Incoming Books: 14 February

I haven't been blogging much this week (here, at least; it feels like I've been a fiend over at the SFBC Blog); my new assistant started on Monday, and it's been a busy week at work anyway, so I haven't had much time.

And I'm running off to Boskone tomorrow morning: there won't be any blogging until (maybe) late on Sunday. So I'm trying to do a couple of posts tonight, to have a little something here for those long, cold winter nights.

And, of course, I went to the comics shop yesterday (yes, on my way home from work, during the snowstorm, on Valentine's Day -- I was betting that it wouldn't be that busy, and I was right), and I'm compulsive about these things.

For Thing 1, I got the second volume of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, a manga series based on the video game, and one other digest-sized book for the pile of stuff he gets on odd occasions.

For myself, I got:

• Hellboy Animated: The Black Wedding, after much debate. I finally decided in its favor because I do like Hellboy (though not brand extensions) and it was cheap.
  
• The Grave Robber's Daughter by Richard Sala, which I thought was supposed to have been out the last time I went to the comics shop
  
• Doom Patrol, Vol. 5: Magic Bus by Grant Morrison and various artists -- this still isn't the end of his early-'90s run on the comic, which I'd thought wasn't this long. Shows how good my memory is.
  
• The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 6 by Ostrander and Mandrake (the cover still says "Truman," but all he did is the new cover) -- as I recall, Mandrake was a great artist for this series and stayed a while. (He and Ostrander have worked together well for long periods several times -- their Spectre comic was also pretty good.)
  
• Big Baby by Charles Burns -- I might have these stories already, in some form, but I like the new unified Burns collections, and I'm willing to pay money for 'em.

And now my stack of comic-book stuff is getting too tall again; I'd better start reading some of it.