Yo Momma

Since I've been too filled with ennui to write much about the books I've read recently, let me instead tell you about my favorite band of the moment. Say Hi -- originally Say Hi To Your Mom -- is one of those one-guy bands, in which a dude (it's usually a dude) does all of the instruments and vocals himself into an Tascam or a Mac in his room. In this case, the guy is Eric Elbogen, and Say Hi (To Your Mom) has released seven records over the past ten years.

It's somewhat droning music, rock-based songs that usually stick within a specific sonic range and form a solid hedge of sound, and I find his best songs sneak into your ear and stay there for a long time. The vocals tend to be buried a bit, so Elbogen's voice is another instrument rather than floating on top, and the lyrics are allusive and hermetic, usually circling around topics rather than saying things explicitly.

The song I'm currently obsessed with is "Hooplas Involving Circus Tricks," the closest Say Hi comes to the obligatory what-it's-like-on-tour song, from the 2004 Say Hi To Your Mom record Numbers & Mumbles:


The first Say Hi song I fell in love with is the odd love song "Maurine," from 2009's Oohs & Aahs, which might just be from the point of view of a ghost:


And the song I'm most fascinated with is "November Was White, December Was Grey," in which Elbogen's breathing punctuates the song, also from Oohs & Aahs:


You don't have to like 'em, but I do: so there.

Ghouls of the Media

I said what I had to say about the Newtown massacre over the weekend (though the topic is certainly coming up over at Editorial Explanations, my other blog -- look for a bunch of cartoons with bizarre slants tomorrow).

But I do have to note one particularly slimy sidenote.

My last name is Wheeler; one of the kids murdered in Newtown had the same last name. And Newtown is less than a hundred miles away from me, which is practically next door, in US terms. There's no connection, as far as I know -- Wheeler is a common name.

But there was a call, from some random reporter from my local paper, on my answering machine yesterday. I have to assume they sat someone down with a phone book and a list of last names of the dead, to scare up potential relatives who might give a sad quote to their fish-wrap.

And at moments like that, I'm happy that the US newspaper industry is in such decline, if this is how they work a major story. It's disgusting, stupid, and a massive waste of time, all in the service of "human interest." And The Wife wonders why I'm such a misanthrope!

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/15

The package fairy has forsaken me this week: there was no mail, and so nothing to write about here.

I'll be back next week, I expect. And, if I'm lucky, I'll have some books to write about then.

(Parenthetically, I hope I never forget how very lucky I am to have people send me free stuff in the mail -- it really is  a wonderful thing, and not to be taken for granted.)

Grand Master Gene Wolfe

That's a nice phrase, isn't it?

SFWA announced on Thursday (hey, I've been busy!) that this year's recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award [1] will be the tremendously worthy Gene Wolfe.

I've groused about some Grand Masters in the past, but I have no complaints this time: Wolfe's work is smart, intricate, extensive, deeply rewarding and contains some of the best novels available in the SFF field. He already was a Grand Master, so it's good of SFWA to officially recognize that.

If you haven't read him, "The Book of the New Sun" is the canonical place to begin, but The Fifth Head of Cerberus is another good choice, and I personally always liked the somewhat lighter There Are Doors.

But you do need to know: Wolfe expects his readers to be smart and to attuned to small details; he doesn't make a habit of over-explaining and will only tell you some very important things once. So you need to actually read a Wolfe book, and not just skim over it, looking for the space-battle scenes.


[1] And I'm so happy that it's Wolfe that I'll forgo my usual sniping at the overgrown silly award name, which sounds like a football arena or an endowed university chair.

What Does, and Doesn't, Kill People

Yesterday, in two great nations, alike in self-regard but different in nearly everything else, there were startlingly similar attacks. Young men, afterwards described as mentally disturbed, each burst into primary schools, attacking over twenty children, and some adults, with intent to kill.

In Chengdeng, China, Min Yingjun stabbed twenty-two children and one adult outside the local school, sending nine to hospitals. No one is reported to have died, and no life-threatening injuries are reported.

In Newtown, USA, Adam Lanza shot twenty children and seven adults, only three of whom survived long enough to reach a hospital. All twenty children and six of the adults are dead.

The gun-rights folks like to say that crazy people are everywhere, and that we can never completely stop them. That is true but besides the point. Maybe Yingjun was just as crazy as Lanza, and maybe there was no way to stop either of them before their murderous rampages. Even granting those arguments for the moment, Lanza had access to a bulletproof vest and high-powered handguns, so he was able to kill people in an industrial, hideously efficient way that similarly crazy, murderous people in most nations of the world simply can't.

Maybe Newton will finally be the USA's Dunblane, the uniquely shocking event that makes this country wake up and realize that its gun policies are insane and horribly destructive. (And I write that as a man who worked for a book club for hunters for five years; I believe in the rights of individuals to own some guns, under some circumstances, for some purposes.) And maybe the discussion, and the legal framework of gun control, will finally move forward from the NRA's paranoid scorched-earth defense of the right of every last lunatic in the country to have military weaponry and armor, though I suspect the NRA itself will need to be marginalized and shouted down to make that happen.

For that to happen, though, we'll all need to remember Min Yingjun as well as Adam Lanza. This was not that cliche, the one lone crazy young man -- the world has thousands of similarly lonely crazy young men. Some countries do a better job than others of identifying them and getting them help, and some countries do a better job than others of protecting themselves when those young men go on rampages. And we can identify the policies that work, in both ways, and fight to have them implemented where they don't already exist.

Because the USA is currently horrible at both things: we don't find and help these men, and we don't stop them from arming themselves like elite soldiers to slaughter our children. And that is simply unacceptable for a nation that keeps insisting that it's the beacon of liberty and the wellspring of justice for the world.

This Is Not the Future I Was Promised

Today, I got an e-mail promoting "backplanes." I was momentarily excited, visualizing some kind of backpack-mounted personal-flight device -- maybe not a jetpack, specifically, but certainly something cool.

Sadly, a backplane turns out to be something dull and technical having to do with computer monitors, and my dreams are shattered.

Have we lived and fought in vain!?

Amazon Is Special

"[T]there's a reason why most companies don't employ the "provide a great service at such a great price that we don't actually earn any profits" business strategy, namely that shareholders typically want to own shares in profitable companies."
- Matthew Yglesias, Amazon Is a Great Company Because It Has the Most Generous Shareholders in the World

OK, one more, from further on:
"Wall Street has essentially granted Bezos the right to operate an extremely forward-looking charitable venture on the theory that at some future point it will acquire monopoly pricing power and start screwing us all."

Go read it all.

Kochalka and Kochalka Again

All artists want to stretch, to do different things and not get stuck in a rut. Some are more successful than others, though -- some are so much better at their particular area than anything else, and some have a sensibility that only really works in one style. But Shakespeare wrote both comedies and tragedies, and even Meryl Streep dove into musical comedy singing ABBA songs, so every creative person wants to try to do the same -- to be Chris Gaines as well as Garth Brooks, to direct as well as act, to show the world The Day the Clown Cried. And the results are often less than attractive.

James Kochalka, though, seems to have no trouble with it. On the comics side, he does graphic novels for kids -- particularly the Johnny Boo series -- at the same time as projects like Superf*ckers, which should be kept far away from children (particularly the ones who like to copy what they read). And when you add in his music, animation, and game projects, it's difficult to understand when the man sleeps, or if he has any thought that doesn't immediately express itself in art.

Pinky & Stinky is one of Kochalka's books for kids -- originally published in 2002, so it's older than most of his material in that area (Johnny Boo, the Monkey Vs. Robot books). Like so many Kochalka fictions, it has an odd premise -- two talking pigs are sent on a ten-year mission to Pluto --that's immediately and completely accepted. Events follow in a linear, almost dream-like way: an asteroid hits the piggies' rocket, so they crashland on the Moon. They salvage what they can from the crash, and walk until they find human astronauts at a pumping station. Most of the astronauts don't like the "fat little piggies," and, in the ensuing conflict, they all fall beneath the surface into the ice city of the hand-shaped Moon Men. And so on -- the piggies end up triumphant in the end, but there's a lot of activity along the way, all of it both following directly from previous events and plausible the way stories told by elementary-school boys are plausible. It's silly and adventurous like a Saturday-morning cartoon, and Kochalka's loose, energetic style suits it well.

American Elf is something else again, the daily diary comic Kochalka has been doing, and posting online, since October of 1998.  He draws himself as an "elf" -- pointy ears, massive overbite -- but most of the rest of the "cast" (which means just the people Kochalka encounters in the course of his life) are drawn like Kochalka humans: simplified and cartoony, but meant to be human. There are exceptions, though: one friend and band-mate, Jason, is drawn as a cartoon dog, and crowds tend to become shaggy outline figures -- just as real crowds seem like a mass rather than individuals.

Diaries are a tricky form: they can easily descend into banality (of the "I had toast for breakfast" style), but that very prosaic every-day-ness is what makes the best diaries really work. American Elf, more than ten years on, is a casual, immediate account of moments in Kochalka's life -- one cartoon, usually in four square panels, now always in color, on one or two events that happened in the last day or so. Those can be domestic moments with his wife, Amy, and two young sons, sometimes touching but more often riotous or complaining, since those are two rambunctious boys and Kochalka doesn't gloss over how nervous and angry and hard to live with he often is. Or they can be moments from his various artistic careers -- a "rock show" or a concert for troubled kids or phone conferences with Hollywood or the minutia of designing a game or read-testing his new comics stories with his sons. It's all together in American Elf -- all of the stories and thoughts and moments and ideas, the conflicts and meals and errands and bedtimes of a real life, presented as they happen and assembled into books afterward.

Book 4 is the most recent collection, with all of the strips from 2008 through 2011 -- a fat book, like the first collection, and unlike the middle two, which only collected two years each. That added bulk is good for Book 4; it gives a wider view of Kochalka's life, from just after the birth of his second son Oliver up past Oliver's fourth birthday, with time to see projects come and go and feel the ebb and flow of the year (summer camping trips, holidays, comics conventions at the same times each year). Kochalka's eye on his own life is unsparing and all-encompassing, from fears to lusts to career concerns to anger to playing with his sons -- and, in every strip, it feels like utter honesty, no matter what the subject. American Elf is one of the great comics of our time, and it got that way quietly, assembling itself day by day through Kochalka's eye and hand and brain, making art every single day out of something that happened to him, something that he thought and felt. The brilliance of American Elf is that it has no beginning or end -- a reader can jump in beginning any day (today, six months ago, the beginning, 2002) and come back to it every day for more. But Book 4 is a great package for a great strip, and Kochalka's life and art is well worth exploring and examining and celebrating.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/8

There is a tide in the affairs of books which, when taken at the flood, leads on to a big stack of stuff on the corner of my desk. And that flood occurred this past week, with a big box from the fine folks at Yen Press and several other notable publishing concerns, leaving me with more than a dozen things to write about today.

As always, I need to emphasize that I haven't yet read any of these books -- many of them, in fact, are volume eight, or twelve, or fourteen, or twenty in a series that I'm mostly unfamiliar with -- but that I'll tell you what I can about them, attempting to be both mainly positive and as accurate as I can.

I'll start off with a book I've already seen twice before (and still not read), besides getting the sequel a few weeks back. Yes, someone in this world really wants me to read David Wong's novel John Dies at the End, the humorous interdimensional invasion novel originally serialized online and then republished as an old-fashioned ink-on-paper "book." This newest edition commemorates the upcoming movie starring Paul Giamatti and directed by Don Coscarelli (famed in legend and lore as the man who brought us The Beastmaster). The movie hits video on demand on December 27th, the Sundance film festival in late January, and actual movie screens a few days after that, but you can read the movie tie-in edition of the original novel on December 24th. (Or track down one of the earlier editions, which are widely available now.) If you like your Lovecraftian horror with bro-humor, this is the book you've been waiting for.

Vertical sent me a couple of manga volumes this week, both of which are (coincidentally?) the second volumes in their series:

• Keiko Suenobu's Limit, Vol. 2 continues a dark story of high school cliques pushed to the, um, limit, as the five young survivors of a bus crash continue to fight and struggle for power and survival in the wilderness.
• Ai Yazawa's Paradise Kiss, Vol. 2 is much lighter in tone, centered on a young woman working  on a career in fashion and her various personal, school, and professional travails.

It seems odd that I've got a copy of the long-awaited novel A Memory of Light -- the fourteenth and final book in Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, written from his notes by Brandon Sanderson -- since I've never read the series and there are a few hundred thousand fans slavering for it. But I guess that's just the glamorous and exciting world of blogging. Memory publishes on January 8, and everyone else (besides my fellow bloggers and probably a few hundred traditional journalists and other tastemakers) will have to wait until then to read it. But, since I like you folks, I'll give you two tiny previews:

• the very last word of "The Wheel of Time" is "ending."
• and the first word on randomly-chosen page 349 is... "Mandragoran."

To read the rest, you'll have to wait until January 8th.

The bulk of the books I got this week were in the aforementioned big box from Yen Press, which are all coming in December. As usual, I'll organize those in order of volume number, so I can get more and more confused (and, perhaps, more entertaining to you) as I go along.

So I'll start with a standalone, Kaoru Mori: Anything and Something, a collection of short manga stories, illustrations, columns, and other short pieces by the titular manga-ka, best known for the series Emma.

Then there's Blood Lad, Vol. 1, launching a new series by Yuuki Kodama about a vampire (boss of a sizable territory in "demon world" but still, since he's a manga hero, a media-obsessed slacker) and the human girl he gets obsessed with when she accidentally wanders into demon world and gets killed. (This isn't as dispositive as you might expect, since she just turns into a ghost.) It looks quite self-referential and mildly goofy rather than deeply serious.

Alice in the Country of Hearts: My Fanatic Rabbit, Vol. 1 begins a new series in the world of the original Alice in the Country of Hearts series (though both of them are line extensions, since the original properties are games). The story is credited to the game studio QuinRose, the art is by Delico Psyche, and there's also a credit for scenario to Owl Shinotsuki. As far as I can tell, this is more cod-Alice in Wonderland adventures -- and the hook this time is that the March Hare character (another creepy but well-dressed young man, I expect) has showed up for the first time.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Vol. 3 is by Magica Quartet and Hanokage -- it, too, is from a different medium, adapting an animated TV show -- and continues the self-conscious magical girl story, with the usual fabulous costumes, hairstyles, and powers.

Spice and Wolf, Vol. 7: Side Colors is not a manga at all! (I have to throw in a curveball every so often to make sure you folks are awake.) It's the seventh light novel in the series by Isuna Hasekura, with illustrations by Jyuu Ayakura, and has more adventures of a traveling merchant and his companion, a minor wolf-based pagan harvest goddess. Actually, this is more of a light short-story collection, since the back cover describes it as "a series of short vignettes focusing on the series' favorite characters." (And that raises the question: can a series have favorite characters? How do you ask it which characters it likes best? And will it necessarily like characters from its own story?)

Chocolat, Vol. 8 is the end of the manwha series by Shin JiSang and Geo about a boy-band-crazy teenage girl and the second-choice boy-band she got caught up with. It looks like there's at least one love triangle here, and probably much more exotic shapes as well.

Raiders, Vol. 9 is also the last volume of a manwha series, but JinJun Park's story is as firmly for boys as Chocolat was for girls: full of fighting and supernatural vampires powered by the Holy Grail, the preserved blood of Christ, and other things probably just as blasphemous in Alabama. (And I'm sure certain conservative segments of Japanese culture feel exactly the same way about some Western re-interpretations of their own religious practices.)

Jun Mochizuki's Pandora Hearts hits its lucky thirteenth volume this month as well -- I reviewed the first volume a few years back, if you want a sense of where this vaguely Alice-inspired story began -- but I have to admit I have no idea what's going on in the story at this point.

Hitting its fourteenth volume is the well-known The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, about a literally irrepressible girl and the club of secretly superhuman folks she unknowingly gathered.

And last for this week is the twentieth volume of the proliferating Higurashi: When They Cry uber-series -- this one is Massacre Arc, Vol. 2, and it's by Ryukishi07 and Hinase Momoyama. As I understand it, each arc is really a separate horror-mystery story --- though all set in basically the same place and time -- so this is, in a way, only the second volume in its series.

The Imp of the Perverse

Yesterday, along with the other mail, I got a copy of A Memory of Light, which, as you know Bob, is the thrilling conclusion to a very long-running epic fantasy series. It presumably contains many shocking and surprising events that are eagerly awaited by hundreds of thousands of fans.

And so it came with a little notice, asking -- well, perhaps demanding is more correct -- that any coverage or reviews hold off until the official publication date in early January.

So of course I was immediately seized with the desire to thumb through the last chapter or two, type up what seemed to be the juiciest and most amazing bits, and post immediately. That was a silly, weird desire, particularly since I've never read any of the other books, but it was definitely there.

I didn't do it, obviously -- I do have more tact and couth than that. But I'm sure someone, somewhere on the vast Internet, has already done so. And perhaps that's the lesson of the Internet: anything you can think of, someone has already done.

Gloriana by Kevin Huizenga

Comics can be as smart as anything else, as focused on ideas and deep thoughts as any other art form -- in fact, comics' immediate, graphic nature can make it easier to present complicated concepts by combining pictures and text.  And at the middle Kevin Huizenga's small collection of Glenn Ganges stories Gloriana, there's an excellent example of that -- a chart-filled, text-dense explication of the moon illusion, partially told by Glenn to his neighbors on seeing a huge, red moon at the horizon and partially told directly to us the readers by Huizenga through Glenn.

Huizenga's comics work has a strong experimental/formalist streak to begin with, and Gloriana -- collecting four stories, three of them closely linked, originally published in Huizenga's comics ten years ago -- sees him pushing comics out in two directions, both the schematic moon-explanation of "The Moon Rose" and the pure tone-poem comic at the ending of "The Sunset," with exhilarating results.The other two stories -- "The Groceries" and "Basketball" -- are more conventional, slice-of-life stories, one serving as an introduction to the sun and moon stories, the other a shorter look backward at Glenn and/or Huizenga's life (it's not clear which, or if that's even a meaningful distinction).

Gloriana is comics the way most of us have never seen it -- one part post-Crumb personal soul-searching, one part Larry Gonickian explanation of complicated topics, and several parts pure Huizengian fascination with the hidden depths of the world, both interpersonal and scientific. It's exhilarating and demanding and lovely and utterly modern.

Quote of the Week

The whole post is worth reading, but the last line is the killer:

"I think an awful lot of what passes for political discourse in this country these days works off that principle: There's money in making stupid people mad."
 - Mark Evanier

The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler

I don't re-read books much; there are so many things that I think I want to read (or, at least, to have already read, which is not quite the same thing), that it's hard to justify time spent running through words I've already seen once before. But I've spent the last decade recommending The Basic Eight, an high-school murder story with a highly unreliable narrator that was Daniel Handler's first novel, published back in 1998 (in a very different world, pre-Columbine, pre-9/11, pre-cellphone, almost pre-Internet), and I felt the need, recently, to go back to it and see if it was still as impressive now as it was in memory.

(But what is as impressive under close scrutiny as it is in memory and at a distance?)

You'd have more trouble publishing a novel like The Basic Eight today -- especially from a major publisher. From the first page, we know that our narrator and protagonist, Flannery Culp, is a ward of the state, in some kind of institution for some horrible thing she did about a year before. And we know pretty quickly what that horrible thing was, and what day she did it, but we need to read through her journals as she presents them -- supposedly only lightly edited, but actually full of new commentary and special pleading. Flan was a high school senior, in an elite school in San Francisco, part of a group of friends -- now notorious nationwide -- called The Basic Eight. And she's going to tell us the story of the beginning of that senior year, from the letters she sent over the summer to a boy she had a crush on up through an eventful Halloween party and through the days after that.

And, along the way, Flan is going to lie to us. All first-person narrators lie at least a little -- unless their authors are both fanatical and dull -- but Flan is different: she has one big lie, which colors every page of The Basic Eight, and she won't admit to it until the end. The Basic Eight is a masterful example of a deeply unreliable narrator, a young woman who the reader knows is dissembling and misrepresenting all the way along -- but only at the end do we realize how much.

Basic Eight is as gripping and readable as I remembered: Flan's voice is tough and smart, damaged and immediate, with a smart kid's emphasis on vocabulary words and a thoughtful kid's sharp eye for the unfairnesses of life. It's a book that grabs immediately and demands to be read at speed -- though that's part of Flan's trick, to get you to read so quickly that you swallow everything she says whole.

I'll admit that Basic Eight is exactly the kind of book I love: unreliable narrator, text presented as an artifact, fancy writing, sneaky ending, big emotional stakes, huge secrets and reversals. Not everyone may look for those things in their books. But, if you do, you need to read Basic Eight as soon as you can.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan used to be a buzzsaw, but he's mellowed over the past decade or so, book by book, and Sweet Tooth is his softest and quietest novel yet, perhaps driven by his heroine, Serena Frome. McEwan clearly wants us all to know that Serena does not have a top-flight intellect -- and there may be a buried intellectual argument in her intense love of novels, particularly those by mid-century British women writers -- and so he has first-person narrator Serena tell us so, and then demonstrate it, over and over throughout this fairly short novel. Serena is not so much unreliable as reliably dim -- not dumb, in any sense of the word, but not nearly as smart as (McEwan implies) she should be, or as smart as those around her. Not nearly as smart as  McEwan, or his fictional stand-in here, certainly.

Serena thought she was smart -- she had that typical smart-kid childhood, where she was better at math than anyone in her school (and better than several of her teachers) but then went to Cambridge, where she soon found she wasn't that smart. And if she'd been allowed, or allowed herself, to read English there, she might have found congenial minds and read her way into work she really could do well. But, instead, she parlayed a third-class maths degree and a hastily-ended affair with an ex-spook teacher into an entry-level position at MI5, Britain's internal-espionage division, in the early '70s immediately after her graduation.

Serena doesn't tell us all of this explicitly, but McEwan makes it clear what her real assets were: she was very pretty, and very amenable, girlish and quiet and deeply conventional. The era when women in offices were meant to be primarily decorative might have been falling apart elsewhere, but government bureaus are very conservative, and secret ones even more so. As at university, Serena was intellectually outclassed at work, with even her best friend clearly more accomplished and savvy (though less pretty) than she was.

And so Serena found her niche, perhaps being shoved into it, out of spite or pique or a misplaced magnanimity, by Maximilian Greatorex, a young man who is her superior -- pointedly her superior, though joining the service at the same time she did, primarily because he was a man -- and was, briefly, her boyfriend. And that niche was a bland, minor operation called "Sweet Tooth," in which MI5 secretly bankrolled the careers of a number of politically appropriate writers, early in their careers, to bolster the case of anti-Communism, particularly on the left. The CIA had been doing the same thing in Europe for a couple of decades by that point, and the British service apparently though it was time to get into the act -- but to do it slowly, carefully, and in a small way, with stipends running through respectable front organizations to a bunch of nonfiction writers mostly concerned with the rotten conditions behind the Iron Curtain.

But the writer for whom Serena would be the main contact was an outlier: short-fiction writer Thomas Healy, who was not quite as reliably anti-communist, but who was the result of a compromise high up in MI5. The outlines of the program aren't clear to Serena -- either because they were never explained entirely to her, or because McEwan is keeping her dim in this as well -- but it seems likely that someone realized that the most influential and well-known writers of each generation are its novelists, and so they should probably try to snag one of those, if they could. So Serena is sent off as the representative of a front organization, to put Healy on the taxpayer's payroll secretly.

Of course Serena falls in love with Tom; of course they fall into an affair. When a middle-aged novelist writes the story of a gorgeous, not-as-smart-as-she-should be young woman who meets a young writer much like he was at the same time, he's always going to have her fall into bed with him. And, since this is still Ian McEwan, no matter how mellow he may have become, Serena's lies and misrepresentations will surface to cause trouble.

But this is the new-model McEwan: instead of the expected bleak ending there's instead something with quite a lot of hope and possibility in it -- it's not a crisp, specific ending though, but instead a choice, an open ending that could recast the entire novel if we let it. I do have to wonder what the McEwan of 1972, the McEwan who was thinking of and writing the stories that would become First Loves, Last Rites, would have thought of Sweet Tooth, if he could have read it without knowing who wrote it. I have a suspicion his opinion would not have been positive -- but, then, can any of us live up to the ideals of our younger selves?

Sweet Tooth is pleasant but, ironically, lacking in the bite that McEwan's best work had: it notes and points at rather than investigating and attacking, it wanders and ambles rather than stalking. As the title suggests, this book is uncharacteristically sweet, and not stronger for that.

Incoming Books: December 1

I needed to build up my stocks of comics and manga for my sons -- they're reading a lot of novels, so the novel-for-a-manga scheme is chugging along, and I also want to have a stash of comics for Christmas stockings -- so I placed a couple of mailorders for various comical funnies about a week ago, and they both arrived on Saturday.

(Anyone stalking me will have noted that I tweeted about the difficulty of getting into comics-shop packaging on that day.)

And, since I'm somewhat trying to rebuild my flooded graphic-novel collection (I have no hopes of rebuying any of the floppies; that's just a total loss), I got a few things for myself along the way:

Matt Wagner's Grendel Omnibus Volume 1: Hunter Rose -- I'm not crazy about the idea of this -- Devil by the Deed is a fine nasty little story, but all of the modern stylish crime junk Wagner has been weaving around it for the last decade-plus has obscured what made it special. So collecting it with all of those later Hunter Rose stories looks like a big mistake to me. But my copies of all of this stuff was turned to wet pulp, so you know what they say about beggars and choosers.

Elektra: Assassin by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz -- One of the great completely insane comics of our times, fizzing with livewire energy and pulsing with Miller's obsessions, then still (just barely) kept in check. I couldn't be without a copy of it for long.

Lobster Johnson Volume 2: The Burning Hand by Mike Mignola and various others -- I've gotten a year or two behind on my reading in the Hellboy-verse, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me. I might have to read a whole bunch of it at once, sometime soon.

And Fables: Werewolves of the Heartland -- for a moment, I was excited, because the spine just says "Bill Willingham," and I thought maybe it was so late because he actually drew something, for the first time in a long time, but it's just corporate-comics being corporate; there are a whole slew of artists credited. I'm also solidly behind on Fables, and I probably should stop buying them until I read some.