Ryan
I tried three times to come up with a review of this book that was neither long-winded or rant-filled. I was unable to do so. Let's just say that when Patton Oswalt, in the introduction to this book, says that it's “what's wrong with modern comic books”, he was right. He was trying to be ironic but hit the nail right on the head.
During the summer I was heading downtown one afternoon, and I started thinking about how popular urban fantasy has been over the past several decades, and that I'd never heard of anyone publishing suburban fantasy, which seemed a little odd. I started plotting out a possible such story, and after I'd started writing it out, did some research to make sure I wasn't going over well-trod ground, which is how I found this book.
So, what we have here is a collection of stories about witches, all linked by the setting of suburbia. All the classic suburban stereotypes are there: SUVs and soccer moms, strip malls and PTAs, housewives and urban sprawl. The authors manage to interpret that in a variety of unique ways, however, and manage to give you a fun glimpse into how magic would change the suburbs, and how the suburbs would change the practice of magic.
I think I'm in the minority among King's readers: I think that some of his most powerful writing comes when he avoids using supernatural elements in his stories, and that his short work is much better than the longer stuff he's better known for. The modern publishing industry hasn't been knd to the novella, but King is an absolute master of the form.
As a result, I was pretty excited for Blockade Billy, which for the most part is a classical Americana story – two old men sittinig down to talk about baseball. Then, near the end, the story twists, adding a horrific element to it. It was a pretty good story, familiar but not predictable: my only quibble was that I didn't see how the consequences of the story's climax necessarily followed from the climax itself.
Even creepier was the ‘b-side' story, Morality, a story about what people will do for money and how difficult it can be to escape those decisions.
There's no ‘new' story in this book - it's instead a graphic-novel adaptation of the ‘Recorded Attacks' section of Brooks' Survival Guide. For those of you who haven't read the guide, the section in question outlines zombie outbreaks in various points in history, ranging from prehistoric Africa, ancient Rome, the age of Sail, and others.
Adaptations are tricky things. They require balancing being faithful to the story material with having something unique to say; this becomes even more difficult when the same author's writing both versions. Recorded Attacks doesn't really have anything unique beyond the change of format from written medium to visual one, and Brooks has clearly thought about what makes for a scary comic versus a scary print story. So while I can't really call it great, it's a solid story that's a worthwhile read for fans of zombie comics as well as for those who have read the Guide and want more.
What really makes the collection worth a read, though, is the art by Ibraim Roberson, whose work I wasn't familiar with prior to this. The man draws a mean zombie, and also does a pretty good job of capturing the various cultures throughout history that the zombie attacks take place in.
The first in a series of novels spun off of the Red Panda podcast at Decoder Ring Theatre. The podcast is an effort to recreate the feel and sound of audio dramas from the Golden Age of Radio (the Shadow, Batman, the Green Hornet, etc), and it does that well, adding enough of a modern sensibility that prevents it from feeling dated.
If you haven't listened to the podcast, I would recommend starting with that, as it serves as a better introduction. If you're a fan of the show, this is a good way to enjoy it in the off-season.
The title is a bit of a misnomer.
There had been, at the time this was published three Flashes: Jay Garrick in the 1940s, Barry Allen from 1961 to 1985, and Wally West from 1985 to 2007 (when this book came out). As such, one might expect Allen and West to be equally represented, with Garrick a little less so. Instead, we got 2 Garrick-era stories, 5 Allen ones, and 1 West story.
The Garrick and Allen stories are pretty run-of-the-mill Golden and Silver age superheroes. The one West story, which has him getting trapped into moving so fast that the entire world around him is frozen, is excellent, and I really wish they had more like it. Given the excellent creators that have worked on Wally West-era Flash (Baron, Messner-Loebs, Morisson, even Geoff Johns to give the devil his due), it seems like a bit of a slap in the face to them to ignore all their work in favour of stuff like “One Bridgegroom Too Many”.
Second book in the Company series; this one switches focus from Mendoza to Joseph, and in doing so gives us a more detailed look at the history of The Company and some of their past actions. At the same time, we are in the “present” of 1700, where Joseph has to preserve a tribe of Chumash natives from being wiped out by other tribes and European conquerors.
Once again, I'm really impressed with Baker's ability to develop character through voice - I feel like I've got a good feeling that I know who Joseph is from listening to him talk, even when he's not talking about himself. When he is, though, he seems more self-aware than Mendoza was, too, which is nice - he describes himself at one point as a cross between Bugs Bunny and Phillip Marlowe, which is an excellent description.
Baker's characterization of the Chumash - that despite being Stone Age natives, they are people and therefore not really all that different from us - was well done, and their civilization seemed nicely fleshed out.
Oddly, though, this seems to have been written like the end of Joseph's story, but having read later books in the series, I know it's not.
So a tzaddik, a rabbi, and a vampire walk into a bank ...
A collection of four stories, one featuring each of those characters at a turning point in their lives and a heist story that ties it all together. Each of those stories features concepts that could fall into the ridiculous - for example, a drug-addled immortal warring with an angel, a blood bank that keeps holy water in its sprinkler system as an anti-theft system, and lychanthropic nazis seeking Vlad Dracul to recruit him to their cause.
Tidhar's writing style is like a good whiskey - dark, and with a hard edge to it, but in a way that manages to be self-effacing at the same time. He's good, and he knows that he's good enough that he doesn't need to try to impress you.
On a technical level, Uganda is the most interesting story in the collection - in in Tidhar manages to tell an epistolary story that intertwines an interview transcript and three different yet fully-realized journals of different characters. It would be difficult enough to keep those stories straight and well-developed in a novel, but to do it in the limited space of a short story was very impressive.
Professional wrestling is a form of entertainment as fascinating as it is misunderstood. Baum understands it, though - it interests people as much for what goes on outside the ring as inside, and for the stories being told as for the action and athleticism. It's a timeless, unique form of drama, and at its best its damned entertaining.
One Fall takes place during one of the most interesting times in pro wrestling - the “Monday Night Wars” of the early 2000s, with the Global Wrestling Alliance and Revolution Wrestling taking the place of WCW and the WWF. It's not a straight analogue, though - Baum is a better storyteller than that, so he takes the elements of reality that make for a great story, twists them together, and adds fiction where appropriate. The result is a story that's a must-read for fans of pro wrestling, although I'm not sure how appealing it would be to others.
Book 2 in the “Millennium” series. This one again mixes personal history with international intrigue, but this time the goal is to learn more about Lisbeth Salander, who was something of an enigma in the first book.
Larsson does this by having her accused of murder, after which she goes into hiding. Mikael Blomvkist is determined that she's not guilty, so he starts his own investigation separate from the police one, which requires delving into Lisbeth's personal history and unlocking some huge secrets. It's an interesting way of telling the story, and one that allows everyone to stay in character while allowing Larsson to continue to present Blomkvist as the hero of the story, even though he seems to recognize that Lisbeth is the most interesting character.
Larsson's mysteries work well because there's some elements in them that are obvious, so you feel smart for guessing them before the characters do, but other elements that you (or at least I) don't seem coming so you stay surprised and hooked throughout the story.
One minor thing that bugged me while reading this was Larsson's tendency to use brand names and product details to create verisimilitude. It's enough for me to know that Salander used her laptop to hack into someone's computer; I don't need to know that it's an iBook with a 15.6” screen, or the exact amounts of RAM and hard drive space that it has.
The New Jedi Order series, for its faults, did a lot to advance the Star Wars universe by shifting the focus from the characters in the movie to the next generation of Jedi, and by introducing some interesting moral relativism that forced the characters to think beyond the good/evil dichotomy of Jedi and Sith. Betrayal seems to undo a lot of that - the kids are still there, but the focus seems to be primarily on Luke, Han, and Wedge.
Jacen's Sith turn also seemed sloppy and rushed - although Lumiya presented it as a continuation of his studies in moral relativism, it clearly isn't, because it requires him murdering a former apprentice in cold blood. I may be biased, because Jacen has become one of my favourite characters in the entire saga, but he just seems out of character here.
It's about time I read this one - I started Baker's Company series with the third book, for some reason, and have loved making my way slowly through it, but missed out on some defining character moments at the start.
So, Iden is not a misspelling of the garden of Eden, but rather a reference to Sir Walter Iden, a character in the novel who has a stately estate garden full of botanical curiosities. During the time of the novel, the counter-reformation will occur in England, and Sir Walter will go to court to try his fortune in once again Catholic England. As a result, his garden will go fallow, and many of the unique items will be lost to the future.
Luckily for The Future, there's a company named Dr. Zeus, Inc, who specialize in preserving unique items, and are not afraid to use their knowledge of time travel and their immortal cyborg army to preserve those items, and a trio of those cyborgs are sent to rescue Sir Walter's garden, and have to only dodge falling in love with mortals and inter-European political intrigue to do so.
This was a bittersweet read - I've been a big fan of the Scott Pilgrim books for the past few years, enough that I've been re-reading the previous books in the series each time a new one came out. And now it's done.
The series is brought to a very fitting end - we learn about Gideon, Ramona's ex who started the League of Evil Ex-Boyfriends, why he started it, and why Scott's had to fight them. Seemingly every minor character makes a final appearance, and everyone ends up a bit wiser and more mature, even Scott, no matter how much he might try to fight it.
Along the way we get the same mix of video game logic, indie rock, and comics references that the series has featured throughout, and some great gags that are as funny as anything else in the series (Scott's “memory cam” primarily). If you've been loving the series so far, you should love this one too.
Recommended to me by a friend after she learned I was doing the Couch to 5K program to try to turn myself into a runner.
There's a lot of info here, and I didn't read all of it - some of the sections, like the one on running a marathon, don't apply to me (for now, at least), and some of them, like women's issues when running, never will. But what I read was really informative, really helpful, and really encouraging. Definitely recommended for anyone who wants to run.
I was of two minds about this book. On one hand, it was a fun read, and I still get a bit of a chuckle from reading the title. At the same time though, it takes itself fairly seriously: maybe there's some humour in the details for the serious Lincoln scholar, but for someone who doesn't know too much about Lincoln, it seemed like it was trying to be a straight horror novel about Abraham Lincoln and his secret war against the vampires of America.
It took a little time to get used to the format of the book, as well - it's being told by Grahame-Smith, but the paragraphs are interlaced with excerpts from Lincoln's hidden journals about his war against the vampires. I found the speed at which it went back and forth between the two to be distracting - I think I would have enjoyed the journal bits more if they'd been told as separate chapters.
I found the “vampires were responsible for supporting and maintaining the slave trade” theme a little distasteful, as well. I can understand why it was included - you can't write a book about Lincoln without discussing slavery, after all - and I would even concede that “slave owners as blood-sucking parasites” metaphor is a good one, but it also comes across like an attempt to absolve humans from the evil of slavery. We're capable of evil enough without vampires there
In summation: it's deeper than I had been expecting it to be, but kind of unsatisfying at the same time, although I can see why a lot of people seem to love it.
One of the problems with war is that it requires warriors: you have to take people and turn them into weapons, which creates the problem of what to do with those weapons after the war is over. A gun can go on a rack, a sword can be mounted on a wall - but what to do with the warriors, and how to re-integrate them into regular society?
Starkings et al address this question by literally creating warriors - the oddly-named Elephantmen, warriors created by creating genetic amalgams of humans and different beasts, such as elephants, hippopotami, and crocodiles. The series begins after the war they were created for ends, and they deal with being celebrities, freaks, and the most visible veterans of war in a dystopian future.
Stylistically, the series is a blend of noir and science fiction, but one that avoids being overly “pulpy” in the traditional sense, while telling a series of loosely-connected short stories.
Continuing the story of the Trojan War. This volume continues to look at the build-up to the war itself; there are some initial skirmishes and conflicts, and we see how close the war comes to not happening, as the fragile alliance between the different groups of Acheans tries to keep itself together.
What's really interesting here is how Showalter depicts the Greek belief in fate. We're dealing with kings and legendary heroes here - the types of people that you would assume would be strong, commanding people - and they're unable to move, or to come to a consensus, without a sign from the fates that their course of action is right, and without confirmation that the gods will be on their side. Often people writing historical stories write them as a reflection of their own society, but Showalter doesn't do that - he's telling the story from a very classical Greek sensibility, which helps to show how well-thought out and researched this story is.
This one was, to say the least, a little afield from what I normally read. when I do pick up YA books, they usually have either wizards or dystopian futures in them. Down to the Bone has neither of those; just a teenaged girl trying to navigate the tricky paths of love, sexuality, and identity in a Cuban neighbourhood in Miami.
What really sold me on this book was the culture that it's steeped in - from the food, to the language, to the way the characters interact with each other, their faiths, and their sexualities, it all feels very real, and very grounded in a real place. I always appreciate that in a book - when you feel like you've visited a place by having read about it.
The main character, Laura, is interesting as well - she's very strong in her beliefs in most things, like environmentalism and vegetarianism, but when it comes to her dealing with her attraction to other girls, she's completely unsure of herself, which adds an interesting dimension to her.
“Amateurish” is a tricky word. Technically it just means stuff that's not created by professionals, but I've never seen it used to just mean that - it's always used as a pejorative, implying that stuff created by amateurs is inherently inferior to stuff created by professionals. It's a little sad, when you think about it, that stuff people create just for the love of it is reflexively valued as less than stuff people get paid to make.
So I'm not going to call this an amateurish novel. It's not written in a “professional” way - the story kind of goes all over the place, the narrative voice and the sense of humour that runs through it are inconsistent at times, and it has an attitude that is snide and flippant towards its audience. And because of those things, it's a great, fun read.
Plus, you've got to love a novel that spoils itself in the title.
First volume in a series about a reporter on the ground in the demilitarized zone that is Manhattan, during America's second civil war. I've always loved the city of New York, so it's a little hard to see it torn to pieces in the chaos and anarchy that follows the pull-out, but it's also the perfect place for a series like this.
One of the things that I liked about this is that, unlike most dystopian stories, this one involves people being resourceful, and rebuilding after the government's gone and things have fallen apart. True, there's no cell service or cable television, but people start rooftop gardens, and underground hydroponic farms, and attempt to rebuild society rather than just abandoning cities for a rural, 19th century type of lifestyle. I think that's what I would try to do in a setting like this, so it's nice to read a story that reflects that.
I'm a big fan of poutine. For those of you who are not Canadian, nor have Canadians in your life, poutine is a Quebecois dish based on french fries, which have cheese curds placed on top of them, and then the whole thing is smothered in gravy.
This seems off-topic, but I swear it relates.
The thing with poutine is that it's a really common dish, because it's simple and easy to put together, but few people make it really well. I've been in restaurants where they've just shredded some mozzarella cheese and tossed it on top of the gravy, and other places where the curds are rubbery, or the gravy's watered down or tasteless. It's easy to make, but real easy to get wrong as well. When it's done right, though, poutine is artery-clogging ambrosia, and one of the tastiest foods on the planet.
Strangers in Paradise is poutine literature. It takes a lot of common elements from other stories and mixes them together - between the emo-before-emo-was-a-thing characters, the love triangle between those characters, the feminist politics, the complex interplays of sexuality, cross-gender friendships, and attraction, and the “on the run from the mafia” plot, you've got elements of around half of the cinema and indie comics of the early 1990s represented here in some way, shape, or form. And it works. My gods does it work. Everything fits in perfectly together - the plot, the characters, the artwork - and you end up both loving and hating those characters at the same time for the choices that they're making as the story progresses. It's a difficult, demanding story to read at some points, but it's a very rewarding read at the same time, one that gives you all it has and leaves you wanting even more once you're done.
Another highlight of this GN is the artwork - Moore's black and white brushwork might seem a little simplistic at first, but it's a concious choice, done to get you to pay more attention to the words on the page, and the way he varies style and layout throughout it (for example, cartoonish styles for dream sequences and complex, multi-balooned conversations in one panel between good friends), as well as incorporating things like music, poetry, and prose writing throughout the book - it's almost like he's using Strangers in Paradise to teach a seminar on what the GN is capable of while at the same time telling a great story.
I'm admittedly not a fan of the big ongoing crossover that modern Marvel comics has become, so there's probably a lot of backstory I'm missing out on, but this was a fun GN equivalent of a blockbuster summer popcorn movie.
The story starts off with a Hulk who's been banished from Earth by the “Illuminati”, sent to die on a barbarian world. Instead, because he's the Hulk, he becomes king of this barbarian world, and leads its horde back to Earth to SMASH, as SMASHing is what Hulks do best. Hulk has been lead to believe that the “heroes” that sent him away also killed millions in his new kingdom, so he has righteous anger and furious vengeance on his side, as well.
That's around 90% of the plot here. Hulk shows up, beats the crap out of Black Bolt, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, and Mr. Fantastic, completely destroying New York in the process. Then, in a completely unsatisfying deus ex machine ending, he finds out that the murders he blamed the humans for were actually committed by one of his own, kills that guy, and gets taken into SHIELD custody. The ending really ruins this one - it seems tacked on in an attempt to not completely assassinate the characters of some of the most central Marvel characters, retconning itself while the book is still in progress.