Upcoming 10/15/2008

This week’s ComicList has me wondering if there’s a comics equivalent of the movie industry’s Oscar Bait Season. Maybe a Ten Best List Season? Because there are a lot of potentially intriguing books coming out tomorrow.

Rutu Mordan’s Exit Wounds (Drawn & Quarterly) was easily one of the most warmly received books of 2007. I thought that book was really solid, though I wasn’t transported by it to the degree that a lot of other readers were. Anyway, Mordan’s follow-up, Jamilti and Other Stories, arrives tomorrow via D&Q.

I like Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods a lot, but I tend to be generally fond of reconfigured fairy tales. (Though oddly enough, the very idea of a musical version of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked makes me cringe, Kristin Chenoweth or no Kristin Chenoweth.) So I’m inclined to take a look at There’s a Wolf at the Door (First Second) written by Zoey Alley and beautifully illustrated by R.W. Alley. You know all those wolves in popular fairy tales? This book posits that all those stories happened to the same wolf.

NBM has become one of those publishers where I’m automatically inclined to pay attention to their releases, what with Rick Geary’s books and Glacial Period and Run, Bong-Gu, Run! This week’s eye-catcher is Dirk Schwieger’s Moresukine, which is based on Schwieger’s blog. “Assignment: Pod Hotel” is probably enough to get me to track it down, because the prospect of sleeping in a tube triggers all of my claustrophobic nightmares.

I was e-mailing back and forth with an editor at Viz about something entirely unrelated, and he made a point of talking up Asano Inio’s Solanin. It features a recent college graduate who “struggles with the feeling that she’s just not cut out to be a part of the real world.” (I hate to break it to her, but that feeling doesn’t go away with time.) A done-in-one josei series in a big fat package? Why yes, thank you, I’d love one.