The two books I got today: Gilbert Hernandez's massive collection of the PALOMAR stories, and Bhob Stewart's biography AGAINST THE GRAIN: MAD ARTIST WALLACE WOOD.

PALOMAR is nothing short of a masterpiece, the kind of comics stories people have been aching to read and claiming don't exist. And here they are, some twenty years old, if not older. Words don't quite describe these stories, at least mine don't, and certainly not in the grand kind of cadence it deserves. I've been slow to review the components of PALOMAR on ARTBOMB for precisely that reason. These works are Marquez and Carver, Allende and Russo, Kahlo and Schulz all in one. Unfairly overshadowed or overlooked for god knows why, works comparable to PALOMAR can be counted on one hand with change left over.

AGAINST THE GRAIN, which really could've used a better title (or at least not a title with, ho ho, two whole puns), has been forthcoming for quite a while. Bhob Stewart has written more than a few articles that I can recall reading in The Journal about Wood and they're never anything less than fascinating and crushingly, crushingly sad. Wood was not a happy man, and life just ground the poor bastard down again and again. His art remains astonishing, his life yet another one of the inescapably tragic arcs so many in comics seem to lead.