Two Abrams Cartoon Books, by Shanahan and Ziegler

I recently "read" two books of single-panel cartoons, both published by Abrams -- one was by Danny Shanahan and one by Jack Ziegler. Since it would be silly to give them each a separate post, here they are together:

Bad Sex! by Danny Shanahan: The pages aren't numbered, but I'd say that there are more than a hundred cartoons here -- let's say that this is probably 128 pages, with a single cartoon on each small, square (about 6" x 6") page. Shanahan gets a lot of mileage out of standard situations -- there are a lot of creatures (dogs, bulls, birds, and humans in various combinations) lying in bed post-coitally, a lot of bar scenes, and a number of office scenes.

Shanahan is good at New Yorker-style zinger captions, and this book has a lot of good ones that ring changes on the traditions -- like a bartender who says "If it's your wife, I'm not here" to a patron pulling out a cellphone, or one doe saying to another "What I couldn't do with a million bucks." In the best New Yorker fashion, the captions are nearly always a single line of dialogue.

How's the Squid? by Jack Ziegler: Ziegler is less conventional than Shanahan, with a looser line and stranger flights of fancy. (Such as the logo of Metro-Goldwyn-Macaroni, with the famous lion replaced with...you guessed it.) Shanahan is funny and good, but he does cartoons that you could see several other cartoonist coming up with. Ziegler, though: he has an odd, askew sensibility, and many of his cartoons couldn't have come from anyone else.

(He's perhaps the closest we have to a new George Booth -- he's not exactly like Booth, but they're both different from the usual New Yorker cartoonist along a similar axis.)

The cover cartoon shows Ziegler's style pretty well -- it's New Yorker deadpan, but stretches that deadpan well into Sam Gross or Gahan Wilson territory. The cartoons in How's the Squid also vary much more than those in Bad Sex! do -- Ziegler includes cartoons that have anything at all to do with eating, from the usual diner and restaurant cartoons to such surreal pieces as "The Empire State Building and a Side of Fries" and one of a man sitting in a gallery, looking at "The Scream" and eating popcorn with a large "Munch Munch Munch."

So Shanahan is funny, but -- purely on the evidence of these two collections -- Ziegler is just as funny, and across a wider spectrum, with more idiosyncratic cartoons to boot. (That might, of course, have something to do with the choice of cartoons for each book, or with the breadth of the two themes. But I call 'em as I see 'em.)

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

The Graveyard Book is Gaiman's second official novel for Young Adults, after Coraline. Well, it is if you don't count Odd and the Frost Giants -- which I don't because I haven't seen it, so I'm not sure if it qualifies. But that's the thing about Gaiman: every new project is something unexpectedly new, somehow. If I were to make a list of the prose writers I'd be least surprised to see put out a sonnet sequence, or an opera, or suddenly turn to composing music for the Andean grass-harp, Gaiman would be at the top of the list, simply because he does always seem to be starting something new and different.

And, in typically untypical Gaiman fashion, he started writing The Graveyard Book in the middle -- with the fourth chapter, "The Witch's Headstone," originally published as a novella in the anthology Wizards, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois -- and then worked out to both ends.

In a city that could be anywhere, but feels English (even in the American version of the novel), a murderer -- "the man Jack" -- slaughters nearly an entire family as part of a mysterious mission. But the toddler son of the family wanders out of the house in the middle of the deaths, and makes his way to a local graveyard. And, there, the ghosts -- and one other inhabitant, neither dead nor living -- argue over what to do, but eventually decide to take him in.

The boy is given the name Nobody Owens, and called "Bod" for short. A 19th century ghost couple take on his day-to-day care, and that undead gentleman, named Silas, becomes his guardian and his one source of contact with the modern, living world.

That all happens in the first chapter, "How Nobody Came to the Graveyard." Later chapters -- there are eight in all, plus an "interlude" concerning doings elsewhere -- each see Bod a year or two older. The Graveyard Book is inescapably episodic; each episode is its own story, with Bod at a different point in his journey to becoming a man -- much like Kipling's The Jungle Book, which Gaiman admits was a great inspiration.

Bod starts young and innocent, with the freedom of the graveyard and not much else, but gains (and then loses) a friend, and learns much along the way. Gaiman, as usual, doesn't sugar-coat his worlds when he's writing for children; this may be a graveyard with friendly, helpful ghosts, but it's still a world with much nastiness in it. Gaiman's cosmology is influenced by Lovecraft here, as it has been before, so there are real horrors in this world, who would kill Bod -- or do much worse to him -- if he's not smart and tricky and thoughtful and brave.

Luckily for Bod, he is all of those things.

The Graveyard Book -- at least the US edition that I read; I understand that it varies quite a bit from the US to the UK -- also contains extensive illustrations by Gaiman's frequent collaborator Dave McKean. McKean provides the equivalent of three-to-five pages of art -- all grey wash and black ink -- for each chapter, bunched at the beginnings and ends. It's very atmospheric, and quite appropriate for the book.

Gaiman's novels have gotten very assured lately, through Coraline and Anansi Boys to Graveyard Book. I know there are those who think American Gods is his great, defining book, but he's actually been doing much better work since then, in smaller, tighter, more careful and precise novels. Graveyard Book continues that string of excellent work, and I hope Gaiman doesn't entirely abandon long-form prose for more exotic forms of storytelling -- he's a damn good novelist, these days, and I'd like to see him write one a year for a good long time. (That's not too greedy, is it?)

Into the Smoke

Today for ComicMix, I reviewed the second collection of Jason Lutes' current trilogy: Berlin: City of Smoke.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/1, Part One: Not Yen

And this is the second half of this week's list of books received in the mail -- everything published by companies that aren't called "Yen Press."

(Quicker-than-quick recap of the point of this exercise: I review, so books come in the mail. But I can't review them all. Oh, the sadness! So I mention them all as they come in.)

I have to lead off with Laurell Hamilton's new elf-sex book, just to get that cover up top. If I were Boing Boing -- and we all know that I am not -- I would right now be comparing that cover image to a well-known, but not well-liked, image known on the Internet by a six-letter name. Luckily, since I'm not Boing Boing, I won't be doing that.

The book in question is called Swallowing Darkness by Laurell K. Hamilton and it will be published by Ballantine in hardcover on November 4th. I've made enough fun of it -- now and when I saw the galley a few weeks ago -- so I'll leave it at that.

Coming from Vertical on November 18th is Black Jack, Volume 2 by Osamu Tezuka, the second of what's planned to be a seventeen-volume series reprinting nearly all -- excluding only a few controversial stories that aren't included in the standard Japanese series -- of Tezuka's most popular series with adults. (I reviewed the first volume recently for ComicMix.)

I saw a bound galley of Grady Klein's The Lost Colony, Book Three: Last Rights a few months ago, but still haven't read it -- partially because I haven't read the first two books, partially because the to-read stack of comics (excluding manga, which has its own pile) is nearly as tall as I am. Now that it's a real book -- it was published by First Second in October -- maybe I'll be able to find time for it.

I've read a number of graphic novels by Lewis Trondheim this year -- he's one of the stars of the French scene, and a number of publishers here are translating at top speed to get caught up on his stuff -- but I haven't before seen the work of Appollo (which the back flap of the book I'm about to name tells me is the thin pseudonym of Olivier Appollodorus). They worked together on Bourbon Island 1730 -- co-writing, with art by Trondheim -- a historical graphic novel with pirates, ornithology, and Trondheim's signature duck-headed people. First Second published this in October as well, but this is the first that I knew about it.

I saw Gus & His Gang (by Chris Blain) in bound galleys, and reviewed it for ComicMix a few weeks ago), so I'll just direct you to my review for further details. It's now available, yet another October book from First Second. (They have quickly become one of the most dependable graphic novel publishers around -- nearly everything they publish is wonderful, and all of it is interesting.)

Next is a tie-in I probably won't read for a game I'll probably never play: Gears of War: Aspho Fields. The novel is by Karen Traviss, who's very good at this kind of thing. (So if you do play Gears of War, you'll probably want this: Traviss is one of the better tie-in writers out there now.) It was published by Del Rey in trade paperback on October 28th.

Another book I saw in galleys but haven't managed to read yet -- though I still do intend to read it -- is Alan's War by Emmanuel Guibert, a graphic novel based on the WWII experiences of an American GI Guibert knew well. It's another book from the suddenly ubiquitous First Second, and will be published in November.

Gene Wolfe's new novel is An Evil Guest, which I'm greatly looking forward to reading. However, looking at it as a marketer, it's confusing me a little. It has a stylish, enticing cover, and some great quotes on the back -- about this particular book, by strong names, starting off with Neil Gaiman -- which generally means that the publisher (Tor, in this case) thinks they have something special and want to call more attention to it. (Special, in this case, would mean even by the standards of Gene Wolfe, and that's saying something.) But the flap copy is a bit dull and meandering -- starting off "An Evil Guest is a stand-alone supernatural horror novel in the Lovecraftian tradition with a 1930s noir atmosphere," like a particularly bland Library Journal review. I'm sure all the writers out there know the rule "Show, don't tell" -- but the editors, marketers and copywriters need to remember it as well. An Evil Guest was published in hardcover on September 23.

Also from Tor is the first book in a new contemporary fantasy series: Thirteen Orphans by Jane Lindskold. This one has its basis in Chinese lore -- there were thirteen exiles from the Lands Born from Smoke and Sacrifice, one each for the Cat and all of the signs of the Chinese Zodiac, and their powers were passed down through the generations. But now, in the modern day, many have forgotten their powers -- right when a new attack from their great enemies looms. (I'm sure we've all seen something similar at least a dozen times, but it's all in the execution, as always.) Thirteen Orphans will be published on November 11 in hardcover.

I also made my monthly trip to the comic-book shop this week, spending some of my own money on comics and related stuff. I'll be reviewing a lot of them, here or at ComicMix, so I might as well list them as well:

The second of Gilbert Hernandez's stories from inside the world of his "Palomar" stories -- they're supposedly graphic novel adaptations of low-budget movies one of the characters appeared in -- is Speak of the Devil, just published by Fantagraphics. (The first was Chance in Hell, which I reviewed for ComicMix.) These stories are a weird experiment, but "Beto" often gets very experimental, and it's usually exciting, even when it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Sealed in plastic, so that the tidal wave of existential despair can be contained, at least briefly, there's Chris Ware's new annual hardcover issue, #19, of ACME Novelty Library. Drawn & Quarterly distributes it, and the razor-blade and rat-poison industries thank them for it.

Also sealed in plastic -- though, I hope, for a different reason -- is Jonatham Ames's debut graphic novel, The Alcoholic. Ames is a novelist (I read his novel Wake Up, Sir!, which is also about an alcoholic writer not unlike Ames himself), and he's joined on this book by Dean Haspiel, who handles the art chores. (I love that phrase, with its connotations of kids cleaning their rooms or farm hands feeding chickens.) The Alcoholic is about an alcoholic writer named Jonathan A., though -- since this is being billed as a graphic novel rather than a graphic memoir -- it's apparently somewhat less directly autobiographical than it appears. DC Comics has just published The Alcoholic for your delectation.

The new collection of the best current SF comic (and one of the few good ones, ever) is Ex Machina, Vol. 7: Ex Cathedra, by the usual team of Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris. It's also published by DC.

And the first miniseries about a key member of Hellboy's B.P.R.D. team -- part of the ever-burgeoning Hellboy empire, growing like kudzu over the new-comics shelves -- has been collected as Abe Sapien: The Drowning. It's by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and Jason Shawn Alexander, and was just published by Dark Horse.

And last for this week is Powers Vol. 10: Cosmic (or "Cosimic," as the spine says) by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. I'm almost caught up with this series -- the twelfth volume will be published in December or so -- even though I enjoyed the "cops in a world with superheros" angle of the early issues better than the "cops get caught up in sidebar stories to what would be a major crossover if this was a real superhero universe" hoo-ha that it's gotten into recently. But I've come this far, so I might as well catch up; I am still enjoying most of this. Powers is published by Marvel/Icon, and this one came out just about exactly a year before I got it, in October of 2007.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/1, Part One: Yen

As you read this -- assuming you're reading it soon after I posted it and not, say, in the year 2679 as part of some dreary archival studies -- I'm on an airplane to sunny Florida, and so I'm not expecting to respond to comments, answer e-mails, or interact with anyone electronically for a solid week.

But the show must go on, so here are the latest week's collection of books in the mail. I review books, which means books come in the mail to review -- unfortunately (or fortunately, since I'm an acquisitive and inquisitive sort), more of them than I could ever manage to read. So I post every Monday morning, so all of the books are at least noted and mildly celebrated -- even the ones that I'll end up not managing to read.

This week, there was a big package from Yen, containing a lot of manga and manwha that they're publishing in November. In fact, it was so big that it's getting its own post. Everything else will be in a separate post, going up in a couple of hours. But, for now, it's all Yen all the time:

There's a "final" plastered below the issue number on the cover of Freak: Legend of the Nonblonds, Vol. 4 by Yi DongEun and Yu Chung, which I gather means that this is the epic conclusion of the story. However, when I reviewed the last volume for ComicMix, I didn't have much context, so I doubt I'll be able to explain much better this time. However, the back cover copy does say that, in this one, the Nonblonds head to the seaside to locate "the tears of the mermaid" -- so it's got that going for it.

I liked Shiro Ihara's Alice on Deadlines a lot to begin with -- as a guilty pleasure, very much so, but a silly, light one -- but I liked Vol. 2 less well than Vol. 1, and Vol. 3 even less well than that, as the characters multiply beyond my ability to place them and silly drama began to outweigh silly comedy. This one looks like it's getting even more dramatic, with amazing revelations about the true tragic past of the lecherous death-angel Lapan, and nasty machinations by his bureaucratic masters. So it may be more of interest to those whose tastes differ from mine -- I was perfectly happy with this as a silly, smutty, sexist little creampuff of a comic.

I've read several installments of Higurashi When They Cry in Yen's Yen+ magazine (and reviewed the first three issues of that magazine about six weeks ago), but it's now making the leap to tankubon form. (First of any of the serials in Yen+, I believe.) The series is by Ryukishi07 and Karin Suzuragi, and this volume collects the three installments that I reviewed in Yen+ -- which means that this series is still at the point of explaining itself; I found it had a lot of strengths, but I wasn't sure at all where it was going to go. (On the other hand, so many manga are so obvious that not knowing is a big plus.) One last thing, which may mean something to some of you: this volume is subtitled "Abducted by Demons Arc."

Yen dives in yaoi for the first time with the Mature-rated Love Quest by Lily Hoshino -- I think this is only their second M-rated book, after the Sundome series. Love Quest doesn't have a volume number on it, so I think it's complete in this book. It's a fantasy story, in which two high-school enemies find themselves in a "magical realm" where "the key to [their] survival is...the exchange of their bodily fluids." (The copy immediately mentions "swapping spit," so I suspect "fluids" is meant as titillation, and it's not super-explicit. On the other hand, I haven't opened the shrink-wrap yet, so I could be wrong....)

Another series I've seen before: Black God, Vol. 4 by Dall-Young Lim and Sung-Woo Park. (I reviewed Vol. 2 and Vol. 3.) It's another shonen series with a lot of violence -- well-executed, in a crisp, clear style -- and the usual superpowered good and bad guys battling for control of various things.

And here's another one I've read -- Sunshine Sketch, Vol. 2 by Ume Aoki -- so I can kick you to my review of the first volume. It's a light, cute 4-panel series about high school girls, much more down-to-earth and realistic than most high school manga, and I liked the first one quite a bit.

I also read and reviewed the last volume of Goong: The Royal Palace, Vol. 3 by Park SoHee, a romantic manwha series set in a slightly alternate world where Korea still has a monarchy, and our heroine has just married the heir for dynastic rather than love reasons.

But I've never read any of the earlier volumes of Moon Boy, Vol. 5 by Lee YoungYou, which is some kind of supernatural story about battling (human, or humanoid) Rabbits and Foxes.

And then there's Comic, Vol. 4 by Ha SiHyun, the latest in a series about romances at a manwha school.

I also saw and reviewed the first volume of Very! Very! Sweet, Vol. 2 by JiSang Shin and Geo, about an arrogant rich Japanese boy transplanted to Korea and the Korean girl (our viewpoint character, generally) he's going to be in love with eventually.

And last from Yen is Hissing, Vol. 5 by Kang EunYoung. It's another romance story, with back cover copy describing the tensions among Sun-Nam, Da-Eh, Da-Hwa, and others -- which is doubly confusing to me, because I really don't know the gender markers in Korean names. (Poor me.)

I'm Going to Disney World!

As I've mentioned here and there over the past few weeks, I'm heading off for a family vacation to Walt Disney World early tomorrow morning, and I'll be gone for a week.

I will be taking my laptop -- mostly to use it as a DVD player to entertain the kids in the evening -- but I don't expect to be online much, if at all. So I'm probably going to be completely out of electronic contact for an extended period for the first time since I got e-mail in about 1994. (I hope the cold-turkey shakes aren't too bad.)

I've already written and scheduled at least one substantial Antick Musings post for every day that I'll be gone -- mostly reviews of books like Steven Brust's Jhegaala, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, and many others, in many different genres -- so this site will not be dark. I've also sent through my usual posts to ComicMix, so expect to see reviews from me there Monday-Wednesday-Manga Friday, as I always try (but don't always succeed) to do.

And I'll be back here live, to dive into accumulated e-mails and whatever else, sometime on Monday the 10th.

See you all on the other side.

Movie Log: The Royal Tenenbaums

And the last movie I need to write about before I can go on vacation is The Royal Tenenbaums. (With this post, I will be officially All Caught Up, having written about all of the books I've read and movies I've seen, with five ComicMix reviews sitting in their queue and nineteen Antick Musings posts poised to drop at specified times over the next eight days. I've been damn busy this last week, even if hardly any of it has shown from outside.)

This is the middle Wes Anderson movie, between Rushmore and Life Aquatic; I'm now caught back up on his work. (Not hard to do with a guy who's only directed five full-length movies, but we have to take our wins where we find them.) It's a Wes Anderson movie, so it's a bit off-kilter and has both Bill Murray and a surfeit of Wilson brothers in it. And everyone else who cares probably saw it seven years ago, when it came out.

The Wife and I watched it about a week ago, and we had a buggy Netflix disc with some scratches at the beginning and end. It did mean that we got through the movie fifteen minutes faster than we should have, but I'm not sure if I can honestly claim to have seen the whole thing. So I'll avoid making any sweeping judgments about it.

I'd like to see Royal Tenenbaums again some day, and watch the whole thing -- but probably not for a few years. It felt like a tighter, more constricted, and darker movie than the other Wes Anderson films -- it is about a family of huge failures (all after early, massive successes), after all. (And was that Anderson making a pre-emptive stab at his own career? So that, no matter what happens to him from this point, he can point to Royal Tenenbaums and say, "At least I never got that bad.")

Should I say anything about the plot? Gene Hackman is Royal Tenenbaum, a lawyer in a city that's never actually (in the parts I saw, at least) specified as New York, but seems to be. He and his wife Etheline (Anjelica Houston) pushed their three children to succeed hugely: Chas (Ben Stiller) as a pre-teen business tycoon, Richie (Luke Wilson) as a tennis star, and the adopted Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) as an acclaimed playwright. But all that is prologue -- literally -- and seems to have been over well before any of them turned twenty. Now, fifteen or twenty years later, Royal is disbarred and broke, Chas a paranoid widower, Margot a secretive introvert married to a famous psychologist, and Richie seemingly normal, for a guy who never shaves or takes his sunglasses off.

It's a family story, so what happens from there is how the family members -- in odd, abnormal, Wes Anderson ways -- get on each others nerves and deal with each other. It's not really a happy movie, but family life isn't always happy, either. Again, I'd have to see it again -- see it all the way through -- to say anything I could stand behind. But it's definitely a movie worth seeing, even the way I saw it.

World Fantasy Award Winners, 2008

Grabbed from SF Awards Watch and presented without commentary:

• Novel: Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada/Penguin Roc)
• Novella: Illyria, Elizabeth Hand (PS Publishing)
• Short Story: “Singing of Mount Abora”, Theodora Goss (Logorrhea, Bantam Spectra)
• Anthology: Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Ellen Datlow, Editor (Tor)
• Collection: Tiny Deaths, Robert Shearman (Comma Press)
• Artist: Edward Miller
• Special Award, Professional: Peter Crowther for PS Publishing
• Special Award, Non-Professional: Midori Snyder and Terri Windling for Endicott Studios Website

Movie Log: Train Man

Another day, another romantic comedy -- I guess I've seen a lot of them recently. (I tend to prefer comedies to dramas, and also mildly prefer independent films to Hollywood ones...and "independent drama" is code for "soul-crushingly depressing story of absolutely horrible things happening to unpleasant people.")

This one is Train Man: Densha Otoko -- the latter is "Train Man" in Japanese, I believe. It's the story of a young yutz (called "Train Man," played by Takayuki Yamada) who meets a cute girl (played by Miki Nakatani -- a small in-joke, since the character in the light novel the movie is based on is described as looking just like Nakatani) on a train by vaguely attempting to protect her from an annoying drunk -- he doesn't really do much, but he is the only person on a crowded train who even tried to stand up to the plastered salaryman.

In typical Japanese fashion, she sends him an expensive thank-you gift: a Hermes tea set (which leads him to start calling her Hermes), and he's not sure what to do.

So he does what he's always done: turns to the Internet for answers. He starts a chat room or message board thread -- if I could read Japanese, I could probably even tell you what site, since the movie shows the computer screens large and clear enough to read many of the characters. And a motley group of others -- a nurse, a young guy alone in a room with his rabbit, a thirtyish salaryman, a thirtyish woman in her kitchen, and three similarly young and confused guys on one computer in a manga cafe -- start to give him advice, and to encourage him.

Under their guidance, Train Man changes his image and pursues this romance -- in fits and starts and with an almost fatal lack of confidence -- entirely on the basis of the advice of his Internet brain trust. And things generally go well -- the main obstacle to overcome is Train Man's own crippling shyness. (I gather such a person is not at all unusual in Japan.)

And then the movie throws a huge curve ball at the very end, which I won't describe, since it would ruin the movie. I want to know what other people think about that curve ball -- it's a continuation of a motif seen a few times earlier in the movie, but there could be very different interpretations of it -- so I'm going to encourage everyone to see this movie.

And, honestly, if you can stand to read subtitles, Train Man is a lot of fun: it's funny, cute, and even heartwarming. Train Man's cheering section become characters in their own right as it goes along, and there's even a small sub-plot involving them. But I'm not sure what to make of that ending -- I can tell it's deliberate, and it's a bold choice, but it does leave me wondering.

Read in October

And that's another month down. Here's what I read this time around, with links to my reviews (in the cases where I've managed to finish those reviews).

• Osamu Tezuka, Black Jack, Vol. 1 (10/1/08)
  
• Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney Official Casebook, Vol. 1: The Phoenix Wright Files (10/2/08)
  
• Josh Karp, A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever (10/3/08)
  
• Mitch Clem, Nothing Nice to Say, Vol. 2 (10/5/08)
  
• Scott Meyer, Help Is On the Way: A Collection of Basic Instructions (10/5/08)
  
• Miwa Ueda, Papillon, Vol. 1 (10/6/08)
  
• Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (10/6/08)
  
• Jim Butcher & Ardian Syaf, The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle (10/6/08)
  
• Gaku Tsugano, Nagaru Tanigawa, & Noizi Ito, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Vol. 1 (10/7/08)
  
• Idumi Kirihara, Hitohira, Vol. 1 (10/8/08)
  
• Richard Stark, Dirty Money (10/8/08)
  
• Rutu Modan, Jamilti and Other Stories (10/9/08)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 26 (10/10/08)
  Naruto and Sasuke have a fight, nobody wins, Triangle Man.
  
• Jim Davis & Dan Walsh, Garfield Minus Garfield (10/11/08)
  
• Danny Shanahan, Bad Sex! (10/12/08)
  
• Jim Davis, Garfield: 30 Years of Laughs & Lasagna (10/12/08)
  
• Atsuhi Ohkubo, B.Ichi, Vol. 1 (10/13/08)
  
• Song Yang, Wild Animals, Vol. 1: Key Trafficker (10/14/08)
  
• Douglas Brown, Just Do It (10/14/08)
  
• Jack Ziegler, How's the Squid? (10/14/08)
  
• Ken Akamatsu & Ran, Mao-Chan, Vol. 1 (10/15/08)
  
• Guy Delisle, Burma Chronicles (10/16/08)
  
• Glenn Dakin, Abe: Wrong for All the Right Reasons (10/17/08)
  
• Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates (10/17/08)
  
• Paul Gravett, editor, The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics (10/20/08)
  
• Yukako Kabei & Shiori Teshirogi, Kieli, Vol. 2 (10/21/08)
  
• KwangHyun Seo & JinHo Ko, Croquis Pop, Vol. 2 (10/22/08)
  
• Satoko Kiyuduki, Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, Vol. 2 (10/23/08)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 27 (10/24/08)
  The end of "Book One" has about a hundred page of denouement, with all of the characters heading off into the hiatus on their own paths. And then there's a hundred-page adventure of Naruto's sensei Kakashi, telling the story of how he got his sharingan eye.
  
• Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) (10/25/08)
  
• Marguerite Abouet & Clement Oubrerie, Aya of Yop City (10/25)
• Jessie Reklaw, The Night of Your Life (10/26)
  
• Mari Matsuzawa & Mamizu Arisawa, Inukami!, Vol. 1 (10/27/08)
  
• Jason Lutes, Berlin, Book Two: City of Smoke (10/28/08)
  
• Chip Kidd, Geoff Spear, Saul Ferris, Anne Ishii, & Jiro Kuwata, Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan (10/29/08)
  
• Timothy Truman & Tomas Giorello, Conan, Vol. 6: The Hand of Nergal (10/30/08)
  
• Matthew Stover, Caine Black Knife (10/30/08)
  
• Enrico Casarosa, The Venice Chronicles (10/31/08)
  
• Art Spiegelman, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@#*! (10/31/08)
  A reprint -- oversized like the original -- of Spiegelman's 1978 Breakdowns album, with all of his '70s experimental (very experimental, very formalist) comics, along with a long introduction in comics form and a pretty long prose afterword as well. I don't think the center of Breakdowns has aged very well -- it's artiness for the sake of itself, which works better on a wall in a gallery than on a printed page -- but it's interesting to see, and the new material is more conventionally accessible. (The old stuff deliberately avoids linearity and other story virtues, so it's silly to complain that it does so...but it is tough to read, and one wonders whether the effort is worth it.)
  

Reviews of a lot of those books -- to fill in the so-far-missing links -- will be coming over the next ten days, while I'm off on vacation. I wouldn't leave you folks without content for a whole week!