Depending on your tastes, it’s a relatively lean week for comics arrivals, but there are still some appealing options.
NBM releases the third in a series of graphic novels created in collaboration with the Louvre in Paris. It’s On the Odd Hours by Eric Liberge, and the preview pages are quite striking. Johanna (Comics Worth Reading) Draper Carlson has posted a favorable early review. NBM is offering a bargain if you purchase On the Odd Hours along with Nicolas De Crécy’s gorgeous Glacial Period.
Those of us who’ve been itching to see some of Eisner Hall of Fame nominee Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s early, pulpy dramas will have our itch scratched when Drawn and Quarterly releases Black Blizzard. D&Q doesn’t seem to have a permalink for the book yet, but scroll down a bit on this page and you can see some preview pages.
I’m much more interested in Dark Horse’s omnibus editions of CLAMP’s Cardcaptor Sakura, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the first volume of the manga super-group’s Chobits is due on Wednesday. It’s about a struggling nerd who finds a computer shaped like a beautiful girl. It was originally licensed for English publication by Tokyopop until original publisher Kodansha withdrew its titles from Tokyopop and handed the relevant CLAMP titles over to Dark Horse, perhaps as a consolation prize for the fact that Kodansha yanked Akira and Ghost in the Shell from Dark Horse to sort-of launch its own comics-in-translation imprint. Next week on All My Licenses…
Speaking of properties that used to call Tokyopop home, Image releases the sixth issue of Brandon Graham’s King City. I’m not going to bother trying to link to this one, but I’ve been enjoying this series very much in pamphlet form, and the individual packages are very handsome things.
Viz has only one book to offer, and I bought it a couple of weeks ago at a bookstore. It’s the third omnibus edition of Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, collecting volumes seven, eight and nine. I’m of the opinion that all of Oda’s gifts as a creator really, truly come together in the ninth volume, but I’ll get into that in more detail at a later date, possibly Sunday, since that’s the day I seem to devote to my pitiful One Piece geek-outs. We now enter an unfortunate fallow period before the release of new volumes and the fourth omnibus. I may have to pick up the tenth, eleventh and twelfth volumes individually, though I may maintain my resolve to stick with the cheaper omnibuses.