Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/22

I have no particularly amusing opening for you this week, and for that I deeply, humbly apologize. Really. But we must soldier on anyway, and so I'll tell you that the below are the books and other ephemera that arrived on my doorstep over the past week, which I have not yet read. Here, then, is what I can tell you about them, in hopes that one or more of them will be your favorite whatever-it-is of the year or decade or week or hour.

First up is a comics collection, Wings for Wheels: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen, which comes in a neat pseudo-LP format, with a red 36-page "record" with six comics stories sitting inside a white "sleeve" with that swell wraparound art from Dan McCool that you can see above and to the left. Wings for Wheels is edited by Nomi Kane, who also contributes one of the six pieces as well -- other contributors are Todd McArthur, Jen May, Josh PM Frees, Jen Vaughn, and Pat Barrett. I imagine I got this because I'm a Jersey guy who reviews comics, and I'm very happy to see it: it's a great package with work by cartoonists I'm not familiar with, so it'll be a great sampler. My quick web research shows that it debuted at the recent SPX small-press comics show, and that you can get it either at other shows attended by the contributors or online at Kane's Brew for Breakfast webstore.

Along completely different lines is the young-readers "choose-your-fate adventure book" Wonder Woman: Power Outage by Michael Teitelbaum. It's one of those "if you go through the right door, turn to page 17" books that people my age remember from the '80s, with a storyline centered on Wondy losing her powers at random times for unknown reasons and a number of puzzles in the middle of the story. It's for readers from age 8-12 (or possibly strong readers a bit younger than that, and WW fans above that age), and will be published by Tor's Starscape imprint in paperback tomorrow.

Vertical, a prominent publisher of smart and interesting books from Japan in translation (including a lot of Osamu Tezuka books over the past few years) has a couple of new manga series starting this month, and first up is Keiko Suenobu's Limit. It's a look at bullying and cliques in a high school setting, and -- since Suenobu is best known for her Kodansha Award-winning shojo story Life (which included elements of self-mutilation, rape and suicide), it's not likely to be a quiet or renormalizing story.

Also from Vertical and also set in a highschool -- though looking to be slightly less dramatic, is a new edition of Paradise Kiss from AiYazawa (best known here for Nana). This classic josei story of high fashion will be published in three volumes this time around.

Max Gladstone's first novel is Three Parts Dead, which clearly spurns all conventional pigeonholes to instead strike out on its own: it seems to be, more or less, a necromantic steampunk legal thriller set in a quirky secondary world. Our heroine, Tara, must resurrect the fire god Kos before his city falls apart -- and, of course, it will not be that simple. Three Parts Dead has admiring quotes from writers as diverse as Carrie Vaughn, Jerry Pournelle, James Morrow, and John Crowley (whom I don't recall seeing blurb anything for a long time, if ever), and will be a Tor hardcover hitting stores October 2nd.

I have to admit I don't really understand the thrust of Walter Mosley's current writing project for Tor, "Crosstown to Oblivion," which will eventually consist of six novellas published in three volumes -- probably because I haven't yet read the first duo, The Gift of Fire/On the Head of a Pin. But the second volume -- again, two novellas, this time entitled Merge and Disciple
-- will be published by Tor in hardcover on October 12th, and Mosley remains one of the most interesting contemporary American writers, so it's certainly worth a look. (See the opening paragraph of my review of Mosley's novel Killing Johnny Fry for a sketch of my brief for Mosley as a major American writer; I don't think it makes sense to continue to qualify him as "mystery" or "African-American" at this point.)

And last for this week is The Skybound Sea, the finale of Sam Sykes's Aeons' Gate trilogy. It's big, dark epic fantasy, and it has one of the best blurbs I've seen in a long time: "I do not wish Sam Sykes dead." -- John Scalzi. How can you resist that? Skybound Sea is a trade paperback from Pyr, which hit stores two weeks ago.

Dapper Caps and Pedal-Copters by David Malki!

I find it very hard to fault a man who includes an exclamation mark in his name, so don't look to me for serious criticism of David Malki!'s latest Wondermark collection, Dapper Caps & Pedal-Copters.

Dapper Caps is the fourth collection of the Wondermark webcomic, and -- like all collections of periodical comics, though even more so since webcomics started outcompeting newspaper strips -- it's basically a compendium of stuff you could have read, or perhaps already did read, elsewhere. But if that didn't stop your kid brother from amassing the world's largest collection of Garfield books, why should it stop you from getting a Wondermark collection?

As usual, Malki! takes old art, primarily Victorian, and twists it to his own ends, creating quirky, unconventional dialogues among diverse creatures and people -- his humor is often dark, and always at right-angles to expectations, which is just what I look for in humor. There are rarely continuing characters -- except the alien Gax, for some reason -- so you can start reading Wondermark anywhere: the beginning, this book, today's strip, or a random point in the archives.

Dapper Caps is funny, and weird, and overdesigned in that silly Wondermark way -- if you're not familiar with that, check out the online strip to see if it hits your particular funnybone.

The Most Meta Post Yet

Blogger, in its relentless Googleicious quest to make everything as stark and white and difficult to navigate as possible, has made the new design mandatory, as of a couple of days ago.

But it's still ugly, and still more difficult to use, and all of the problems it had before. It's dull and bland and I hates it.

(And now I have a new excuse for not blogging! Yea me!)

In Which a Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

All that talk about the 47% not paying taxes and being "takers" is bunk -- you know that, right? (See Ezra Klein for the details, if you disagree.)

And, also from Klein, is this graphic, which combines all US tax burdens (state, local, and federal) to show that we'll all paying tax, and that the very rich are actually paying slightly less, as a percentage of income, than those of us in the middle. (You may think that's hunky-dory, which I respect, but you do need to admit what is actually true.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/15

It's Monday once again, so I'll regale you with details of the stuff that arrived on my doorstep last week. (Yes, it's a man's life reviewing books on the Internet.) As usual, I haven't read any of these books yet -- in fact, what I've done with them, up to this second, is opened their packages and placed them gently onto a pile on my desk -- so what I have to tell you has the slight chance of being somewhat inaccurate. But I'll do my best to avoid that, and to tell you whatever are the most wonderful/interesting/compelling things about each of these books, since your favorite book is not necessarily the same as mine.

But, just in case your favorite book is the same as mine: I'll start with that. Chris Ware's most recent massive comics project (after Rusty Brown and Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth and the various other things he's bundled into ACME Novelty Library over the years) has been Building Stories: a series of separate stories about the residents of one apartment building, appearing in different publications over the past decade. But now Building Stories has completed construction: it will be published, as a single artifact, by Pantheon on October 2nd. But Building Stories is not a book: it's a box containing 14 different comics objects (two hardcover books, one softcover, several pamphlets of radically different sizes -- including a couple at broadsheet size -- and a fold-out printed in what looks like a board-game format). It's a fascinating experiment in narrative, and many people will try to convince you over the next few months that it's not "comics" or a "graphic novel" because of that. But it is comics -- a massive, proliferating, expansive exploration of many of the ways comics can tell stories -- and so you must deny anyone who says that: this is comics, it's just really good comics.

It's also time for the monthly mass-market paperbacks from DAW, and the three that will be hitting shelves and wire racks near you in October are:

• Changes, a Valdemar novel by Mercedes Lackey, and the third in her "Collegium Chronicles" sub-series -- I see from the card page that there will be at least one more, Redoubt, so this is not the end of a trilogy.
• The Ninth Circle, fifth in the Military SF adventures of the redoubtable ship U.S.S. Merrimack by R.M. Meluch.
• And Sand Witches in the Hamptons, fifth in Celia Jerome's urban fantasy series about a comics-artist-turned-magician named Willow Tate, which is, as the astute reader may have realized, set in New York City's playgrounds of the rich, the Hamptons.

Clay and Susan Griffith's alternate-historical vampire epic Vampire Empire hits its third book with The Kingmakers, which was published by Pyr on September 3rd. (This is the series where the vampires have conquered the temperate regions of the world, and regular humans -- who, from the covers of the books, all look to be pretty pale themselves -- are fighting back from the hot tropical regions.)

Swedish horror writer John Ajvide Lindqvist is still best known for Let the Right One In, his novel about a boy's unsettling friendship with an ancient vampire who looks like a girl his age (partially because that novel was made into movies both in Sweden and the US), but he's written a number of other novels (I saw his Harbor in a trade paperback edition just a couple of weeks ago). And his 2010 novel Lilla Stjarna has been translated into English as Little Star, publishing from Thomas Dunne Books on October 2nd. This one is about a baby girl, found in the Swedish woods in the early '90s, and the teenager she becomes fifteen years later, when she enters a TV singing contest. And it is a horror novel.

Steven Erikson has not let the end of his main "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series slow him down -- barely a year after the end of that series with The Crippled God, he's back with the first book in a new trilogy in the same world. Forge of Darkness, the first book in the Kharkanas Trilogy, is set in the deep past of the original series, in the warren of Kurald Galain, apparently at a time when the Tiste people had not yet been split into three. It's a Tor hardcover, available September 18th.

And last for this week is the newest book from Tom Pomplun's Graphic Classics line, Halloween Classics, which has 140 pages of comics based on classic tales of monsters and mayhem from writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Washington Irving. Creators involved include Matt Howarth, Rod Lott, Simon Gane, Jeffrey Johannes, Nick Miller, Antonella Caputo, and Pomplun himself. It'll be in comics shops and other retailers any day now -- in plenty of time for the holiday -- and, like the others in the series, it can be a great way to introduce reluctant prose readers (possibly including yourself) to the work of great writers while still being very entertaining at the same time.

Incoming Books: September 14th

It's been a hectic and busy week -- I had jury duty Tuesday-Thursday, and then was at a conference part of the day on Friday (on top of a major quarterly project at work being due Tuesday) -- but, on the way out of NYC yesterday, I did manage to stick my head into a comics shop and buy some books.

And this is what I found:

Gloriana, a small-format book of comics by Kevin Huizenga, mostly about his semi-autobiographical character Glenn Ganges. (See my review of his Curses, which also featured Ganges. I also looked at The Wild Kingdom, which was less definable.)

The third of Darwyn Cooke's adaptions of Richard Stark novels about a particularly focused criminal, Parker: The Score. (See my reviews of the first two: The Hunter and The Outfit.)

The fifth of Rick Geary's "Treasury of XXth Century Murder" books -- which followed eight similar books of Victorian murder and an initial larger-format collection -- is Lovers' Lane, about a dual murder in New Jersey in 1922. (I've reviewed a bunch of them: The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans, The Lindbergh Child, Famous Players, The Case of Madeleine Smith, The Saga of the Bloody Benders, and The Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti.)

Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 5, the latest in the current annual series from Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. (I reviewed 1, 2, and 3, but still haven't read 4 -- I might end up holding it for my massive re-read of Love and Rockets, or maybe not.)

Michel Rabagliati's The Song of Roland, another in his series of semi-autobiographical stories about his stand-in, Paul. (See my reviews of Paul Goes Fishing, Paul Has a Summer Job, and Paul Moves Out.)

And last was another Love and Rockets book, the all-Jaime collection with the jawbreaker of a title God and Science: Return of the Ti-Girls. I wasn't as thrilled by this superhero/women's wrestling story as most Internet commentators were -- possibly because I have very little residual affection for superheroes, unlike most of the comics world -- but I do want to see how it reads as a single book, and as part of the overall L&R experience.

Bacon Numbers and Pointless Quests

So today's Internet buzz is that Google has quietly rolled out another way to waste time interesting searchable thing: you can now google a name and "bacon number" (in either order) and get that person's links to Kevin Bacon. (A la The Oracle of Bacon -- every previously standalone website will eventually become a minor Google app.)

And the wailing and gnashing of teeth has followed, as we should have expected: some because it ruined their party games, and some because it's difficult to get a number above 3 for any person recognized as a movie actor.

I've been doing a little poking around, and found a number of 3s -- all either old or odd cases, including Tor Johnson, Richard Thompson, Jimmy Page, Syd Barrett, Leopold Stokowski, Zeppo Marx, Edward R. Murrow, Harry Secombe, Vera Lynn, Erich Von Stroheim, and Mary Pickford.

Getting higher than that, though, is thorny, and it may be exacerbated by Google -- it's not clear if they've built logic to allow bacon searches on every name in IMDB (or whaterever other back-end they're using), and some names I'm putting in aren't coming up with any number at all.

But I have found a handful of 4s: Bettie Page, John Bonham, Tempest Storm, and Johnny Carson. (And it seems to get a 4, you need to pick someone who appeared either in only one movie with "real" Hollywood actors, or who is from an film industry in an entirely different language. I tried to pick names I could think of without help from outside help, but I did cheat a bit when I couldn't remember specific names -- as with the Ritz Brothers, none of whom have definable Bacon Numbers in Google.)

In older articles about Bacon numbers (and the Oracle of Bacon itself), there's indications that there are a few people with 5s and even higher -- the Oracle claims there are 27 people with a Bacon Number of 8, even. But I haven't been able to find or replicate any on Google today.

(And, sadly, Paul Erdos has an undefinable Bacon Number.)

Hear Him, Hear Him

Joshua Bilmes is wise about the Hugo ceremony:

If you don't think the Hugo Awards should go on for three hours, and they most certainly should not, you have to do away with the damned clips for the dramatic presentation. If you're going to leave in the clips, then I want people to read one-minute excerpts from the nominated pieces of fiction. Believe it or not, the Hugos are supposed to be a literary award, so none of these damned clips for the dramatic presentations.

 (I wasn't even there, so I have no particular axe to grind.)

Top Shelf's Massive Annual Sale Returns Again

I've flagged this in past years, but they publish new books every year -- so even if you got everything good last time around, there's more good stuff since then.

So go check 'em out -- dozens of great graphic novels and comics, as low as $3, for the next two weeks.

Things I've just ordered myself include:

• Jeff Lemire's new GN, The Underwater Welder
• Eddie Campbell's new book, The Lovely Horrible Stuff
•  Campbell's epic and awesome Alec: The Years Have Pants, possibly the greatest autobio comic ever
• Jess Fink's sexy and fun Chester 5000
• and a good half-dozen more

Your list will probably be different from mine, but these deals can't be beaten with crowbars or baseball bats -- grab them while you can.

Dante's Divine Comedy by Seymour Chwast

The Divine Comedy is already half-way to being a catalog -- a long listing of sins and sinners (with a much shorter list of virtues and the virtuous) matched to their punishments, with loving detail on many of those very inventive punishments -- so that turning it into a graphic novel and making that catalog real, as noted designer Seymour Chwast did two years ago, seems like an obvious idea afterward.

Dante's Divine Comedy runs through the three long poems in less than a hundred and twenty pages of comics -- and those are Chwast's comics, which come more from the schools of poster-making and design than from the flowing layouts of Eisner and Kirby, so those pages are stark and schematic, with the emphasis equally on the look of the pages and on the matter. The skeleton of the story is still here -- a Dante out of a '30s private-eye movie is escorted through the supernatural realms by a Virgil who could be Hercule Poirot and a Beatrice who might be played by Constance Bennett -- but Chwast's retelling focuses primarily on the high points, which means running Dante and Virgil through the circles and pits of hell while showing as much misery and torment as possible.

Dante does manage to get a few cracks in about free will and the plight of the virtuous pagans along the way, but the joys of Chwast's Dante's Divine Comedy is in the long sequence of pages that would all look wonderful printed large and plastered up on a wall -- this is a book that would work as well as a gallery show, or papered up, oversized, on a wall in some downtown full of sinners who need to be suitably chastised. It's a decent introduction to Dante's original, or at least to the idea of it: due to the format, Chwast can use almost none of Dante's poetry (just the first and last lines). So Chwast's Dante is a condensed and highlighted version: there's no notes or sidebars to explain how many of the people Dante meets in Hell and Heaven are ones he knew in life -- and how much he's settling scores with the Divine Comedy -- though the parade of Italians does make the general point clear to savvy readers.

So this is no replacement for the original -- what adaptation ever is? -- but it's a striking re-imagining of Dante's realms of the afterlife through the eyes of one of the best designers and artists of the past century.

(Chwast has also adapted Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales into a graphic novel; see my review.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 9/8

Every month, there's a slow week. Some months -- the ones with a major holiday -- things can get so slow that there's no mail at all for me to write about. (And that makes me sad, because a lack of easy content is almost as bad as a lack of free books.) This week had a second-tier holiday, Labor Day, which meant the mail was light.

But I still have two books to write about, which means I get a post out of them. And, even though there's only two books here, I still didn't get the chance to read either of them. But I'll be able to tell you some things about them, such as:

Omamori Himari is a manga series about the usual "typical teenage boy" -- in this case named Yuuto Amakawa -- who gets involved with wacky supernatural hijinks, in this case a cat spirit in the form of a sexy girl, Himari, who is of course devoted to him and who defends him from the relentless attack of demons who want to kill him (and, I expect, also from the relentless attack of pretty human girls who want him to be their boyfriend, because that's how these kind of series go). There have been ten collections of the series so far (though the English version is lagging about two books behind, with #9 scheduled for later this year), and, I'm sad to say, that that excrescence of the US comics market, the "zero issue" has come to manga as well. Because the book I have here is Omamori Himari, Vol. 0, even though it doesn't collect prequels to the main story, but instead has a few regular sidebar stories (including a color opener that is that massive cliche, the get-all-the-girls-into-a-hot-spring-naked story), a prose story, some 4-koma, character sheets from the manga, and other miscellaneous stuff related to the series. I wish they hadn't numbered it "zero," but I expect fans of the series will enjoy it a lot -- and it's coming from Yen Press this month.

And the other book is This Book Is Full of Spiders, by David Wong, which I've already disposed of because, dude! it's full of spiders.

Ha ha! It is a joke! This book has a title that is meta and funny, and so I am funny, too! Ha ha!

Levity aside, this is the sequel to John Dies at the End features David Wong and John (who, I gather, either didn't die at the end, or got better) facing more horrifying and funny threats to mankind. Plus spiders. It's a hardcover from Thomas Dunne Books on October 2nd.

But I think Wong is completely ripping off Donald Dane, down to the conceit for Book Two:

Page by Paige by Laura Lee Gulledge

Art is hard. We know this because artists tell us so incessantly, and we're happy to agree with them, since it ends their complaints a little sooner than arguments would.

Of course, plenty of other things in the world are hard -- major software implementations are really gnarly, and finance, law, and medicine are full of difficult, complicated questions and details -- but art is uniquely, specially hard, because it's made by special, wonderful people who are in touch with both the cosmos and their own feelings, and all that connection makes them so, so fragile. This can be wearying -- but, sometimes, it's justified by the art that actually does come out of it.

Paige Turner is a young would-be artist -- indeed, for a long time in Page by Paige, we're not clear how young she is, until she finally goes to high school on page 45, and suddenly everything is a lot clearer (particularly for those of us who remember being teenagers or have direct contact with the angst of current teens). She wants to be an artist -- frankly, she's obsessed with a self-image as an artist, to the exclusion of everything else in her life -- and this entire graphic novel is somewhere in between a book of affirmations from Page to herself about that work and the story of how she became more confident and active in her art.

Page by Paige is an odd, obsessively artsy, relentlessly inward-focused graphic novel, something like a more specific, personal version of Lynda Barry's What It Is or Picture This -- there's something like a plot, as Page has just moved to New York from a small town in Virginia and makes some new friends (who are all budding artists of various kinds themselves), but the core of it is her self-examination and journey. And it's going to be most immediate and gripping to young artists -- young visual artists, cartoonists and painters, mostly, though maybe also poets and playwrights and singers and dancers -- who are working through the same feelings themselves.

So it is self-indulgent, the way teenagers are and have to be -- when you're building your own identity, that has to be the center of your attention -- but it's lovely and inspiring and energetic and inventive, and Page's enthusiasm is infectious, even for those of us who can't draw a straight line. But, if you're a curmudgeon about art, stay far away from Page by Paige, because it could give you a coronary.

Explorer: The Mystery Boxes edited by Kazu Kibuishi

So, first there was the series of Flight anthologies, edited by Kazu Kibuishi -- they showcased mostly younger cartoonists, mostly people working in and around animation, and weren't officially for younger readers, though they were almost entirely young-reader-friendly. Flight ran eight annual volumes, and ended last year. (I've reviewed Flight volumes three, five and seven.)

There was a spin-off anthology, Flight Explorer, which was specifically targeted to younger (roughly tween) readers -- though with pretty much the same crew of creators, very similar or the same main characters, and not much difference from the main Flight volumes. That was published in 2008, and was billed as "Volume One," though a second volume hasn't yet appeared. (And I reviewed it, as well.)

And now there's Explorer: The Mystery Boxes, which smells a whole lot like a themed Flight Explorer: Volume Two: seven graphic stories, edited by Kibuishi, all about mysterious magical/scientific/marvelous boxes and the people that open them, also aimed at middle-grade readers. Now, my major problem with the big Flight anthologies is that they were each three hundred pages of stories that were all mostly the same kind of thing: young or otherwise naifish protagonists wandering through big, visually exciting worlds, learning Important Lessons, being Nice, and probably saving something along the way. Flight Explorer was better: it focused on adventure, not so much on lessons, though it also seemed to be trying to launch each of its main characters as the hero of a series of separate graphic novels. (And the moderate success of that might be why we haven't seen a second volume.)

Mystery Boxes is the most circumscribed of the books: all of the stories have a mysterious box, which then opens to reveal something wondrous, unpleasant, or otherwise surprising, and then the heroes have to deal with that situation in eighteen pages (or, in one case, only sixteen). The resulting stories are pretty varied, though -- the unpleasant box-dwellers range from the creepy, in Emily Carroll's "Under the Floorboards" to the Warner-Brothers-inspired goofy, in Johane Matte's "Whatzit," and the lesson stories -- like Jason Caffoe's "The Keeper's Treasure," "The Soldier's Daughter" by Stuart Livingston with Stephanie Ramirez, and Kibuishi's own "The Escape Option" -- at least teach slightly different lessons from each other. And the sheer fun-mayhem level is high, in "Whatzit" as well as Dave Roman and Raina Telgemeier's amiable cartoony "Spring Cleaning" and Rad Sechrist's Littles-inspired "The Butter Thief" (which has a muted moral of its own).

As usual, the art is all excellent and very colorful -- even the creators that don't come out of animation embrace mostly bright palettes ("Butter Thief" uses muted tones in pursuit of a similar aim, and "Under the Floorboards" has a softer, scratchier feel) and clean black lines to define spaces. These are fun stories -- with a hint of spinach in the lessons most of them teach -- that should be enjoyed by tweens and viewed favorably by those tweens' gatekeepers (parents, teachers, librarians), who will be happier at those lessons that the target audience probably will be.

An Appropriate Level of Sarcasm

Unfortunately, the people who most need the message are sarcasm-deaf, but, anyway...