Ryan

I've been enjoying the Flash tv series, so I decided to give Barry Allen a second chance. He's still no Wally West, but this was a fun read, and I think I'll keep going with the series.

The art was fantastically kinetic, the story pushed the idea of “the fastest man alive” in interesting directions, and set up an interesting status quo.

With Nigh, Bilodeau provides an intriguing and enticing inroduction to a modern fantasy rooted in classic storytelling conventions. For those interested in reading a serialized story, it promises to be an interesting story experience.

For a more detailed review, visit https://northerntomorrows.wordpress.com/2015/05/07/nigh-1-by-marie-bilodeau/

The opening chapters, about Bufkin the Flying Monkey leading a revolution in Oz, were delightful. The second story was a bit weaker, but it was great to see Snow White the BAMF in addition to Snoe White the loving mother we've been seeing for so many volumes.

This was a hilarious, sentimental story of a middle-aged man whose life is in such complete disarray that he figures the only way to make sense of it is to run 26.2 Miles. Like every decision made to run long distances, this ends up being brilliant. As Shulman runs the marathon, and reminisces preparing for it, he undergoes an existential crisis and realizes his life is in shambles.

I've never run a marathon, but I have done distance running, and a lot of Shulman's experience rang true for me. Funny and bittersweet, The Other Shulman would be a good read for anyone who's taken up the sport of running, or who's been through life-changing experiences that left them reminiscent of days gone by.

One's a fun-loving immortal with a drinking problem. The other's a deadly assassin trained in a theme park by Christian fundamentalists. Together they fight crime! “Crime”, in this case, being a cadre of nuns who are also ninjas, the greatest of all secret societies (called “The One Percent”), and Nazi Kung-Fu masters.

This was an incredibly fun goofball comedy/action series. Tongues were fully in cheek for the entire story, it had a great, roller-coaster sort of pacing, and the characters were oddly believable and relatable given their bizarre origins. A welcome break from the usual superhero sort of adventure.

There's an often under-appreciated art to blockbuster action sequences, and Micheline and Lapham are masters of that art. They managed to combine superpowers, sci-fi body mods, an A-Teamesque group of characters, into a thoroughly entertaining series. I'd gladly be reading this every month if they were still making it.

If there was one thing this book was missing, it was a chip in it, like greeting cards have, so that it could belt out SOMEBODY SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVE MEEEEEEEEEEE every time you opened the book. Aside from that, it's a pitch-perfect extension of the Smallville version of Superman, capturing the thematic tone, unique character voices, and melodrama that made the show so popular.

For readers that have never explored Sawyer's work, Triggers serves as a great introduction to his style of writing and the issues that he deals with in many of his works. For more entrenched fans of his work, it's an engaging look at consciousness and individuality, and how they relate to our responsibilities to the communities that we live in.

For a more detailed review, visit https://northerntomorrows.wordpress.com/2015/05/07/triggers-by-robert-j-sawyer/

With A Little Help is filled with a wealth of interesting concepts that would likely appeal to people who are attuned to Cory Doctorow's views on science and culture; however, the way in which those stories are presented leave all but the most entrenched fans feeling disappointed.

Read a more complete review at https://northerntomorrows.wordpress.com/2015/05/21/with-a-little-help-by-cory-doctorow/

This is suffered a bit from what many Image books do - DeConnick has grand, epic ambitions for this book (in the proper Homeric sense of the word, I expect), and that requires a fair amount of setup, which is what we get here. As with many Image books, I expect that the action will really kick up with the next volume.

As set up goes, though, this is pretty fantastic. DeConnick draws from a lot of old mythology - Hades and Persephone, and Coyote, and other tales, and wraps them in a beautifully depicted weird west tale. It's sexy, it's dangerous - Pretty Deadly was the perfect title for this work.

Lee and Kirby are the McCartney and Lennon of superhero comics, so this “lost” story was obviously of interest. It's definitely not their best work together, though, and the additional material thrown in with it to make this big enough for an entire TPB stretches a bit thin.

I'm so torn by this book, as I am with the Temeraire series on the whole. On one hand, there's so much that I like about it – in this book, for example, we continue to find out more about how different cultures deal with dragons being around in their society. I found the Russian experience of dragons to be very interesting, and neatly paralleled to the interactions between Russian aristocracy and its peasantry (which eventually came to a head with the Russian revolution). The big action set pieces, which relate to Napoleon's attempts to invade Russia in 1812, were all really fun to read as well. If someone is a student of history, though, it's intriguing to see how little of an impact dragons ended up having on the entire course of the war.

At the same time, I found the amnesia storyline to be fairly uninteresting. It seemed like an unnecessary attempt to inject an artificial level of drama into the character interactions. With everything that Temeraire, Laurence, and the other characters have been through, there's plenty of other material to mine for drama without adding this. The other main conflict in the book is Temeraire and Laurence's romantic lover subtext coming oddly close to plaintext. It's an odd plot, and I don't particularly care for it, so reading through their lovers' spats was a bit boring.

Overall, if you've read this far into the series, Blood of Tyrants is definitely a worthwhile read. Rumour has it that the next book in the series is going to be the last, which I think is something of a blessing. It's an enjoyable series at many points, but it feels like it's reaching a natural ending point (not just due to the fact that the Napoleonic wars eventually ended, either).

This book has 416 pages. I was really enjoying it for the first 415. It featured interesting characters, an epic, thematically-interesting threat, and gorgeous visuals. and then, it just ends. Right in the middle of a big, epic fight scene, everything literally fades to white. There's literally no ending to this story. It just stops, whichis incredibly frustrating.

I have this weird amnesia where modern Avengers stories are concerned, where I keep forgetting that I don't like them, get more out of the library, and then get disappointed all over again.

My main problem with this story: it strikese as fundamentally unbelievable that Green Goblin would be put in charge of SHIELD, and that he would be given enough autonomy to single-handedly decide to invade Asgard. Nothing in the story really attempts to justify it either; Bendis just assumes we'll take it on faith that this is a reasonable story for these characters to be involved in.

Also, the ending only made sense after I visited Wikiledia, which seems sloppy.

I'm absolutely thrilled that this has been reprinted. It's been unavailable for so long, and it's such an important part of superhero comics from a historical standpoint. Beyond that, I'm not sure what else there is to say about it - Moore and Leach's work is phenomenal, and really sells the idea of the superhero as Nitzschean übermensch in a way that would have been difficult with text alone.

At the same time, it's interesting to read this book now, because while it was completely groundbreaking and an integral part of Moore's reinvention of the he superhero genre in the 80s, it's also a victim of its own legendary status. It's almost like listening to an old Chuck Berry record - revolutionary for its time, but show it to someone now and it seems hackneyed and cliche (because it first created those cliches). I have to admit I'm jealous of people who got to read this before Watchmen, before The Authority, before Irredeemable and all of the other versions that have come since.

It took me a little while to warm to this, but it was overall an absolutely delightful read. Interesting characters in an interesting setting, and a steampunk story that managed to feel authentically Victorian in a way that few of them (in my experience) do.

I enjoy the parts of this series that are travelogues exploring how dragons would have affected the age of colonization a lot more than I do the parts that are Napoleonic warfare with dragons. This book leaned heavily on the first, so I quite enjoyed it, and found myself very intrigued by the role dragons played in the Incan empire. If anything, I wanted more, not only in Incan-controlled territory, but also in the fascinating implications of dragons surviving in an ecosystem fairly devoid of megafauna (pre European contact, at least). It looks like that's not going to be addressed, what with the series apparently returning to Asia and Europe in later books, but it has given me something fascinating to think about, and what more can you ask for?

The problem with Crisis-style stories like this is that you need to be invested in the other worlds before they go kablooey. In the actual Crisis, that worked, because they were Earths people cared about. Here, though? Alternate Earths are introduced as nothing more than cannon fodder. We're supposed to care because the heroes have the same names as people we care about, but I'd be much more interested in reading about, say, Betsy Braddock as Captain Britain, than having her walk on stage and then get blown up.

This was a fun, daring work. It manages to reimagine The War of the Ring from Mordor's perspective in a believable way, as well as looking at how the after-effects of the war would have played out in a “realistic” setting. The end result is a book that you would need to be well-versed in Tolkien to appreciate, while also being something that most Tolkien fans would probably dislike as it “ignores the beauty” and “misses the point” of the original. Regardless, I loved the concept of “history is written by the victors” applied to a beloved tale.

Fables has told a lot of great stories since the series started, and of those Black Ops Secret Agent Cinderella is probably one of my favourites. This was a quick, fast-paced read that explored some as-yet undiscovered corners of the Fables world, while still telling a fun story along the way.

I didn't find this volume as immersive as the rest of the series has been, partially due to my own unfamiliarity with Indian folklore, and partially due to the fact that Prince Charming seemed somewhat shoehorned into a story about a young woman fighting to save her village.

I was confused by this. It's clear, as you're reading it, that you're supposed to accept the narrative that Cyclops has “gone rogue”, and abandoned all of his ideals and beliefs. But the way that that's shown is by him teaming up with other former headmasters that Xavier had entrusted with the leadership of his school, building a new school, and reaching out to scared mutants who can't control their powers. I doesn't really seem like he's changed all that much from where he was in years past.

On the other hand, the “good guys” advocate for the cold-blooded murder of innocent teenagers and treat the space-time continuum like a plaything. Oh, and a bunch of them also make lustful comments about the teenaged version of one of their best friends (who, even with “Marvel time” in place, needs to be a good ten to twenty years younger than them for the story to make sense).

So, overall, a confusing read spared by shiny artwork and fun Cyclops stuff.

This was a fascinating read. Wilson looks at social media with a parable about how it could eventually cause a complete reorganization of how we organize ourselves into groups, for good and ill.

(more detailed discussion at https://northerntomorrows.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/the-affinities/)

Definitely one of the weirder dystopian works I've ever read. It suffered from the traditional “Vertigo vol 1” problem of too much setup, not enough story. Probably worth reading if you're going to be willing to commit to the whole series - it felt like it'll take awhile to pay this story off.

It's Starlin doing Adam and Thanos. If you're the kind of person who likes that (and I definitely am), it's an interesting iteration of their relationship, but it has little to offer for those that aren't converts to the Universal Church of Truth.