Before delving too deeply into this week’s ComicList, I wanted to mention how great the manga and graphic novel selection is at the Barnes & Noble in Easton Town Center near Columbus. They had shelf copies of Mijeong (NBM), full runs of series I don’t normally see at a chain bookstore, and all of the staples. Seriously, though, an NBM book at a mall store will force me to add that mall store to all future central Ohio itineraries. Oh, and there’s a Graeter’s Ice Cream stand mere steps away. In a perfect world, it would be a Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams stand, but I like Graeter’s well enough.
But what about specialty comic shops, you ask? What bounty awaits on Wednesday?
Well, for starters, there’s the third volume of Mi-Kyung Yun’s Bride of the Water God (Dark Horse), which is so pretty that you can actually see volumes from space.
Del Rey offers the third volume of Papillon, which started as a psychologically nuanced sibling-rivalry drama, then turned into one of the more ridiculous Lifetime movies in the second volume. There is no possible way to speculate what might happen this time around, but I’ll just throw out the terms “sudden eating disorder” and “wildebeest stampede” to try and cover the bases.
Speaking again of NBM, Rick Geary is looking through the dirty laundry of another era again with a new Treasury of 20th Century Murder, Famous Players, which examines the death of silent-film director William Desmond Taylor.
And speaking of books with “20th Century” in the title, Viz offers the third volume of Naoki Urasawa’s excellent 20th Century Boys. (I already bought it at the aforementioned B&N.) I know we aren’t even halfway through the year, but let’s face it: with the two Urasawa books, Detroit Metal City, the soon-to-arrive Children of the Sea, and the due-this-fall Ôoku: The Inner Chamber, we might just have to hand 2009 to Viz, you know?