big arrivals

Apart from my usual slackness, some 60+ hour weeks at work has ground pretty much everything else to a halt. But today was a big mail day: the monthly shipment from Discount Comic Book Service, the annual box from WFMU and the once-in-a-lifetime arrival of Tim Lucas' Bava biography. The Lucas/Bava book is stunning with an amazing amount of illustrations (one-sheets, behind-the-scenes photos, ad slicks, stills, etc) and enough text to fill possibly two books. It's also probably the heaviest book I own (my shipping scale only goes up to five pounds so I can't weigh it). This and Stephen Thrower's Nightmare USA are going to be top priority when I get some free time and finish my TCM assignments. The DCBS shipment had the first volume of the Terry & the Pirates release and a blind buy of The Mammoth Book of War Stories which seems more interesting than I expected. It has Eisner's Vietnam story, a manga about Hiroshima, some British comics, a Toth pilot story, some undergrounds and modern indies and even what appear to be Charlton reprints. Man, what I wouldn't give for some Essentials/Showcase-style Charlton books; if they're doing Harvey then why not? More details later. The FMU stuff included a tour of James Brown tributes, Irwin's latest calypso explorations, a disc of strange country and a couple that I don't remember choosing but probably did. Also, We Jam Econo. And of course super-cool t-shirts.