New This Week: December 8, 2004

Based on the NCRL list for this week's comics shipping from Diamond, here are a few things to look for at the local comic shop tomorrow:



The pick of the week is Global Frequency: Detonation Radio from DC/Wildstorm. This collection of issues #6-12 of the limited series show writer Warren Ellis at his best, as he crafts six taut done-in-one thrillers about 'normal-yet-extraordinary' people saving the world from extraordinary threats. He is joined by a different artist for each story; this volume features Lee Bermejo, Simon Bisley, Tomm Coker, Gene Ha, Jason Pearson, Chris Sprouse and Karl Story.



In other comics:



AiT/PlanetLAR has the final issue (#12) of Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan's Demo.



Antarctic has a Pocket Manga collection of Ben Dunn's fun alternate world/British secret agent story The Agents.



Dark Horse has the second issue of BPRD: The Dead.



DC has new issues of Fables (#32), Gotham Central (#26); JLA (#109--more with the Crime Syndicate); JSA (#68--JSA/JSA begins, with Per Degaton!); and the 100th issue of Nightwing (please please please don't let it suck...)



Image has the penultimate issue of JMS's Rising Stars (#23).



Lost in the Dark has a new issue of the end-of-the-world story Video.



Marvel has a new issue of Powers (#7) and, um, well, that's it really.



Origin has the first issue of Temporary: Cubes and Ladders



Viz has the fifth volume of Osamu Tezuka's magnum opus, Phoenix.





It's a small week, which is good because my to-be-read pile is waaaay too big!

Draft of DDC Revisions

It takes a special kind of geek to be both a library geek and a comic book geek. Thankfully, I fit that description.



If you do too, or if you're just interested in the minutia of Dewey Decimal Classification, then you may be interested in the fact that OCLC has released the Draft schedule 741.5 Cartoons, caricatures, comics, graphic novels, fotonovelas.



They've moved a couple of things around and clarified several things in the notes, including explaining what I call the 'Neil Gaiman problem'. (Gaiman is an English author, but most of his works were published by American publishers--so if you're categorizing geographically, where does Sandman go?)

Christmas Covers - December 7

For each day of December until Christmas I'm featuring a Comic Cover Advent Calendar. Just move your mouse over the image to reveal today's special Holiday comic cover. Click on the image to get a larger version from GCD.



Today's cover is 1986's Alf Holiday Special #1, where ol' Gordon Shumway seems to be having vowel troubles at Santa's North Pole offices.



Just 18 more 'get-ups' until Santa!