Bucket of Birthday Comics!
Do kids still have to sell magazines for school? Does it work out the way it did for Lydia? I always had better luck with the chocolate selling….
A couple of weeks ago, I had a birthday. Like pretty much every birthday since I could read, I asked for a pile of books. Comic books. This year’s haul was super-rad. I finished a collection (Scott Pilgrim), narrowed down another one (Dragonball), and topped off another collection with a special hardback (Blacksad), until I realized there was another volume yet to be released in the U.S.
I was disappointed when I heard Scott Pilgrim vs. the World didn’t do great at the box office. I had never actually read Scott Pilgrim. The trailers got me excited and the movie was hilarious, visually giving me cavities with its super-sweet deliciousness. As soon as we left the theater, my husband James and I zoomed over to the local bookstore and bought the first three volumes, with the logic that “There’s a birthday soon, so we should not buy the rest yet”
Although he is two years younger, Scott Pilgrim helped me win my birthday.
Which meant that volumes 4, 5 and 6 of Scott Pilgrim were the first birthday books I devoured. So much birthday win!
What is taking longer to devour is the ultimate tomes of epic that make up Dragonball volume 3 and 4. They are super fat VizBIG editions, where 3 volumes are sandwiched until they are quite large. The fatness of the books convey both epic and awkward, epic because HOLY CRAP AWESOME AMOUNT OF MANGA, awkward as such a fat paperback is a little weird to hold during the first and last 50-ish pages. There’s also periodic segments in color….I watched a lot of DBZ in middle-high school during the sweet block of action called Toonami on Cartoon Network, but fell out of watching TVÂ around the time the network had Dragonball. This will be fixed! After I’ve finished these bricks of awesome.
Goku can take those VZZAPs
Crazy dalmations are rad.
Blacksad is a comic I had actually given up on as far as getting any new volumes. The comic is written and drawn by two fellows in Europe, and the company who had translated the first two volumes went bankrupt before the third was translated. Thanks to the Internet, I saw some gorgeous pages in French that I could only sort of make out with what I remembered from AP French class. While Blacksad is visually stunning, one of the main pulls for me is the crime noire storytelling aspect and I knew I would be missing out without being able to understand the words. Hooray for Dark Horse comics for collecting Blacksad volumes 1 -3 in hardback! Blacksad follows a hard-boiled detective who is a cat…but everyone is an animal of some sort in this anthropomorphic universe, so that’s not weird. A dalmation in Volume 3, Red Soul, is the prime example of the expressions you just can’t seem to get with human-based characters.
Seriously, people can't make these faces.
Shortly after finishing said Blacksad story though, I learned that volume 4 had just been released in France. Maybe it will be translated for my next birthday?