Coming This Week: African Girls in Trouble, Crumb Does Adam & Eve, and More Oversized Hardcovers Than Your Unemployment Check Can Handle

Every week I review Diamond's “New Releases” to determine what I’ll definitely be buying sight unseen, what I’m interested in enough to do a quick scan of at the LCS to see if it can win me over, and note any other items that catch my eye. Here’s a look…

Buying:

Aya: The Secrets Come Out (Drawn & Quarterly): The long-awaited third volume of this terrific series by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie spotlighting a seldom explored part of contemporary African culture. Previous volumes have had 13 Minutes Graphic Novel of the Month status bestowed upon them, in addition to appearing on my Best of the Year lists!

Book of Genesis Illustrated by Robert Crumb (W.W. Norton): I don’t know how excited I am to read the bible again, but a mere $24.95 gets you a massive tome of work and the pages look amazing. Oh, and it’s Robert Crumb.

Considering:

Justice League of America: 80 Page Giant #1 (DC): That really is a lackluster creative roster. I mean, seriously, who are these people? It’s like DC should print a special edition of Who’s Who? that provides explanations of all the C-list writers and artists responsible for this thing. Anyway, the $5.99 price tag seems a little steep, but it is 80 pages and some of the story descriptions have a Silver Age team up panache that I’m finding irresistible, like “Green Lantern and Red Arrow locked in a showdown with Cinnamon in the Old West” or “Black Canary and Zatanna evading gangsters with the original Crimson Avenger!”

Best American Comics: 2009 (Houghton Mifflin): I still expected to see Dave Eggers’ name adorning this book, but instead I find it’s edited by Charles Burns and Jessica Abel, which is just as great, if not better. Often times I’ve read many of the excerpts already, but the essays are usually spot on and reading these books reminds me of having done so on long flights from Boston to San Francisco at my old job. It could wind up being the nostalgia buy of the week.

Noting:

In no particular order, it’s just cool to see all of these books getting collected in swanky editions as we gear up for the Christmas season: Absolute Promethea: Volume 01 HC (DC/Wildstorm), Fables: Deluxe Edition: Volume 01 HC (DC/Vertigo), Strangers in Paradise: Omnibus Limited Edition (Abstract Studio), Hellboy: Library Edition: Volume 03 HC: Conqueror Worm & Strange Places (Dark Horse), and Umbrella Academy: Volume 02 TPB: Dallas (Dark Horse) following right on the heels of the absolute edition that came out last week.