A murder on halloween kicks off a year of murders in the mafia family. It is a year where almost all well known batman characters are instantiated; the killings continue every subsequent holiday. Batman is trying to catch the killer, but as in all the best batman-stories he is really just the path that the mystery walks upon. The story is well drawn, and incredibly well crafted. Loeb and Sale play with story telling techniques brilliantly executing some of the best themes throughout Batman; the […]
Fables Vol. 19: Snow White
This volume has three separate stories: Bufkin and Lily, great Oz liberators, tell some of their follow-up adventures as they become heroes for hire. Bufkin has been one of my favorites, ever since the Magic Mirror painted him as one of the most formidable of foes, because “he reads, he reads EVERYTHING.” Bigby is off trying to track down his two missing cubs, while at home … Snow is trapped by an old promise and a new adversary, a situation that no one but Snow […]
Fatale: A murder/mystery with more murder and more mystery
It is raining. Darkly clad people under umbrellas at the funeral of Dominic Raines. One woman stands out, beautiful and dark. Our protagonist is immediately taken with her as she explains how her grandmother had a fling with the deceased – the godfather to our protagonist. This is the scene where Nicholas Lash meets Josephine. We meet these people just this day because this is the day Nicholas Lash’s life changes; people try to kill him at his Godfather’s house and Josephine appears to save […]
A farm girl walks into a bar. In her defense, it was invisible.
Unlike with Peter Pan, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was one of my first stark realizations of the differences that adaptations of works could bring. When I was wee, though I can’t recall if this was during elementary or middle school, there was a program by which one could earn a little extra credit. Quite literally, it was a program on one of the Apple terminals the school had that contained countless quizzes on books that our school library had in stock, ranging across various difficulties and lengths. […]
The Unwritten, Volumes 4-7: Leviathan to The Wound
I read all four of the trade paperbacks in a row, and I hate to spoil them for anyone looking to read the series. However – I really liked them, as always. The stories are dense and complex, the art is consistently well done, and I can’t quite see how it will all end.
Anarchy in Italy
Graphic memoirs are in a real danger of becoming an old hat. The genre seemed so groundbreaking in the early 90’s when Art Spiegelman finished Maus, or even in 2000 with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and there are still some interesting work published under the umbrella “graphic memoir.” And it’s a good thing that the new comic book releases shelve in our local library calls to me like heroin calls to Iggy Pop, or I might have missed one of them, namely Ulli Lust’s