comics

A Wealth of Pigeons

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by Steve Martin and Harry Bliss
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There’s some mild swearing and pictures of bums. It’s in the Graphic Novels section of the bookstore.

I saw a poster at the store for this book, and thought to myself: “Huh. So, Steve Martin is doing cartoons now.” And yep, I was right. He is! He has collaborated with New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss. Collaborated is the right word — sometimes Martin would send ideas to Bliss to illustrate, and sometimes Bliss would send illustrations to Martin to caption. Either way, what they have come up with is an utterly enjoyable collection of small comics that just delighted me.

Not all of them are hilarious — some of them did make me laugh out loud, but most just made me smile — but it’s just the utter charm of the book that won me over. There are dog jokes and cat jokes and Woodstock jokes and Bliss and Martin poking fun at themselves.

And there’s not much else to say. It’s delightful, and is the perfect thing to pick up at the end of this very long and often horrible year.

A Hundred Thousand Worlds

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hundredthousandby Bob Proehl
First sentence: “Alex Torrey, nine but small for his age, writes the names of the places on the exit signs in his notebook.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: June 28, 2016
Review copy put in my box at work by the purchasing manager.
Content:  There’s a bunch — a couple dozen — of f-bombs, plus other swearing, and some sexytimes, though nothing graphic. It’ll be in the adult fiction section of the bookstore.

By all accounts, I should love this book. A single mother, the former star of a beloved canceled sci-fi show, travels across the country attending ComicCons (some big, some small), meeting all sorts of cosplayers and comic writers and artists as she comes to terms with letting her nine-year-old son live permanently (at least temporarily) with her ex-husband, his father.

Except, I didn’t like it. At all. (In fact, I thought upon finishing it: “This is why I don’t read that many adult books anymore!”) It wasn’t bad enough to bail on; in fact, I kept hoping that it’d get better.  But I just didn’t like it. I wanted to like the inside peek behind the scenes of a con, of the ups and downs of being a cosplayer, or even one of the main talent. I’m not too terribly interested in the politics of comics (that’s more Hubby’s ballgame), and there was a lot of  time devoted to the politics of characters, the dynamics between artists and writers, and the politics of creating a storyline, none of which I was interested in.  (And that’s not even mentioning the precocious nine-year-old who was simultaneously too young and too old to be real.)

I wanted to like it. I hoped to like it. But, in the end, it just fell flat.