Previews review

It’s time for a look through the latest Diamond Previews catalog! (Only slightly related, but it’s also time for a lot of publishers to updated their web pages!)

Sometimes all it takes is a gorgeous illustration to make me want a book, and that’s certainly the case with Mi-Kyung Yun’s Bride of the Water God (Dark Horse, page 44). In my defense, the plot sounds interesting too, with a human sacrifice getting even more than she bargained for.

Sample pages (and great-looking art) go a long way towards piquing my interest in Mike and Louise Carey and Aaron Alexovich’s Confessions of a Blabbermouth (DC – Minx, pages 118-120). The fact that it’s about a blogger probably doesn’t hurt either.

For those of you who passed on Andi Watson and Simon Gane’s Paris (Amaze Ink/SLG, page 218) in single issues, it’s being released in collected form. The story is okay – two very different girls meet and fall in love in the City of Light – but the art is truly wonderful.

I snickered at part of the solicitation for Hoyuta Fujiyama’s Ordinary Crush (DMP – Juné, page 286) – “in an all boys school where 90% of the students are gay” – until I remembered the rumors about some of the parochial schools in the area where I grew up.

Well, lots of people have been wondering about the health of Ice Kunion, given shifting shipping dates and an unresponsive web site, but they’ve got listings in this month’s catalog (page 309). Take that for whatever it’s worth, which might be nothing.

My adorability sensors have been triggered by Mizuo Shinonome’s Chibimono (Infinity Studios, page 319). It’s about a guardian spirit for household items with some serious memory problems.

Bryan Lee O’Maley’s Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together (Oni Press, page 330) is almost here. That is all.

Vertical offers more classic stuff from Keiko (To Terra…) Takemia with Andromeda Stories (page 368), the first of a three-volume science fiction story.

There’s no cover image to lure me, but I’ll give anything in Viz’s Signature line a look. The latest addition is Taiyo Matsumoto’s TEKKONKINKREET: Black and White. (Okay, so it’s just a repackaging of a series that Viz has published previously. It’s still nice that they’re giving older, weirder books from their catalog another shot at an audience.)