Chad’s Comments (group member since Oct 24, 2019)

Chad’s comments from the Edelweiss & Netgalley Reviewers group.

Last week's ARCs.

Conan the Barbarian Vol. 5 Twisting Loyalties ★★★
Conan and Belit run into Set's followers while trying to steal an artifact. Then we jump to after Conan has left Belit behind and is plagued by an infection from his encounter with Set's followers. I appreciate Zub delving into Conan's long history. At the same time, I don't really want to read a bunch of text pages to figure out all that history.

The Night Eaters, Vol. 3: Their Kingdom Come ★★★★
The final volume in the Night Eaters trilogy sees Milly and Billy waking up for the apocalypse or that's how at least a lot of people are taking it. Monsters are beginning to come out into the open. There's a lot of random social media posts in this. I guess that's replaced the talking heads on the news of the 80s and 90s. I really like how much this is about family. Milly's and Billy's parents love for them in straight contrast to Ming who is willing to sacrifice his family to get what he wants. It's great stuff, compounded with Takeda's interesting East meets West artwork.

What We Wished For ★★★
A group of kids stumble into a cave and are each granted a wish. However, they take too long and the comet they wished on has already passed. 38 years later the comet is back and so are the children's wishes. The problem is a child's wish often isn't practical to being an adult with some of these wishes reeking havoc on their lives. It's a fast-paced read.

Bowling with Corpses & Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown ★★★★
Mignola's got a brand new bag, starting up another new universe. This one seems more fantasy based. It's a bunch of short stories, told in taverns and the like. It gives off dark fairy tale vibes. The stories are good, filled with the undead, vampires, talking animals and the like. Who am I kidding though, I've been in the bag for Mignolia since the 90s. I will say it's really nice to get an entire comic that he both wrote and drew.

Barbaric Vol. 4: Born in Blood ★★★★
Nothing much new here in volume 4 but still fun. Owen and Soren return to Owen's home to find out his barbarian clan isn't protecting the other tribes they pledged to. Why not is a bit telegraphed early on.

Arkadi and the Lost Titan ★★
An epic story that spanned 20 years of Caza's life to create. It's a tomb at over 500 pages and finally translated to English. This is set on a Earth 10,000 years after it has stopped spinning. The last people live in villages in the twilight demarcation between day and night. Most people have some kind of mutation. Way below the Earth exists one last city, its citizens pampered and run by an A.I. What follows is a really long adventure spanning 2 generations. It's full of things to say, never straight-forwardly, leaving you to figure out what Caza is getting at. Caza's art is really detailed, giving off a Moebius and Cam Kennedy vibe.

The House ★★★★
Three adult siblings return to their family's vacation cottage to fix the place up to sell a year after their father died. Along the way, they bear old grudges, have fond reminisces of the past and try to decide what to do with the place. As someone who is at the same stage of their life as these kids, I identified a lot with this simple story.

You're specifically talking about posting reviews on Barnes and Noble's website? TBH, I don't even bother with them. It was always such a hassle that I just gave up.

Last week's ARCs.

Geiger, Vol. 3 ★★★★
Geiger and Nate the Knight find a small town that was untouched by the nuclear war when they help some children in a 3 issue story drawn by Paul Pelletier. Then we see some of Tariq's history after the bomb dropped and how he got his control rods. It's all good stuff with great art

The Rocketeer: Breaks Free ★★
Unfortunately, there's not much plot here other than "Let's fight Nazis". They just appear in San Francisco while Cliff and Bettie are visiting. There are some anachronisms too like the CIA being involved even though the CIA didn't exist during WWII. I mean, come on. If you're going to write for a time period at least know something about that time period. It's not as if there's not thousands of books and movies on the subject.

Star Trek: Defiant, Vol. 3: Hell Is Only A Word ★★★★
Oh yeah, those creepy parasitic bugs from TNG are back. The ones that take over and eat your brain and can only be killed by intense phaser fire. They managed to make this as creepy as possible. I can imagine those scorpion bugs crawling across a spacecraft floor, ticking along even now.

Star Trek: Defiant, Vol. 4: The Stars of Home ★★★
The crew of the Defiant seems to be suffering from a war of attrition as it is now down to Worf, B'elanna and Ro. Anyway, they get embroiled in a conspiracy to overthrow the Romulan government with Spock being a prisoner of the Romulans. It starts off pretty cool but kind of peters out quickly. Almost feels like an editorial thing as we go from a coup to defending 100 colonists on a farming planet. Definitely a shift in stakes. Chief O'Brian and Bashir also make an appearance and I'm guessing will set to actually do something in the future besides ride around in the Defiant and talk about Section 31.

Star Trek, Vol. 4: Pleroma ★★★★
The crew of the Theseus head outside time and space to confer with all the Godlike beings that have appeared throughout Star Trek history for the most part. Oh, and Lore's on his way to make things even worse. It's good stuff. Kelly and Lansing have definitely done their Star Trek homework.

Profane ★★★
Peter Milligan doing his Milligan thing. A fictional P.I. comes to life to investigate the murder of his author. Things get half baked from there like a lot of Milligan's comics do. It's alright.

Night Drive ★★★
This one should be considered only for Richard Sala completists. It's short, only 28 pages expanded with interviews and forewords. It's Sala's first work and feels like it. It does have Invisible Hands in it, which was later turned into a serial on Liquid Television.

The Sin Bin ★★★★
I didn't know what to expect here but this was fun. It's about a teenage girl and her dad who is a minor league hockey goon mentoring younger players. One night she sneaks along with him to find out he's also a monster hunter. There in the two of them fall in to fighting monsters and this queen who has a larger plan...

The Song (Verse #3) ★★★★
Probably could have used a recap just because it's been 3 years since volume 2 came out, but I remembered what was happening as the book went on. It's all about the end battle here as the humans here are on their last legs with the Vel. Nothing groundbreaking here, but a nice fantasy adventure.

Downlands ★★★
A teenager loses his twin sister after she sees a black dog. The story incorporates a lot of traditional ghost stories as we move more into what's going on. Not bad but probably didn't need to be 300 pages to make this story.

Last week's ARCs.

Doom Treasury Edition ★★
While it's neat to see this blown up to treasury size, you'd have to be real bad with your money to spend $30 on a 40 page story, that comes with the same story again without coloring or lettering and the script and layouts plus 2 unrelated reprints of a Fantastic Four issue by Hickman and a Runaways miniseries from Secret Wars.

Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam ★★★★
A really good memoir about the author immigrating to the U.S. as a child, beginning when they were on a refuge boat after leaving Vietnam. Then in a refuge camp in Thailand. Finally his family struggling to establish themselves in America. That makes up the bulk of the story but there are two interludes from later in life, one in high school, the other in his 40s. I do wish he had connected the dots more with those because I still have questions. The art style is very simple and worked well with the story.

Muybridge ★★★★
A very interesting biography about Eadweard Muybridge, a man who early on got into photography and took thousands of pictures of nature before hooking up with one of the men behind the continental railroad. They wanted to determine how a horse runs and if it ever is completely in air. So Muybridge spent years to develop the technology to capture this. His 2 books of moving pictures are still in print today, over 120 years later. The graphic novel does reprint several of his actual pictures which I thought was great so you can see what was just so groundbreaking. The latter portion of the book goes into the further inventions revolving around motion pictures and cinema showing the whole history up into the start of the 20th century. It's a very interesting and well done book.

Last week's ARCs.

Noblesse, Vol. 3 ★★
I think there's a lot that gets lost when this is translated from the web to the page. All of the art looks like it's floating in random boxes in space and it's really difficult to figure out what order to read the panels in. Then there are zero backgrounds in each of the panels so it just feels like random figures floating around and it just breaks any kind of flow for sequential art. The gist is there's a shadowy organization with no name that's making monsters and on the other side is Dr. Frankenstein and his thrall plus some kids who definitely take a back seat in this volume.

Cthulhu is Hard to Spell, Volume 1 ★★
Fragments of stories about people meeting elder gods. I wish these were longer and more fleshed out. There's not much here to hang your hat on.

The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos Volume 2 ★★★
Volume 2 loses steam as it struggles to find a direction. Some of Tynion's recent stuff is just looking to get to a point. This is one of those. Thankfully, the characters are still interesting and Goodheart's art is very good.

Will Eisner: A Comics Biography ★★★★★
It makes complete sense to give the creator of the graphic novel, a graphic novel biography. I really enjoyed this one. It mainly focuses on his younger years from childhood up to running his own publishing company and then syndicating The Spirit before World War II. The rest of his life is still covered, just not in the same depth. Anyway, I thought this was really informative and brings one of our most historic comics creators to light. Keep these biographies coming NBM!

Drifters Omnibus Volume 1 ★★★
Historical figures get sucked into a fantasy world where elves and dwarves have been subjugated by Hitler. It's a crazy scenario with terrific art by the creator of Hellsing. The writing isn't as good as the art though and Hirano has a dumb predilection with breasts that keeps coming up. Every once in a while it feels like a 12 year old boy is writing the book and just points over at a woman and says "Boobs" and giggles.

Last week's ARCs.

The Kids ★★
This was kind of stupid to be honest. One night infants grow instantly into adults and start hurting people because they don't know their own strength, I guess. For some reason, this neighborhood seems to have 6 billion infants in it that have turned to adults too. I know of only one in our immediate part of the neighborhood. We probably wouldn't even know anything happened if this occurred in our neighborhood. The coloring made it really difficult to tell what was happening in places.

Supermassive Volume 1: A Massive-Verse Book ★★★
The first three crossovers in the Massive-verse. Be forewarned, these get timey-wimey with multiple universes and timelines. It also helps if you read all of the comics in order and you basically need a roadmap to do that. There's basically a year's worth of each comic between each of these annuals.

Piecemeal ★★
Someone needs to take Szymon Kudranski's black crayons away. His artwork is always so dark, I can't tell what's happening and that occurs here. A teen finds a brain in a jar in a haunted house and his friends begin to die. That's about the last I could figure out of this story that seemed to start with a solid black page and then carve out minor other dark colors from there.

Freddie The Fix ★★★★
I really liked this one and want to see more of this Ninth Circle entry. Freddie the Fix is a fixer from England working in Los Angeles. When a werewolf gets out of control and kills his sex partner, Freddie comes in to make sure it never actually happened. Later that guy he gets sent on a case, one that could get him killed. It's good stuff. Mike Perkins's art fits well with the subject matter.

Nacelleverse Vol. 1: Biker Mice from Mars & RoboForce ★★
I'm not the target audience for this. I have no nostalgia for the properties in this. I was a bit too old for these cartoons. In fact I'd never ever heard of RoboForce and only knew Biker Mice from Mars was a cartoon. This was all some pretty bland sauce here though. These did feel like inoffensive cartoon episodes. There just wasn't much in either story to peak my interest. Dynamite and Mad Cave have both done a better job of furthering their comics based on cartoons.

Johnny Geronimo: Art of Darkness ★★★
Native American crime fiction as a detective on a reservation investigates a series of murders. It's not bad. The lettering is place incorrectly and the font is too small but otherwise this was decent.

Tales of Mother F. Goose ★★★
Mother Goose reimagined as crime fiction and given the R rated treatment. Jack Horner and Miss Muffet are police detectives investigating the murder of Georgie Porgy. It's not bad.

AfterDark ★★★
Four short horror tales. My favorite was Cullen Bunn's tale of last love as a man whose wife has died and he is taking her remains on all the trips they had over the years. The Black Eyed Kids and Jim Starlin generic apocalyptic story didn't do much for me. The last story was a little precursor to the Tales of Mather F. Grimm one shot Tieri and Eisma put out about a serial killer that Detective Muffet of Little Miss Muffet fame tangles with.

Roihu ★
Twelve short stories that honestly aren't very good. Not sure if something was lost in translation or if they just didn't make much sense in the first place.

Summer Shadows ★★★★
This was kind of cool. The Talented Mr. Ripley meets Dracula seems very apt. A twenty-something boy heads to Greece after his ex-boyfriend. There's a yacht offshore where people go to party with the rich and some don't come back. It's a slow burn of a vampire story that I dug.

Evil-ish ★★★
A young nonbinary kid wants to be evil and idolizes the Brigade of Shade, an evil group that lives in a castle in this fantasy town. But when they get what they want, will they really be the kind of evil that it takes to be in the Brigade of Shade or did they just think it would look cool?

Hellsing, Vol. 10 ★★
If your idea of a good comic is just nonstop endless ultraviolence with blood splattered everywhere, this may be the book for you. However, if you're looking for an actual plot give this a pass. The art is good, it could have been half as long if you took out all of the pointless panels of splatter effects though. And it's so spread out, I couldn't really follow what plot there is at all other than good guys win. Hirano's Drifters is much better at this point.

Last week's ARCs.

Face Meat ★★★
Some vintage horror from 1960s Japan. These stories were originally printed in men's magazines and come complete with the ads, thankfully untranslated. It's basically Tales from the Crypt with boobs.

The Masked Macher ★★
This is not very good. It's also just weird. It's about a buffoonish actor in the thirties who becomes a wrestler. There he meets other wrestlers, including a woman posing as a man so she can wrestle, a talking bear addicted to drugs and Joe Louis. The book also ends on a cliffhanger and I'd be surprised if this gets another volume. The art is really poor and basic.

Mugshots ★★★★
A tight crime thriller about a criminal coming back to Brighton when his niece goes missing. There he has to weave in and out from the crime lord he crossed and the Albanians trying to move in and take over t find her. Good stuff right out of a Guy Ritchie film. I like the stylized art from Chris Matthews too.

Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures Phase III Volume 3 ★★★
These are fine. I feel my interest waning though in what has become a very bland series with the High Republic era. It started off so strong too.

Paranoid Gardens ★★★
Gerard Way returns to comics for what would have been a Vertigo comic back in the day. It's about an elder care facility that could have been in Top Ten with all kinds of aliens and mutants in it. There's a secret plot to turn it over to a wannabe Mickey Mouse in exchange for immortality. I'd have to like to see more of the backstory here explored but it's fine. I do like Chris Weston's detailed art. I feel like we don't get enough of that kind of thing these days with the influx of manga influenced artists who don't bother with backgrounds at all.

The Lemonade War: The Graphic Novel ★★
A graphic novel adaptation of the popular book series. It's written for really young readers, under 10. Kids in that demo may enjoy it but anyone older is going to say that this is written for babies. I found the writing pretty juvenile even though the practical math involved was presented in a way that while the math itself isn't too advanced, the presentation was. It was an odd dichotomy. Younger kids really into math will probably enjoy this, others not so much.

Call Me Emma: One Chinese Girl Finds Her Way in America ★★★
A memoir of a Chinese family immigrating to New York when the author is in high school. It's about how she and her family struggles and it's not like how it is in the movies. There's no real resolution though and it felt like it left me hanging some. She just finished high school and that's about it. I would like to see more about how she came to terms with the differences and went on with her life.

The Lighthouse ★★★
Francisco, a young soldier is fleeing after coming down on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War. He's injured and rescued by an eccentric lighthouse keeper. It's a small story about the power of dreams as the two of them rebuild a boat to one day navigate to a nearby island. The story is only around 50 pages, go read the rest of it yourself. The essay about the foundations of the story was good as well.

Lumine Volume Three ★★
I keep hoping this series will get better. Plenty of other people like it. I feel like it moves at a snail's pace. It's 340 pages and hardly anything happens. The art is pretty good but things definitely get lost in the transformation from webcomic to actual comic with the panel construction. The art doesn't flow from panel to panel. The panels just feel like they are floating in space and not telling a story. Then there's the fight sequences. The last one goes on for about 100 pages and I couldn't be more bored with it. It's just random panels of two wolves fighting one another. The majority are of just the two of them locked up together rolling around. There's no sense of how it's going for either one. I find myself just flipping through those pages as fast as I can because they are completely uninteresting. Kind of like this series as a whole.

Last week's ARCs.

Kirby's Lessons for Falling [in Love] ★★
I liked Gao's first book but this one was a miss for me. It's a queer YA romance comic about a girl who is a top rock climber. Her dad passed away when she was young and she's grown up in a tight knit church so she hasn't told anyone she's gay. When she breaks her arm, she's forced to take an elective and joins the newspaper where she is assigned to the astrology column with a quirky, punk girl. There's way too much time spent on astrology and tarot that had me completely check out of this. I also have my doubts about how accepting a Texas church would be about gay members as well.

The art looks really rushed and unfinished. I couldn't tell who was who most of the time except for Bex whose punk hair cut made it look like she had a lamb sitting on her head.

X-Men: The Manga: Remastered, Vol. 2 ★
This was just plain awful. Most of the art is terrible. The best chapters are only passable. If you're older than 7 or so, you're probably going to say this was written for babies. The dialogue and story are written so poorly. You can tell zero effort was put into this and they just wanted to push it out due to the success of the cartoon. It also ends mid-story which is annoying for an omnibus.

Saint Catherine ★★★★
This is how you write a 350 page graphic novel. I was never bored. I was always engaged and just wanted to keep on reading. It's about a twenty-something living in New York. Her mother has always guilted her about going to church and she's never missed a mass. If you know any Catholics from the Northeast, this is a very common thing. Just ask my wife. The first time she decides to skip mass to spend the day with her boyfriend, something happens and she may be possessed by a demon. I'll leave the rest of the story up to you to find out what happens.

The art is wonderful. It's got this soft and clean feel to it with subtle colors. I really enjoyed it. Now I need to see if Anna Meyer has worked on anything else.

He Lost His Keys in Space ★★
This was an exhausting read because the main character is the worst. He's the most awful person you've ever met, completely self-absorbed, being a satire of the worst of Americans. The premise is that he's been a diplomat to other planets for the last dozen years and realizes he left his house keys on one of the planets he visited. He returns to each planet and we see how badly he effed up each one, leaving his coworkers to clean up his messes. This took a while to read, just because I could only stomach 10-15 pages at a time. I get that it's satire but this was like staring at Fox News for an entire day nonstop. It's like being trapped in a barbershop. I could only do it in bits and pieces before being overwhelmed.

The Science of Ghosts ★★★★
I haven't seen Lilah Sturges's name on a comic book for awhile so when I saw this as a Hoopla Bonus Borrow I decided to check it out and I'm glad I did. It was really good. It's about a transgendered woman who is a forensic parapsychologist and used to work as a forensic psychologist for the police before she transitioned. She gets involved in a mystery of two generations of the same family who were murdered in their house and were the heirs of a firearms company. El Garing's and Alitha Martinez's black and white art is exquisite, so detailed. These days that really stands out to me with so many artists going the manga route of no backgrounds at all.

Catboy ★★★
This originally appeared as a webcomic on Vice. It's a series of strips about Olive, something of a homebody and recently graduated from art school. She wishes on a shooting star that her cat could be her roommate and Henry transforms into a cat/human hybrid. The two of them become best friends and Henry is often more cat than human, still wanting to eat birds or play in an empty box. Some of it is pretty funny like Henry ends up getting a better job than Olive and doesn't know what to do with all the money.

Hellsing, Vol. 9 ★★
The art in this is excellent if you look at just a panel at a time. However as sequential art, I couldn't tell at all what was happening. It's just nonstop fighting between random people. Maybe if the whole series came out at once and I could read it straight through, it's be different. To me this read as just a bunch of random people getting dismembered and turn apart amidst swirling effects in every panel and the occasional terrible dialogue like "I will kill you until your die."

Last week's ARCs.

Storm King Comics Dark & Twisted: The Killing Hole ★★
It's 1979. Two outcast friends dig a hole in the woods and hang out there. Eventually one of them does something really bad. Just not at all satisfying as a story. I think there was a reason Niles let this one sit for 30 years before telling it.

The God List ★★★
A used book dealer is given a book listing hidden masterpieces and is immediately attacked. He and a woman he just met travel to Europe to find these masterpieces while being constantly pursued. There are quite a few holes in this. It's more of an elevator pitch than a well thought out story. Still, I found the concept intriguing.

John Carpenter's Night Terrors: Usher Down ★★★
This is a crazy story about some people who find Poe's House of Usher buried underground. It starts off as this haunted house story and then involves time travel and all kinds of craziness.

Twists Of Fate ★★★★★
A World War II story about the Spanish exiles who fought with the Allies. They were kicked out of France after being forced to flee Franco's forces in Spain, eventually becoming prisoners in work camps in North Africa. After being liberated they joined the Allied army and headed to Europe. It's a compelling story, told by an old man who has been forgotten, living under an assumed name in France. I like how the details of the war are told in color while the current time is in black and white as he begrudgingly tells his story to a graphic novelist.

Seance in the Asylum ★★
This is set after the Civil War. It's about a medium working at an asylum who turns out she may not be the fake that she has always believed she is. This starts off very slow for only a 4 issue series. The art wasn't to my taste. It was scratchy with a lot of lines and it looked like those lines had been connected by Connect the Dots.

Kill All Immortals ★★★
Turns out Leif Erikson is immortal along with his children. After a thousand years, his daughter has had enough when he tries to kill her boyfriend and she turns on her family. I didn't engage with the long fight sequences though. They just felt like random snippets of fighting as opposed to a fight sequence that flowed together. I also felt the art was weaker in these sequences. I really liked the stinger at the end and it makes me want to see more of this series.

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City: A Graphic Memoir ★★★
A graphic memoir about an Indian woman who always dreamed of moving to New York and after a dark time in her life, she finally did. Parts of this I quite liked and identified with as well. I grew up in the Midwest and moved to New York as an adult as well. I quickly identified with all her feelings of moving to this magical place where all these literary masters made their home. But the books shifts a lot of gears, focusing on a lot of different subjects. That's where it lost me some because of how disjointed it felt as a whole. Sohini's artwork is REALLY good. I hope she continues to make graphic novels and I look forward to reading her next one.

Aya: Face the Music ★★★
An African, soapier version of Love and Rockets. It deals with some harsher subject matter as well, like human trafficking, arson, the inability to pay hospital bills. It's all well done. I'll be checking more of these out as this is the 8th volume.

The Order of the Circle ★★★★
I quite liked this. It's set in London 1952 but a London where magic is real and a society of mages has helped since the middle ages. There's one witch that is looking for revenge though after the society framed her husband for murder and banished him to hell while taking away her voice so she could no longer practice magic. She's looking for a weapon that can kill the demon who dragged her husband to hell. It's cool stuff. The art was really good too, especially since this artist was new to me.

Strange Bedfellows: A Graphic Novel ★★★
In the future humanity was moved on to another planet, one where kids born there often develop powers. Our main character, Oberon, develops his late in life at 19. He's lonely and realizes he can bring what he dreamed the night before to life. That's where an old high school boyfriend comes into play. He starts appearing in Oberon's dreams and Oberon starts bringing him into reality as his power develops.

Last week's ARCs.

Kosher Mafia ★★★
1936 in Cleveland, a bookkeeper and an enforcer have to go against the head of their criminal organization to out what the German Bund is up to.

The Eternal Warrior ★★★
Valiant's latest attempt at a prose novel featuring one of their characters. I thought this worked pretty well. I liked that they stayed in the same constrains as the comic book incarnation unlike when they did the Bloodshot novel. Gilad Anni-Padda has been around for thousands of years, righting wrongs and fighting wars. Here, a death cult tries to capture him so they can end the world through the Boon, which is the otherworldly place where he and his two brothers were granted their immortality.

Uncanny Valley Vol. 1 ★★★★
A fun comic about a boy who is part cartoon. Think Harry Potter meets Roger Rabbit. I do wish there was more plot advancement. It feels like a shorter story that was stretched out to more issues which is more or less exactly what happened. That being said, it's still a really cool book. Dave Wachter's art is inventive. I really like the different look of the cartoon versus "real" characters. Looking real forward to more.

Last week's ARCs.

Hello Darkness Vol. 1 ★★★
These stories are OK. The back half is by Garth Ennis and Becky Cloonan. It's their attempt to tell what would happen during a nuclear war. It's not very interesting to tell you the truth. The story everyone is probably wondering about is the 2 part Something Is Killing the Children short. It's fine. I'm sure it got people to buy this. It's nothing you haven't seem before though if you've been reading the monthly comic. The other random stories are really hit and miss.

Heat Seeker: Combustion A Gun Honey Series ★★★
James Bond if Skinemax had the license 20 years ago. Yes, I know Cinemax isn't a thing these days but that's what I always think of when I think of movies that are supposed to be titillating for no reason. Basically Heat Seeker is a female James Bond who constantly is stripping her top off. For this outing, she has to protect a 12 year old girl and her father is a scientist who has created a nerve agent. The plot has a lot of double crossing. It's pretty much ridiculous. But it is also fun. So if you like B grade action flicks, you'll probably enjoy the Heat Seeker series.

Charred Remains ★
Unfortunately, this was terrible. It's about a woman whose parents died in a fire when she was a child. She saw this person she calls the "Fire Man" in the flames. Now there's some kind of conspiracy brewing in New Orleans. The storytelling is very obtuse. It's not helped by the artwork. This comic looks like it was dropped in a puddle. Mutti needs to spend some more time giving his characters more definition instead of rushing to push out as many comics as he can.

Hard Bargain ★★★★★
An excellent read. Of course, I'm a sucker for supernatural noir, especially when it's done this well. It's about a P.I. in a Los Angeles where magic and demons exist. He's investigating a case that has to do with his childhood friends and their fathers. What a terrific ride. I hope DeKnight decides to take a pause from Hollywood again in the future to make more comics. (DeKnight worked on Buffy, Angel and Daredevil among others.) The art is excellent as well. Just an all-around home run.

Deer Editor ★★
Basically a dad joke turned into a comic and played straight. The main character has a deer head and is a reporter while everyone else is human. I was onboard until the vampires showed up. Then the plot just dissolved into a confusing mess. Sami Kavela's art is always excellent.

Minor Arcana Vol. 1 ★★★★
The main character has recently returned home to the small Canadian town she grew up in. (I know, a shocker that Lemire would set his new comic in a small Canadian town like half his other comics.) Her mother is the town psychic, but she's also sick and her daughter has returned to help take care of her as she goes through chemo. Oh yeah, and where her mom is a charlatan, she may actually be a psychic and is unaware of it. Good stuff.

Pathfinder Wake the Dead ★★★
Some solid fantasty D&D type action with this new Pathfinder collection. There's also a one-shot called Bad Alchemy and character sheets for all of the new characters in this so you can use them for your own adventures.

Last week's ARCs.

End After End Vol. 1: At the Moment of Your Death ★★
Five issues in and I feel like it's just getting started. It's about a guy who dies and wakes up in a world of neverending battles. That's pretty much the whole story with very little explanations. There are a lot of flashbacks to his life, but they seem to go nowhere unless volume 2 turns this into some kind of Jacob's Ladder scenario. The art often feels unfinished as well. It goes down that manga road of not finishing faces or backgrounds.

Fearscape Vol. 2: A Dark Interlude ★
I guess it's appropriate that a comic about the evils of sequels stinks since it is, itself, a sequel. This was awful. It just droned on and on while I kept checking the page numbers to see how much longer I needed to suffer through this. Damn, my completist nature!

Death Hawk: The Complete Saga ★★★
Some surprisingly solid space opera. It started out in the 80's, Adventure Comics folded after 3 issues and years later all of it finally came about. Death Hawk is kind of like Indiana Jones set in space. It has a pulp feel to it along with similar twists and turns. You could do much worse than reading this.

The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien ★★★★
I'll just start by saying I was in the bag for this book before it was even written. The Chronicles of Narnia was the first book series I became obsessed with and I still remember when I found them at the library when I was 8. Two years later I picked up The Hobbit and was immediately enthralled again. These two series were so formative on my childhood. Then to discover that the authors of both were longtime friends and colleagues? It boggles the mind. I just knew them as the two men who developed my love of fantasy from an early age.

This is not purely a graphic novel. Nor is it strictly prose. I guess you'd call it illustrated text as it has long passages of both. What it really is, is really good. If you like nonfiction and want to read about two men whose visions shaped the 20th century and beyond, this is the book for you.

What If... Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker Were Siblings? ★★★
This is a prose novel not a graphic one. It's not bad, although I thought the ending was a little glossed over so it could be part of this larger story of America Chavez being a Watcher. It made this feel like it wasn't a complete story after the build up of this whole book.

The story itself is about what would happen if the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were separated as babies and Wanda was adopted by Peter Parker's family. It works much better than I expected. It hits most of the major bests in Spider-Man's life but now he has a sister. The story is told from her point of view as she learns how to use her powers as the Scarlet Witch while still suffering the many tragedies that occur in Peter's life over the years. After all the build up though, it felt like we just ran out of pages instead of actually ending the story.

Human Remains: The Complete Series ★★★
Huge shrimp monsters are portalling in and destroying any person with heightened emotions. This is understandably causing worldwide trauma as you have to keep calm even as you see people ripped apart right in front of you. Even though this is 8 issues there are some subplots that get dropped before they are resolved. The art isn't all that detailed, sometimes making it difficult to tell characters apart.

Storm King Comics Dark & Twisted: Death Mask ★★★
The wife and wife creative team of Amanda Diebert and Cat Staggs team up to bring this tale of a mother's justice. When people start getting murdered in elaborate ways out of a movie, the lead detective realizes there may be more to this than just random killings. Not too shabby.

Last week's ARCs.

Batman and Robin and Howard: Summer Breakdown ★★★
A kids book where Damian Wayne's best friend, Howard, knows Batman and Robin's secret and helps out with monitor duty. They discover the park where they play soccer at is slated to be turned into a recycling facility and realize something fishy is going on. It's a bit of a slight mystery but it's a fun enough story even if Batman is a dope.

Babylon Berlin ★★★★
A noir set in the Weimar Republic era of Germany. This is an adaptation of the first of the Gereon Rath novels about a police detective who transfers from Cologne to Berlin and quickly gets embroiled in a mystery involving a murdered driver and missing Russians along with missing Russian gold. It's good stuff.

X-Men: The Manga: Remastered, Vol. 1 ★★★
An X-Men manga from the 90s now getting an English translation, largely based on the cartoon. It's got a manga slant to it of course. The art is hit and miss depending on who is drawing the chapter. Not bad.

Pixies of the Sixties: You Really Got Me Now ★★★★
I gotta say, this was better than I expected. In this version of England, Pixies are known but discriminated against, treated like second citizens at best. These two stories are much darker than I expected. One involves some serial killers while the other is about some humans who disappeared. The stories also involve a lot of racism and LGBTQ themes. It's quite good with good art.

Pixies of the Sixties: We Can Work It Out ★★★
Two more stories of pixies living in the U.K. in the Sixties. The stories lean toward the heavier side, both about murders of pixies and the pixies are all treated terribly. The first is about a journalist investigating a murder and finding out she's adopted. The second is about a police detective investigating a pixie dust ring. They're both fine.

We Ride Titans ★★★★
This is a family drama about a family that operates the mech that protects a city from Kaiju. The story is in media res so you only get dropped contextual clues about the larger picture of what's going on but that's OK. It just leaves an opportunity for more stories which I'd love to see. Kit is estranged from her family because her parents are hardasses. But her brother who actually operates the mech is spirally out of control and she needs to come home. The art is really good. The story is interesting. What more can you ask for.

Final Cut ★★★
I'll just start by saying I'm in the bag for Charles Burns. Black Hole is one of my favorite comics even with taking 10 years to finish. His illustrations are always so gorgeous and just a little off-kilter. This story is a little more straight forward. It's about some kids making horror movies on their Super 8. One of them has some mental health issues and is in love with the new girl. So we have him pining after the lead actress in their movie while they are all drinking in the Northwest. There's just not a whole lot going on in this. It's too many pages and not enough content. All of the illustrations are still terrific. There's just not enough story to accompany it.

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls ★★★★
It's 1970 in the South. A 15 year old girl gets dropped off at a home a state away to have her baby so no one in her home town will know she was pregnant. Yes, this is set back before Roe Vs. Wade became law. It also has a lot of parallels to now. This is not your typical Grady Hendrix book. The dark humor is gone replaced by how poorly women and especially young girls who got into trouble were treated as pariahs. Anyway, one day at this home, Fern comes across a book about witchcraft and some of the girls begin to take their power back after feeling helpless for so long. But will there be a price to pay? A lot of horror in the book is how these young girls know nothing about childbirth and is treated almost like body horror. It's a good book, just not a light read.

Farewell, My Odin ★★★
It's the Viking versus a wolf boy in this story about the Vikings invading England. It's not bad. I was getting confused about some things until contextual clues helped. Like I thought the bad guy was a bad woman for half the book because he's drawn androgynously. (This happens more than you'd think with manga.) I also would get confused about who the white haired man was because it's in black and white and at some point I guess they die their hair because it's darker. It turns out it's the same person I thought was a woman.

Trench Dogs ★
An anthropomorphic and almost wordless retelling of World War I. I couldn't follow this at all. It's almost all just random violence set in World War I. The art had all of this same muted color too and wasn't very detailed. I couldn't really follow much of a story at all. Just an all around fail unfortunately.

Welcome. Try some of the smaller publishers first, Brittney. Once you build up some stats you'll probably have more luck.

Last week's ARCs.

The Rush: This Hungry Earth Reddens Under Snowclad Hills ★★
Months ago a teenager went to the Yukon to stake his claim in the gold rush. Now his mother follows in his wake, tracking him to this remote outpost where strange things happen and people disappear. I've tried again and again with Spurrier's writing and he always comes at things at such an obtuse angle that I can never follow it. It's further compounded by how much Spurrier loves the written word. I think he secretly wants to write prose. I'm honestly surprised there's any room for Gooden's art with the sheer amounts of journal entries on each page.

The Incal: Dying Star ★★★
An offshoot of the Incal universe about the pirate captain Caimann. He's devolving into a reptilian mutant and the only thing that can hold it back is a rare flower. Meanwhile his crew have all died and live on only as electronic ghosts on his ship. Then there's this weird subplot about a nun that's part of a nihilistic cult at the end of time. This is all fine. I am a fan of Jon Davis-Hunt's art so it all loos very good.

The Blue Flame: The Complete Series ★★★★
A story told in two parts. The Blue Flame has been chosen to defend humanity in a galactic trial to determine if humanity should continue to live or not. At the same time, he's in Wisconsin recovering from a horrible tragedy that happened to his superhero team. It was really good. I do with the ending was a little less ambiguous but I get it.

Money Shot Vol. 4: Money Shot Comes Again ★★★
For the fourth installment of this series, we take on the tech bros. It's not terribly interesting. What was more interesting is that they somehow got permission to use the character of Cherry, an obscure underground character from the 80's who was basically from a sexy Riverdale. What is even more interesting is that Patton Oswalt is working on the next story.

Barbaric Vol. 3: Hell to Pay ★★★★★
The third volume of Barbaric continues to be badass. Owen is trapped in Hell with an old friend while his friends try and figure out how to get him out. I love that Owen thinks that Hell is just a good time. This series is so much fun and super funny. The Hell to Pay one shot with Nicholas Eames is dementedly hilarious.

Life Sucks ★★★
This is actually a comic that came out about 15 years ago, originally from First Second. Now Fantagraphics is giving it a new lease on unlife. It's about a college age kid working at a deadend job at a convenience job, the twist is that he's actually undead, a vampire. It turns out becoming a vampire isn't all touring from castle to castle, seeming all mysterious and sensual. It's a grind, especially when you don't want to kill anyone. Anyway Dave is trapped working all night in this convenience store and meets this hot Goth girl who longs to be an Anne Rice type vampire and has no idea they really exist. Then there's this piece of crap surfer vampire who is the bane of Dave's existence who just wants to get in her pants. That's the crux of the book. There are some smaller trigger warnings for language and attitudes that have changed since this was originally released.

Blow Away ★★
A good story premise about a nature documentarian in Canada maybe accidentally filming a murder. There's way too much focus in throwing a gazillion twists and turns into the last two issues. I completely lost the thread by the time it was over on who the actual bad guys were. Just too much focus on shock and awe and not enough on good storytelling.

Door to Door, Night by Night Vol. 2: Knocking On Heaven's Door ★★★
Not the most original story, I mean monster hunters have been done plenty of times. There's something about these inept door to door salesmen fighting monsters though that's quite fun. BTW, these takes place during the 80's when door to door salesmen still existed.

Last week's ARCs.

Yucatan 1512 ★★★
Not bad. It's about some conquistadors attacking Mayans for their gold. Somehow some big mechs get involved. It's cool even without things being explained. The Mayans talked in pictograms which I thought was interesting. Strangely enough, I was in the Yukatan today when I read this.

Sparks Volume 2: Royalty ★
An LGBTQ+ story where almost nothing ever happens. It's all lurid glances and kissing but no story to speak of. In this one the main character goes to the palace where he meets another wastrel satyr and the two of them live a life of leisure while his ex occasionally trains to be the next arch mage. It's all so tedious, LGBTQ+ or not. I can't believe it took a year to make this drivel.

Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures Phase III--Echoes of Fear ★★★
This was OK. It's about these Echo Stones that can amplify a Jedi's abilities but also uses their life force. I really hate how piece meal this high republic era of storytelling is with no road map on proper reading orders and across multiple reading levels and media. It's a real shoddy way to put this all together and leads to needless confusion to the point of not even making me want to bother. Just number the damn books so I can easily figure out what I need to read.

Space Usagi: White Star Rising ★★★★
You could consider Space Usagi, Usagi Yojimbo with a Star Wars skin on it. Star Wars already had a lot of Japanese influences in both the character designs and even the story itself, so these mesh together very well. The second Space Usagi arc takes place directly after Death and Honor and is really a continuation of that story. Gen makes his first appearance in this universe as Usagi and his small team need to infiltrate his ancestral home. There's also a new story with Akemi but that's a bit goofy. If you like Usagi Yojimbo, you're almost certainly going to like this as well. And it's in full color.

Canto Volume 5: A Place Like Home ★★★★
I love this story of the little clockwork man with the huge heart. He never gives up, even against the powerful Shroudless Man who has enslaved the countryside. It all comes down to this as Canto's rebels have a final confrontation with the Shroudless Man and his minions who are too scared to fight back.

Dr. Werthless: The Man Who Studied Murder [And Nearly Killed the Comics Industry] ★★★★
A really well-balanced account of the life of Dr. Wertham, the man who nearly killed the comic book industry in the 50s with his vendetta against them, even testifying before congress on their evils. I think it's ironic that this is a comic book. But this is played straight. It shows the good he did like the fact that he was instrumental in ending segregation in schools. There are also some gruesome stories of insane people that he testified for, so be forewarned. He was a very complicated individual who thought he was never wrong and rarely got along with people.

Eric Powell adopted a bit of a different style for this comic. It's full black and white and he was trying to emulate the pop art style of the time. I think Powell can do no wrong with his pencils. They always look fantastic.

Fierce: The F*cked-Up Fairy Tale of a Fed-Up Princess ★★★
As a King Arthur story, this is a misnomer. If you changed the name of King Arthur to something else in this story, I'd have no idea this had anything to do with that story. There's no Round Table or other nights, Excalibur is never named. Mordred is not in the picture, instead Arthur has two girls and is just a terrible father. It really has nothing to do with that. Once you get past that, this is a decent story on its own though.

The character designs are sometimes weird and offputting. I honestly had a hard time who was supposed to be human and who wasn't because of it. Everyone just looks kind of Muppety. The story itself is about a princess who runs away because her shitty drunk of a father is determined to marry her off to a disgusting old baron and she runs off with her dad's magic, talking sword.

Nullhunter Volume 1: An Olympos Saga ★★★
Some decent sci-fi opera. I think I'd rather Walsh drew this as well as write it though.

Where Monsters Lie Volume 2: CULL-DE-SAC ★★★★
I actually liked this more than volume 1. Maybe because it focused on fewer characters. Anyway the story of this secret society of serial killers continues with a mix of dark humor and ultraviolence.

The Liminal Zone, Vol. 2 ★★★★
Four more twisted, short stories from Japan's master of horror. I liked the one about the clockwork quite a bit but they are all solid.

Championess ★★★★
A made up story about the first female boxer. Almost nothing is known about her other than she existed. Here she's mixed race in London. Her half sister is in severe debt from their mother getting sick and in danger of being sent to debtors prison. Because the main character is half Indian, no one will give her a job so she takes up boxing to make ends meet and get her and her sister out of poverty. It's a compelling story. The art's solid. The lack of backgrounds can be distracting at times but otherwise pretty good. I really liked the story even if we don't really know how much of it is true.

Just got back from vacation and read a bunch on the plane (and poolside).

Raymond Chandler's Marlowe: The Authorized Philip Marlowe Graphic Novel ★★★
Adaptations of three Chandler short stories. I think something was a bit lost in these adaptations as the motivations can get a bit clunky in places. I'd say read the originals first, then the adaptations if you hunger for more.

Latina Superheroes: Jalisco & Santa ★★
I found the first story about Jalisco to be much better than the 2nd story about Santa (not to be confused with Santa Claus). Jalisco's story is about women in this town going missing. Jalisco meets some other women who help her train to fight back against the people that took her mother.

I didn't know what was going on in the 2nd story. It was about a border town and an election. There were a bunch of people who wore luchador masks and they were some kind of stand in for white people I guess? They thought they were superior and those who didn't wear them were some kind of mongrels. None of it really made any kind of sense and I was completely lost. Kudos though for making diverse comics about women with an all female creative team.

Orisha, Volume 1: With Great Power ★★★
A West African influenced manga. A boy gets the power of an Orisha buried in his chest and is pursued by the rest of the Orisha because of some vague prophecy. It's not bad. Bit underdeveloped maybe.

Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures Phase III--Crash Zone ★★
A big nothingburger of a volume. Crash and her team have been killing off Nihil who were involved with starting the war on Corellia. They find a joke of a Nihil who says he can kill Marchion Ro. It's all just pretty poorly done and the art is poor. These High Republic books have just turned into a big disappointment.

Survival Street Volume 2: The Radical Left ★★★
The adult version of the muppets from Sesame Street are back. They're fighting corporate greed as freedom fighters in the near future of America. There's not really a central story that keeps it from being great. It's still solid though.

What If... Marc Spector Was A Host To Venom? ★★★
This is actually a prose novel. I'm just not a fan of how Marvel has changed the What If concept. It used to be how a small change like if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four would diverge the Marvel time line. Now it's just any story not taking place in the 616 universe. This starts off pretty confusing. There's multiple Moon Knights running around from different universes. Then Venom from yet another dimension is put up to find the psy-fon by some big bad and takes over one of the Moon Knights. I do like how each chapter is from one of Moon Knight's multiple personalities or Venom. The story is just OK though. Really kind of only for Marvel diehards like me.

Sisters of Sorcery: A Marvel: Untold Novel ★★★
Another prose novel taking place in the Marvel universe. The obscure magical women of the Marvel universe band together to take on Clea’s mom Umar after she takes over the Dark Dimension. Clea, Margali Szardos, Holly LaDonna and Talisman must make their way through a bunch of magical realms to overthrow Umar the Unrelenting. It’s not bad.

There's No Time Like the Present ★★★
This was one very strange book. It’s about a couple of British introverts obsessed with nerd culture. It’s a slice of life story with the addition of the Ultranet, an internet that allows you to access media from the future. At a certain point people from the future start traveling back in time. We jump to when these nerds are old men. I really liked this part of the story. Then we jump ahead to the far future where things get pretty weird. It’s pretty solid stuff overall though.

7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga ★★★★
The story takes place across 7 generations of this family but we don't visit every generation in the story. It's about some indigenous people in Canada. A young man has tried to take his own life and his parents tell him stories of their ancestors' hardships coming from the perspective of the Indigenous. The father's story about he and his brother was the most heartbreaking and something that used to be very common then with whites forcing the Indigenous children to go off to schools where they were forced to forget their heritage and live as white people while doing all of the manual labor. The stories are just heartrending.

Last week's ARCs.

Animal Pound ★★★★
An updated Animal Farm for our current political system. This is set at a pound instead of a farm but picks up a lot of the same beats until the animals are all led astray by a charismatic and foolish dog. I'll let you draw whatever conclusions you will. This is Tom King so don't expect a happy ending.

Wingborn ★★★
This series is one I think kids will get a kick out of. I have some issues with the art, mainly the coloring being too dark, making the panels hard to see. The ending was different. I think there will be another one, but it could end here on a bit of a downer too if sales don't warrant another book.

The Innkeeper Chronicles: Clean Sweep The Graphic Novel, Volume 2 ★★
This was pretty much plain awful. This 2nd half of the adaptation needs a bunch of diversions to keep the page count up. The story is just all over the place. The art is terrible. Just go read the book instead.

My Riot ★★★★
I really liked this. But then again I was the same age as Valerie when this took place in 1991 and it really brought me back to that age. Even though I'm not a girl I liked where this headed and the subjects it touches on. It's about a high school ballerina trying to keep her weight down so she can perform in Swan Lake. Then she goes to see a local rock band with a new friend, becomes completely enthralled and decides to start a band. That becomes her new focus as she begins to discover there's more to life than she initially knew. There is some triggering things that were real both back then and now. Struggles with smoking to keep weight off and struggles with body issues and not handling it properly. But there's also acceptance about who she is as she gets into her band more and more and I get that.

Essential Judge Dredd: Origins ★★★
For a book called Origins, I would not consider this a good jumping on point for Judge Dredd. It's about the 100+ year history of how the Judges came about. To be honest, It dragged in parts with the pages and pages of exposition. The story taking place in current time was much more intriguing. Still, it was cool to see the creators of Judge Dredd return to tell this story, especially now that Carlos Ezquerra has passed away.

Song of a Blackbird ★★★★★
Just terrific. It's about a young woman in Amsterdam and her grandmother. Her grandmother gets sick and finds out she's not biologically related to her siblings. The young woman, Annika, begins to research these prints that her grandmother owns and finds a story about the Resistance against the Nazis in World War II. The story begins to be told in two time periods, one about this young woman who resisted as a printmaker and helped her grandmother when she was a child. The other is the current story about Annika trying to rediscover her grandmother's past while also trying to find a donor match for her grandmother's leukemia. The two stories eventually dovetail perfectly into one another.

The art was really interesting. In the flashback scenes during the war, van Lieshout took actual period pictures of the buildings and then drew her characters on top of them. It was a really interesting way to immerse oneself into the time period.

While the story itself is fictionalized, all of the characters are based on real people. The last 20 pages are so delve into the real characters everyone was based on.

Little Monarchs ★★★★
A near-future, dystopian, all-ages comic that doesn't hide any of what that might entail. All of the bad stuff is there, just maybe not presented in such a way that a middle schooler or older couldn't read it. In 2101 most of humanity is gone after 70 years where the sun's rays kill people. Elvie is 10 years old, living with an adult woman scientist who has created a temporary cure that allows them to be out in the daylight. The cure revolves around monarch butterflies. While they are trying to find a permanent cure, they migrate kind of like the monarchs, harvesting what they need while avoiding people. The beginning of the book is written from Elvie's point of view and sometimes includes her observation in her journal as prose. It can be a little much at times but you can also skip some of it if it loses your attention. I thought the rest of the book was kind of great.

Fire Starters ★★★★
A story of racism and history of intolerance towards the indigenous people of Canada. It's about 2 First Nation teenagers who are left to take the fall when someone sets a gas station on fire even though they had nothing to do with it. It kind of reads like a morality play.

Nemesis: Rogues' Gallery ★★
Did we really need a third volume of nihilistic Batman? This was so uninteresting. BTW, how is Nemesis not dead after Big Game? If nothing else, Hit Girl would have for sure put a bullet in his head instead of letting him live, paralyzed or not. Anyway, Nemesis makes a comeback and gets a paper thin evil Robin for a sidekick.

Orcs in Space ★★★
To be honest, I expected more when I saw Justin Roiland was involved. Rick and Morty is one of the funniest things I've ever watched. This was just OK. It's more for younger readers and if you're a 10 year old boy, you'll probably love this. Otherwise, this play on Star Trek where 3 dumb orcs steal the Enterprise gets old pretty quick.

Jonna and the Unpossible Monsters Vol. 1 ★★★★
A really fun, all-ages comic about a family who gets separated when kaiju appear in the area. A year later Rainbow is looking for her missing family. She finds her sister, Jonna, in the wilderness living feral and apparently super strong. I really like how Samnee tells this story visually for the most part. It reminded me of his series Fire Power in that regard. Just really good stuff. I immediately put the rest of the series on hold at the library.

Soul Taker ★★★
A story about an immortal psychic vampire who is hunted by the Venatori, an ancient Catholic sect of warriors. I've seen a variation of this story a lot of times before. It's fine. I hate how it ended in the middle of the story though. With these new titles from smaller publishers you need to have a series of well-defined arcs in case of cancellation so you have a complete story. This ending was pretty frustrating.

Into the Sun (The Underfoot #2) ★★★
This 2nd volume felt like it skewed more to younger readers. It's still exciting but egads, there are a lot of characters to follow. These smart hamsters start off on their heels trying to figure out what's happening as the wasps and iguanas reveal their plans (somewhat). I do hope we see more as there is clearly meant to be more and this is left in media res.

Dimwood ★★★★
Richard Corben's final work. It's a tale of gothic horror. Corben died before he could quite finish it, leaving Jose Villarubia to color the final 20 some pages. It's about a woman who returns to her ancestral home after her mother's death. We soon find out there is a monster roaming the countryside killing people. It's solid stuff and unlike a lot of artists later in life, Corben never lost a step in his art. It still looks the same as it did 50 years ago.

You're Not a Real Dog Owner Until… ★★★★
Dog owners are going to identify with this book a LOT. If you're not a dog owner, I'm not sure why you'd be reading this in the first place. There were certainly pages where I just said to myself, "Yup!"

Secrets of Camp Whatever Vol. 1 ★★★★
This was a great book for kids. It's about a girl who moves to a new town and is almost immediately dropped off at camp where things are more than a bit weird. Willow has hearing aids but it never defines her. I love how parts of this get pretty spooky but it never gets overly scary. It's the perfect balance for kids.