Featuring Scott Snyder & Jock; Philip Reeve & Sarah McIntyre; Kathryn Immonen & Stuart Immonen; Jason Little; Alex Grecian & Riley Rossmo; John Arcudi & James Harren; Peter David & George Perez, Dale Keown; Nick Spencer & Ramon Rosanas; Lee Bermejo & Rob Haynes, Jorge Corona.
News underneath!
Russian Olive To Red King h/c (£18-99, Adhouse Books) by Kathryn Immonen & Stuart Immonen.
“Just let me
know when you’re coming home.”
“I will. I will always come home.”
“I’m counting on it.”
He’s a tough, muscular guy with a square jaw, chiselled features and cropped white hair. But Red really is counting on it.
He likes being left behind far less that he’s letting on.
Why will only become clear during the substantial coda which Red writes for Olive in prose illustrated by photographs of windows smashed in by stones.
And it all seems to start so idyllically, early on the morning before Olive leaves. Light streams into the bedroom in lemon yellow as Olive’s Border Collie, Pasha, pads in and considers carefully before bounding onto the bed anyway. What dog could resist?
Jet-haired Olive is the first to surface from underneath the sheets, tentatively at first. It’s a quiet, tender scene, beautifully choreographed with body language that says so much, Red reaching out to here with his hand: he really, really doesn’t want her to go. He won’t say as much, of course, but he’s frowning slightly even after Olive’s reassuring smiles and enveloping touch.
He promises to walk Olive’s dog, but is far from keen.
He’s really not as stoical as he seems.
If you were in any doubt after the opening remarks that Olive isn’t coming home, there’s her flippant reply to this, quoting Chekov.
“Why do you always wear black?”
“Because I’m mourning my life. Duh.”
”Okay, Masha. But I don’t think Chekov wrote “Duh”.”
After that you’re just waiting, and as Red walks Pasha down the tranquil, tree-lined, Brownstone avenue, Olive flies away through a cloudless azure sky in a rust-red seaplane piloted by an old man with heartburn.
“Sixty is miles away from fifty-nine, I tell ya.”
The scenes are intercut and played out against each other beautifully, two commercial jets streaking the sea-green sky up above Red and Pasha while opposite the silent seaplane banks at a disastrously steep angle. Extraordinarily it is still all so quiet. But then Red remarks, “The light’s changing”.
Boy, Stuart can control colour and light, and ever so abruptly in places. In places it works on an audible level. The skies are absolutely majestic. He’s so versatile, too, adapting his entire style for each project. This really couldn’t be much further from SECRET IDENTITY or – at another end of the spectrum – NEXTWAVE. There’s a huge sense of heaviness in what follows. Inertia too, as the darkness closes in.
Kathryn completely eschews the obvious far before the stark and startling coda. There’s no melodrama. Instead it’s all very elliptical, especially the phone conversations.
I’ll be interested to hear what you make of the final page of chapter six.
But yes, I think it’s safe to say that Red has abandonment issues.
“It’s hard to tell when you’re blinded by despair.”
SLH
Buy Russian Olive To Red King h/c and read the Page 45 review here
Oliver And The Seawigs (£6-99, Oxford) by Philip Reeve & Sarah McIntyre.
Hold on to your
hats, your toupees, your seawigs, this is going to prove… exploratory!
Oliver Crisp may be only ten years old but he’s already seen so much because his parents are Famous Explorers. They even met on top of Mount Everest!
Since Oliver was born they’ve taken him right round the world. They’ve pushed his pram across rope bridges dangling precariously above alligator-infested rivers; they’ve balanced him in their backpacks as polar bears roared so loudly that ice cliffs have cracked; they took him into a musty old tomb where his mum met a mummy. (Oliver didn’t scream “Mummy!” Probably.)
Now that they believe they’ve peered into every nook and cranny and discovered all there is to discover the family’s going home to Deepwater Bay, to the house they’ve barely set foot in. Believe it or not, Oliver’s delighted to lay down some roots for a change. But when they get there they discover that there is more to discover: the bay is full of steep, craggy, grass-tufted islands that weren’t there before. The Crisps of course love exploring mysterious islands, but now they’re going to encounter mysterious islands which love to explore! These are the Rambling Isles whose dark caves are mouths and they’re about to set off for The Hallowed Shallows for the Night Of The Seawigs contest – taking Oliver’s mum and dad with them!
This illustrated prose for Young Readers is such deliriously great fun that I bought a copy myself! Both creators constantly surprise.
At their first sight of Deepwater Bay Oliver goes “Wow!” and his parents go “Wow!” and I defy you not to go “Wow!” as well. The headland they’re driving down from curves up in a cliff of line-free grey tone leaving room for its black nesting birds to stand out a mile; the gabled house below is all curves too, reflecting the Crisps’ quirky nature – it’s quite wonky-woo! – while the sea blooms below it, more curved lines reflecting the white-on-black stems of the bushes up above.
On page after page Philip Reeve lobs out such loopy ideas so often that I swore even Sarah McIntyre – comics’ own exuberant human hat-stand of JAMPIRES and VERN AND LETTUCE fame – couldn’t possibly illustrate them, yet she does. In fact she illuminates them, matching Reeve’s zeal with her own wild imagination to create gibbering, chittering, chattering sea monkeys which grin with gormless glee no matter what chaos is coming up behind them! There are googly eyes everywhere – blinking within shipwrecks, lurking in the murk of tunnels or poking up from behind flapping fern fronds – while Colin the crab pops up all over the place.
But, oh my days, you wait until you see all the Seawigs!
What is a seawig, you ask? They’re wigs worn by the Rambling Isles fashioned from all sorts of found things. Everyone loves a little bounce to their bonce, so imagine you’re an island with a lighthouse on top of you. That’s flashy all right! But what if you were a sentient isle that could dip down underwater then come up for air (they don’t really need air) with a narwhal on your noggin, a train in your tresses or even a radio telescope? Somehow one does. Ridiculous!
They’re all so elaborate they almost match McIntyre’s own crazed and colourful headpieces, and they’ll have to if they want to win the Seawig competition.
That might be Neil Gaiman on the right of Sarah, yes!
Now let’s catch up with Oliver in pursuit of his parents on top of another Rambling Isle called Cliff. He’s also made friends with a short-sighted mermaid called Iris (of course she’s called Iris!) and Mr. Culpeper, a grumpy old Albatross. When Oliver leaves Iris a handwritten note she has to squint hard to read it.
“What does it say?” she wondered.
“How would I know?” said Mr. Culpeper. “I’m an albatross.”
Quite.
I love the way Reeve tweaks one single word to create hours of caustic commentary thus:
“We must be in the Sargasso Sea!” [Oliver] said excitedly. “Sailors fear it because their ships get becalmed here, and the weed tangles round them and traps them.”
“No, this is a completely different place,” said Iris. “It’s called the Sarcastic Sea, and sailors fear it because the weed keeps making horrid, hurtful comments about them.”
Oooh, dangerous!
Once more McIntyre delivers on the eye front, the seaweed bladders we all love to pop peering with withering disdain.
Eventually they will find the Rambling Isle that ran off with Oliver’s mum and dad. It’s called the Thurlstone and it’s not very nice at all.
“Octopuses writhed their tentacles among its eyebrows, and a shark fell out of its nose like a fierce bogey.”
It has a most elaborate seawig already including a stone temple, knotted trees, a rusty battleship and a mean-spirited bully called Stacey de Lacey in command of the pesky sea monkeys. He overcompensates appalling for having a girl’s name. The language here is delicious.
“He was older than Oliver: a tall teenager, balancing precariously on beansprout legs and about to tumble clumsily into adulthood.”
Sometimes the text is integrated within the illustrations. When Oliver crawls through the cave which is the Thurlstone’s craggy throat, so does the writing. When the sea monkeys grow so boisterous at play that they threaten to smother Oliver out at sea, Sarah comes up with a double-page spread which is as close as you can imagine to the suffocating sensation of drowning, the monkeys’ faces looming over him, wide-eyed and grinning, squeezing the text between them and the air out of Oliver.
Stacey de Lacey and the Thurlstone are going to give Oliver, Iris, Cliff and that Culpeper a terrible time. So are the sea monkeys.
You, on the other time, are going to have a riot. Err… so are the sea monkeys. “Eep!”
SLH
Buy Oliver And The Seawigs and read the Page 45 review here
Wytches vol 1 s/c (£7-50, Image) by Scott Snyder & Jock…
“Pledged is pledged.”
“… Yes, it is.”
Brrrr… this is one of the creepiest, nay horrifying, comics I have read in some considerable time.
The Rook family – Dad, Mom and daughter Sailor – have moved to the sleepy town of Litchfield to begin again after a life-shattering event. What they find hiding beneath the friendly veneer of this sleepy backwater is beyond even their worst nightmares. For lurking in the woods around the town are dark forces that have a taste for human flesh… preferably young human flesh. And they are old, very old. But perhaps even worse is the fact that these Wytches couldn’t operate unseen without the assistance of their mortal acolytes…
The unease that builds throughout this volume before exploding in spectacularly violent fashion had me squirming in my seat. There was a grindhouse film classic from 1975 starring Peter Fonda and Loretta Swift called Race With The Devil (check out the official trailer HERE) that I was vividly reminded of after reading this. Basically in the film the four main protagonists who are travelling around relatively rural America in a camper van stumble across a midnight black mass and then are relentlessly pursued by the coven.
There is growing paranoia then full-blown hysteria as our heroes gradually realise to their ever-increasing horror that the coven is far larger and more influential than they could possibly have feared, and they are being watched at absolutely every turn, before the pursuit truly begins. There is no escape, no happy end either. The film concludes with them being burned alive in their camper van, surrounded by chanting, cowled figures. It certainly made a powerful impact on me, watching as a child of far too tender years, shocked that the heroes hadn’t once again triumphed despite overwhelming odds…
I’m not entirely convinced there is going to be a happy ending for the Rooks either. Some of them, possibly. All of them…? I very much doubt it, as the forces of darkness begin their inexorable circling in towards their intended prey. Their pledged prey… Of course, it does take someone to pledge you to them…
So if you are in the mood for some grisly chills, look no further, albeit through half-closed eyes from behind the settee. Brutally captivating art from Jock (who did one of the finest Batman covers ever in my humble opinion, during Scott Snyder and his’ BLACK MIRROR arc – The Joker’s face nearly entirely composed of bats – see it HERE), he really nails the practicably unbearable tension in some of the pursuit sequences.
The Wytches, when we finally see them are so horrifically gruesome, contorted perversions of a barely human shape, practically faceless aside from chittering, exposed teeth, you can really understand the stark terror experienced by the Rooks. I’m reluctant to give too much more away in terms of the plot, specifically because there are a number of shock reveals and twists that serve to increase reader discomfort even further up to those full-on seat-squirming levels, but suffice to say this is already up right there with OUTCAST and RACHEL RISING for me in terms of horror rating!
JR
Buy Wytches vol 1 s/c and read the Page 45 review here
Borb (£14-99, Uncivilised Books) by Jason Little.
“Beggar
Bum
Derelict
Drifter…
Tramp
Transient
Vagrant
Wino”
This is true horror.
It will have you wincing or even retching depending on your tolerance threshold. Unlike some critics the one thing it never did was made me laugh, even grimly. It’s painful.
Obviously it’s not as painful to watch as it is painful for Borb to endure: a catalogue of extractions, infections, infestations and more than one compound fracture leaving bearded Borb with his tibia or fibula split in two and jutting out of his lower leg. The fracture is further compounded even after medical assistance by inflammation then a transmogrification worthy of FRANK’s Jim Woodring. Alas, there is nothing fantastical about it or what follows, which is worse.
Glimmers of hope turn out to be temporary or even illusory. Even on a vaguely upward curve, always he goes back to the spirits, and every time he does so it destroys the scant help given to him. But guess what? Borb passed the point of alcoholic a lifetime ago. It’s a chronic addiction. A new set of dentures doesn’t come with a concurrent cure for addiction.
Nevertheless Dean Haspiel speaks true when he writes:
“Jason Little’s empathy-challenging BORB is the antidote to Frank Capra’s It’s Wonderful Life. You will beg for Borb to bite the dust while stuffing your face with chocolate and watching hours of puppy and cat videos to wash away the elegant horror that is Borb’s trains-wreck on a life.”
“Empathy-challenging” is right and intentionally so. Jason Little has in no way romanticised the plight of the terminally transient which is, as I say, true horror. What appears on the page is revolting. Again, intentionally so, and I did beg for Borb to bite the dust, so help me God.
This hasn’t been written or drawn to tug at your heartstrings, though he may do during and post-illusion: if Borb was a Horseman Of The Apocalypse he would be Pestilence.
It’s delivered in the form and style of an unrelenting series of newspaper strips “[paying] homage to the Depression-era imagery of Harold Gray (LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE) and Frank King (GASOLINE ALLEY), and the long tradition of the comic strip slapstick vagabond archetype” which it surgically undercuts. You’ll see what the publisher means during the pratfalls and split seams and their ramifications.
“Oops.”
Oops of all things.
SLH
Buy Borb and read the Page 45 review here
Rumble vol 1: What Colour Of Darkness s/c (£7-50, Image) by John Arcudi & James Harren.
Next time you wish
for more excitement in your life, think twice.
“If your life were a movie it would be over in an hour and a half.”
So says Cogan, an old man propping up the bar. And he should know: he’s even older than he looks and not really a man at all.
He’s talking to Bobby the barman, who is exactly who he seems. Already unlucky in love, he’ll be lucky if his life lasts longer than a minor movie’s credits!
He wasn’t expecting closing time to be called by a sword-wielding scarecrow slashing his way through the door and Cogan’s right arm. What on earth is their beef? Why has it lasted for thousands of years? Why is there no blood and no Cogan when the cops are called? Just a whole mess of straw and that ancient blade Bobby decided to hold onto.
He might want to rethink that: there’s a whole menagerie of monsters on their way to lay claim to it.
Labelled an “urban fantasy / horror” on the back, I’d call this more of a caper.
Bobby’s mate Dell declares, “Be-Bop, c’mon! You always do this! Stop overthinkin’ it! Let’s just have fun!”
A perfect description. It’s a vast variety of creepy critters slicing and dicing each other to bite-size pieces, a short-tempered fire god who’s not so hot when he’s been put out (funny visual gag, that) and a quest to get the scarecrow chap his ancient body back (real name: Rathraq), all interspersed by an old lady’s kittycat Mr. Bildad making a mess while gorging himself into something increasingly gargantuan.
Those were my favourite bits – James Harren nails cute-gone-wrong. There’s also a great deal of gurning going on for this is very much an up-and-at-‘em action comic – with icky stuff.
SLH
Buy Rumble vol 1: What Colour Of Darkness s/c and read the Page 45 review here
Rasputin vol 1: The Road To The Winter Palace s/c (£10-99, Image) by Alex Grecian & Riley Rossmo…
To people
of a certain age, mention one Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, and they will almost certainly think of this… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBXRJgSd-aU . However long before Boney M re-popularised the exploits of Russia’s greatest love machine, he was widely lionised and lambasted in equal measure, depending on your politics, by the chattering classes of turn-of-the-twentieth century Europe.
What is undoubtedly true about Rasputin is that he had an enormous impact and influence upon Russian political and regal life, by dint of sheer force of personality, to such a degree that eventually, certain people decide he needed to be done away with… Though achieving that wasn’t quite so straightforward. Rasputin managed to surviving multiple assassination attempts, a fact which only added to his considerable mystique with the public.
Rather than being a straight biographical work, though, this is most definitely a fantasy yarn, appropriating the mad monk as its central character and building a heavily fictionalised story about and around him. It’s very entertaining, actually, with the transformation of Rasputin from a callow youth with a reputation for healing powers into a full-blown beardy magician, courtesy of the spirits ruling the snowy plains of Siberia.
So, in this first volume we see his early years, his initial development as a mage, and the burgeoning cost to his soul of using even his healing powers. Simultaneously Rasputin himself narrates the story of his demise, the final successful assassination attempt, perpetrated this time by his friends and travelling companions. He knows it is coming, foreknowledge of his own life, and consequently his death, being another of his acquired magical powers, yet gives no warning to his friends that he is aware of their impending treachery.
Why he seems happy to go along with his own murder I have no idea, but I suspect we will find out in volume two, presumably along with the answer to a most puzzling and not entirely unrelated mystery that transpires in the final pages of this volume resulting in an intriguing temporal cliffhanger.
I think people who enjoyed the likes of UMBRAL and PORCELAIN may well enjoy this. It’s basically a dark fantasy revolving around a character that you really shouldn’t be rooting for, but much like the Romanovs, you may well find yourself charmed and lured in by his charismatic ways.
Art is supplied by Riley Rossmo who I was not previously familiar with, but he does a mean angular face with piercing eyes, a touch Sean Murphy-esque, plus it’s always nice these days to see someone break out the coarse dot-stippling effect in the background, very retro. He throws in the occasional dramatically splendid full page too, usually when Rasputin is filling the air with eldritch cracklings, or when the spirits of the plains are making their considerable supernatural presence felt.
JR
Buy Rasputin vol 1: The Road To The Winter Palace s/c and read the Page 45 review here
We Are Robin #1 (£2-99, DC) by Lee Bermejo & Rob Haynes, Jorge Corona.
What a 
contemporary cover – all very inclusive and le parkour!
It’s drawn by the writer, Lee Bermejo, artistic collaborator of Brian Azzarello on that nasty little number THE JOKER, and I mean that in a good way – brrr…
The interior art is by Jorge Corona over Rob Haynes’ breakdowns and it’s as lithe as you like as our principal protagonist for the moment, Duke Thomas, fends off attacks – by which I mean beatings with baseball bats – at school. He does so very successfully. Too successfully for his adoptive family and social worker who now needs him to move on to another.
It’s a lose / lose situation and you feel for his plight. Duke has no stability, no castle that he can call his own and that’s what you need from a home: stability and safety. He doesn’t even know if his parents are dead or alive. They were victims of THE JOKER: DEATH OF THE FAMILY but they’ve never been found. They may be dead or left to wander the sewers of Gotham with amnesia, and that makes Duke restless: if there is a chance at all that they’re there, he must do his best to find them.
Obviously given the title and cover there is something much bigger brewing about taking back the streets but on top of the acrobatics there’s easily enough here in this first instalment to make you care and that’s what counts. Corona has no powers, just hours and hours of wondering where his life is heading without structure, a safety net or – let’s cut to the quick – love.
“Who here does not belong?” snarls an underground rabble-rouser once Duke’s been detected.
I believe that’s very much on Duke’s mind.
SLH
Buy We Are Robin #1 and read the Page 45 review here
Hulk: Future Imperfect s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Peter David & George Perez, Dale Keown.
Back
in time for its SECRET WARS satellite sequel FUTURE IMPERFECT #1 which is on our shelves now!
Future stories of your favourite Marvel characters have met with varying degrees of acclaim and indifference. Quite how the 2099 line lasted as long as it did 18 years or so ago is beyond me.
On the other hand Byrne and Claremont’s X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST which capped their collaboration – and in which most mutants have finally fallen victim to man’s love affair with genocide and concentration camps – is single-handedly responsible for so many homages and follow-ups that it’s easy to forget what a neat little self-contained number it originally was. We’ve seen the Punisher take on (and out) the Marvel Universe, we’ve seen the final days of the Avengers. There are so many variations that nothing is definitive – indeed they’ll only have aged another year or so by 2099 anyway, so putting a date on them seems somewhat foolish.
SPIDER-MAN: REIGN was a belter with more than a whiff to it of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS (a book so ancient that at the time of typing we don’t even have a review of it) but by far my favourite – which took us all by surprise at Page 45 – was Mark Millar’s WOLVERINE: OLD MAN LOGAN. In it we discover that something so atrocious has befallen the crested Canadian that he’s sworn to the cause of pacifism no matter the provocation. And it’s quite provoking having the inbred, redneck offspring of the Incredible Hulk as your landlords. Actually they’re just collecting the rent because Daddy dearest is very much alive and well and so many people have evidently made him so very angry over the years that nobody likes him at all anymore.
Which brings us to Peter David’s future of the Hulk as seen in this collection of FUTURE IMPERFECT from 1992 drawn by George Perez and THE END as envisaged by Dale Keown in 2002 where we discover that the Hulk has finally got what he said he always wanted – to be left alone. By necessity, then, that’s a somewhat bleak and ruminative affair which has its origins in a short prose story called The Last Titan.
But back in FUTURE IMPERFECT there were still plenty of people to give the jade giant grief because he hasn’t aged well. He’s outlived almost everyone whom he could ever have considered his friend and, in their absence, succumbed to his own worst aspects. As the Maestro he’s ruler of all he surveys. There’s only one relic from his past remaining who sits in a trophy room of broken helmets, shredded capes, abandoned armour, fractured shields… and a poster of the Phoenix saying “Dead… Again!” He’s lived far too long – it’s over ninety years since we last saw him – but he’s determined to be reunited with the Hulk he once knew, even if it means bringing him forward through time so that Banner can look himself in the eye and see what he’s become.
Originally written with a specific but unidentified European artist in mind, you could not have found a more apposite replacement back then than George Perez, an American master of ligne claire, so distinctly European-looking it remains. That trophy room (“Needs a giant penny. Pretty complete otherwise”) is full of tiny details – even at the back of a bookcase you can make out the Serpent Crown – some of which may prove useful or even fatal later on.
SLH
Buy Hulk: Future Imperfect s/c and read the Page 45 review here
Ant-Man vol 1: Second-Chance Man s/c (£11-99, Marvel) by Nick Spencer & Ramon Rosanas.
“That thing
earlier was just the setup. There was no way to beat it.”
“You mean like the Kobayashi Maru?”
“The what?”
“From Star Trek.”
“Oh, you’re of those.”
Stark’s arched eyebrow there by Ramon Rosanas is priceless. I think he’s a John Byrne fan which is no bad place to start especially since Scott Lang’s first appearance as Ant-Man was drawn by Byrne and now reprinted in ANT-MAN: SCOTT LANG along with his subsequent team-ups with Iron Man against the Hulk and Hawkeye, Spider-Man and The Avengers en masse against the Taskmaster, all of which will be revisited in this much more modern incarnation.
So yes, this is the Scott Lang Ant-Man who will feature in the forthcoming film, not the original Hank ‘Who Even Am I Today?’ Pym, he of the multiple identities, mental breakdowns and size issues whose early exploits in TALES TO ASTONISH made me chuckle heartily.
This too made me chortle but I expected no less from the writer of THIEF OF THIEVES VOL 1, EXISTENCE 2.0 / 3.0, FORGETLESS and MORNING GLORIES. He’s gone for the HAWKEYE model of self-deprecation on the protagonist’s front for Scott is a clot and always has been, even in FF: FANTASTIC FAUX (highly recommended).
He’s a failed thief so ex-convict and ex-husband, but his redeeming feature right from the start has always been as a doting dad. Spencer wisely focuses in on this – his relationship with his daughter and understandably less than enthusiastic ex-wife – so that there are as many “Awww” moments as there are in Grant Morrison and Chas Truog’s family-centric ANIMAL MAN which itself comes highly commended and in three volumes. See also G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphona’s current run on MS MARVEL.
Scott’s also an ex-corpse, and explaining that gap in your CV is never easy.
Nevertheless – in spite of all the above – he does get an interview with Tony Stark for the job of Stark Industries’ Head Of Security. Stark turns him down immediately. Nevertheless does get the chance to hack Stark’s security alongside the likes of Prodigy. He fails that too. Nevertheless he decides to do what he does best which is steal the password instead by breaking into Stark’s private apartment at night. He gets caught.
“Tony, I, uh… I don’t know what to say.”
“Hey, if I saw what you just saw for the first time in there, I’d be speechless too.”
Oh my god, that really is a knob gag!
Don’t worry, it’ll all go over the heads of your young ones, but if any doubt at all we’ve the MARVEL UNIVERSE ANT-MAN DIGEST for your youngest.
What follows is a move to Miami to maintain contact with Scott’s daughter Cassie and a decidedly dippy attempt to start up a small business by selling his skills as a thief on a giant billboard:
“Ant-Man Security Solutions: Who knows how to not get your stuff stolen better than the guy who used to steal your stuff?”
Inset is a thumbs-up portrait of Iron Man, declaring: “I’d hire him”.
“And no, for the record,” Scott says, “I don’t think Iron Man will mind. Regardless of what happened, us superheroes gotta stick together!”
Iron Man’s alter ego Tony Stark sits still, fingers pressed together, in front of a laptop snapshot of the billboard held aloft by his lawyer: “Sue.”
SLH
Buy Ant-Man vol 1: Second-Chance Man 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.
Noughts & Crosses: The Graphic Novel (£12-99, Doubleday) by Malorie Blackman, Ian Edginton & John Aggs
Supreme: Blue Rose s/c (£10-99, Image) by Warren Ellis & Tula Lotay
The Wicked + The Divine vol 2: Fandemonium s/c (£10-99, Image) by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie
Criminal vol 6: The Last Of The Innocent s/c (£10-99, Image) by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips
Devlin Waugh: Red Tide (£18-99, Rebellion) by John Smith & Colin MacNeil, John Burns, Peter Doherty, Sean Phillips
Gun Machine s/c new edition (£7-99, Mulholland Books) by Warren Ellis
Hound vol 1: Protector h/c (£20-00, Cuchulainn Entertainment) by Barry Devlin & Paul Bolger
Magic Trixie vol 1 (£6-99, Harper Collins) by Jill Thompson
Nimona s/c (£9-99, Harper Collins) by Noelle Stevenson
Pain Is Really Strange (£7-99, Singing Dragon) by Steve Haines & Sophie Standing
The Autumnlands vol 1: Tooth & Claw s/c (£7-50, Image) by Kurt Busiek & Ben Dewey
Bob’s Burgers vol 1 (£13-50, Dynamite) by various
The Classic Comic Colouring Book (£9-99, Michael O’Mara Books) by various
Star Wars: Jedi Academy vol 3: The Phantom Bully h/c (£9-99, Scholastic) by Jeffrey Brown
Batman: Arkham Origins s/c (£10-99, DC) by various
Runaways: Complete Collection vol 4 s/c (£25-99, Marvel) by Terry Moore, various & Phil Noto, Emma Rios, Sara Pichelli, Humberto Ramos, various
S.H.I.E.L.D. vol 1: Perfect Bullets s/c (£13-50, Marvel) by Mark Waid & various
Assassination Classroom vol 4 (£6-99, Viz) by Yusei Matsui
Blue Exorcist vol 13 (£6-99, Viz) by Kazue Kato
Dragon Ball 3-in-1 Edition vols 25-27 (£9-99, Viz) by Akira Toriyama
Lone Wolf And Cub Omnibus vol 9 (£14-99, Dark Horse) by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima
News!
ITEM! Out this week: 8HOUSE #1 by MULTIPLE WARHEAD’S Brandon Graham & BEAST’s Marian Churchland Have an illustrated 8HOUSE interview with Marian Churchland!
ITEM! Adorable flick-animation effect going on at Richard Swan’s panel-per-day UNTITLED COMIC.
ITEM! From the creator of comicbook creepiness THROUGH THE WOODS, Emily Carroll illustrates Neko Case’s ‘Wild Creatures’ for Songs Illustrated.
ITEM! Check out Tom Gauld’s ‘Endless Journey’ a “myriorama” for the Laurence Sterne-based Shandy Hall Museum! “Twelve picture-cards which can be arranged to form 479,001,600 different landscapes.” Ha!
– Stephen
Page 45 Reviews written by Stephen & Jonathan then edited by a clapped out cockatoo with cataracts
