Incoming Books: Week of December 7th

About a week ago, I blogged about two sales going on in the comics-on-the-Internet world: one from my "local" comic shop, Midtown Comics, and one from the excellent Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly. And, over the past few days, the books I bought from those sales arrived, allowing me to gleefully unwrap them and cackle over them. (I hope you were able to make purchases of your own and engage in your own unwrapping and cackling.)

The Search for Smilin' Ed is the most recent major Kim Deitch book, in his ever-proliferating Waldo universe of secret histories of obscure and oddball entertainment media of the early 20th century. I reviewed it with two other (very different) graphic novels two years ago, and I just had to re-buy it, since my first copy was lost in the flood. But I was happy to do so.

Rick Geary has a new book in his long-running series of graphic novels about historical murders, currently under the umbrella title "A Treasury of XXth Century Murder." This year's entry is Madison Square Tragedy, about the 1906 murder of noted new York architect Stanford White. I've reviewed many books in this series over the years, and expect this one will be as carefully-researched and thoughtfully executed as all of the rest.

I also had to re-buy Thor Visionaries: Walt Simonson, Vol. 3, since my first copy was lost in the flood. (I think my sons might like to read this one, one day.) And this is the book with Skurge's last stand at Gjallerbru, one of the finest moments in comics, and in heroic literature.

The program to reprint the whole run of Charles Schulz's strip Peanuts has continued at Fantagraphics -- two volumes a year, regular as clockwork -- with The Complete Peanuts 1989-1990.

And there was a new graphic novel from the Norwegian cartoonist Jason this year, called Lost Cat, which is some kind of Chandleresque hardboiled PI story.

I will re-collect the entire Love and Rockets saga, so I can do a big re-read -- it's now the major thing on my "future reading projects" shelf, now that Starktober is done -- and I got two books this week to bring me closer to that goal. First was the new book for this year, Love And Rockets: New Stories No. 6, by both of the Hernandez Brothers.

And the other one was Human Diastrophism, collecting the second major storyline from the original L&R series by Gilbert Hernandez. I've not got nearly twenty L&R books, and only need about three more -- I should be able to get this reading project in sometime in early 2014, before New Stories No.7 hits.

Ray Fawkes's One Soul is a book I've already read -- I reviewed it when I got it from the library about eighteen months ago -- but it's so good and so wonderful that I needed to own a copy for myself. I hope you decide to do so, too.

Drawn & Quarterly's program of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's books continues with his contemporary work, which only very slightly disappoints me -- A Drifting Life is deep and interesting and thoughtful, but Tatsumi's early-'70s stories as collected in The Push Man, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye are raw-nerve powerful and searingly immediate, so I want to see if he has more work as unrelenting and striking as those from around the same time. So his new book this year was Fallen Words, originally published in 2009 in Japan.

Another book -- like One Soul -- that I bought because it's so major and so full of energy that I know I'll need to read it again is Anders Nilsen's Big Questions, a gigantic and major graphic novel that's as good as. I did a quick review of it when I read it two years ago.

And last was Vanessa Davis's Make Me a Woman, which I've been vaguely looking for since late 2010, when it was published. (When you already have a lot of unread books, and are interested in lots of things, most of the books you're looking for aren't all that urgent -- you can find the ones you happen to come across in person, or find cheaply, or whatever, letting chance decide what you read next.) I've liked her short strips in various anthologies and Year's Best books, so it will be fun to see a whole book of her work.

Glad Tidings of the Season!

Today is an actual holiday that I did not make up: Krampus Night! It's the day when Santa's [1] evil helper punishes all of the bad kids. (Can you guess it's a German holiday?)

These words are to make it less obvious that I was going to throw the below image onto my Tumblr, then remembered that I don't post enough to keep this blog and a tumblr active.

[1] Saint Nicholas, if you're being nitpicky about it. But has anyone ever seen the two of them together?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/30

These are the books that arrived the last week of November, all of them new paperbacks from major American publishers. I haven't read them yet, but here's what I can tell you about them:

I'll start out with Year's Best SF 18, because it makes me feel so very old to remember when the first book in the series came out from Harper in the mid-90s and I bought it for the SFBC. The editor is still David G. Hartwell, who is as close to the perfect SF editor (both long and short form) as it's possible to find in this imperfect world. And this latest edition of the annual series collects twenty-eight of the best stories of 2012, from writers including Eleanor Arnason and Andy Duncan, Linda Nagata and Gene Wolfe, Megan Lindholm and Paul Cornell, Pat Cadigan and Tony Ballantyne. All of those are short stories, and all are science fiction -- rather than fantasy or something else -- at least according to Hartwell's compass, since people can and do disagree strongly on the subject. Year's Best SF 18 is available as a trade paperback on December 10th.

Everything else I have this week comes from the empire of Yen, one of this country's major publisher of manga as well as related things. (They're all December publications, and all paperbacks.) And so I think I'll slip into that world through the related things -- light novels, manga-influenced comics from American sources -- and then dive into the pure stuff from the other side of the world.

So next up is Spice and Wolf, Vol. 10 by Isuna Hasekura, from a series of "light novels" (which, in Japan at least, are shorter and quicker reads than things sold as just plain "novels") about a medieval merchant and the ancient goddess embodied as a wolf-girl who travels with him. There are seventeen novels in the series in all, so we're a little over halfway at this point. If you've ever wished that your secondary-world fantasy had fewer flashing swords and more details of economics and trading, you are in for a huge treat with this series.

The Dark-Hunters: Infinity, Vol. 2 is set in the world of Sherrilyn Kenyon's urban fantasy series "Dark-Hunters," and is credited to Kenyon, with art by JiYoung Ahn. I'm not clear if this adapts part of Kenyon's sprawling series of books, or if it tells a new story set in that world -- I think it's the latter, but the book itself doesn't make the connection clear. In any case, there's a teenage boy who has recently (in the first book) discovered he has supernatural powers and Everything He Knows Is Wrong, along the usual lines of urban fantasy.

Similarly, Soulless, Vol. 3 adapts Gail Carriger's steampunk series -- I think each comics volume adapts one book, so this would be 2010's Blameless in comics form -- with art by an entity credited as REM. (Not the one with the twanging guitars, I presume.) I reviewed the first novel a few years back, if you want more details of the world and such-not. But, hey: Steampunk! Parasols! Victorian clothing! Tea ceremonies! You folks go nuts for that stuff, don't you?

And now I'll get into the actual manga, and take them by volume numbers:

Lunching this month is Shiwo Komeyama's Bloody Cross. She's a cursed half-angel, half demon! He's a full angel! They're cops vampire hunters! It's more complicated than that, of course -- her particular curse means she has to drink demon blood regularly to stay alive, and through the usual confusions at the start of a manga series, she transmits the curse to him, so they have to stay together for both of their survival.

Also launching this month is Shiro Amano's Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, and I have to admit I have no idea what the title means, even after a quick skim. But it's about Roxas, who was born as a Nobody and is now part of Organization XIII -- and if you know what that means, go for it.

Yoshiki Tonogai's psychological horror thriller Judge is back for a second volume, in which the bunch of young Japanese people kidnapped and trapped in an abandoned courthouse continue to be forced to decide which of them are the worst sinners and be killed. (So it looks like a slightly more legalistic Saw from my point of view.)

Are You Alice?, Vol. 3 is by Ikumi Katagiri and Ai Ninomiya (credited as "original story by") and is some kind of Alice in Wonderland-themed story with gangsters in a weird alternate world.

The ever-proliferating "Puella Magi" magical-girl saga is back with Kazumi Magica, Vol. 3. Kazumi, the helpful subtitle adds, is "The Innocent Malice," which makes everything all right.

And then there's Until Death Do Us Part, Vol. 5, continuing Hiroshi Takashige and DOUBLE-S's story of a blind swordsman (those are the most dangerous kind, of course, just like little old men have the deadliest kung fu) and the precognitive girl he's protecting from the obligatory evil rich man (here called Mr. Wiseman, to be that much more on the nose).

Sunshine Sketch, Vol. 7 contains more 4-koma gag strips about the six girls living at the Hidemari Apartments and taking art classes at their school, by Ume Aoki.

JinHo Ko's ultraviolent Jack Frost is back for an eighth volume -- actually, I should admit that I don't know for sure if it's still ultraviolent, but it certainly was for the first two volumes, which I reviewed back in 2009 for ComicMix. I do hope that the young heroine is not getting decapitated nearly as often by this point in the series.

My sons will be thrilled to see that Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&!, Vol. 12 has arrived: they love this series about an amazingly enthusiastic and innocent young girl encountering new things and being amazed by them over and over again. (I have to admit that it's never clicked with me, though I'm not quite as clueless now as when I read the first volume.)

Speaking of things my sons like, there's also Atsushi Ohkubo's Soul Eater, Vol. 17, the latest in a very energetic and active boys' manga series, with all of the associated demon-fighting and details about everyone's secret moves. (I reviewed the first volume of this one way back when, as well.)

People who like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya will be happy to hear that the seventeenth volume is now out, and anyone else is advised to find the beginning and start there. It's by Gaku Tsugano and Nagaru Tanigawa, as usual, and contains approximately twelve times the recommended daily level of teen-girl energy.

And last for this week is Pandora Hearts, Vol. 19, another series (this one by Jun Mochizuki) that does weird things to Alice in Wonderland for its own purposes. I reviewed the first volume back at the dawn of the world, but I bet that things have changed and gotten more complicated since then.

Read in November

I went straight from the structure of October (which became Starktober around here) to first a family vacation and then a work conference, so reading fell off a lot this past month. Of course, the real lesson is more complicated: like everyone else, I'm busier and have more distractions than I'd like, so I need to prioritize the things I really want to do. When I do prioritize reading and writing about books, that happens regularly -- when I don't, it doesn't.

This was a "don't" month, then. But here's what I did read, and perhaps something will seem interesting to some of you:

Lisa Lutz, The Last Word (11/2)

This is the sixth and potentially final -- my suspicion is that Lutz thinks the series is over, but her publisher hopes to persuade her otherwise, so the book itself doesn't quite promise there will be no more books -- novel in the series of seriocomic private-eye books about Isabel Spellman and her complicated, difficult family. I've written about the series before in round-ups in November of 2012 (the first book) and then January (books 2 and 3) and February (books 4 and 5) of this year. It's a really good mystery series that I haven't wanted to dissect here: they each work well as individual novels and move this family forward along a larger plot, which is a remarkable achievement to be celebrated. If Lutz does manage to quite the series here -- and intended to -- it will be something nearly unique: a series that didn't outstay its welcome, didn't descend into self-indulgence, didn't fall into the twin faults of massive woe or massive joy, and did tell a great story. I recommend these books really highly; start at the beginning with The Spellman Files.

Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics (11/14)

For two or three years in the mid-70s -- the back cover says 1972-1974, the afterword by Gary Groth says March 3, 1974 to June 5, 1977 -- Gahan Wilson created a weekly Sunday comic, for his then-hometown paper The Boston Globe and syndicated at least somewhat by The Register and Tribune Syndicate. And now all of those strips have been collected in one place, surprising a lot of Wilson fans who had no idea he ever did such a thing.

There's no continuing story, and only a handful of "continuing characters" -- really just stock figures for Wilson's gags. Sunday Comics was a collection of gags, something between a place to use the single panels that magazine editors rejected and a place to work out the ideas that weren't right for those magazine clients in the first place. Some of the weekly "strips" had a vague theme -- there are a number of holiday-themed installments, for example -- and there were recurring "features," such as the space-themed "Future Funnies" and the serial-villain-looking "The Creep," but Sunday Comics was essentially just a collection of gags. Those gags are all Wilson, though not high-powered Wilson; he clearly had to work more obviously and less cruelly to fit into newspapers -- Wilson's best work is more dark and creepy than he's ever allowed to get here.

So this is a diversion, and interesting sidebar to Wilson's main career. It's mostly for Wilson fans -- but I am one, so I'm thrilled to see it, even if I was surprised to know it ever existed.

Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (11/19)

September is no longer the heartless child who first visited fairyland (and saved it from an unpleasant ruler) in The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, or even the year-older person who returned in The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There to fix a problem she didn't know she caused. This third time out, she's solidly a teenager, growing up in a Kansas where the distant War is possibly rumbling to an end and learning to drive an old Model A Ford borrowed from a neighbor.

One might assume that this is the third book of a trilogy -- by the end of this book, September has now seen fairyland from all around, beneath, and above, which sounds final, and growing up has generally proved to be a fatal to journeys to fairyland. But Valente took aim at that latter assumption in the last book, and Soared is definitely not the last story about September. (I can say that much without without getting into the details of the end of this book.)

Unfortunately, I didn't find Soared as vital and enthralling as the first two books. I don't know if that's due to my own jadedness, or if Valente is writing a different kind of story this time out, or if there's some other reason. But I enjoyed Soared without loving it the way I did its predecessors. Whether people more female and substantially younger -- the true audience for this book -- will feel anything like the same way is a question I can't answer.

Alina Simone, Note to Self (11/22)

Simone is an excellent musician (now retired, I think) who has previously written the very good collection of memoir essays You Must Go and Win, which explored a lot of the aspects of her interesting life: the rock 'n' roll dream and the horrible apartments that show up on the way there, her ancestry in Ukraine and Russia, the perils of an examined life. Note to Self is her first novel, about a woman in her late '30s who's addicted to the Internet -- clicking random links for hours on end, checking news and social media and Craigslist, dreaming ideas of what to do with her life and never following through.

Note to Self is the story of what happens to that woman, Anna, when she loses the dead-end "cubicle serf" job at a law firm that she thought she hated, and tries to move on to something better. Like so many people, she decides she wants to make art, which pushes her to meet a filmmaker, and that reverberates through other parts of her life as well. Simone's voice is smart and quick and witty, and every page of Note to Self is a joy to read. I thought the ending was a bit rushed and didn't entirely fix the problems that the book had set up, but it's a first novel -- and a very assured and promising one at that.

Lemony Snicket, "When Did You See Her Last?" (11/25)

Snicket, in case you don't know, is the YA-writing pseudonym of Daniel Handler (whose first novel The Basic Eight I will continue praising until every last person in the world has read it) and whose first major work was the excellent, very dark, and surprisingly popular "Series of Unfortunate Events," thirteen books in which things went very wrong for three orphan children. "Snicket" didn't produce any novels for several years, but has returned with a four-book series called "All the Wrong Questions," about Snicket's own youth -- the "author" was the narrator of the first series, and at least a minor character as well.

The first book of All the Wrong Questions was "Who Could That Be at This Hour?" and this now is the second: young Snicket, just shy of thirteen, is still in the decaying ex-coastal town of Stain'd-by-the-Sea, still working for his incompetent, distracted, self-obsessed "mentor" for their mysterious organization of interlopers and busybodies, and still -- as he tells us in his narrative voice, years later -- following up the wrong leads and missing the point. The matter of this series comes from the last few generations of juvenile horror -- pre-Goosebumps, I think, with John Bellairs as a major touchstone -- but the tone and style of writing is straight out of the pure adult PI tradition, with requisite Chandlerisms and femmes fatal not yet old enough to drive.

It's a mystery, so much of the enjoyment is seeing the details first come out and then fall into place, and I won't spoil that. Snicket/Handler is still an incredibly engaging writer, by turns deviously tricky and emotionally direct, and this series is at least as good as "Unfortunate Events" was.


Next month: who knows? I'm sure I'll manage to read something, though.

Quote of the Week: There Is No...

Nobody wants to hear that you will try your best. It is the wrong thing to say. It is like saying 'I probably won't hit you with a shovel.' Suddenly everyone is afraid you will do the opposite.

  - Lemony Snicket, "When Did You See Her Last?", pp.19-20

In Case the "Black" In Your Black Friday Shopping Refers To Ink

There are scads of sales going on over the next few days in North America, but only a few of them are on comics, making those sales even more special than they would normally be.

First off, the fine Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly is having a very rare holiday sale -- available both online and in their actual Montreal storefront, for those of you either local or up for an immediate road-trip -- of 40% off everything through Monday, December 2nd. I've already spent my money on Vanessa Davis's Make Me a Woman, Yoshihiro Tatsumi's Fallen Words, and Anders Nilsen's Big Questions (which I reviewed when I read it from the library -- but I think I'm going to want to read it again, since it's that big and impressive).

And what used to be my local comics store -- Manhattan's own Midtown Comics, which is probably the place I still get more comics from than anywhere else -- is also having a big sale, both at their three physical locations and online. All graphic novels are 40% off, and a bunch of other things are "up to" 40% off as well. And everything in the store is 25% off in the store on Friday until noon. I'd tell you what I'm buying there, too, but I'm still assembling my cart. (But, if you do buy from them online, they have free shipping over $75, and they pack as carefully as only a retail-employed comics geek can.) The main sale here seems to continue through next Wednesday, but some categories may just run through "Cyber Monday," so don't delay too long.

Sure, you can get deals on toasters and linens and car parts elsewhere, but are those things as good as comics? Obviously not.

The Oddly Specific Denial

I'm reading "When Did You See Her Last?" today, by the author called Lemony Snicket, and it has the following very interesting denial on its copyright page:

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

This is weird for two reasons: first, it should go without saying that any entity is not responsible for things it didn't do. But, if it doesn't go without saying, why is a disclaimer only needed for websites, and not for every other media packet in the world?

Does this therefore imply that Little, Brown is responsible for all of the TV shows, movies, podcasts, radio broadcasts, magazines, newspapers, and books that it doesn't own? And, if not -- which would be a really silly implication, obviously -- why on earth does L,B feel the need to tell us that, for this one category of media, just for our knowledge, they don't control anything they don't control?

I'm sure this, like most legal language, is the remnant of some unpleasant situation in the past that an executive decided to fix forevermore by printing a big notice in all of the L,B books in the future. But that's the boring, staid explanation -- I prefer the more baroque possibilities of what TV Tropes calls the Suspiciously Specific Denial.

(I've probably mentioned this before, but one of my best friends in college had a great example: he would often remark, usually in a reasonable context, that he "had never been convicted of a felony in New York State." I've since used that several times myself, and it usually elicits at least a double take.)

What would it mean if L,B were responsible for everything in the world -- except for those few "websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher"?