It’s One of Those “Ooh, Look What’s in Previews” Posts

I’m not going to bother with Dark Horse, DC, Image or Marvel, because they’ve already had their solicitations up on Newsarama and Comic Book Resources for weeks. But here is some unexpected and interesting-looking stuff from that section of Previews where it’s easy to miss things, because your eyelids are now getting as heavy as your arms after leafing through the first few hundred pages.

Hill & Wang
Rick Geary J Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography. Although I am always wary of the difficulty of separating fact from reconstruction from imagination in non-fiction comics, I am also always bowled over by the way Geary recounts his Treasury of Victorian Murder stories, and it is good to see him branching out. This is labelled “Not available in Canada, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia and the UK.” I suppose it is only appropriate that a biography of J Edgar Hoover should involve curtailing the free movement of information. One for Amazon, then.

Houghton Mifflin
Frederik Peeters Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story. Bart Beaty wrote earlier this year, “For six years when people ask me ‘What is the book that you think most needs to be translated from French to English?’ my answer is always the same: Pilules Bleues, the true story of a young man and his romance with a woman living with HIV.” So this is good news for ignorant anglophone monoglots like me.

Titan Books
Willie Patterson and Sydney Jordan Jeff Hawke Volume 1: Overlord. In the 1980s, Titan published two volumes of this beautifully drawn science fiction newspaper strip, which originally ran in the Daily Express from 1954 to 1975. This volume reprints all three stories from the 1980s Book 1, plus the first story from the 1980s Book 2, so, once again, Titan are skipping over the first thirteen stories in the series. The solicitation art (below right) is a nasty bodge of one of Brian Bolland’s covers from the previous reprints (below left). Let’s hope that they change it for the actual cover. Whatever my gripes, this is still well worth getting for the actual content.