• Tom Corwin & Craig Frazier, Mr. Fooster: Traveling on a Whim (6/20)
  
• FSc (Foo Swee Chin), MuZz, Vol. 1 (6/22)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 14 (6/22)
  This volume is wall-to-wall action; there are about three major battles/chases going on at the same time, and Kishimoto cuts back and forth between them. It's all middle, but it's all good, exciting middle.
  
• Hana Aoi, Love for Dessert (6/23)
  
• David J. Schwartz, Superpowers (6/23)
• Mitsuki Oda, Real Love (6/24)
  
• Shiuko Kano, Kiss All the Boys, Vol. 1 (6/25)
  
• Jordan Mechner, A.B. Sina, LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland, Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel (6/25)
  
• Rob Walker, Buying In (6/26)
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 15 (6/28)
  And this volume is mostly taken up with a big fight between Naruto and Gaara, a creepy young ninja from the village of the Sand. (There are some parallels between Naruto and Gaara, which Naruto thinks about a bit too much.) The fight begins in this volume, but it's not quite done as it ends...though the next volume says it has the aftermath of all of these big fights, so I think this massive plotline finally finishes there.
  
• Bobbye S. Goldstein, editor, Mother Goose on the Loose (6/28)
• Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming, Powers, Vol. 9: Psychotic (6/29)
• Chica Umino, Honey and Clover, Vol. 1 (6/30)

And that was June.