8/27/2007

Ok, post for real now.

*So -

LAST WEEK'S REVIEWS:

Krazy & Ignatz: The Kat Who Walked in Beauty (in which our cast goes wide)

Incredible Change-Bots (Jeffrey Brown parody comic, in full color)

Plus!

Column #6 (the path of Igor Kordey at Marvel, with a special focus on Soldier X #1-8)

teeny reviews (Batman/Lobo: Deadly Serious #1, Guy Ritchie's Gamekeeper #4, and so much more)

all at The Savage Critics!

*Publishing news of the day: Garth Ennis & Gary Erskine will produce a new Dan Dare miniseries for Virgin Comics, a seven-issue miniseries to begin in November. The plot sounds a tiny bit like the Grant Morrison/Rian Hughes version, only mounted as a contemporary science-hero revival thing. Fairly inspired choices on the creative team (and ooooh, covers by Bryan Talbot!). It's got my attention.

*And -

THIS WEEK IN COMICS!

Chance in Hell: Excellent new Gilbert Hernandez graphic novel from Fantagraphics. I think some stores may have gotten it in already, but Diamond says this week's official. My review here.

Tokyo is my Garden: Gah! A live Fanfare/Ponent Mon release! Approach with care if you find one; these things are known to flee if spooked, and you might never see another. This one's an $18.99 English-language edition of a 1997 collaboration between Frédéric Boilet & Benoît Peeters -- featuring special guest Jirô Taniguchi! -- concerning the misadventures of a French cognac salesman in Japan who, in true farcical fashion, tries to fool his visiting boss into thinking he's not just bumming around the local nightlife. Some readers may appreciate the separation from Boilet's later, autobiographical(ish) formalist solo works, but they pretty much had me at Taniguchi.

Asthma: Has this been out for a while? Maybe Diamond's just getting to it now. It's a Sparkplug Comic Books collection of stories by John Hankiewicz, $17 for 104 b&w pages. Here's a sample. Diamond also has another Sparkplug release this week (albeit with Ben Catmull on as co-publisher), Mats!?'s Asiaddict, a travel comic through Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.

Bill Mauldin's Up Front: Yet more confusion - Amazon tells me this $24.95 W.W. Norton release came out back in 2000, so maybe it's a new edition? Either way, this 1945 prose & comics fusion from the famed creator of Willie & Joe (a gigantic hardcover collection is due from Fantagraphics in early 2008) comes highly recommended for its grounded view of WWII, from a man who lived it.

Mean: For heavy-duty fans of Steven Weissman, Fantagraphics has this $16.95, 128-page collection of his early Yikes comics from 1993-98. I suspect laffs within.

Local #10 (of 12): Always nice to see this around.

Hellboy: Darkness Calls #5 (of 6): This too.

The Last Fantastic Four Story: Pretty much all that catches my eye from Marvel this week is this oddball one-off project from writer/co-creator Stan Lee, teaming with penciller John Romita Jr. for his own damned Fantastic Four: The End, apparently. It's 64 pages for $4.99, and contains several exclamation points. Meanwhile, DC's most striking pamphlet is Peter Milligan's Batman Annual #26, so it's pretty lean over there too.

Devilish Greetings: Vintage Devil Postcards: Ok, so this isn't a comic at all. But it is from writer/editor/designer Monte Beauchamp, he of Blab!, and it's basically a sequel to his 2004 release The Devil in Design: The Krampus Postcards, which filled 168 pages with real 19th and 20th century postcards depicting a demonic anti-Santa's yearly romps. This new 160-page tome expands the scope to everything devilry in early 20th century world postcard art, although there's still plenty of Krampus left over. With annotations, translations and a diverse collection of styles on display. A perfect choice for flipping.

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