Wildlife painted by Federico Bertolucci; brand-new CRIMINAL plus THE FADE OUT by Brubaker & Phillips; lost SERAPHIM manga from anime’s Satoshi Kon; Meredith McClaren’s doe-eyed, dreamy HINGES and far, far more. Remember, there’s news underneath!
Love vol 1: The Tiger h/c (£13-50, Magnetic Press) by Frédéric Brrémaud & Federico Bertolucci.
Beautiful, 
beautiful, album-sized book following a day in the life of a tiger.
And you know how David Attenborough can get all rip, tear, gouge, growl and predatorial on your Sunday evening ass…? (I don’t mean David personally, I mean his wildlife documentaries and the blood-thirsty cycle of life they portray.) This will too because a tiger does not spend its day perched on your window sill, idly gazing at your neighbours heaving heavy furniture into the removal van, furiously following a leaf buffeted by the breeze or hissing at next door’s cat.
No.
A tiger wakes, stretches and yawns (which is perfectly good manners if alone in the jungle and not listening to yet another of your lame holiday anecdotes), then immediately sets off in search of a snack. And, once again, that doesn’t mean pit-pattering down your carpeted stairs to the kitchen-floor cat bowl which you have filled to the brim with prime kitty nom-noms.
No, it does not.
It means tearing the throat out of whatever poor poppet is closest, assuming it can catch it first.
It then means defending that kill from other top predators and I’m just trying to warn you that this will pull at your heart strings just as the carnivores within will be pulling at tendons, muscles, fat, cartilage and sinew. Tigers aren’t invulnerable, either.
I have but one problem with this silent scenario in that there is – just occasionally and in this specific context – a wee bit too much anthropomorphism for my taste. As in, any at all: in this context there should be none. GON is burlesque so that’s perfectly fine. Here it shatters the illusion and kills the mood but the effects are mercifully brief.
Instead the rain, it will pour down. Lightning will strike, flamingos will fly and an owl will stir. There will be snail sex as well. Mmmm!
I don’t even need animals; the landscapes alone are to die for.
This is as lithe as lithe can be then – OMG! – sketch pages, folks! Just one look at the jaws and the haunches will show you that Bertolucci knows how these beasts are put together.
It is ridiculous that there aren’t more graphic novels which offer themselves up to the nature-loving rather than obsessing about the human condition (which is worth exploring) or hitting each other in the face with guns (not).
I will leave you with a reminder that THE RIVER exists.
SLH
Buy Love vol 1: The Tiger h/c and read the Page 45 review here
Criminal Special Edition (£3-99, Image) by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips.
“I wasn’t 
done reading that yet, you fat fuck…”
If you don’t want to sneeze tea all over your keyboard then either remove the keyboard to a safe distance before reading that page or try going dry for ten minutes.
A perfectly representative, accessible and self-contained introduction to the twilight world of CRIMINAL in which we finally get to meet Teeg Lawless, the often referred-to father of Tracy.
He’s not the smartest con in the can having landed himself there – en route to collect what would have been some considerable cold cash from an armoured-car stick-up – over failure to appear in traffic court. He stopped off for a beer then beat up a biker who didn’t press charges but, yeah, Teeg got sent down instead for a failure to appear in traffic court.
So he’s stuck on the inside instead of keeping his commitment to Sebastian Hyde – whom you do not want to piss off – to take down a councilman blocking a construction contract Hyde’s set his heart on. And Teeg’s trying to keep his head down, he surely is, by reading the latest instalment of ZANGAR, THE SAVAGE but he doesn’t half get interrupted every five fucking seconds.
“You Lawless?”
Which is a funny thing to ask a criminal.
Seems there’s a price on Teeg’s head and Hyde swears it ain’t him but he won’t offer protection, neither. Almost immediately they’re coming at Lawless from all directions – in the canteen, the laundry room and showers – and Teeg is trapped in there with them. It’s relentless. So what, as they say, is actually up?
I wish every comicbook artist would make reading as easy, as fluid, as accessible and addictive as Sean: monologue or dialogue across the top. Also, there’s an immediate time and place: I love Teeg’s hair.
For long-term readers there’s the not inconsiderable satisfaction of seeing Tracy from Teeg’s point of view, especially after Tracy’s reminiscence about the car pedals in CRIMINAL VOL 2 and it’s at this point I should point out to readers of the collected editions that this is almost certainly the only format you’ll be able to read this in for some time to come given that FATALE‘s Brubaker and Phillips are currently working on the long-form FADE OUT. We’re talking years!
As ever Brubaker has something to say about human behaviour – not rash generalisations but specific tendencies or patterns within individuals. With Teeg it’s that this sort of structure in the slammer or army actually serves him quite well. Too much freedom gives him too many choices and too many opportunities to choose wrong. He really is Mr Bad Decision.
As to ZANGAR, THE SAVAGE, Phillips provides a dozen or so pages emulating the magazine-sized black and white barbarian adventures printed on paper so low-grade that they’d yellow and brown before you got them back home, and I can only imagine how much easier it has been to apply computer-generated zip-a-tone than it used to be using a scalpel.
I warn you right now that Phillips has pulled no punches and that the art is as battered and brutal as the inmates themselves and you will find within the dreaded Injury To Eye And Almost Everything Else Motif over and over again.
Still, he wasn’t done reading that yet, you fat fuck…
SLH
Buy Criminal Special Edition #1 and read the Page 45 review here
The Fade Out vol 1 (£7-50, Image) by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips.
“This was 
just how it was here… something in the air made it easier to believe the lies.”
Los Angeles, 1948. Hollywoodland, to be precise, where the art of selling lies is its hugely successful business.
Acting itself is a form of lying – creating the semblance of someone else – but there are also the myths spun to make actors more attractive to their idolatrous fans. Take the profile of dreamboat actor Tyler Graves, concocted by bright publicity girl Dotty Quinn, playing up his years as a ranch hand in Texas.
“Dotty, you’re a riot… I’ve never ridden a horse in my life.”
“I know, I still prefer the first one we came up with…”
“Oh right. I was a mechanic Selznick discovered when he broke down in Palm Springs.”
“It was your own little Cinderella story.”
But there’s a telling line in Posy Simmond’s British classic TAMARA DREWE from the horse’s mouth of successful crime novelist, Nicholas Hardiman:
“I think the real secret of being a writer is learning to be a convincing liar… I mean, that’s what we are: story tellers… liars…”
He should know: he’s a serial philanderer.
Screenwriter Charlie Parish is already lying. He’s a good man at heart, though he does like to party, by which I mean he drinks much more than he should. He’s prone to blackouts: not just passing out in the bath – which he did, last night – but to alcohol-induced memory blackouts. He’s not as bad as Gil Mason, the former writer now blacklisted for supposed Communist sympathies.
That man is a full-time drunk and a bar-room bore, badgering all and sundry before being thrown out on the street:
“Can you get up, Gil?”
“Not just this second… I threw my back out trying to deck Bob Hope.”
Charlie and Gil used to be friends before Charlie shopped him. Now it’s common knowledge that they hate each other’s guts.
That’s a lie for a start – a dissemblance to cover a mutually beneficial arrangement.
But this morning Charlie has woken up in one of those little bungalows set up in Studio City to keep people close to the set. The night before is a mystery to him, but there’s a lipstick kiss on the bathroom mirror that reminds him of a smile, the smile leads to a face, and that face belongs to the woman lying dead on the living room floor.
It’s Valeria Sommers, young starlet of the film Charlie’s working on. She’s been strangled while Charlie was sleeping. Slowly, assiduously, Charlie begins to remove all trace of his and anyone else’s presence. But that’s nothing compared to the cover-up the studio’s about to embark on, and it’s going to make Charlie sick to the stomach.
Anyone who’s read CRIMINAL knows of Brubaker’s unparalleled ability to immerse readers in the minds of others and make those troubled minds utterly compelling. Anyone who’s read CRIMINAL VOL 6 knows he’s so good at it that he can make you root for a prospective murderer. You’re certainly going to want Charlie to get away with his role – however circumstantial it may be – in Valeria’s death and his complicity in the subsequent cover-up, even though the studio is going to smear the poor girl’s name.
“He felt sick. Because he knew exactly what they were doing.
“Studios had been covering up murder and rape and everything in between since at least the Roaring Twenties. That’s what men like Brodsky were there for… to prevent scandals.
“And he’d helped them this time. He’d helped them.”
Charlie is yet another man trapped by his own act of fear, plagued by his guilt and about to do something else he knows he really, really shouldn’t…
Oh, and if readers think they will miss the horror of this team’s FATALE, wait until you see what Phillips pulls off for the nightmare.
It’s a period piece, the period being rife with tight-knit nepotism, closed-doors studios and overtly voiced bigotry. Wisely Brubaker has refrained from redacting that. Some people are shits – they just are – and there is such a thing as the non-authorial voice. So much here is tied to the Congressional Hearings just before McCarthyism really hit its stride including a role for Ronald Reagan.
Thankfully Sean Phillips is a dab hand at likenesses for Reagan is joined in this fiction by the likes of Clark Gable. There are also a few neat new tricks from Sean like the ethereal memories of Val’s replacement Maya Silver which again reminded me of Posy Simmonds, this time specifically the Janice Brady sequences in MRS WEBER’S OMNIBUS. Makes sense when you think about the subject matter.
As for colour artist Bettie Breitweisser she leaves it until the open-air daylight hours of poor Valeria’s funeral in chapter two, but on that very first page – wham! – she’s invented yet another colouring technique which is in its own way both impressionist and expressionist concerning the colour and quality of light not as it actually falls or what it falls on but as it might dance on the brain. It’s rendered in free-form, fuck-you panes of light and slabs of colour with scant regard for the line on the page and every regard for your eye.
Anyway, back to the acting, the lying and back to the slight-of-hand rigmarole involved in marketing commodities (actors and actresses) to their adoring, lap-it-up public. We’re not necessarily quite talking beards here, but Tyler’s manliness needs boost-merchandising and Maya proves the perfect accessory. Plus she needs to be introduced to her soon-to-be-adoring public.
“So good old Dottie found a way to kill two birds with one photo op. After dinner, Tyler and Maya dodged the press just badly enough to be followed to Ciro’s… where a drunk in the crowd got too friendly with Maya… [Hey!”] … and Ty knocked his block off.”
Oh. In the process of typing this, I think I may have solved a substantial part of the puzzle.
SLH
Buy The Fade Out vol 1 and read the Page 45 review here
Seraphim 266613336 Wings (£14-99, Dark Horse) by Mamoru Oshii & Satoshi Kon.
A global 
pandemic of bubonic proportions has wiped out the world as we know it. Whole countries have succumbed to the plague itself or the mass migration of refugees that followed.
Certainly Japan’s air force failed them, while China has ruptured under the stress and scant resources, the World Health Organisation having thrown a protective Cordon Sanitaire around what’s left. A Cordon Sanitaire, yes, keeping the plague contained through military means, for infection rates range from 60% to 80% and WHO has acquired combat-ready status, armed as it is to the teeth right now with weapons from multiple states. It was also been infected with a religious fervour turning its leadership into a cowled cabal of those who call themselves Magi.
But perhaps this is understandable given the nature of the plague.
Early stages show twin shoulder blade growth, bone pushing itself to the surface. As to the terminal stage of Seraphim, it is a hideously emaciated, ossified corpse with sunken cheeks, protruding hip bone and wings like an angel’s – except scruffy and scrawny with far too few feathers.
It bears a harrowing resemblance to the Jewish prisoners in WWII concentration camps.
The comparison doesn’t stop there for there are both ad hoc ghettos of victims and medical facilities sanctioned to use eugenics in search of an explanation or cure. You should see the cages of the Angel Hunters, hounds of the Holy Inquisition who rule a lightless and otherwise lawless Shanghai.
Cages feature heavily here: there’s another designed to keep humans protected from the birds outside, which is a turn-up for the books.
It is at this key stage that The Magi dispatch Three Wise Men into the Cordon Sanitaire with a silent young girl called Sera. The first is Professor Erasmus, rechristened Balthazar, a former Magi who resigned; the second called Melchior was originally named Yacob and known as the Killer of Countries; the third is a basset hound called Caspar.
As to Sera, only Professor Erasmus knows who the legendary Silent Girl is and why she is known also as Time Stopped. Only Professor Erasmus knows their true mission to unstop time. And only Yacob knows why he is injecting himself.
This is strong stuff. Fans of AKIRA will be disappointed neither by the politics nor the art by OPUS and TROPIC OF THE SEA’s Satoshi Kon who was heavily influenced by Otomo, and worked with him on the ‘Memories’ anime film. While not as far down the photo-realistic road as Ikegami, his characters are as sturdy as Otomo’s and Taniguchi’s while his skyscrapers and gigantic, walled fortress compounds are as detailed and precise as an architect’s projections.
It is also quite grim stuff as you’d expect from totalitarianism, eugenics and the cauterisation of entire populations to purify and conserve resources.
I’ve already alluded to the terminal stage of Seraphim itself which Satoshi Kon presents starkly with the same sort of thin-lined hatch which Moebius used in THE EYES OF THE CAT, but if you thought it comical that the third of the three was men was a basset hound, you wait until you see it gets its teeth stuck in.
Satoshi is best known for his anime, of course, like Perfect Blue, just as Mamoru Oshii is better known for his. Indeed he was adapting Shirow’s GHOST IN THE SHELL and injecting its cutesy heroine with a little more grit at the same time as writing this. It was originally serialised in Animage Magazine until, abruptly it wasn’t. Yes, like Satoshi Kon’s OPUS, this was never finished and there is much speculation in the (substantial!) afterward as to why. I’m actually all for the cover treatment element but also the increasing strain of two such formidably creative minds attempting to keep a mutually cooperative peace without busting out into fisticuffs, verbal or otherwise. A similar schism occurred between Claremont and Byrne resulting in the material collected in X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST being the last they ever worked on together. (I am emphatically not ranking them up there with Kon and Oshii but that X-MEN run was a tremendous run and it was immediately clear how much Byrne contributed to its direction the very second he left.)
I swear to goodness, however, that even without a conclusion (I’d say they were halfway in at the most) the journey in this instance is as rewarding as any destination could prove and in some cases conclusions really do fail to live up to their promise, don’t they?
Oh yes, the title: divide 266613336 by the number of wings worn (2, traditionally) and you have a very specific group of angels.
SLH
Buy Seraphim 266613336 Wings and read the Page 45 review here
Hinges Book 1: Clockwork City (£11-99, Image) by Meredith McClaren.
When I 
first clapped eyes on this ethereal beauty I was immediately transported back to Joshua Middleton’s SKY BETWEEN BRANCHES prelude. Sadly, that came to nothing, but here, have this instead.
The colours are cool, calm and as easy on the eye as Optrex: far from primary, there are never too many at one. Image-driven, the pages are predominantly silent because so is our heroine throughout. One’s not entirely sure to begin with how much of what’s going on around her she fully comprehends. She needs to… acclimatise.
We first find her kneeling on the bare-boarded floor of a town hall with the most gigantic clock up above her. There will be another laid into the stone square outside. And then there’s her pocket watch which will attract some her attention, inscribed with what assumes is her name, Orio.
She’s also found by Senior Orderly Margo who wears a nurse’s uniform, is held up by strings and makes the same assumption. She speaks in white boxes which appear worn or overexposed like very old film strips. To me this suggests ancient radio / recording crackling as in the video game Bioshock.
She sends Orio downstairs to select her Odd. There are shelves and shelves of odds: animals plushes and figurines. The one that stands out – because it helped her choose a jacket upstairs and now saunters across the floor with a sorry-I’m-late shrug – is Bauble.
Bauble is beautifully designed: the sort of thing LENORE’s Roman Dirge might come up with if working in porcelain. It’s a smooth, bipedal, cat-like creature with a satin sheen and an extra carapace segment forming its forehead, nose and upper jaw so that it appears to have little, fanged mandibles. Its eyes are the most enormous orbs except when its cross when they narrow under the weight of a furrowed brow, and the inky spots around each eye morph according to mood.
When it skritches and scratches at a door it leaves little ghost-outlines of itself behind. I’m telling you, the art throughout is exquisite.
Bauble appears to come with a reputation for trouble which precedes her / him / it. I’m afraid it turns out to be very well earned.
Out on the Eastern European country-town street Orio and Bauble are met by Alluet and Bristle, Bristle being a blue bird made out of felt – Alluet’s Odd.
“As your adjustment liaison I’ll be your tour guide, temporary roommate, friend, confidante, career advisor, cook, counsellor, and all around handler until we’ve settle you here in Cobble.
“Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?
“It does, doesn’t it?”
It does.
“So then. Shall we go?”
It’s only then, when Alluet offers out her hand, that you finally notice her hinged wrists.
I like that there is no info on the back cover. None whatsoever. You’ll need to discover this for yourself, just like Orio. It depends on how much time you’re prepared to put in, whether you’ll spot things like the big fluffy beast curled up by the bread oven, basking in its heat. It has a centre seam running up its back.
Everyone Orio’s introduced to seems friendly enough – until Bauble grows bored and buggers things up over and over again. And this first act is, as much as anything else, about Bauble learning to trust and appreciate Orio rather than make things messy for her, lead her on a goose chase or into danger.
Because late at night something in Cobble is stirring. There are CRICKS and there are CRACKS and there are shadows on the move. There is a silhouette of a feral skull in profile with the most enormous jaws and thick, thick fangs. Then it moves out of the shadows and into the daylight between deserted market stalls. I’d probably run.
SLH
Buy Hinges Book vol 1: Clockwork City and read the Page 45 review here
Suiciders #1 (£2-99, Vertigo/DC) by Lee Bermejo.
Okay, 
you know the drill:
1. Natural or Nuclear Disaster (check!)
2. Government cuts city loose (check!)
3. City builds a quarantine wall (check!)
4. Everything’s a bit paramilitary (check!)
5. Wives are all cheaters ‘n’ liars (check!)
It’s at this point that some ultra-violent variation on an already brutal entertainment like boxing or roller derby or Come Dine With Me is televised to a TV-crack-craving audience (check!) while someone attempts to break in or out of the quarantined zone (check checkity-check!).
I could not find a single original element or angle within, although the city wall was indeed Chinese in scale.
From the artist on Brian Azzarello’s THE JOKER, then, I give you muscles on muscles, a combatant with an uncanny resemblance to The Midnighter, and arena whose deathraps are so lo-fi they resemble those last seen on clunky combat boff-o-thon Robot Wars, though sadly not used on Craig Charles.
SLH
Buy Suiciders #1 and read the Page 45 review here
Black Panther: Who Is The Black Panther? s/c (£18-99, Marvel) by Reginald Hudlin & John Romita Jr.
Very different
from Christopher Priest’s socio-political approach, this is more geo-political but just as sassy and sharp.
Quality art from John Romita Jr. depicts one specific instance from the history of Wakanda – the African nation ruled by the Black Panther – oh so elegantly illustrating why it was the only such country that has never been invaded by another.
As Reginald Hudlin has written elsewhere, it has been firmly established that African humans were far more advanced far earlier than their European counterparts, so it stands to reason that if one nation had continued to develop unimpeded then they would have the technology to defend themselves against European imperialism without even breaking a sweat.
There’s an immensely satisfying sequence in which one such arrogant, nineteenth-century would-be conqueror, devoid of any humanity whatsoever, is humiliated then dispatched. The Wakandan chief is the epitome of fearlessness and strength: a warrior of few words which, when delivered, are no idle threats.
Cut to the present and Wakanda has reacted to America’s current, Iraq-invading neo-imperialism by declaring a no-fly zone over their country.
So, how do you like them apples?
“There is no way a bunch of waffle-makers are going to play us out of position in Wakanda! We need to send in support troops to aid our Wakandan allies right away!”
“And where are those troops coming from? Our troops are spread too thin already. We just don’t have enough bodies.”
“Oh, that’s the one thing we have plenty of.”
Ouch!
“We’ve got more than enough bodies to inva — I mean, assist Wakanda!”
Standing in front of row upon row of coffins, each laid out under the Stars & Stripes flag on a U.S. Aircraft Carrier off the African Coast:
“I think it’s time you found out what kind of special cargo we’ve got on this ship. These brave men and women died for their country. All that training and manpower wasted. The military hates waste.”
The dead rise, cybernetically enhanced.
“We’ve found a solution to our manpower problem. They’re tougher, stronger, fearless, take orders exactly and don’t write sad letters back home.”
This contains the first story arc of the last politically pointed series before it all went unnecessarily tits-up during a crowbarred in crossover with The X-Men and readers fled faster than stoats from a boat that’s been set on fire.
Boats are infested with stoats. It’s a modern epidemic.
SLH
Buy Black Panther: Who Is The Black Panther? s/c and read the Page 45 review here
Rocket Raccoon vol 1: A Chasing Tale (UK Edition) s/c (£12-99, Marvel) by Skottie Young & Scottie Young, Jake Wyatt.
“Ok, well,
it looks like you’re wanted for murder.”
“What? That’s crazy!”
“Is it really? Are you murdering someone right now?”
“What? Maybe. That’s not the point!”
*GURGLE!*
Quick-fire stupidity and hyperactivity done well. To begin with.
Rocket Racoon is the anthropomorphic ladies’-man member of Marvel’s GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, although let us not forget Groot, its walking, talking tree-trunk. Groot indeed guest-stars in a wrestling match to which Rocket Racoon has taken his this-minute’s lady-love on a date. He so romantic!
The epitome of the sort of careless and callous, self-centred male about whom so many of my lady-friends used to complain until they wised up and found someone infinitely more sensitive and so suitable instead (ah, youth! ah, maturity!), our resident raccoon even attempts to secure future dates while on a date in front of his date. Brilliant!
He’s also in trouble. One gleaming, fang-faced smile into one too many cameras and his status as a wanted man is flagged planet-wide. Now who could possibly want him?
Everything I’ve typed up so far links up by the first chapter’s punchline and makes perfect sense. Also, the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY sub-plot about a second sentient raccoon (when Rocket supposes he’s the last of his race) is reignited. Ooooh!
The cartooning is gleeful with big, broad grins with flashing canines, showing the show-off to maximum advantage whilst keeping you all screaming “Yay!”
Obviously some episodes are more successful than others. The chapter book-ended round a cub-scout camp fire at story time sees Rocket Racoon refusing to tell them The One With The Map. You’ll see why if you buy this book, for Groot has no such reservations. Unfortunately the root of Groot’s humour lies in the running joke that, regardless of what key information he seeks to impart, all he comes out with is “I am Groot!” It’s not easy to keep that gag going successfully, though Bendis has done improbably well so far.
Here, however, the entire story, whilst told visually, is punctuated over and over and over again with “I am Groot!” no matter who is saying what because of course it is Groot telling the story. A whimsical idea on the surface but, oh my god, talk about a point belaboured…
Never mind, all is forgiven for a prison cell scene opening with:
“Nope.”
“I’m good.”
“I’ll pass.”
Very wise.
SLH
Buy Rocket Raccoon vol 1: A Chasing Tale (UK Edition) s/c and read the Page 45 review here
Scooby Doo Team-Up vol 1 s/c (£9-99, DC) by Sholly Fisch & Dario Brizuela.
Aimed at
younger readers with its animation-style Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman and Teen Titans, this teams those evergreen meddling kids with DC superheroes to decloak monks, defrock vicars and pull the masks of phantoms and werewolves alike.*
There’s one scream of a scene here where they go through the traditional process of pulling off masks only for more masks to be revealed underneath. And then more, like Russian nesting dolls. When there are superheroes involved that really works.
It was a cause of constant disappointment to me that Shaggy, Scooby, Velma, Daphne and whatever that bland blonde jock was called never discovered anything supernatural: that everything was explained by trap-doors and lever mechanics. I don’t know why that was important to me, but it was.
Also, I blame American obesity on the not-so-subliminal Scooby Snack craving. Learned behaviour!
* Please note: actual scenarios may vary but thou gettest the picture.
SLH
Buy Scooby Doo Team-Up vol 1 s/c and read the Page 45 review here
Arrived, Online & Ready To Buy!
Reviews already up if they’re new formats of previous graphic novels. The best of the rest will be reviewed next week while others will retain their Diamond previews as reviews. Neat, huh?
Chester Brown: Conversations (£22-50, University Press Of Mississippi) by Dominick Grace, Eric Hoffman
George Romero’s Empire Of The Dead Act Two s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by George A. Romero & Dalibor Talajic
Julius Zebra – Rumble With The Romans h/c (£8-99, Walker Books) by Gary Northfield
Menu – 100 Postcards Box Set (£16-99, Scholastic) by James Jean
Nemo: River Of Ghosts h/c (£9-99, Knockabout) by Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill
Shame vol 3: Redemption (£7-50, Renegade) by Lovern Kindzierski & John Bolton
The Shaolin Cowboy: Shemp Buffet h/c (£14-99, Dark Horse) by Geof Darrow
Tales Of Telguuth: A Tribute To Steve Moore (£18-99, Rebellion) by Steve Moore & Simon Davis, Clint Langley, various
Through The Woods s/c (£11-99, McElderry Books) by Emily Carroll
Y – The Last Man Book vol 2 (£14-99, Vertigo) by Brian K. Vaughan & Pia Guerra, Paul Chadwick, Goran Parlov
Assassination Classroom vol 2 (£6-99, Viz) by Yusei Matsui
Hawkeye Vs. Deadpool s/c (£12-99, Marvel) by Gerry Duggan & Matteo Lolli, Jacopo Camagni
Gantz vol 34 (£10-50, Dark Horse) by Hiroya Oku
New Lone Wolf And Cub vol 4 (£10-50, Dark Horse) by Kazuo Koike & Hideki Mori
Whispered Words vol 3 (£12-99, One Peace Books) by Takashi Ikeda
News!
ITEM! WICKED + THE DIVINE T-SHIRTS available to pre-order in multiple bodyforms! Yes, we cater to shape-shifters, and dispatch internationally! Here’s THE WICKED + THE DIVINE VOL 1 reviewed.
ITEM! Kieron Gillen talks WATCHMEN. And he’s filmed doing so!
ITEM! Income tax. Illustrated by cats. Off topic, but I chortled until I choked.
ITEM! More guests announced for The Lakes International Comic Art Festival 2015 October 16th-18th.
ITEM! Transcript of actor Michael’s speech at St David’s Day march to celebrate the NHS and its founder, Aneurin Bevan, on Sunday March 1st. The last paragraph is a belter.
ITEM! Both funny and literary, here’s Andi Watson interviewed following the release of PRINCESS DECOMPOSIA AND COUNT SPATULA.
ITEM! Final reminder that Scott McCloud will be signing at Page 45 on Sunday 8th March 2015 from 2pm to 4pm. Details there including a link to my review of Scott’s THE SCULPTOR which was in any case just linked to there! If you can’t make it but still want a copy signed then details are also at that first link.
Cheers,
– Stephen
