My Alarmingly Large and Increasingly Grown-Up Son

My older son -- whom I'm still calling Thing 1 for the purposes of this blog, though I probably should ask him if I should use his name or some other alias at this point -- is currently at his Eighth Grade Dance as I type. He got all gussied up -- wearing a shirt of mine, an old blazer of mine, and an "eight-bit" tie of his very own that was a Christmas present -- and was dropped off at his school by The Wife an hour or so ago.

That's him right there, looking startlingly mature and serious, and I only hope he's not breaking too many hearts at the dance this evening.

On the other hand, I remember my own Eighth Grade Dance, back far too long ago to be precise, and how the one thing I really participated in was an air guitar competition. I pinwheeled so vigorously that my glasses flew off of my face. Repeatedly. I was not then smart enough to simply fold the things up and put them in a pocket, or perhaps not willing to be that blind. Still, I'm pretty sure my son won't do anything quite that dumb this evening. Or maybe I mean that he won't tell me if he does anything that dumb, which is close enough.

Awards! Awards! Awards!

The lingering memory of my year of blogging for the SFBC -- which ended five years ago, so I really should be over it by this point -- still compels me to post SFnal awards, even when I do so far too late to benefit anyone. What can I say? I'm a flawed person.

Anyway, here's some recent awards that you probably already know about:

2011 Aurealis Awards

The Australian national awards for SF and other imaginative literature were given out three weeks ago (I know, I know!), and the full list has been available since then.

Here's the novel-length awards, just because:

• YOUNG ADULT NOVEL: Only Ever Always, by Penni Russon
• FANTASY NOVEL: Ember and Ash, by Pamela Freeman
• SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL: The Courier’s New Bicycle, by Kim Westwood

(via SF Signal)

Analog and Asimov's Reader's Awards

The same weekend as the Nebulas (suddenly suspicious -- did I blog about the Nebulas? Yes, I did!), the editors of Asimov's and Analog announced the winners of their respective reader polls for the most popular features of the past year:

Analog’s Analytical Laboratory (AnLab) Awards:

• Best Novella: “With Unclean Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro (11/11)
• Best Novelette (Tie):
  • “Jak and the Beanstalk” by Richard A. Lovett (7-8/11)
  • “Betty Knox and Dictionary Jones in the Mystery of the Missing Teenage Anachronisms” by John G. Hemry (3/11)
• Best Short Story: “Julie is Three” by Craig DeLancey (3/11)
• Best Fact: “Smart SETI” by Gregory and James Benford (4/11)
• Best Cover: December 2011 (for “Ray of Light”) by Bob Eggleton

Asimov’s Readers’ Awards are:

• Best Novella: “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” by Kij Johnson (10-11/11)
• Best Novelette: “All About Emily” by Connie Willis (12/11)
• Best Short Story: “Movement” by Nancy Fulda (3/11)
• Best Poem: “Five Pounds of Sunlight” by Geoffrey A. Landis (1/11)
• Best Cover Artist: October/November, by Paul Youll (for “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”)

Note that Analog readers are scientists, carefully weighing the validity of each piece in their "Analytical Laboratory," while Asimov's  readers just vote for stuff they like.

(also via SF Signal -- you really should read them, and get this stuff quicker)

Sturgeon and Campbell Finalists

Finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards were also announced around Nebula time. These are juried awards for the best SF (generally interpreted broadly) story and novel of the prior year, and this year's nominees are:

Sturgeon:

• Charlie Jane Anders, "Six Months, Three Days," Tor.com, June
• Paul Cornell, "The Copenhagen Interpretation," Asimov's, July
• Yoon Ha Lee, "Ghostweight," Clarkesworld, January
• Kij Johnson, "The Man Who Bridged the Mist," Asimov's, Oct / Nov (Note: removed from consideration because Johnson is a Sturgeon juror, though it still appears on the official list of nominees.)
• Jake Kerr, "The Old Equations," Lightspeed, July
• Ken Liu, "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary," Panverse Three
• Ken Liu, "The Paper Menagerie," F&SF, March / April
• Paul McAuley, "The Choice," Asimov's, Dec / Jan
• Catherynne M. Valente, "Silently and Very Fast," Clarkesworld, October

Sixteen (named) people nominated for the Sturgeon, many of them the editors of the short-fiction venues of the field. My eyebrow is cocked as I type this, but I really don't know the process. I'm also surprised to see a story by a juror appear on the shortlist, even though it has a note saying it was removed from consideration.


Campbell:

• Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (Crown Random House)
• Kathleen Ann Goonan, This Shared Dream (Tor Books)
• Will McIntosh, Soft Apocalypse(Night Shade Books)
• China Miéville, Embassytown (Ballantine Books / Del Rey)
• Christopher Priest, The Islanders (Gollancz)
• Joan Slonczewski, The Highest Frontier (Tor Books)
• Michael Swanwick, Dancing With Bears(Night Shade Books)
• Lavie Tidhar, Osama (PS Publishing)
• Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse (Simon & Schuster)
• Gene Wolfe, Home Fires (Tor Books)
• Rob Ziegler, Seed(Night Shade Books)

Both awards will be given out during the Campbell Conference in early July.

Compton Crook Award

This award goes to the new SF author of the best novel of the prior year -- not to the book itself, but to the author. (It's also not quite clear if it has to be a first novel, or if newness persists in a writer for some extended period.)

This year's winner is T.C. McCarthy, for Germline.

(via SF Scope, for variety)


Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees, and thanks to all of the various nominators, judges, voters, and other functionaries that make these various awards run.

The Curse of the Masking-Tape Mummy by Scott Meyer

The Platonic ideal of the comic is precisely balanced between art and words, each as exquisite and precise and lovely as the other. And there might actually be one or two comics that come within spitting distance of that, but not much more: it's an ideal because it really doesn't happen. Every comic, like every work of art in any medium, has its strengths and weaknesses, and what good cartoonists do is to work to their strengths.

Scott Meyer's strength is his writing: he's witty, writes great dialogue, and has a enviable eye for the situations in his own life that can be turned into comics. His art is serviceable but a bit bland: he rotoscopes (or "traces") over photographs, reusing the same poses (and, one suspects, the same art) repeatedly, and this means his cast is inherently limited and their poses equally limited. (It's not a coincidence that the primary characters of Myer's strip, Basic Instructions, are the Meyer stand-in, his wife, and his best friend.)

Meyer clearly knows what he does well: Basic Instructions is a deeply wordy comic, a four-panel newspaper-style strip crammed full of captions, explanations, dialogue and repartee, with just enough art to hold it all together. And the third collection of Basic Instructions, The Curse of the Masking Tape Mummy, has just been published by the wonderfully named Don't Eat Any Bugs Productions, bringing together 136 comics (just shy of a year's worth at Meyer's three-times-a-week posting schedule) between two dark-blue covers.

This year's worth of strips does see Meyer extending the strip, moving out from his original office and home locations (it's not coincidental that Basic Instructions got a big boost from a laudatory post from Dilbert's Scott Adams; Basic Instructions is one of the heirs of Dilbert in many ways, from that office focus to its snarky tone to the balance of art and writing) into superhero parody, with the introduction of Omnipresent Man, the Knifeketeer, and more to complement the original could-have-been-a-one-off-joke of Rocket Hat. That also gives Meyer a way to extend his cast without getting more models -- he reuses himself and his friends (I assume that his models, whatever characters they turn into in the strip, are actually his friends, because otherwise it would be difficult to get them to do multiple poses) as those superheroes as well as "themselves." (And even the names and powers of two of those heroes -- Omnipresent Man and Mr. Everywhere -- have a secondary joke in their re-use of the art for "Meyer" and "Rick".)

Basic Instructions is a mature strip at this point; it has a solid cast with well-defined relationships, and Meyer is free to use that to just make his jokes and commentary -- which range from the usual "my office-mates  have idiosyncrasies that horrify and disgust me" and "my spouse is vastly smarter and more in touch with the real world than I am" to the more particular nerdy complaints about Star Wars's AT-AT and to explorations of the odd psyche of "Rick." Humor isn't as universal as it should be -- which is one way of saying that too many people don't find the right things funny, the way I do and the universe intended -- but Basic Instructions is nearly always quite funny, and always at least mildly funny. If you haven't read it before, you should check it out -- unless you're some kind of un-American type who doesn't like to laugh.

(My old review for the first collection, Help Is on the Way, is also still floating out there in the Internet ether.)

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, adapted by Seymour Chwast

Yes, that credit does have the faint whiff of "by William Shakespeare, additional dialogue by Sam Taylor" to it, but it can't be helped. Anything needs to be adapted if it's going to work in another medium -- which is a big "if" -- and having it done by one person, who then lays out and draws the thing himself, is about as pure an auteur case as you can get.

And it's not as if most people encounter The Canterbury Tales in their pure form, anyway -- when I read them, way back in college years, my class was atypical in using an edition with Chaucer's original spelling and grammar, but even we read an abridged version. The full-on Early Modern English Canterbury Tales has been primarily for scholars for generations now, so any time it comes close to a mass audience -- which is not that often -- you're looking at an adaptation.

Chwast does Chaucer well with his adaptation of The Canterbury Tales -- he does have them riding motorcycles, but otherwise doesn't modernize the occupations or the world -- these stories are still told by a Pardoner and a Franklin, a Clerk and a Reeve and a Manciple, and take place in their own times and places. Chwast does use modern spelling, and clearly uses only a fraction of Chaucer's text, but he keeps enough to give the sense of Chaucer's world, obsessed with religion almost as much as sex or honor. (Maybe it's not all that different from our own, after all?)

Chwast came to graphic novels late -- this is his second, after an adaptation of Dante's Divine Comedy -- after a long career as a noted graphic designer and illustrator. And his Canterbury Tales is well-designed, but not as overly designed as I was worried it would be. Chwast's line is stiff and illustrative, giving all of his pages the look of bas-reliefs; his panels aren't windows into a world of story but clearly pictures, drawn and placed just so.

This is admittedly an odd book -- an adaptation of a classic most readers never think about, into a format most serious readers still scorn. It's certainly quixotic, but admirably so -- Chwast clearly enjoys Chaucer, and wants to share his love with the rest of us.

Hornswoggler Says "Check It Out"

Haruki Murakami Bingo, from the inimitable Incidental Comics. This is only one square -- clickthrough for the entire thing.

Read in May

This post is mostly an organization device for my blog -- or a way to track down my reviews of books, for those who may be stalking me literarily for whatever unfathomable reasons -- so most of you will have already moved past it, and that's just fine.

But here's what I read this past month, with links where possible and with links to come (at what time, deponent sayeth not) for the rest:

• Rudy Rucker, Nested Scrolls (5/1)
• Doug TenNapel, Bad Island (5/1)
• Anders Nilsen, Big Questions (5/2)
• Ray Fawkes, One Soul (5/3)
• Charuca, I Love Kawaii (5/5)
• Ysabeau S. Wilce, Flora's Fury (5/8)
• Faith Erin Hicks, Friends With Boys (5/9)
• John Gardner, Grendel (5/10)
• Geoffrey Chaucer, adapted by Seymour Chwast, The Canterbury Tales (5/11)
• Tim Powers, Hide Me Among the Graves (5/17)
• Alan Moore, Curt Swan, et. al., Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? (5/21)
• Steve Erickson, These Dreams of You (5/24)
• Jules Feiffer, Passionella and Other Stories (5/29)
• Scott Meyer, Basic Instructions: The Curse of the Masking-Tape Mummy (5/30)

Next month: more books!

It's a Hell of a Town

Some guy named Frank Oscar Larson took some pretty nice pictures of NYC during the 1950s, and his family has been putting them up online. You could even buy a print, were you so inclined.

(via Mark Evanier)

Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? by Alan Moore and various artists

If you know this story at all, you know the quote: "This is an imaginary story...aren't they all?" That would be true but trite if it weren't for the fanatical identification of the superhero reader with his favorite characters -- and, even more so, with the continuity of their stories. When "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" first appeared, in the then-last issues of Action Comics and Superman in the fall of 1986, as the decks were being cleared for what still looked then like a fresh start for DC Comics's characters in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths, continuity was still something in large part built by the fans, a collective work of imagination linking the most interesting and resonant parts of a thousand stories told over five decades.

Now continuity is just another commodity: carefully spooned out, measured by drops and pints and liters, controlled almost day-by-day by the two big comics companies, as they alternate shocking reveals with the inevitable returns to the fan-preferred status quo ante. Continuity, these days, is just the name of another dead comics company -- Marvel and DC tell you what the past is today, and they'll tell you differently tomorrow, and if you don't like it, well, where else can you get your stories of Superman and Spider-Man?

Alan Moore isn't part of our new world, of course -- even if everything else had been different, and DC hadn't screwed him over at every possible turn over the last two decades, his sensibility couldn't fit into the current soup of cynicism -- and his superhero comics come from the '80s and '90s rather than now. His few actually cutting-edge works -- primarily Watchmen and Miracleman/Marvelman -- worked to undermine retro nostalgia, and to show what costumed heroes might be like, psychologically and physically, in something more like a real world. But most of his comics that deal with superheroes take them as icons, as the true representation of what a young Moore must have seen in them in the '50s -- from these stories to Supreme to the superheroes scurrying around the margins of Swamp Thing, trying valiantly but completely out of their depth in more complicated works of fiction.

Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? is a 2009 hardcover collecting three Alan Moore-written stories from 1985 and 1986, illustrated by different artists. The longest piece -- that swan song for the Silver Age Superman -- is given pride of place, first in the book with title and cover features, and it has suitably iconic art by classic Superman artists Curt Swan (inked too fussily by George Perez in the first part and more straightforwardly by equally classic Kurt Schaffenberger for the climax). Moore takes all of the pieces of Silver Age Superman's furniture -- the silly villains, the big cast with their complicated relationships, the thousand toys and wonders -- and systematically breaks them all down and takes them apart, in pursuit of his big ending. It's impressive in the context of comics of the time, though the ending, seen twenty-plus years later, is too facile and the pieces that should be tragic are just swept under the rug. But it is a Silver Age Superman story, so those are features rather than bugs: those stories can't be any deeper than they are, or they would be something else.

The other two stories collected in this book are something else, and see Moore using Superman to tell deeper, more resonant stories: first is "The Jungle Line," from the minor team-up book DC Comics Presents, in which Superman is infected with a deadly Kryptonian disease, and heads off to the least superhero-infested part of the USA -- the Louisiana swamps -- expecting to die. Instead, he runs into Swamp Thing -- star of the monthly comic Moore was also doing excellent work in at the time -- and finds a way not to die of his affliction. It's strengths lie equally in Moore's incisive captions -- particularly as he examines Superman's failing powers and growing sense of mortality -- and in the art of Rick Veitch and Al Williamson, which is much more like the Swamp Thing look, lush and full and organic, than the Superman comics of the time. It's a minor team-up story, of course -- entirely about something that doesn't happen -- but it's a small gem of its time.

The last story here, though, is something stronger than that: "For the Man Who Has Everything," which was the Superman annual in 1985 and has Dave Gibbons's inimitable art support: precise and utterly superheroic in every line, but modern and detailed and dramatic in ways that Swan and his cohort weren't. It's a story of Superman's birthday, and of the best and worst possible present. It's the only Superman story that has ever made me tear up, and possibly the only one that ever could: it gives Kal-El (Moore, again, is most at home with the Silver Age version of Superman that he grew up with) what he always wanted, and makes him tear himself away from it. It's completely renormative, of course, in the style of the Silver Age, but it points directly at Watchmen, which Moore and Gibbons would start work on within a year, and it implies Moore's growing uneasiness at always having to put all of the pieces back neatly in the same box at the end of the story.

So this book reprints three very good '80s superhero stories by excellent creators -- but readers do need to realize that these, if not actually Silver Age stories, have a Silver Age sensibility and feel to them. In particular, Moore's DC work was very heavily captioned, which has gone entirely out of style these days. If you can't stand a Superman who's a big blue Boy Scout, who has a dog named Krypto and a fortress in the Arctic with a gigantic gold key, and who would never ever kill anyone under any circumstances, this is not the book for you.

Today Needs Some Feedback and Fuzzy Guitars

I have no idea what this song is about, and I'm still listening to the rest of the album it's on -- not sure yet what I like and don't like.

This song, however -- it's "Infinity Guitars" by Sleigh Bells -- sounds like the fight song for that high school on the bad side of town you do not want to mess with, and I'm currently playing it at least once a day:

Incoming Books: three or four days ago

Hey! I'm busy being on vacation here! I can't remember what day these books arrived, or bother to blog about them when they came!

One of the comics shops I order from semi-regularly (Midtown Comics, in NYC) had a good sale last week, so I stocked up on manga for the boys to earn [1] and also got a few books for myself:

Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book One by Alan Moore and various collaborators. I'd been looking at this for several years -- thinking that I really should have the complete AM Swampy on hand -- but I had the precursor trade paperback of this collection (and no other Swampy reprint volumes), and was feeling odd about re-buying almost exactly the same package. Well, the flood solved that problem, so I can collect the whole series in this format -- particularly since the flood wiped out all of my comics, including my collection of the first two series of Swamp Thing.

Esperanza, a Love & Rockets collection by Jaime Hernandez. The flood similarly destroyed all of my L&R stuff, from the original magazine-sized issues (though I was patchy on those) to the old paperback series, to the first three volumes of New Stories. So I'm rebuilding, with the aim to re-read the whole thing sometime in the next year.

The Complete Peanuts 1983-1984 by Charles M. Schulz. Schulz's work in the last few volumes hasn't been as impressive as his heyday -- and that heyday was from the beginning of the strip in 1950 up to about 1973-74, which is one hell of a "day" -- but it's still a fine, iconic American comic strip, and I suppose I will keep collecting it, even if I did lose all of the volumes from the best years in the flood. 



[1] The current deal: Thing 1 (now 14) gets one for each time he mows the lawn. [2] Thing 2 (now 11) gets one for each actual novel (or non-fiction book, I guess, but the question hasn't come up, since he's on a fantasy tear) he reads and tells me about. So I have to keep some choices on hand.

[2] Yes, I have now officially entered the wonderful period when I have sons who are both old enough to mow the lawn without supervision and young enough to still be living at home. And I am savoring it, believe you me.

Ready for Another Tour of the Sublimely Hideous Javitz Center

So I've gotten my marching orders for this year's Book Expo America (BEA, the book-industry convention that I'm old and dull enough to still think of as ABA), where, for the very first time, I will be working official hours in the Wiley booth. [1]

(I'm not sure if that means that there's a rigorous five-year vetting period, or if I'm one of the dwindling number of people who care enough to go at all; I've been in publishing long enough that going to BEA was a perk -- which I didn't get for more than a decade -- so it still feels thrilling.)

Anyway, I'll be demonstrating something -- I believe our enhanced ebooks, or other techy stuff; there is training promised, but it hasn't happened yet -- in the booth from 11 to 1 on Wednesday, June 6th. I'll also have other time doing something else in the Wiley booth -- my department head has let me know that, though not what or when -- probably the same day.

So my current plan is to be at the dumpy Javitz center just that one day, the 6th. (Wiley's in Hoboken, so schlepping over there is somewhat more cumbersome than it is from many other publishing houses.) If there's anyone out there that I should stop by and see (or vice versa), e-mail me, and we can set something up.

Or, conversely, if you want to avoid seeing me, the 6th is the day you need to be more careful, and in particular avoid the Wiley booth.


[1] Which seems to be substantially larger this year, if I'm reading the layout correctly. I have no idea why -- decisions like that are way above my pay grade -- but anything that emphasizes how powerful, stable, and utterly awesome we are is fine with me.

Update:

I will also be the official  Business Marketing Group person-on-duty in the Wiley booth on the 5th from 1-3 and on the 6th from 3-5, giving you three times the opportunities to find me, should you want to. Feel free to torment me by asking me questions about other marketers' books!

Note that this now means that I will be at the Javitz for a day and a half -- the afternoon of the 5th and all day on the 6th -- making it that much harder to avoid me.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/26

I write this from the middle of a particularly long holiday weekend -- I took extra days fore and aft -- so I'm about as relaxed and contented as it's possible for me to be. (Which is not very, but it's as good as things get.) So the big stack of books that came in this past week looks like an exciting panoply of potential riches to me, instead of a chore or any of the other things it could be if I were in a grumpier mood.

All of these books showed up on my doorstep, essentially unannounced, over the last week. And I haven't read any of them yet. But here's what I can tell you about them:

The Rapture of the Nerds is the first novel-length collaboration between SF writers Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, coming as a Tor hardcover in September. Actually, I should walk that back a bit -- it's actually a fix-up, consisting of two previous published Doctorow-Stross novellas, "Jury Service" and "Appeals Court," along with a new novella-length story, "Parole Board," all of which has been rewritten at least somewhat to make it read smoothly. (The fix-up is an venerable and respected SF form; Asimov's original Foundation Trilogy and half of the works of Van Vogt are notable examples.) Rapture is set in a moderately post-human future, a hundred years on, in which the various uploaded minds floating around near space occasionally interfere with the lives of the billion traditional humans left on Earth -- which interference our hero, the grumpy young Welshman Huw, tries to minimize.

Timothy Zahn's Quadrail series -- which has something to do with trains in space, or at least began with the novel Night Train to Rigel -- concludes with Judgment at Proteus, a Tor hardcover on sale June 5th. It's adventure SF in the space opera style, with an evil parasitic alien force trying to conquer the brains (sweet, sweet brains!) of the galaxy, and the One Man who must stand against them.

Just in time for this year's gala Nebula Awards ceremony -- literally; it was published on May 15th as a trade paperback from Pyr -- is Nebula Awards Showcase 2012, an anthology edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, containing the 2011 winners, given out at last year's ceremony. The book itself very careful does not say anywhere easily noticeable -- it could be buried in the introduction, which I only skimmed -- that these are the 2011 winners, though a very careful reader could infer that from the list at the end, which contains all Nebula winners from publications years 1965 through 2009. (But that's even more confusing, since SFWA's current numbering scheme calls the winners in this book the 2011 Nebulas -- given in 2011 for works generally published in 2010 -- though the list in this book's appendix uses year of publication, implying that the year 2010 had no Nebulas at all.) Anyway, this book has stories by Harlan Ellison™ -- literally; he's credited with the trademark after his name -- Kij Johnson, Geoff Landis, Rachel Swirsky, Adam Troy-Castro, and more, plus excerpts from the novel nominees, and the aforementioned introduction.

It's also time for the monthly flood of manga from Yen Press -- the comics side of the Orbit SF imprint on my side of the Atlantic -- which is more than half of my books on hand this week. All of these publish in May, and nearly all of them are later volumes, so I'm going to arrange them as a countdown, from thirteen right down to 1 (without ever number being represented of course; I couldn't get that lucky at random):

• Bamboo Blade, Vol. 13 continues the high-school-girls'-kendo-class drama from Masahiro Totsuka and Aguri Igarashi. And when I say "continues," I mean it: two girls are in the middle of a bout (match? spar? round? whatever the correct term in) on the first page, which ends at the end of this book.
• Sumomomo, Momomo, Vol. 12 is the finale of the martial-arts parody series by Shinobu Ohtaka (I loved the first two volumes in this series, and lost track of it for a while, and then mildly enjoyed the previous volume), and the kind of parody it is has turned much louder and more obvious by this point -- which probably has pleased many people.
• The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Vol. 12 is by Gaku Tsugano and Nagaru Tanigawa (from characters by Noizi Ito), and I'm afraid I've never been able to really get into this series, so your guess is as good as mine -- the hero seems to be time-traveling back to his own recent past in this one, which I suppose means it's only for series fans.
• Pandora Hearts, Vol. 10 is an adventure manga with semi-random references to Alice in Wonderland thrown into it -- as I like to point out when things like that come up in manga, it's the equivalent of all of the ninjas and samurai in western comics with equally serious underpinnings -- by Jun Mochizuki, and I reviewed the first volume, back in the day.
• Nabari No Ou, Vol. 10 has a painfully thin guy on the cover -- seriously, won't somebody give him a sandwich? -- and otherwise is deep into a story I know nothing about. The back cover explains that Yukimi -- possibly that thin dude -- is searching for the true Yoite, and has been given the name Sora, but Yoite also seems to be another person, who is in danger or something. I'm sure it makes sense if you've been reading Yuhki Kamatani's story, and not just trying to make sense of back-cover copy.
• Soul Eater, Vol. 9 is the latest piece of Atsushi Ohkubo's very energetic story of the training of minions of the death god (in a good way!), something like Bleach set at Hogwarts, following up on a previous volume I actually read.
• Omamori Himari, Vol. 7 is the only volume this month that came shrinkwrapped -- due to it's M-rating -- and the panty shot on the cover may give some indication why. Milan Matra's story looks to be another typical manga melange -- one part harem story, with a bevvy of pretty girls in short skirts fighting over one far-too-ordinary boy, and one part he's-the-heir-to-a-thousand-year-tradition-of-fighting-demons.
• Daniel X, Vol. 3 has a huge "James Patterson" on the cover, but I think it's actually adapted from Patterson's novel by Adam Sadler, and the art is definitely by SeungHui Kye. Daniel X is one of Patterson's YA series protagonists, which means he's got paranormal powers, is part of a band of similar teenage misfit/runaways, and has to save the world from the forces of EEEEEvil.
• Until Death Do Us Part, Vol. 1 is a double-sized volume launching this new series by Hiroshi Takashige and DOUBLE-S. She's a precognitive pre-teen on the run from yakuza who want to use her powers to get rich! He's a blind swordsman in modern Japan with techno-glasses and a computer voice in his head! Together, they will...well, we'll have to see about that.
• And last is another debut, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Vol. 1, credited to Magica Quartet (story) and Hanokage (art), which seems to be a spin-off from a different magical girl series (not to mention an anime cartoon adapted into comics). Anyway, there's this magical girl, and her fabulous friends, and their stunning costumes, and all the rest of that stuff.

Back to prose, Daniel H. Wilson -- author of the bestseller Robopocalypse [1], the kind of thriller that we're supposed to pretend isn't actually SF -- is back with his new novel Amped, about a near future in which hundreds of thousands of people are "amplified" with high-tech prosthetics and then the Supreme Court (clearly Scalia and Thomas were only the beginning) rules that, apparently, anyone with a prosthetic anything doesn't count as human for the purpose of the law anymore. And then the requisite thriller plot kicks in. I'm sure that Amped is not nearly as stupid as that description makes it sound, by the way -- but I'm getting that straight from the flap copy and cover letter. Doubleday, which used to know what SF was, back in the day, publishes Amped as a hardcover on June 5th.

Larry Tye is a journalist, biographer, and author of general nonfiction -- his Satchel (a bio of Paige, I believe) was a bestseller a few years back -- and his new book is Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero. Tye's previous works are nowhere near the comics field, so I hope he's bringing an outsider's objectivity to this regularly re-told (and heavily mythologized) story. It is, obviously, the story of DC Comics's biggest cash-cow, the character that enriched a thousand corporate executives but couldn't manage to save his creators from poverty. Random House publishes Superman on June 12th in hardcover.

And last for this week is the new Amos Walker detective novel from Loren D. Estleman -- some folks may remember when I read a whole bunch of books in that series -- called Burning Midnight, and coming as a hardcover from Forge on June 5th. This time out, Walker investigates gang violence and the disappearance of a teenager -- related to his frenemy, police detective John Alderdyce -- in his native Detroit.


[1] By the way, Robopocalypse: A Novel is the silliest title I've heard in at least a decade and possibly my entire life. Was someone worried that readers would confuse it with Robopocalypse: The True Story of My Battle Against Skynet by Sarah Connor?