New comics

"I'm interested in truth, I like science.  But truth's a menace, science is a public danger.  As dangerous as it's been benificent.  It has given us the stablest equilibrium in history.  China's was hopelessly insecure by comparison;  even the primitive matriarchies weren't steadier than we are.  Thanks, I repeat, to science.  But we can't allow science to undo its own good work.  That's why we so carefully limit the scope of its researches..."--Brave New World

Saturday afternoon I went to the Crowdreads Meetup at the Reference Library, except it turned out they didn't have it that week.  Just as well since the place was crammed for a comics festival.

That reminded me to visit the comics store The Beguiling. My father wrote me a $100 cheque for my birthday three months ago, I got around to depositing it last month, and I got around to spending it that day.

I bought four books.  One was a reprint of the excellent Frank Godwin's Connie, a rare 1930s adventure strip whose central protagonist was a woman! (This reprint has the story of her spy adventure in China.) I also got Shigeru Mizuki's Onward Toward Our Noble Deaths, a manga about his experiences fighting in World War II.  His four-part manga about Japan during Hirohito's reign is superb!

And I got two graphic novels by the unique Peter Bagge. One, which I've started reading, is Credo, about the life of Rose Wilder Lane, who helped her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder write the first two of her Little House books, then became a libertarian kook.  The other is Woman Rebel, about the life of Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer who founded Planned Parenthood and ultimately changed the world.

Today I finished breaking the sod to extend the garden, sooner than I feared.  The next challenge is to put as much of the topsoil as possible within the frames of the two beds and level it out.  We may be late with the planting, but this will help us be early next year.

Tonight I watched the DVD of Alfred the Great with the History Meetup. (Like Juarez, I bought it online.) Rather heavy-handed in a '60s way, best for the battle scenes at the beginning and end.

That Istanbul book is excellent!  Thomas F. Madden knows how to write history.