Back from the comics shop...

...with both some things for the archive shelves and some for pure reading enjoyment.

Mark Waid is one of the better US superhero writers, so I'll of course want his new Boom! stuff. "Ka-Zar" was one of Andy Kubert's early triumphs as an artist (I misremembered and bought the collection because I thought it was Bruce Jones' version, but that was earlier and drawn by Brent Anderson IIRC – but since this was scripted by the aforementioned Waid, no problem anyway). "Magnus, Robot Fighter" is a classic and by the elegant Russ Meyer – unfortunately, the colors in this edition are a rather flat, and murky to boot. A "Phantom" collection from the pen of Ray Moore; the exquisite art of Alex Raymond from his "Rip Kirby" years; and Jeff Jones has done some of the most beautiful paintings I've seen (though I'm not always as keen on his ink work, and the scripts for his comics were always a bit... well, shall we say, sparse?).

Well, more Segar "Popeye"; starting putting together a complete "Prince Valiant" collection; a book on John Buscema ("Mr. Marvel Comics"); and Jim Steranko's comics history (part 2).

Marvel's "Civil War", two more collections; a DC war comics collection that judging by a hasty first look is pretty uniformly crappily drawn (I hope the scripts will be better); and Mark Schultz' marvelous and beautiful "Xenozoic Tales".