The Comics: The Complete Collection
is actually an omnibus, which is where that amusing subtitle comes in. Brian Walker -- son of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois creator Mort Walker and toiler in the strip-comic mines himself, working the old man's claim since the mid-80s -- assembled two books about the American newspaper comic strip in the early aughts, under the titles The Comics: Before 1945 and The Comics: Since 1945. And the massive slab I have in front of me right now -- seriously, my right arm is resting on it as I try to type; the thing is immense -- shoves those two books between two covers for a single century-long look at one of the great American artforms.Each book has a general introduction -- the one in Since 1945 recapitulates a lot of what we've just read in the first book; there clearly was no additional editing or changes in turning this into one volume -- and then is divided into a few long chapters by decade. Each decade gets its own introduction, running through the new strips that started at that time and some more general details, and then Walker gives notable strips of that time some space. Major creators like Milton Caniff or Walt Kelly or Charles Schulz get several spreads -- and, actually, these multi-spread sections grow more common in the second half, as there are fewer new strips to choose from. (The untold story here is how zombie strips -- like the ones Walker himself works on -- choked the comics page like kudzu and stopped all but the smallest changes from taking place over the past three decades.) The thirties gets the single longest chapter in the book, which is plausible, though the forties gets even more space, split across the two section.
The original books were a little too early to discuss the migration of strip comics to the web -- or the destruction of the traditional newspaper business by the Internet; take your pick on how to characterize that -- so there's none of that here. The Comics discusses the artform that Hearst and Pulitzer facilitated starting in 1895 and covers it for the next just over a century, but takes no position on what would happen in the future. It's inevitably somewhat nostalgic, though a lot of the best and most interesting comics are in the first half, and are now out of the living memory of nearly everyone. Even the dullest reader will see how the variety of styles and endless flow of words of the pre-war years has been successively cramped into a mostly big-black-line school of art and a tightly limited number of words a day to form a single gag. Sure, the modern form has a lot of great stuff in it, but the older, larger comics sizes could accommodate any of the modern strips and a whole lot more.
But it's not as if newspapers are a growing or thriving business; even if they survive, and their comics along with them, it's unlikely we'll see giant strips across the width of huge broadsheet pages again. And with the web, maybe we don't need to -- though the screens we look at online comics have been shrinking in the past few years as well, so the same problem is happening again in a different format and vastly more quickly.
The Comics is a lovely coffee table book with bits of dozens of great stories and a few hundred good gags. It showcases a great American artform, and gives space to a few dozen incredibly varied artists, writers, and craftsmen, to provide many hours of enjoyment. But be careful lifting the thing, or else you could easily sprain something.
by C.T. Adams, who is herself one-half of the "Cat Adams" writing team. (Though she seems to provide most of the name, with her partner responsible only for a lonely lower-case 'a.') It's the first book in an urban fantasy series called "The Fae," and no points at all for guessing what magical creatures are most important here. Our heroine is not only half-Fae, but the daughter of the Fae king, brought back to Earth by her witch mother as a young teen when things got too dangerous over there. And she now lives a quiet human life running a magic shop -- until, of course, a battle over the Fae succession spills over into her world as well, and drags her into it. (A fantasy novel entirely about someone living quietly and happily might be neat once in a while, but it's certainly not the done thing.) The Exile is a trade paperback, available from Tor on March 10th.
is at the opposite end of its series: it ends the trilogy called "A Tournament of Shadows," about the young life of his series hero Morlock Ambrosius. (Young is relative here; Morlock has been married for a hundred years when this book opens.) I read one of Enge's books about Morlock, 
has seventeen brand-new stories about creepy dolls and similar homunculi from folks like Joyce Carol Oates, Carrie Vaughan, Jeffrey Ford, Pat Cadigan, Mary Robinette Kowal, Richard Bowes, and Richard Kadrey. It's a Tor hardcover coming March 10th, and I expect it will keep you up at night.
, the somewhat SFnal most recent novel by literary/mystery novelist Kate Atkinson, in what turned out to be the QPB book-club edition. (Even seven-plus years later, it's amusing and pleasant to see those slightly-smaller format books when they turn up. I am of course not a member of any of those clubs at this point, and don't expect to ever be again, but I do still have a soft spot in my heart for that publishing model. And it's encouraging to see that they're still out there, and still using decent paper.) I read the first two of what we probably shouldn't call a series of mysteries about private eye Jackson Brodie -- he's in them all, but they're not traditional mystery novels in any way -- and reviewed them here: 
, which was never published in the US and probably never will be. (I'd half-given up on actually finding it on this side of the pond, so this Widenfeld & Nicolson hardcover was a happy discovery.) Ballard has long been one of my favorite writers.
. Chabon's another writer that I know I will enjoy if I read more of his books, but finding time is always the issue. Still, I can't read it if I don't have it, right?
, collecting three books of short stories about the worst Scottish soldier in the history of the world. (The word "Scottish" might be slightly misplaced in that sentence.) It's by George MacDonald Fraser, author of the nastily wonderful "Flashman" books, and probably based at least somewhat on his own service during WWII. I read one of the three books -- I think the first one, but I could be wrong -- sometime in the '90s, and had been vaguely looking for the rest since then. An omnibus is a great solution.
, an early John Le Carre spy novel in a classy Penguin paperback. I'm vaguely trying to get at least the Le Carres in this current Penguin look -- he has a big backlist, across several publishers, so there's no unified dress for everything (much to my annoyance). I'm also happy to see that not only is this one short, but it also was the immediate follow-up to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which 
, second in Walter Mosley's semi-new mystery series about New York PI Leonid McGill. I read the first one a couple of years ago, but didn't have anything to say about it. Mosley's many things, but he started out as a great mystery writer, and all signs show that he still is one.
. It's also a book-club edition, which I think means it was a SFBC Selection, so good for Al on that one.
, a 1926 novel about a young man in love (what else?) adapted from a 1917 musical written with Guy Bolton
, a 1931 novel about two boys -- the son of an Earl, and the son of a barber (and, more importantly, of the earl's son's nanny) -- who may have been switched at birth
, another book of memoirs, this one by Wodehouse and Guy Bolton about their theatrical adventures
, a mid-50s book in which three chicken-farming American ladies meet a penniless aristocrat in a tony French resort
by Todd Hignite at less than a third of cover price. This is an oversized art book about one of the brothers behind the long-running and consistently excellent Love and Rockets series, including one L&R story that doesn't appear anywhere else.
. Sneyd's gorgeously painted full-page cartoons have been appearing in Playboy for decades, and this book collects a lot (all? most?) of them. Looking quickly at this, I realize that I remembered his voluptuously beautiful women (the point, of course) but not how openly predatory and rat-like his men look: it's sexist humor, obviously, but there's at least an undertone of knowledge there, too.
is the first in a trilogy of graphic novels from the French team of Balak, Michael Sanlaville, and Bastien Vlives, set in a pseudo-medieval Europe among a group of young people training for the annual gladiatorial/magical Games. It's coming in April from First Second, and the rest of the trilogy will also be on its way this year -- so readers won't have long to wait for the full story.
is the second book in Australian fantasist Will Elliott's Pendulum Trilogy, after last year's The Pilgrims. It's a portal fantasy, in which a London journalist stumbled accidentally into Levaal, a world between world filled with dragons, magic, stone giants, Tormentors, and the evil Lord Vous, who is scheming to turn himself into a god. It has a lot of the well-worn furniture of standard epic fantasy, but it promises to be something more subversive or post-modern. But I do expect our journalist will succeed in stopping the Dark Lord from conquering all of the universes in the end. Shadow is a Tor hardcover, available February 24.
is the sequel to the very popular YA fantasy novel Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman. (Rachel Hartman.) It's set in another semi-medieval world, where dragons and humans mix -- and, as you might expect from the fact that it was popular, there are also human-dragon half-breeds -- don't think too closely about the mechanics of that; this is a book for young teenagers -- and our heroine, inevitably, is secretly one of them. This book sees more challenges and dangers for our half-dragon girl, as well as hints of a capital-D Destiny. It's coming in hardcover from Random House Books for Young Readers on March 10th.
is the first novel by Simon Kurt Unsworth, and it's pretty much what the title implies: the central character is a functionary in Hell, and he has to investigate when first a member of a delegation from Heaven is murdered, and then the string of killings continues. I have a soft spot in my heart for afterlife fantasies, so this looks very interesting to me. It's a Doubleday hardcover, coming March 3rd.
, the second novel by V.E. Schwab (who also writes young adult novels as Victoria Elizabeth Schwab), after the twisted superhero tale Vicious. Darker Shade is a sideways-in-time book, with a hero who travels among three alternate versions of London, each delineated by a color -- and, inevitably, he gets caught up in larger schemes that threaten not only his life, but all of the Londons as well. It's a Tor hardcover, available on February 24th.
-- I'm still not sure if I will re-read these, but I now just need two or three of them.
by P.G. Wodehouse, in the wonderful Overlook edition, which I'm trying once again to collect (I lost fifty or so of them in the 2011 flood, and am back to around forty at this point -- but Overlook is closing in on having published all of Wodehouse's roughly hundred books by now.) This, I believe, is a collection of stories all concerning Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, who is one of Wodehouse's lesser-known great comic creations. And I'm sure there will come a time when I'll need it to lift my spirits.
and its lesser-known sequel 
.
, edited by Maxime Valette, Guillaume Passaglia, and Didier Guedj. (Yes, F My Life was originally French -- with a title that roughly translates to "the Shit Life" -- and only came to the English language after a first initial success there. The things you learn from quirky little books.)
, which was her second memoir/collection of essays. She's an interesting figure anyways, and I also want to understand my older son better -- he's "on the spectrum," as they say, though exactly where is a fuzzier thing.
. I may end up back in the fields of mass-market publishing, soon or eventually, and that kind of thing has always fascinated me: why do so many people decide they want this, right now?
, from Christopher Miller. I heard about this somewhere and knew I had to have it: I love weird encylopedias, the quirky side of history, and humor.
, from 1989. If you're a SF or science person, you've seen his work many times -- you may even have a Harris up on the door of your office right now.
, by George R.R. Martin with Elio M. Garcia, Jr. and Linda Antonsson. Since I'm not commuting at the moment, if I can ever make myself sit down and read, I'd be able to sit down and read this big thing. And I'm always fond of fake nonfiction, which this more-or-less is. (I think there's some actual fiction in there, too.) [1]
by Tatsuya Ishida. Yes, it's all online, and there's no reasonable chance the whole series will ever be collected in book form. But sometimes I just want things between two covers, OK?
by John Layman and Rob Guillory -- I think I now have three of these lined up, so I might run through them quickly and write one post. (Or run through them slowly or quickly and bury them in an end-of-month roundup: could go either way.)
-- the 1997 Kitchen Sink edition that's the only time the first ten color issues of the series were collected, and what looks like the only time they ever will be collected. (Seriously, they're not vastly different from the later black and white issues -- they're not training-wheel comics or anything.) Another book I'm very glad to have back in my hands.
-- I'm not even sure what this is, or how it fits it, but I'll give it a try
& 
& 
-- I'm now missing 7, oh woe is me
, by Moore (here laughably credited as "The Original Writer") with artists Alan Davis, Rick Veitch, Chuck Adams, and John Ridgway. It's still one of the better arguments that it's possible to take superheroes seriously.
is one of the great graphic novels of our time, though I don't see it mentioned with Blankets or Ghost World or Bottomless Bellybutton all that often. (It did win the Eisner for Best GN for Nate Powell in 2009 though, which is something.) I had a rough galley before the flood -- I 
, though I couldn't tell you where or when. But it's a horizontally-formatted book, collecting what was oriignally a webcomic, and with any luck I'll read it soon.
, with the first seven issues, and 
, collecting up to #16 -- which is a shame, since only one more would finish off the original series. (And another one would collect the mini-series, and two more would get all of War Shaman between covers. Heck, as long as I'm wishing, how about a world where Truman either can now do Marauder and Blue Leader, or one where he got to them around 1990ish?) Well, at least these two books exist, and I have them now.
, the beginning of the latest spin-off from Bill Willingham's Fables series. (This one was written by Willingham with Matthew Sturges with pencil art mostly by Phil Jimenez and inks more often than not from Andy Lanning.) I'm not really sure what angle this takes from the original, but I do want to catch up on this and Fables, though I'm clearly already missing the big finish.