Upcoming 7/23/2008

In honor of Entertainment Weekly’s recent redesign, I’m going to start putting random phrases in boldfaced type. Okay, no, I’m not. Well, maybe just this once.

Now, on to this week’s ComicList:

Yen Press releases the first issue of its anthology, Yen Plus, featuring licensed work from Japan and Korea and original series from the likes of James Patterson and Svetlana Chmakova. (How often do you get to type phrases like that? Maybe I should bold it.) Is anyone else frightened by Pig Bride as a title? Outside of VH1’s slate of reality shows, how can a series live up to that name?

The thing about Rick Geary’s Treasury of Victorian Murder series (NBM) is that I’ll mention every book in the series every time it shows up on a shipping list, because Geary is just that good. This week’s re-release is the paperback version of The Murder of Abraham Lincoln, which I reviewed here.

Del Rey rolls out two new series this week. First up is Kasumi, written by Surt Lim and drawn by Hirofumi Sugimoto. It’s about a girl who can turn invisible, and Leroy Douresseaux liked a lot. Deb Aoki interviewed the creators for About.Com.

The other debut, Kujubiki Unbalance, created by Kio Shimoku and Koume Keito, is about as meta as it gets. Those who read Shimoku’s wonderful Genshiken will recognize the series as the oft-referenced touchstone property of a bunch of the characters in that book. (If you can’t be counted among those who read Genshiken, you might want to correct that.)

Last but not least is the second volume of Yuko Osada’s fun travel adventure, Toto. Sure, it’s got plucky ‘tweens with big dreams, but it also has an adorable, weaponized dog.