ANNOUNCING:
PAGE 45 21st BIRTHDAY PARTY: Evening Booze Bash on Saturday 3rd October plus Afternoon Signing & Sketching with FLUFFY’s Simone Lia & ADAMTINE’s Hannah Berry! Please come & celebrate with us! Free drinks, prize draws, sentimental speeches & guaranteed buffoonery!
Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl #1 (£2-99, Image) by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie with Matthew Wilson.
“I always 
wanted to be self-destructive. But I never really had a life to destroy.
“So thank you, other me. Thank you so much.”
I’m chuckling to myself, but I will not explain.
It sounds pretty ominous, right?
From the mischief merchants irresponsible for THE WICKED + THE DIVINE comes more music magic or in this case music as magic as I explained in PHONOGRAM: THE SINGLES CLUB. Music has the power to alter your brain chemistry – to kick-start your memory and control your mood – and so change reality as you perceive it. I recommend you start either here or there (both in full colour) but PHONOGRAM: RUE BRITANNIA was their first book which I’ve often described as HELLBLAZER at Ladyfest because I’m incredibly shallow.
Speaking of superficial: music videos, eh? In the 80s I was obsessed.
Paul Morley denounced Duran Duran as the worst culprits, sneering at their videos’ style and self-indulgence while lamenting all the money they cost while so many working-class people suffered under the austerity of Thatcher’s Britain. What the highly literate, very clever and culturally well versed but fractious, judgemental and supercilious critic omitted from consideration in his verdict is that so many including the working class enjoy style, dream of creating such para-personalities and crave escapism especially when starved of the basics. Even Oliver Twist wanted “more”.
I can assure you that Kieron Gillen has incorporated every single aspect of those last two paragraphs into this comic with comedy, including just how opinionated, competitive and combative critics can be. Ooh, and territorial. Territory is a big thing here. Have you never wanted to hate a band just because someone you despise adores it or vice-versa? We should all rise above that, shouldn’t we? Yup: Gillen has gone there too. This is attitude on a stick.
As for McKelvie, how perfect to homage Patrick Nagel’s Duran Duran ‘Rio’ album cover (Morley’s bête noire was Duran’s ‘Rio’ video) whilst creating a composition entirely new with exquisite finger arrangement and done Patrick proud. Even the intervention of diagonal red lines is apposite for Nagel incorporated those too. Here, however, they’re more resonant of futuristic, prison-cell, razor-red laser beams, trapping the protagonist helplessly where she may well be left to rot.
The first issue takes place in front of the TV screen in South London during 1980s; in a sparse function / club room for the kick-off of a coven in Brighton, 2001; in an equally unadorned office in London, 2009; and somewhere else entirely.
Don’t expect the same pyrotechnics you may be used to in THE WICKED + THE DIVINE but McKelvie delivers on the hair and the fashion front and his expressions are as priceless as ever. I love Kohl’s slightly bulging belly after the passage of time but for once I’m not going to give you plot points – I’ve implied quite enough already. For clues I honestly recommend you listen to David Bowie’s ‘Changes’ and ‘Time’. Oh, most especially ‘Time’, regardless of whether you want this comic or not.
From the glossary (you get a glossary):
“Take On Me: A-ha song with a pretty memorable video based on a girl in the real world falling into a comicbook. Someone should homage it in a comicbook. That’d be really clever and definitely not twee as fuck.”
Now what do you suppose happens here, hmm?
Oh, it’s cleverer than that. Because in this comic it’s the video someone’s sucked into via the television that played them all over and over again. And – being an ‘80s kid who used to tape hours and hours of pop and alternative MTV shows then edited them down into, ooh, two dozen 3-hour videotapes? – I know exactly how that feels.
The problem with music videos is this: they can enhance, illuminate or elevate what you already loved about the music itself (I love Anton Corbijn as a director for David Sylvian and Depeche Mode) but overwhelmingly they can ruin your own vision of what the music and lyrics mean to you by being so specific and potentially contradictory in their own visual and narrative message. Is that really worth the risk?
I think not.
Which is almost, I think, where we came in. With a certain degree of departure.
SLH
Buy Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl #1 and read the Page 45 review here
Little Nemo’s Big New Dreams (£12-99, Toon Graphics) by Winsor McCay, Art Spiegelman, Francoise Mouly, Gerhard, Charles Vess, Craig Thompson, Jim Rugg, Box Brown, Carla Speed NcNeil, Mark Buckingham, various.
“The only 
thing better than dreams…
“Is making them come true.”
Awesome, in its truest sense, this will make you grin your head off.
Françoise Mouly has carefully selected thirty-one of the one hundred and eighteen tributes by some of comics’ most creative minds in the gigantic, 16” by 21” LITTLE NEMO: DREAM ANOTHER DREAM H/C for a much more affordable (and portable!) edition.
Mouly and husband Art Spiegelman also provide forewords putting Winsor McCay’s original 16” by 21” weekly comic strips for the New York Herald from 1905-1914 into context creatively, historically, practically in their printing, and personally when it comes to Art and Françoise’s family and careers. Art eloquently identifies so many of the innovative elements which make a prime Winsor wonder so spectacular – so many storytelling inventions only the very best can pull off properly – and there are four full pages to drop your jaw before moving on to see what the modern masters have made from them.
For those unfamiliar with the originals (recent reproductions are very expensive whereas I lucked into my 400-page Taschen h/c at a ludicrous £14-99), young Nemo is a lad in a long white nightgown or red-striped white jim-jams who travels to Slumberland where he experiences the giddiest, most eye-popping dreams imaginable before waking in the bottom, right-hand panel in one panic or another, only to be reprimanded by an often off-stage parent for causing a ruckus, getting up late or eating the wrong thing before bedtime! There are forty such variations on this theme reproduced on the inside front cover and endpaper and, taken together, one can’t help but giggle and the consistent lack of compassion or consolation poor Little Nemo receives after such imaginary trauma!
The architecture in the page and of the page is spectacular. As I say, Art will give you a brief guided tour.
To pay proper tribute to McCay you need to incorporate at least some of the various structural elements that made up his comics and Yuko Shimizu’s panel-free piece still contains multiple Nemos swimming through or buoyed back up by the water in a satisfying arrangement echoing McCay’s own sinuous choreography which leads the eye both to the central bed-ridden figure at the bottom and away from it, up to the right, in a way that emulates the physical effect of a body of water on any body!!
Cliff Chiang also nails this as – in three distinct, middle-tier panels which join seamlessly together through dint of them being a single landscape shot from above – his characters snake through a house, up its stairs and then round the L-shaped landing before ascending towards the attic. It’s so cleverly constructed that I laughed out loud. But wait – it gets better and meta! Along the way they stop to peer through a bedroom door from which hangs a sign saying “Robert”.
“Huh! That kid looks just like you, Neo!”
“He’s sleeping so peacefully.”
“Someone’s in the attic.”
Indeed they are, and they’ve fallen asleep at the drawing board. Robert is, of course, the name of Winsor McCay’s son and model for Nemo. Guess who wakes up this time?
There’s a lovely lilt to the script from FINDER’s Carla Speed McNeil which sounds just like Nemo, and she’s paced the action perfectly, each of her four tiers dedicated to a different ‘floor’ as a giant cat picks Nero up by the scruff of his neck, hoisting him from the safety of his crib upstairs and depositing him in a much rowdier one outside. Animals played a significant role in LITTLE NEMO and CEREBUS’ Gerhard on the back cover won’t let you down, through in this instance the LITTLE NEMO: DREAM ANOTHER DREAM H/C is by far the better option because there’s so much going on. As in Carla’s contribution the animals would often be larger than life, so large in fact that it’s scary. One of Winsor’s pages reproduced here there’s an elaborately adorned the elephant which is squeezed between such tight but tall panels that it threatens to burst through and trample the reader to death.
Zander Canon nails this sense of scale, as does James Harvey with his monumental architecture – again in both senses. Harvey has created a vast, arched, stained glass window / advent calendar, its panels numbered as McCay often did to guide you round their intricate arrangement and satisfyingly circuitous path.
MOUSE GUARD’s David Petersen’s comparative simplicity of constructions works wonders for him. Unsurprisingly he brings the requisite animals with him, they are indeed larger than life, one does threaten a trampling, plus there’s the pageantry to boot. J.G. Jones gets the rough-and-tumble just right, leaping through the panel borders, while Brandon Graham fans will love what Andrea Tsurumi has in store both visually and in terms of the wordplay as Nemo’s convinced to go bra shopping! Bra shopping!
“Look! Zebra print! Leopard print! Newspaper print!”
Too funny. The punchline is exquisitely cute.
Arch-satirist Marc Hempel confronts poor Little Nemo with even more adult concerns as an off-panel papa tells a 2015 Nemo that he’s been dreaming for one hundred years and needs to wake up and grow up.
“No more ostentatious, art nouveau splendour for you! Time to get a job! Deal with it! Your new life of complacency and vapidity awaits!”
“Vapidity! Oh! I’m scared, Papa! Maybe I’m dreaming! I wish Flip was here! He’s know what to do! Huh! Oh!”
Love the way Hempel maintains the cadence of Nemo’s speech patterns even as his awakening gets ruder and ruder in the bubble-bursting sense:
“Every horrifically burdensome moment of adulthood is rife with the potential for crushing failure! You’ll hate it, but then you’ll get used to it!”
Bishakh Kumar Som breaks with tradition in a different way by making his dreamer an adult. Long since graduated in architecture, she is left to wend her way through her own overwrought thesis, worried that she might have to take exams again. Familiar, much? The thesis is, of course, a design for a building and Bishakh has drawn this as a single, three-dimensional floor plan, so where this is completely in keeping is a) in its use of architecture, b) the winding road and c) the ‘map’ provided for following the protagonist’s route – in this case the woman’s speech balloons are all joined to each other by a clear, unbroken thread.
Finally, Jim Rugg’s send-off is a scream. and could not be more apposite, messing mischievously with LITTLE NEMO’s one golden rule that the diminutive dreamer will end up safely in or tumbled out of his bed. All I’ll say is watch out for that bed sheet and then the pillow!
SLH
Buy Little Nemo’s Big New Dreams and read the Page 45 review here
The Diary Of A Teenage Girl new ed. (£13-99, North Atlantic Books) by Phoebe Gloeckner –
“Who’s
Trish? She’s one of your grown-up friends, I guess.”
“On come on… I have to act normal with her… she’s just a friend… Christ, I’m glad she didn’t see you!”
“Why?”
“What d’ya think? She’d wonder what the hell I’m doing with a teenager.”
“You hate me! You’re just embarrassed by me!!”
“You’re just a kid, and you don’t understand. We gotta lay low! I got some Asti Spumante for special occasions. Oh… and the burritos!”
I’ve read bad ‘slice-of-life’ stories that seem forced, projecting the artist’s best or worst side depending on the image they want to create. This book, a mixture of prose diary entries, accompanying illustrations and multiple page comic sections, isn’t that way – from what I can tell, in as much as one person can judge the truthfulness of another’s art, this book is unbelievably honest, and as such it really gets inside your head. To what degree it is actually autobiographical is apparently not important to Gloeckner, nor should it be to the reader, as she makes clear in her foreword. Undoubtedly though, one of the things that makes it so effective and affecting is the art. There’s no doubt that Gloeckner is an extremely technically proficient illustrator.
This skill, particularly in the comic sections, makes them rather menacing and horrifically life-like. I’m in awe of artists who can draw pictures which actually tell you what is going on in the subject’s mind – Gloeckner does this on every page, explaining and revealing, drawing you into these situations, these nightmare places, face to face with these terrible fucking people.
But each event in turn seems to add up to an understanding, or at least some sort of progress. It reminds me a little of Penny Arcade’s stuff, (the spoken word/performance artist, not the webcomic) except that Gloeckner seems to have come out the other side intact and able to get on and tell her, and Minnie’s stories. Part of me finds it insane that anyone would be this honest and this public, but mostly I’m just in awe of the strength, the force of will and the emotional maturity it must have taken to live this life and make an quasi-autobiographical comic book out of it.
Sadly, but perhaps naturally, the reaction to a book like this – and to the current film – is often outrage or scorn. Rather than deal with the reality, we’d like to imagine the whole thing was artistic license, the ravings of a loony, a publicity stunt to sell more whatever. Or perhaps we’re hostile – we ask, why waste your talent drawing such nasty stuff? Gross, thanks a lot, what makes you think we needed to see that? (Or as a friend said to me of the book Prozac Nation; “So she has depression. What makes her think her life is worthy of a book?”)
Despite what I’ve said above, please don’t imagine that this is a self-pitying work, full of whiney angst. Somehow, incredibly, Gloeckner has peppered this story with wry humour, laughing affectionately at the naivety of her young protagonists. It’s a testament to her own skills that she manages to mix humour and subtlety into such a bold and shocking story. I definitely recommend this book. You may want to read it in small bits, you may only want to read it once and then put it away, but once you have read it, it will certainly stay with you for a long while.
DK
Buy The Diary Of A Teenage Girl and read the Page 45 review here
Beauty #1 (£2-75, Image) by Jason A. Hurley & Jeremy Haun…
“Two years
ago, a new sexually transmitted disease took the world by storm.
“This S.T.D. was unlike any other that had come before.
“This was a disease that people actually wanted.
“Victims of this epidemic were physically changed by the virus.
“Fat melted away, thinning hair returned, skin blemishes faded, and their facial features slimmed.
“It became known as The Beauty.
“The Beauty quickly became a fad.
“Suddenly, perfect skin, flawless features, and a gorgeous body were only one sexual encounter away.
“The only downside appeared to be a slight constant fever, but that didn’t seem to slow people down.
“Now, over half the country’s population has The Beauty, and the other half of the country hates them for it.”
Which is where our story begins, shortly followed by the apparent spontaneous combustion from the inside out of someone rather pretty on the subway. Perhaps giving an indication to us, the readers, that there might just be at least one more teensy-weensy downside to The Beauty than everyone thinks! Consequently, the cops are dispatched to investigate, including the dashing and debonair, virus-free Detective Foster. Sure he has a few grey hairs and some laughter lines, but he’s ruggedly handsome, and completely devoted to his equally naturally lovely wife.
His professional partner, meanwhile, Kara Vaughn, has been virally enhanced to statuesque, goddess-level looks, but she’s actually one of the few people who managed to contract the virus unwittingly, and would rather she hadn’t. Particularly once the forensics expert has given them the run down on what she thinks killed their subject, before agents from the Centre for Disease Control swoop in and quarantine the scene. It’s enough for Foster to draw his own conclusions…
“It was The Beauty. The Beauty killed her, and they know it.”
Still, the why and the how, that remains unexplained, and so our cops do what they do best, and start running down leads on anti-Beauty terror cells. The type of people who might have the inclination to want to induce some temperature-based terror in the more glamorous half of the population. One such lead results in a shoot out with a suspect, requiring some prompt and messy, but ultimately unsuccessful, medical assistance from Detective Foster. After another yet late night on the job, and another missed dinner date with his doting wife, he’s more than happy to hit the sack, but his wife wants to share a tender moment or three before they fall asleep. So imagine his surprise when he wakes up in the morning, feeling twenty years younger. He looks it too. Oh dear. I guess The Beauty might suddenly not just be sexually transmitted… Maybe…
Intriguing opener from Messrs. Hurley and Haun. I like the premise, I’m intrigued to see where they are going to go with it. Our leads are well written, I can certainly see some potential for sidebar drama with this set-up issue too. Is Detective Foster’s wife really going to believe the excuse for his, and presumably by extension her own, unexpected midnight makeover? Especially with that hot partner who’s prone to calling him up at all hours of the day and night. I think he might well have to earn his detective corn just to save his marriage, never mind half the population! Still, at least he’s got a real hot incentive now, what with being a ticking time(sex)bomb himself as well! Great art too from Jeremy Haun, including a fabulous cover. I can see strong hints of Michael LAZARUS Lark in there, though obviously with softer colours here.
JR
Buy Beauty #1 and read the Page 45 review here
War Stories vol 1 (£18-99, Avatar) by Garth Ennis & Chris Weston, Gary Erskine, John Higgins, Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd.
From the 
writer of PREACHER, BATTLEFIELDS (more war) and THE BOYS etc.
Four personal and powerful stories set in the thick of World War II, each with an edge of injustice to it.
They’re fiction, of course, but delivered with an authority derived from historical fact. Plus it’s always useful to be reminded that in any war vast numbers of unfeasibly brave men are commanded to perform the impossible, and often succeed.
It’s also useful to be reminded that you enemy combatants are human beings too – individuals with lives, families and friends of their own; aspirations for after the war and many a moral quandary during it.
It’s ‘Nightingale’ which I normally make a song and dance about, with V FOR VENDETTA’s David Lloyd’s raw, haunting art providing chilling company for a tale told by a dead man, which verges on the poetic.
It’s set initially in the Arctic where a supply convoy is being provided with limited protection by escort vessels including H.M.S. Nightingale. Planes and u-boats they could attempt to hold off, but German battleships like the Tripitz were another matter entirely. In those difficult waters harsh decisions were made; decisions which proved almost impossible to live with for those who did not make them.
The one I chose to read again for the review was the first, and Garth goes for a refreshingly unusual perspective: that of a German Tiger tank commander leading his four men in retreat from Russia via the Ukraine and Poland all the way back to the German forests in order to surrender to the Americans. Besieged by Russian armour divisions pressing ahead with their advance, they also have to avoid the German field police who will hang them for desertion if caught. To Johann, his comrades’ safety is paramount – they’ve been through hell together. He only wants to live long enough to ensure their survival. As far as Johann is concerned – for the acts he has inflicted on others – he has forfeited the right to live.
There’s some fine storytelling involved here, and you know that expression being thrown around a lot, “These Ain’t Your Dad’s Comics”…? Well, these certainly aren’t your Dad’s War Comics.
For those, please see CHARLEY’S WAR, all of which is now in print.
SLH
Buy War Stories vol 1 and read the Page 45 review here
Black Panther: Complete Christopher Priest Collection vol 1 s/c (£25-99, Marvel) by Christopher Priest & Joe Quesada, Mark Texeira, various.
Christopher 
Priest is a very funny man.
“With an election a little more than a year away, it was good politics to do something nice for the African-American community. And, had I been in charge of the guest list and not the White House, I might have actually invited some of them. Outside of the king and his entourage, there wasn’t another black person at the ball who wasn’t carrying a tray.”
Fifteen years ago there weren’t too many superhero series that sent you scuttling for the nearest dictionary. But just as Jenkins & Jae Lee’s INHUMANS graphic novel had been and remains a surprisingly thoughtful and visually stunning Gaiman-like outing for a group of Marvel characters previously displaying all the colour and charisma of a bridge-full of cardboard Star Trek standees left out in the rain and then dumped in a St. Annes communal waste tip, this 2001 BLACK PANTHER book comes in way beyond expectations as a sharply constructed (and visually stunning) action-romp/satire, merrily ripping the piss out of racial stereotyping, tokenism, Marvel icons, the FBI and inveterate ramblers – as in people who go off at a tangent, not those who go out in cagoules.
Like the con-man/crime series THIEF OF THIEVES, it’s told to grin-cracking effect in nothing remotely resembling chronological order with a staccato series of ludicrous subheadings, some applying to one panel only, as government agent Everett K. Ross lamely attempts to justify his catastrophic series of diplomatic cock-ups to his girlfriend / boss, all of which begin when he’s assigned to watch over the comings and goings on U.S. soil of T’Challa, king of the high-tech African nation Wakanda.
Not such an easy task given the client’s devious nature and his propensity for slipping into coal-coloured rubber then jumping out of the nearest window.
Hold on, I’ve just said ‘rubber’. As in spandex, right? Mmmmm. No. No, no, no. Well, yes.
T’Challa is the star of the book only in that he has his name on the title and acts as catalyst for all the misfortunes of fall-guy Everett K. Ross (Chandler from Friends provides the bumbling victim ingredient, James Fox in Spin City gives you a fair example of his status and looks). T’Challa does occasionally perform acts of extraordinary prowess and aggression (but then so would you if you’d been lured from your kingdom in the middle of some severe social upheaval to find the murderer of your personally funded U.S. children’s charity poster-girl), but the star is most definitely Everett who struggles to keep up, pick up the pieces and avert several international ‘incidents’.
Here’s one of Ross and Nikki’s attempts to get the story clear. She summarises thus:
“Giant rats. Teenage Amazons. The client tossing drug dealers.”
“And Satan. You left out Satan. That’s important.”
“And then you lost your pants.”
“Wrong. First we went out for Chinese take-out. Then I lost my pants.”
Satan is supplied in the form of Marvel’s Mephisto long before Kieron Gillen employed him to comedic effect in JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY (highly recommended).
Interspersed between this nonsense are some enlightening thoughts on African politics, international subterfuge and social mores.
Mark Texeira had long established himself as a top-tier Marvel action artist with his neo-classical figure work and heavy modelling but, as directed by Priest, he here displays a hitherto undisclosed brilliance at dead-pan comedy with po-faced expressions and just the right number to beats between dialogue in the form of silent panels.
The longer the series progresses (this repackaging contains the first seventeen issues), the less Texeira there is, but I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Also recommended by the Reggie Hudlin & John Romita Jr, the later series: BLACK PANTHER: WHO IS THE BLACK PANTHER?
SLH
Buy Black Panther: Complete Christoper Priest Collection vol 1 s/c and read the Page 45 review here
Green Arrow: The Archer’s Quest Deluxe Edition h/c (£18-99, DC) by Brad Meltzer & Phil Hester.
If you were
given a second chance at life, would you be curious about who had attended your funeral? What would be worse: surprise absences, or worryingly unexpected guests?
Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow, wasn’t the first of his brightly dressed friends to die, so he made contingency plans for when the inevitable happened to him. But now that he’s back he finds that those plans weren’t followed to the letter, and his old friends discover exactly whom he entrusted them to.
Brad wrote IDENTITY CRISIS, and if you’re one of the many who’ve enjoyed that then you’re more than likely to feel at home here since once more it deals with the importance of privacy and the comfort of friends. There’s plenty of mischief on hand when the rest of the DC crew put in cameos and, now that I think about it, the patter and a lot of the layouts combined with more animated-cartoon art style are as much reminiscent of Bendis’ POWERS as anything else.
Oracle is DC’s ultimate networker, the crippled daughter of Commissioner Gordon, holed up in a high-tech surveillance tower, from which she works closely with Dinah, the Black Canary. Ollie also works closely with Dinah, but in a different way. Here GA and Orcale are communicating via the Canary’s earring:
“What are you doing on Dinah’s line?”
“She left her earrings on my… uh… kitchen table.”
“Don’t lie, Oliver. That microphone was switched on all night. I heard everything. Everything. Trick arrows, my rear end.”
“You serious?”
“Jeez, Ollie, Clark was right — you have gotten gullible in your old age.”
“Listen, you gonna help me or not?”
“Just tell me what you need.”
“I’m looking for a positive I.D. on a guy in a photo.”
“Now you’re singing my song. Just hold it up to the window — And don’t block it with your fingers. I’ll have one of my satellites scan it from space.”
“You can do that?”
“Oh, Ollie– Such a sucker.”
SLH
Buy Green Arrow: The Archer’s Quest Deluxe Edition h/c and read the Page 45 review here
Hellboy And The B.P.R.D. (£14-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Alex Maleev…
“That burned 
body in Buenos Aires is Robert Amsel. Still no word on the man who was seen with him.”
“I suppose that’s it, then.”
“Actually there’s something else, Professor. A witness took a photo at the scene. A rather… strange photo.”
Ha, that’s a great punchline when you see what or rather who – well, probably ‘what’ is more accurate actually – is waving cheerily directly at the camera. Fans of Hellboy, the BPRD and in particular the previous historical arcs detailing various exploits of Professor Trevor Bruttenholm and the young Hellboy, 1946 (which is out of print in single volume form currently), 1947 and 1948 will I’m sure enjoy the joke.
This time around, Hellboy has grown up into a strapping teenager and his adoptive father, the Professor, is finally ready to let him out into the field on his first mission, as he realises he can’t protect him forever. What follows is standard HELLBOY / BPRD fare, rather tame a bit by-the-numbers compared to the extended current BPRD: HELL ON EARTH arc. It very much feels like classic early Hellboy with supernatural monsters and megalomaniacal Nazis trashing a remote Brazilian village complete with spooky castle. So nothing new is what I’m saying, but it is slickly done.
Alex Maleev takes an excellent turn with the pencils, his first for a Mignola creation if I’m not mistaken, coloured in inimitable house style for this title as ever by Dave Stewart. Well, at least this keeps our appetites whetted whilst we wait for the next arc of HELLBOY IN HELL to start.
JR
Buy Hellboy And The B.P.R.D. 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.
Stray Bullets vol 3: Other People (£14-99, Image) by David Lapham
The Last Broadcast (£22-50, Archaia) by Andre Sirangelo & Gabriel Iumazark
The Last Ones h/c (£17-99, Humanoids) by David Munoz & Manuel Garcia
If You Steal (£22-50, Fantagraphics) by Jason
Adventure Time vol 6 (£8-99, Titan) by Ryan North & various
Annihilator h/c (£18-99, Legendary) by Grant Morrison & Frazer Irving
Bravest Warriors vol 5 (£10-99, Kaboom) by Jason Johnson, Breehn Burns & Mike Holmes
Empowered vol 9 (£13-50, Dark Horse) by Adam Warren
Gunnerkrigg Court vol 5: Refine h/c (£19-99, Archaia) by Thomas Siddell
Judge Dredd Casefiles 25 (£19-99, Rebellion) by John Wagner, Robbie Morrison, Marc Wigmore, Paul Neal & Carlos Ezquerra, Henry Flint, Greg Staples, various
Mox Nox (£10-99, Fantagraphics) by Joan Cornella
Nanjing The Burning City (£18-99, Dark Horse) by Ethan Young
Princess Ugg vol 2 s/c (£11-99, Oni) by Ted Naifeh
Constantine vol 4: The Apocalypse Road s/c (£10-99, DC) by Ray Fawkes & Jeremy Haun
Fairest vol 5: The Clamor For Glamour (£10-99, DC) by Mark Buckingham, Bill Willingham & Russell Braun, Meghan Hetrick, Andrew Pepoy
Gotham By Midnight vol 1: We Do Not Sleep s/c (£10-99, DC) by Ray Fawkes & Ben Templesmith
Injustice Year Two vol 2 h/c (£16-99, DC) by Tom Taylor, Marguerite Bennett & various
Avengers World vol 4: Before Time Runs Out s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Sam Humphries, Frank Barbiere & Bengal, Marco Checchetto
Captain Marvel vol 3: Alis Volat Propriis s/c (£9-99, Marvel) by Kelly Sue DeConnick & David Lopez
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 1: Squirrel Power s/c (£11-99, Marvel) by Ryan North & Erica Henderson
Attack On Titan vol 16 (£8-50, Kodansha) by Hajime Isayama
Attack On Titan: Before The Fall vol 5 (£8-50, Kodansha) by Ryo Suzukaze & Satoshi Shiki
Fairy Tail Blue Mistral vol 1 (£8-50, Kodansha) by Hiro Mashima & Rui Watanabe
Inuyashiki vol 1 (£9-99, Kodansha) by Hiroya Oku
The World’s Greatest First Love vol 2 (£8-99, Viz) by Maki Minami
News!
ITEM! Have you booked Saturday 3rd October 2015 in your diary? Page 45 21st Birthday Party All-Evening Booze Bash and Afternoon Signing & Sketching with ADAMTINE’s Hannah Berry & FLUFFY’s Simone Lia! FREE DRINKS FOR ALL!
ADAMTINE is one of the creepiest graphic novel’s I’ve ever read in my life, while FLUFFY almost certainly is the most beautiful. Details including times, links to their other books, their websites and the evening’s venue for alcohol-sodden celebration are on the blog I’ve linked to above.
Please spread the word and come if you can!
ITEM! From the Creative Review: the sorry state of affairs of creative education. As in, the teaching of art, design etc. All very familiar from what I’ve been hearing from educators in other university disciplines and it’s pretty depressing.
ITEM! New contemporary manga exhibition at the British Museum.
– Stephen
