There must be something in the air, because this is the week of weeks for comic book artists to make appearances in SF. On Friday, Justin Hall & friends are doing a book signing at A Different Light (we'll be posting more details about that on Thursday) ... and on Wednesday, Gene Luen Yang, local author of the awesome American Born Chinese, is throwing a launch celebration at Isotope on Wednesday at 7pm.

American Born Chinese is a collection of three stories, told simultaneously and finishing with an unexpected cross-pollination: one is a cute retelling of Journey to the East (with some slightly distracting Christian imagery sprinkled in), another is a Wonder-Yearsy memoir of a young boy named Jin who feels left out of local American culture because his parents are Asian, and the other is a sitcom called "Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee," in which a very average white boy named Danny is mortified by his astoundingly offensive Chinese cousin.

We're not Chinese ourselves, so we can't vouch for the book's resonance with Asians. But replace "Asian" with "gay" and it's the story of all of our friends' early adolescences: knowing we were different, longing for opportunities to assimilate and hating everything that reminded us of how we felt about ourselves, blah blah blah. As a matter of fact, that might actually have been just about everyone's preteen experience -- Asian, gay, smart, tall, Latvian, freckled, whatever. When the Monkey King would rather be imprisoned under a mountain than be a monkey, when Jin wishes he could be a Transformer when he grows up, and when Danny is terrified that everyone is comparing him to his buck-toothed academics-obsessed American-Idol-auditioning cousin, there's no way to sigh and remember going through exactly the same thing yourself.

Gotham by Gaslight, by Brian Augustyn, Michael Mignola, P. Craig Russell, and Eduardo Barreto, takes the Batman legend and turns it UP-SIDE-FREAKING-DOWN by having Batman do exactly what he's been doing all along ... only a hundred years ago. In this curly re-imagining, Gotham of 1906 is terrorized by Jack the Ripper and a Jokery madman, and it's up to suave gadfly Bruce Wayne to blah blah blah like he always does. The conversation probably went something like, "Okay, I've got it ... we keep writing Batman stories exactly like we have been ... only now he's in 1906!" "Wait, why is he in 1906? I mean, is there any reason for him to be in 1906?" "Um, no." "Good enough for me. Now, let's go get drunk and cry."

Gotham of 1906 is not without some beauty -- the cobblestones and giant hats are very pleasant, and we can never get enough steampunky airship action. Or muttonchops! Muttonchops are the best. Ladies, you don't know what you're missing out on; there's nothing more gratifying than waking up in the morning, looking in the mirror, and combing a giant matted plume coming out of the side of your face. That doesn't really have anything to do with Gotham by Gaslight, but then, nothing interesting does.

And then there's "The Dummy's Guide to Danger," in which the best private eye in LA solves crime while toting around his partner: a ventriloquist's dummy who he insists can talk. Both the dummy and the dick have plenty to say; they're both hard-boiled tough-talking type-A manly men, unphased by gore and undeterred by threats. In issue one, they rough up a perv, they schmooze with a sexy lady reporter, and they narrowly avoid being run over by a car driven into their office by a starlet whose head's just been chopped off. Neato.

We're not leaping out of our seats for this one yet, since the characters are a little meh. Sure, it's a private eye and a puppet, but so? It could be Wendell Wilkie in a chicken suit, but that don't make lines like "I'm feeling a little Action Jackson pumping through my blood tonight. Let's get outselves in some trouble" any more tolerable. The predictable blah blah blah banter chops a few points off of the final score "Dummy's Guide," which otherwise shows us an acceptably exciting good time.