Reviewing the Mail: Yen Press
This week’s Reviewing the Mail begins with a long-distance shout-out to Ellen Wright, who started at Wiley the first week I did, but has since moved up and on to working in Publicity with the fine folks at Orbit US. My pipeline of Yen Press titles — Yen being the manga arm of Orbit — had dwindled recently, probably because I hadn’t reviewed many of their books in that same period [1], but I now have a batch of them here, and I hope they’ll continue. (Though, again, I imagine I’ll need to review some of those books for Yen to want to keep sending me books — it’s really not difficult to see how this works, if you’re capable of consider other people’s point of view.)
So hooray for Yen, which will be the bulk of this week’s post. But, before I get into that, first comes the ritual explanation: this is all stuff, as you might have guessed, that came in my mail this week, all sent by publishers who hope I will review and love these books and thus urge all of you to buy and love them in turn. This is the crucial bit: I have not yet read any of these books, and it’s entirely possible (you should see the stacks of review copies I have!) that I won’t get to any specific book here. Thus, what I’m about to type at you is somewhere between an educated guess and a wild surmise, based on my prior knowledge and what these books themselves tell me when I examine them closely.
That’s enough preliminary blah blah blah; let’s see what Yen is publishing in December: (more…)
, the first in a new series (teen-focused, I think) by Mark “Akiko” Crilley, about a guy who discovers secret supernatural powers.
, a highly acclaimed 2009 semi-autobiographical book (by a guy who now goes under a different name, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on) about herpes.
, collecting comics work by Roger Langridge (along with his brother, Andrew) from around twenty years ago.
, an old collection (1991) of Roz Chast cartoons
, a similarly vintage (1992) book of Sam Gross cartoons
, an original graphic novel that came out earlier this year from the indefatigable Gilbert Hernandez, which has a loose (and probably indescribable) connection with his Love & Rockets material.
, which was the first new book of his I didn’t read since 
— entirely because his prior novel, 
, was such a gigantic stinker — and which I used to have, in first edition hardcover, before the recent unpleasantness. 
, the first novel he narrates, but give him a break: he’s a fifteen-year-old boy from a small town, and his brain doesn’t work the way everyone else’s does.
by Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
)
, edited by Kate Bernheimer & Carmen Gimenez Smith (Penguin)
by Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer Press)
is part of the endless repackaging of Daniel Clowes, though this piece (unlike most of his recent books) didn’t first see life as a single issue of his old comics series, Eightball. No, this first appeared in the short-lived New York Times Magazine “Funny Papers” section, one of the few moments when the Grey Lady tried to emulate regular newspapers.
edition. (Particularly since the 
book is out now, all shiny and new, so this is terribly old news.) Each editor shifts the material somewhat — Gaiman’s volume leads off with a long excerpt from the Jonathan Lethem/Farel Dalrymple/Gary Panter Omega the Unknown, the first Big Two story in the series, which feels significant — but the core of each book is very similar, drawing from the same group of major mid-career “alternative” cartoonists, from Gilbert Hernandez (here represented by a story done with his vastly less-prolific brother Mario) to Ben Katchor to Chris Ware to Peter Bagge to Bryan Lee O’Malley to C. Tyler to Robert Crumb. As usual, the series editors, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, picked a hundred notable works from their year — September 1, 2008 through August 31, 2009 — and sent those to Gaiman, who chose from them (and, possibly, from a few things he discovered on his own) to make this collection. Gaiman’s introduction makes it clear that this isn’t the “best” comics of the year — nor even the best “American” comics of the year, whatever that may mean — but it is a big collection of a lot of very good comics (and a few clunkers, though precisely which ones are clunkers may be a matter of personal taste) at a reasonable price. The whole series is a great way to discover what’s going on over on the more interesting, less punchy side of the modern comics world, so I recommend this book, as I do its predecessors, for people who like stories told in comics form, though probably not for the kind of people who like the things that draw in the crowds of maladapted boy-men every Wednesday. 
