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After a rainy Sunday afternoon, my Goodreads inventory<\/a> has been updated with quite a few graphic novels, the most highly recommended among them Tamara Drewe<\/i><\/a>, Posy Simmond’s modern updating of Far from the Madding Crowd<\/i>—but I would also urge you to take a look at volume 5 of Villard’s Flight<\/i> anthology<\/a>; in some ways I liked it even more than The Best American Comics 2008<\/i><\/a> (although that series has significantly improved in the last year).<\/p>\n This weekend’s reading was sort of the culmination of a recent burst of graphic novel reading which began with a plunge into recently translated works by Osamu Tezuka; I’d been a big fan of Vertical’s eight-volume edition of his Buddha<\/i>, so I was looking forward to Dororo<\/i> and Black Mask<\/i>. The latter turned out to be a rather entertaining medical drama, provided you were willing to buy into its more absurd starting premises—work with the story, and it’ll work with you. But Dororo<\/i>… I have to admit, after two strong opening volumes, I was seriously disappointed with the way Tezuka scrambled to tie everything together (and not all that neatly) in the third batch of stories. And then there was MW<\/i><\/a>, which was billed as “a chilling picaresque of evil,” but felt a bit more like a cartoonish action movie romp: “good mindless fun masquerading as a statement about good and evil,” as I put it on Goodreads. But even there, the artwork was superb; you can see why Tezuka has so many fans in Japan and around the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After a rainy Sunday afternoon, my Goodreads inventory has been updated with quite a few graphic novels, the most highly recommended among them Tamara Drewe, Posy Simmond’s modern updating of Far from the Madding Crowd—but I would also urge you to take a look at volume 5 of Villard’s Flight anthology; in some ways I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4095,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/4095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}