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

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

Some recent reads. Just got back from the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown last night.

Seoul Before Sunrise ★★
A pointless story about a girl who feels abandoned by her friend after they go to different colleges in Korea. This girl starts working at a convenience store overnights as a way to put herself through school. She meets this older woman who talks her into repeatedly sneaking away from the store when she should be working. There's never really any chemistry between them and the girl is twice her age but she randomly realizes she's a lesbian and declares her love for her friend which of course goes poorly.

Huda F Cares? ★★
This looked pretty interesting. A comic about a girl growing up in a Muslim family. I used to live near Dearborn, MI and there is a large Muslim community there. It's about Huda and her sisters going to Disney World. For a book that's supposed to be funny though, this just wasn't really. The art is REALLY poor too. Huda looks like a slug with magic hands floating in the air.

FIREBRAND: THE INITIATION OF NATALI PRESANO ★★
This just isn't very good. It's about a girl who has magic. She goes to live with her mom's side of the family to learn how to control it. She returns to Seattle as an adult to fight magical enemies. She isn't allowed to kill even though the bad guys are draining the life force of people left and right, leaving stacks of bodies everywhere. The story is really confusing and often contradicts itself.

Sirens of the City ★★★★★
This was just terrific. It's set in the 80s counter culture scene in New York. A teenage girl gets kicked out of her house when her foster parents learn she's pregnant and she heads to NYC. There she meets some other people and learns there's more to her than one first thought (see the title). It gives off Lost Boys vibes on the East Coast. My only complaint is that it should have been many more volumes.

Yasmeen ★★★★★
This was very good and also harrowing. It's about a teenager who was separated from her family when ISIS took over Mosul, Iraq. The rest of her family made it to the U.S. while she was forced to become some older man's wife that she didn't even know. She's made it to her family at the beginning of the story and we flashback to her time in captivity as the story moves along. It's really horrible but never graphic. She doesn't let it break her though and we see how she and her family adopt to life in a small town in Iowa.

Usagi Yojimbo Saga Volume 7 ★★★★
Another fantastic massive tome of Usagi Yojimbo. One of the things I like is that these stories can pretty much be read in a vacuum. Even though this contains volumes 26-28 of the series, you can start here without missing a beat. The nature of the story is that the main character is a ronin roaming from town to town helping people. There are recurring characters but not a whole lot of mythology that you have to remember unlike most other comics.

If You'll Have Me ★★★
An overly cute light romance between two women in their first year of college. One has never dated before and doesn't pick up on social queues at all. The other has a reputation for one night stands. I found this overly long at 300 pages, considering it doesn't have anything deep to say.

Last week's ARCs.

The Last Fall ★★★
This was actually pretty good. The story is about a sergeant who has lost it all during a religious war between 2 planets.

The Explorers (Snowpiercer, #2-3) ★
Apparently there's an unknown second train travelling the Earth. It's called Icebreaker but a better name would have been Cashgrab.

DEN Volume 1: Neverwhere ★★★
Back in the 70's, Corben hooked up with Heavy Metal to publish Den in its magazine. This person gets a brand new, ripped but naked body after going through a portal to this fantasy realm. Kind of just ignore the plot and the fact that no one wears clothes for some reason, men and women just letting everything float in the breeze. Corben's visuals are terrific. All of the art has been retouched and the terrible lettering completely replaced.

Shades of Magic Vol. 1: The Steel Prince ★★★
An OK prequel story about the King from the books when he was just a prince gathering experience. His father sends him away to a lawless port city.

Wasted Space: The Cosmic Collection ★★★
This started off pretty bad. The story was confusing and the art was terrible. But it does get better. The story straightens itself out. Sherman's art gets better over the course of these 25 issues.

Usagi Yojimbo, Vol. 26: Traitors of the Earth ★★★
I couldn't get into this volume as much as I have with other Usagi stories. I know there's been magic in the series before but the use here was too over the top for me and took away some of the realism. It's still solid, just not one of my favorites. Once people start floating over rivers that's too much for me when the story is typically pretty well grounded.

Brother Nash ★★★★
I like the idea of this Ancient travelling the highways in a semi helping people. I love all the Native American lore in here and just the general strangeness of this story.

Bacchus, Vol. 1: Immortality Isn't Forever ★★★★
Bacchus has been around for 4,000 years, drinking wine and telling stories. Most of the other gods are gone but someone from Greek mythology occasionally shows up and causes problems.

Bacchus, Vol. 2: The Gods of Business ★★★★★
I love the mix of Greek mythology and gangsters. Bacchus is barely even in this volume and it doesn't even matter. Joe Theseus and the Eyeball Kid versus the Telchines is where it's at.

Bacchus, Vol. 3: Doing the Islands With Bacchus ★★★★
Bacchus takes center stage again in this volume. Most of the stories consist of Bacchus drinking with his buddies while telling stories from Greek mythology with his twist on them or the histories of wine or the like. Hermes also makes his first appearance in the story. This is also when I started buying the book in single issues when I could find it at my LCS. Good stuff.

Bacchus, Vol. 4: The Eyeball Kid: One Man Show ★★★
Those one man monologues from the Eyeball Kid are tough to sit through. It's much more interesting whenever the story focuses on the Telchines. So Telchines, good. Eyeball Kid, bad. Even though they are all bad.

Welcome Tasha!

Last week's ARCs.

All Talk ★★
Some dummies in a street gang in Berlin try and up their game. This was kind of terrible with really bad art.

Grendel Tales Omnibus: Volume 1 ★★★
Five stories set in the Grendel universe endorsed by its creator Matt Wagner. Only one of them is more than just OK though.

Pound for Pound ★★★
A female MMA fighter has to go after the cartel who took her little sister. There's a lot of twists and turns here, some of them not making the most sense. It's over the top graphic action. It reminded me some of Machete but less cheesy.

Snowpiercer - The Prequel: Part 1: Extinction ★★
Full of a lot of fluff for a 100 page story. It feels like it was padded out to get two volumes of content out of this. Adding in unnecessary historical things like the Krakoa volcanic eruption added nothing to the story except filling out that page count. Surely the story could have been made long enough just with these ecoterrorists and the lead up to the coming disaster. A better explanation for how this train stays operable and free of snow would be great too. Both my parents worked as engineers on the railroad and snow is an issue, especially when it's dozens of feet deep.

Hellsing, Vol. 7 ★★★
A volume all about Seras Victoria which was cool. It's also pretty much one big long fight. The panels though are so overfilled with crap that it's sometimes really hard to pick up what's happening. Sometimes less is more. I also can't get over how ridiculous the soldiers for the Catholic church look in their Klan robes.

Shook! A Black Horror Anthology ★★
This was a real mixed bag for me. Some stories had solid art, some I couldn't even tell what was happening or didn't assist with telling the story through sequential art. There are some authors I enjoy in this like Rodney Barnes and David F. Walker. It's a real shame that this didn't work more.

Monstress, Vol. 1: Awakening ★★★★★
A breathtaking new series. Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda are firing on all cylinders with this series. Takeda has taken the best of Eastern and Western comics and created an original world with a somewhat steampunk look mixed with the lands of fairy. An uneasy truce exists between humans and Archons (basically fairies). Humans have discovered an Archon's essence can be distilled down to give humans magic. Those on both sides are hunting for a teenage girl trying to control the elder god hidden inside her.

Monstress, Vol. 2: The Blood ★★★★★
The closest thing I've read to a true illustrated fantasy novel. The art and story combine with Manga and Lovecraftian influences for a unique experience. I'm not sure how a book can look both ethereally beautiful and gut-wrenchingly bloody and awful at the same time. Reading this often feels like the first time I read Sandman back in the day, like we're in on something uniquely special that no one else has discovered yet. BTW, I love Kippa. At first, she comes across as this stupid little girl and then says something insightful or profound out of the blue. Everyone seems extremely annoyed by her, but then finds themselves looking after her.

Monstress, Vol. 3: Haven ★★★★★
I will say that this reads much better in big chunks. Reading this straight through has made things clearer. There's a ton going on with a lot of characters weaving in and out. In this volume. Maika Halfwolf heads to a new city that was able to sit out the previous war due to a magical dome over the city. That dome though is on the fritz now with factions approaching. Queue up Maika and the old one inside her Zinn to get it back up and running again. Takeda's art is just as lush and gorgeous as the previous volumes.

Monstress, Vol. 4: The Chosen ★★★★★
Maika meets her father who she immediately doesn't trust. We get a lot of backstory into what's been going on as everyone prepares for war. I love that Kippa gets a chance to shine too. She's my favorite character in this harsh, violent world. Takeda's art is just perfect. Such a terrific blending of East and West.

Monstress, Vol. 5: Warchild ★★★★★
The war between humans and the arcanics begins with the humans invading the city of Ravenna. Maika helps out in a hopeless cause to defend the city. The story continues to be dense and fantastic. The art is amaze balls.

Monstress, Vol. 6: The Vow ★★★★★
A few volumes in, I feel like we're finally getting some shape as to what is going on here. Although there are still a ton of factions here and some of them flit back and forth frequently. Starts off a bit slower with some smaller stories while there's a lull in the war in Ravenna. Then things heat up again towards the end with more revelations.

Last week's ARCs.

This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America ★★★
Two city folk from San Francisco move to rural Idaho purely because they can afford to buy a house there so they buy a tiny house and set it in the middle of nowhere on the 6 acres they bought. It starts off two-fold as the story of 2 dummies that don't know anything about owning a home now have to fend for themselves in harsh country. The other half is moving to a rural and very conservative area filled with racism and conspiracy theories right as Trump became president. Meanwhile, the author is Iranian. It all quickly becomes very surface level though as Mahdavian can't decide what stories he wants to tell. It starts to become more and more about very little.

Always Never ★★★★★
A story about the one who got away. Begins with chapter 20. An elderly couple go on their first date after decades apart. Each chapter steps back in time as things introduced in chapter 20 are explained along the way. Zeno is the boy who left town to travel the world as a sailor while Anita has been the mayor for the last 20 years. It's a terrific love story as long as you overlook one foible that I'm guessing bothers Europeans less than it does Americans.

The Last Murder at the End of the World ★★★
Yeah, I read books too.

This is a different kind of mystery for Stuart Turton. It's set in a dystopian future where a hundred years ago, a mysterious fog covered the earth killing everything it touched. Well, everywhere but this remote Greek island where they were able to keep the fog at bay. Now there are 122 villagers and 3 elders struggling to get by. When one of the elders is killed, the fog begins to roll in and Emory only has 48 hours to find the murderer before everyone dies. This requires a more of a suspicion of disbelief than Turton's other two books. It also has some plot holes in it that you need to ignore to enjoy this. (That's the problem with science. It doesn't change to make your book work.)

Last week's ARCs.
Resonant: The Complete Series ★★★★★
I really like this series. This is actually my 2nd time going through it. There's no real setup. It's about a family in a post apocalyptic world. There are these waves of madness that come through and turn everyone incredibly violent while they are happening. Shortly before they happen the cicadas go crazy giving people time to quickly prepare to keep from hurting others. A father has to go off and find medicine for his sick son leaving his older brother and sister in charge even though they are still kids as well. And the sister is on crutches, missing a leg. So the story takes place in two locations, one about the father trying to get back to his children. The other, the kids trying to survive alone in this cabin in the woods.

These Savage Shores ★★★★★
Absolutely stunning. Ram V's story execution, Sumit Kumar's gorgeous art, all of it is brilliant. Set in 1760's India where the English are trying to invade, a vampire is exiled from London to India where he comes across an Indian demon, a Rakshasa. The story spirals out from there.

Patience & Esther ★★★
A recommend due to something we don't see very often, an Eduardian queer romance along with body positivity. The story's a bit basic. Think Downton Abbey if two of the servant women were a secret lesbian couple with Skinemax level sex scenes.

Worried Whippet: A Book of Bravery ★★★★
A supersized picture book about a nervous dog. They slowly get over their anxiety after making a new dog friend. Anyone that's been around dogs will probably have met a dog with similar traits.

I admire your dedication to planning. Mine is always to wing it and hope I get everything read before it's released. (I also have the benefit of an excellent library system I can use to catch up if something slips through the cracks.)

Last week's ARCs.

Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995 ★★
This is a neat idea and works well once a week. Mack takes odd things he hears people around New York say and puts them in comic strip panels. Each panel is its own thing though so each two line strip is sometimes 14 different conversations. Multiply this by 300 pages and it's an exhausting read.

Alfred Hitchcock: The Master of Suspense ★★★
A pretty extensive biography of the Master of Suspense. All of the jumping around in time made it really difficult to follow though. And it pretty much ignores all of his obsessive behavior with his leading ladies or at the very least plays it down to the point where it seems overblown which it really wasn't. If you're going to do a biography, it should tell the good and the bad.

Taka ★★
You can tell this was written by someone that writes children's comics. It's got that same kind of hand waving over nonsense like "hard lightness" and "hero metal". This thing is filled with all this gibberish that means nothing when it all just comes down to an excuse to fight robot animals.

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees ★★★★★
This is one little messed up puppy of a story. It's set in an anthropomorphic world like something Richard Scarry would do. It's about a person in a small town who has been secretly murdering people off in the city for years. But now another killer has appeared in her town, one that's leaving bodies on display. Now she has to find the killer before it leads the police to what she's been doing. The art is interesting because it's got this fluffy look to it and then all of a sudden there will be a graphic murder. Looking forward to seeing what Horvath does next.

Last week's ARCs.

Just Another Story: A Graphic Migration Account ★★★★
The story of a man living in the U.S. who reflects back when he came here from El Salvador a decade before with his mother. It goes into great detail how they worked with coyotes to travel here over a vast distance all the way through Guatemala and Mexico. You also get a sense of their fears and worries as the whole time they were at the mercy of these shady people. Really interesting to see other people's perspectives and makes you very thankful that we have so much here.

The Strange Death of Alex Raymond ★
This is what happens when you sit alone in an echo chamber for the last 20 years. When you are your only sounding board, everyone involved agrees. It starts off as an examination of art styles. By the end, it's 6,000 notebooks of gibberish that Dave Sim couldn't even be bothered to finish. After 250 pages are so, he just up and ended it, leaving Carson Grubaugh holding the bag with no idea how to finish it.

Salt Magic ★★★
If you are the kind of person that likes answers posed by the story, this is not the book for you. Multiple things are just sprung out of nowhere and you are expected to go with it. The story begins with a little girl in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Her older brother has just returned from World War I a changed man with the scars, physical and mental, to prove it. But things are different now and she misses the closeness they once shared. Then out of nowhere a witch appears and turns the farm's water to salt water and she goes on a quest to save her family.

Petar & Liza ★★
Just a real nothing burger of a story. One that goes on for 175 pages. It's about a guy who returns from military service and then drifts through this city for 100 pages before he meets a girl and they drift through life together for awhile.

Last week's ARCs.

Strangers In Paradise Volume Two ★★★★
Another terrific volume of SIP. The way this one is broken up can be a little confusing at times. We start with Katchoo back working with the Parker Girls. Then after a change we flash back to high school. After those issues we flash forward 10 years into the future where things are drastically different before heading back to the current time and begin to see why things have changed. That's my only criticism, that it may be a little more difficult to piece together the storyline for first time readers. Otherwise it's a perfect combination of a terrific story with fantastic artwork. Terry Moore is in my short list of favorite comic creators.

United States vs. Murder, Inc. Vol. 1 ★★★
Jagger Rose gets a backstory while things ratchet up between what's left of the United States and Murder Inc. There's some great stuff in this but there's also some jedi handwaving moments where things are just glossed over, especially towards the end. It's almost like there's a couple of different stories mashed together.

Dark Horse has made a mess of naming this series. It's actually volume 2. DH rebranded it this go around as Murder Inc.

Django, Hand On Fire: The Great Django Reinhardt ★★★★
Django Reinhardt's early life told in graphic novel form. If you aren't familiar with Django, he's one of the first guitar greats. He was a child prodigy, playing professionally with adults by the time he was 10 or 11. He originally played banjo until a fire badly burned his hand leaving him without the use of a couple of his fingers. At that point he had to teach himself how to play again, this time on guitar.

Hellsing, Vol. 5 ★★★
Hellsing goes after the British carrier the Nazi vampires captured. Then things get even crazier. The way this Nazi leader talks though is just ridiculous.

Murder Inc. Volume 3: Jagger Rose ★★★
Now that the five families have finished their war with the United States, the Pope wants to see them so the heads of the New York mob head to Rome. Then things get really crazy. It's starts off pretty strong. The second half is really compressed though. There's lots of hand waving and then finishing up with a new status quo. It feels like multiple arcs condensed down into one. I'm still not a fan of the coloring on this book either. Too many reds and purples instead of actual coloring.

Last week's arcs.

The Case of the Bleeding Wall ★★★★
This was cool. It's about a woman who is a famous supernatural (or supernormal as she calls it) investigator. She and her new assistant go to Rome to help an old boyfriend. He and his fiancé bought a house that has a painting on a wall that is bleeding. Things spiral from there.

Edgeworld Vol. 2 ★★★
Not as focused as the first volume. Still you say space western and I'm in. I hate that it ends on a cliffhanger.

The Worst Ronin ★★
This was alright. It's about a female ronin in a feudal Japan that also has TVs and cell phones but no cars and still treats women like they are lesser. The art is pretty poor and the story kind of basic, especially considering it's over 300 pages long.

Codex Black (Book Two): Bird of Ill Omen ★★★
Basically a manga set in Mesoamerica by Latin creators. It can be way too wordy at times but it's not half bad. The main characters are a girl with super strength and a boy with wings who are trying to stop a secret cabal from starting a war throughout the area.

Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins: Caduceus Clay ★★★★★
This was short but terrific. I'm not all that familiar with Critical Role but that didn't really matter. A good fantasy story is a good fantasy story. This one is also filled with gorgeous art (which hasn't always been the case with these Critical Role origin stories). My only complaint about this is that I wanted more.

Youth Volume 3 ★
While the story is more focused this go around, it's also just dumb with logical errors and even spelling errors in the lettering. The kids are now living on Mars and can somehow breathe the unbreathable atmosphere there and differences in how sound or gravity work there are ignored. People on Earth are controlling this kid on Mars even though even sending just text to Mars has a latency of 6 to 40 minutes. (This took me less than 30 seconds to find out on the internet so there's really no excuse for Pires.) Science is just completely ignored, as is grammar. Apparently no one at Amazon or Dark Horse knows the difference between here or hear, to or too or even from and form.

Anyone who is struggling to make it in comics and needs some encouragement should just be handed a Curt Pires comic. Because if this person can make it, anyone can. Of course, you'll probably find out he's a nepo baby.

The Oloris: Heroes Will Unite ★★★★
A lot of the series Youneek has been building towards culminate in this series. It's basically the Justice League of this universe as all of the heroes come together to try and stop this despot from taking over most of the countries in Africa.

Loud: Stories to Make Your Voice Heard ★★★★
Some good short stories revolving around violence towards women, slut shaming, self harm, things of that nature.

Watership Down: The Graphic Novel ★★★★★
Now this is how you adapt a classic story into a graphic novel. Who would have ever thought the story of some rabbits in the English countryside could be so compelling? And so fraught with danger. This adaptation does a wonderful job of translating the story to the visual medium. The illustrations are exquisite. So is the story. This is top notch stuff, my friends. There's a very good chance this ends up as a Christmas gift for friends and family this year.

Quentin by Tarantino ★★★★★
This is more of an illustrated novel than a graphic novel but I have to say that didn't lessen my enjoyment of it at all. It goes really in depth on Tarantino's early life and then each of his films. It's really interesting for any film buff in general and Tarantino fans in particular are going to be like pigs rolling around in the mud with how much they'll enjoy this. It's excellent.

Rosh wrote: "Chernobyl: The Fall of Atomgrad by Matyáš Namai

A graphic novel about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Won't ..."

I gave this one 4 stars as well.

A bunch of arcs I read last week.

Radium Girls ★★★★
A true story about the Radium Girls. They worked in a watch factory in New Jersey painting radium on the dials of watches so they'd glow in the dark. The women were encouraged to lick the brush tips to get a finer point, each time ingesting radium. Even after the girls started getting sick, the company's lawyers drew out the trial trying to wait out the women so that most of them would die before the case was settled. This case was part of the impetus used for getting better workplace protections for workers in place and things like OSHA. Apparently this happened in multiple locations because Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine wrote a song about this same thing happening in his hometown in Illinois.

Dark Spaces: Good Deeds ★★★
A completely unrelated story as this Dark Spaces title Scott Snyder created is just kind of a catch all for spooky stories. This one is about a woman and her daughter who move to St. Augustine to open a diner. A disgraced journalist is also headed there for a puff piece to get her career back on track. There some weird things happen including some murders and the plot begins to thicken.

All My Bicycles ★★
A nonlinear biography where a woman talks about little snippets of her life revolving around the tons of bicycles she has owned. It's OK. My biggest takeaway is that she's lived in a lot of places in the Western Hemisphere.

Cyberpunk 2077: XOXO ★
This stunk. I could barely tell what was going on. So many pages of all red art really obscured things. Then interspersing things with that pointless cartoon nonsense. Just completely awful and not worth the paper it's printed on.

Indiginerds ★★★
As with most of these anthologies, some stories are more interesting than others. I didn't think most of these revolved around nerd culture, but just culture in general. My favorite was about a person that started up a bunch of pirate radio stations in Mexico. I didn't like the part where white people tried to take them over and push any minorities out. But it was a really cool and original story, plus it was true.

Tear Us Apart ★★★
Two kids raised in a kung fu murder cult fall for one another and decide to run away. Beset by the rest of the cult, they find some help along the way. Which means they also have something to lose. I liked the use of the limited color palette and the art was solid. This is the rare celebrity co-written comic that wasn't half bad.

Youth Season Two ★★
Not much better than volume one. The story is confused and doesn't make much sense. The art is terrible. I can only tell characters apart from their haircut. Not even the coloring helps because everyone's in shadow so I can't even tell what race a character is to help me differentiate and tell who's who. Then these clowns have the audacity to have their main characters find a comic book from Curt Pires and Alex Diotto and they compare themselves to the terrific Brubaker and Phillips. Oh, the hubris!

Birdking Volume 1 ★★★★
I quite liked this. It's about a teenage apprentice, Bianca, and her father figure smith. They are the last of a line of smiths that can forge magical weapons. Because of this they are the only two left alone in this kingdom perpetually at war. Things happen and Bianca goes on the run with an ancient undead king who has been sitting on his throne in an abandoned castle, the Birdking. This sword and sorcery book is full of dark elements, the kind of which I dig. Crom's art brings to mind if Mike Mignola and Daniel Warren Johnson had a baby.

The United States of Murder Inc. Vol. 1: Truth ★★★★
I'm a huge fan of Powers so I was ecstatic when I saw the same creators were involved in this. The mob more or less operates in the open in New York, Chicago, and Vegas and there's a detente with the government. When a Senator is killed, a newly made man and a hitwoman are blamed and go on the run to determine who actually killed him.

Cheryl ★★
This starts off fine with a woman figuring out in her forties that she's gay. She's obsessed with spiritual alignment and goes on some bad dates with New Age types. Then this thing devolves into being abducted by aliens and visited by a demon. It turned into very much of a WTF is happening?

An Outbreak of Witchcraft: A Graphic Novel of the Salem Witch Trials ★★★★
A well told story, just one that's difficult to read. Over 20 people were murdered basically on the say so of tween girls with no evidence other than the testimony of those who thought they'd be called out too if they didn't comply. People were just making up nonsense stories as "spiritual evidence" and it was taken as fact. (Kind of like stories on the internet.) The prejudices and demagoguery actually remind me of people now and that's difficult to put to paper that that many people could be so stupid and myopic.

Edgeworld Season One (Comixology Originals): A Little Chaos In Your Life ★★★
A solid space western with steady art from Pat Oliff. I gotta say, I didn't expect to like something from Chuck Austen after his terrible Marvel and DC comics but this wasn't bad.

The Early Days of ESPN: 300 Daydreams and Nightmares ★★
I had high hopes for this but it unfortunately wasn't very good. It really needed a stronger editor to put some structure around it. The first third of it mentions almost everyone working at ESPN when it started, but no stories or anything interesting. The guy who wrote this was an executive producer and had some kind of marketing background. It's so inside baseball that I can't see anyone outside the marketing industry really getting into this. Plus, I've never seen a book with so much name dropping and, me a self-proclaimed sports nut had no idea who they were other than Bob Ley and Chris Berman. There are some good stories here, but they are few and far between.

Last week's ARCs.

Star Trek: Day of Blood ★★★
A solid crossover of IDW's ongoing Star Trek All-Stars comics. A faction of the Klingons are trying to take over the empire and killing everyone with everyone else stuck on Qo'noS. Not as much happens as I would have expected. It's mainly a lot of running around. Still it was fine. That Lower Decks issue was unnecessary but pretty funny.

Tolkien: Lighting Up The Darkness ★★
Unfortunately, this wasn't very good. It's about J.R.R. Tolkein's life. Well it's mostly about his teenage years at school and his time in World War I. It's overfilled with passages of reciting poetry instead of actual information about Tolkein's life. And nothing about his time after the war is in there

Too Many Bullets ★★★★
If you've never read a Nathan Heller novel, you are missing out. He's a fictional detective inserted into real world events. I love this kind of thing, where you get kind of an alternate history of a real event and find out what really happened. In this case, Nate is now in his 60's (It sounds like this may finally be the last Heller novel after 19 of them.) and runs the successful A-1 detective agency in Chicago, L.A. and New York. His friend, Robert F. Kennedy, asks him to fill in at the last minute as the head of security at the Ambassador Hotel for his campaign event that night during the California primary. I'm sure you can see where this is headed. Nate's there when RFK is shot and begins to look into the case, where things don't appear on the up and up. Could there really be another conspiracy and cover up circling around another Kennedy? Read and find out.

Mucho Mojo: A Hap and Leonard Graphic Novel ★★★
Joe Lansdale is a good writer so I was excited to see he'd adapted some of his Hap and Leonard novels into comics. In this one, Hap inherits his uncle's house and the two stumble into the hunting grounds of a serial killer.

Last week's ARCs.

A Fire Among Clouds (Codex Black, #1) ★★
This was kind of terrible. It's basically a manga set in Mesoamerica. A boy and a girl become friends as they quest around Mexico. The boy gains the power to fly from falling in a hole. He gathers a bunch of feathers in his hat and suddenly gains the power to fly. WTF? There's a ton of nonsensical writing like this.

Nights Volume 1 ★★
This is set in an alternate 2003 where Florida is part of Spain and there are only 31 states. I'm not sure why that's even noted though because it doesn't play into the story at all and everything culture wise seems to be the same as actual history. The real change is that vampires and ghosts are real and not considered dangerous or scary. There's not much of a through story. It's about a teenager who has to go live with his older cousin after his parents died. There he has a vampire and a ghost for roommates. I guess this would be considered a slacker comedy. I just considered it not all that interesting and a bit pointless.

Usagi Yojimbo: 40th Anniversary Reader ★★★★
If you're an Usagi reader, you aren't going to find anything new here. If you're not, this is a pretty good introduction to Usagi Yojimbo's world. The one really interesting thing is the whole volume is in color which is pretty rare.

Crave ★★
This was kind of stupid. It's basically a cut Black Mirror episode. It's about a dating app running through a school that is answering everyone's desires, to the point where teens are all having sex right in the hallways of the school. There is the downside that everyone saw coming. It hits about every trope it can. I just don't get the love for Maria Llovet. Her comics aren't very good.

Hotelitor: Luxury-Class Defense and Hospitality Unit ★★★
This was pretty goofy. Why would anyone put a hotel inside of Voltron? Well, for whatever reason, Josh Hicks did. Then he has them get lost in space and take on evil corporations. You know, like giant hotel mechas do.

Killer Queens 2: Kings, Not Wings! ★★★
An all LGBTQ creative team leads a story about two bounty hunters, one a woman, the other a gay man. They get involved in this sci-fi universe when a Prince escapes their home world because their father is a toxic male jerk who wants to cut their wings off. It's not bad. Nowhere near as good as Booher's Canto was, but not bad.

Mirka Andolfo's Mercy: The Fair Lady, The Frost, and The Fiend ★★★
So much of this just leaves you hanging. There's a distinct lack of world building or explanation. It reminds me of John Carpenter's The Thing if it had been set 100 years earlier. It's about this small town where this Lady and her aide arrive. They are secretly some kinds of monsters and this thing is filled with body horror. Andolfo's art is fantastic. Her storytelling is severely lacking though.

Scoop, Vol. 1: Breaking News ★★★
A teenage girl gets an internship at the worst TV station in Miami. There she gets involved in a wacky case involving time travel after reporting on a murder for the station.

Star Wars: Hyperspace Stories Vol. 3: Light and Shadows ★★★
Four single issue stories with a through line of what happens to a stuffed animal. It's fine.

A Fox in My Brain ★★★★
A comic written and drawn by a French woman suffering from a bipolar disorder. She does a great job of making the art seem playful while also getting the points across of how it affects her. Her cyclothymia is represented as this fox who tries to talk her into making snap decisions or feeding off her lows. I thought she did a great job of conveying what it's like to have a disorder like this.

Anna ★
I wanted to like this because I like to support Fantagraphics but this was stupid with some real fugly art. It's about 3 generations of Annas who are really tall. That's the whole story. Then it's page after page of legs turned every which way as they spill out of baby carriages and the like.

The Asiri Volume 1 ★★★
A version of Wakanda created by a Nigerian creative team. It's some solid Afrofuturist comics. My only problem with it is there are a lot of characters with little introduction to keep track of, especially with that unexplained cold open.

Trick Pony ★
The art in this is so freaking bad. It looks like a little person riding the horse on the cover. It's about a washed up, gay, rodeo cowboy who is riding home to see his sick father. Along the way are all these magical realism interludes with him confronting his past failed relationships. The storytelling is so jumbled and confusing though as it's hard to make heads or tails of the story. Oof, these Comixology Originals are starting to feel like the comics that every other company said no to first.

Last week's ARCs.

When the Lake Burns ★★
While the art was solid, this story was stupid. Kids decide to see if a legend is true when a local lake in the woods catches fire. They've heard anything put in the fire turns to gold. When they test it out find out everything just burns, they just keep burning more and more things, including things like their skateboard (and ultimately much worse). These are the dumbest kids ever put to paper.

Edenfrost ★★★★★
This was excellent. It's about a young brother and sister who have to go on the run after their parents are killed. It's set in Ukraine after World War I. They are Jewish and being chased by some soldiers. What the soldiers don't know is that the kids can summon a golem. The art is outstanding. A love finding these kinds of gems in independent comics.

Grim, Vol. 3: Lust for Life ★★★
The team goes to Hell in order to get back Marcel while some bigger concept is unleashed. It's a bit more unfocused and scattered than the first two volumes. Flaviano and Rico Renzi continue to do the Lord's work on art.

Fables: The Deluxe Edition Book Sixteen ★★★★
It was so nice to have Fables back even if it took 2 years for the 12 issues to come out and with Willingham's falling out with DC, we probably won't see any more (at least from this creative team which is the reason it was so good.) This is mainly about the Cubs, Bigby and Snow's children as they become adults. There's a new big bad that acts more or less like Prince Brandish, just less interesting. I do wish we at least got some backstory to flesh him out more. Some other old favorites are along for the ride as well, along with some new characters. It was really nice to visit this world again.

The Heart That Fed: A Father, a Son, and the Long Shadow of War ★★★★
The memoir of a Vietnam vet and how his time there affected the rest of his life, written and drawn by his son. It's very interesting.

BRZRKR: Bloodlines, Volume 1 ★★
Two stories of random civilizations that Keanu wiped out with his bloodlust. First he fights Cthullu in Atlantis and it's ridiculous. Then he destroys another ancient civilization by being the world's biggest dummy. There's one part where he hatches from an egg and I was just wondering WTF.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Jennika--The Fifth Turtle ★★★
This is a mixed bag of comics featuring the newest Ninja Turtle, Jennika. It contains the story in the regular comics about how she transformed from a human into a mutant. It also includes the two solo Jennika miniseries of middling quality. It goes like this. The comics by Brahm Revel are terrible. Everything else is good.

Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins: Beauregard Lionett ★★★
Not bad but could have used some more pages to flesh this out more. Was her father's business actually failing or was she just trying to grow it? They didn't really show much of her father not listening to her either. Just her sneakily doing her own thing regardless of the consequences.

Mangilaluk: A graphic memoir about friendship, perseverance, and resiliency ★★★
An Inuit man talks about his life. First abandoned as a baby, then being sent away to a school by a family who seemingly no longer wanted him. It's a REALLY sad read about a man who has lived all his life without being wanted or loved.

Eve of Extinction ★★
This has all of the nuance of a video game plot. Actually, most video games these days have better world building. The rain turns men into mutants. That's the breath of the storytelling. Now a mom, stepmother, and their daughter have to survive through a rainy Houston night.

Batman/Superman: World's Finest Vol. 4: Return to Kingdom Come ★★★★
First up, Mark Waid and Travis Moore show us the first time Batman and Superman met. Then Waid returns to the world of Kingdom Come with Dan Mora in tow. It's many years earlier in both the world of Kingdom Come and Superman's and Batman's career. They finally find Thunder Boy from volume 2 on Earth-22 and look to find him. But they also find the threat of Gog.

DeadEndia: The Divine Order ★★★★
This series is just insane. It's got a lot of Adventure Time and Rick and Morty in it without the meanness of Rick and Morty. Just the insanity and fun. The world has been divided into 13 worlds with the demons being the good guys that the humans are helping and the angels continue to separate planes of existence. All the while the good guys are trying to finally fix this world.

The Witcher, Vol. 8: Wild Animals ★★★
This is one of those stories where no one's really in the right and Geralt is caught in the middle. He washes up on this island and gets stuck between two factions. One thinks that all life including animals and monsters should be treated like humans. The other is the opposite.

Operation Sunshine Volume 1: Blood Run ★★
I didn't realize the guys from The Last Podcast on the Left wrote this. Even David Rubin's always terrific art couldn't save this turkey. It's something about vampires and there's two kinds and they are going to steal something. Reading this is like reading something that was translated into Russian with Google Translate and then translated back into English.

Canary ★★★
This starts off pretty strong as a weird Western where random people across the Old West are doing awful things out of nowhere. The main character is a marshall popularized in the pulps. He wears this kerchief with a design on it that I didn't know what it was supposed to be until it was finally called out that it was a coffin. He is called to bring a geologist back to Canary where he used to live, to check out a mine that's went deeper than any other. It's all a slow burn for the first 4 issues. Then the last 2 feel like we missed about 6 issues. There's all of a sudden this supernatural element as things spin out of control and none of it is explained well. It felt like going to see an old movie and they missed one of the reels.

The Cull Volume 1 ★★★★★
This was terrific. It's about a group of friends who go out in the middle of the night to "make a film". In reality, they've found a portal and think that the little brother that is missing may have went through it as well. Mattia de Iulis does a fantastic job of making this alien world look alien. It very much has a Stranger Things vibe to it crossed with The Mist.

The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos Volume 1 ★★★★
I do like this take that fits in with some of the classic movie monsters. Making Christopher Chaos a burgeoning mad scientist works for me as well. I could use some more world building around this. I'm still not sure what's going on with the bad guys or why the other people in this have powers. Still it's a lot of fun.

Extinction ★★★★
Douglas Preston's newest solo effort. This was a fun and crazy ride. It takes place in Colorado at a remote location where they have de-extincted woolly mammoths along with some other megafauna and turned it into a tourist attraction for the ultra rich. When a couple is murdered while camping there, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation rolls in to find the culprits. The farther it goes on, the more nuts it gets.

Richard wrote: "May we have a 2024 challenge, if you can?"

Ask and ye shall receive Richard.

https://www.goodreads.com/challenges/...

Last week's ARCs.

Fall Through ★★
The art's cool but the story is hard to follow. The panels don't always align to tell the story coherently and the lettering is all over the place. The crux of the story is about a small time punk band on tour in the 90's. Often struggling with basics like finding a place to stay while on the road because they can't afford hotels. Nate Powell has done better.

Rivers of London Vol. 11: Here Be Dragons ★★★
These little bonus comics for the Rivers of London novels are pretty good. This one is better than the previous one. It's about a wyvern attacking London. Along the way the fae and Jimi Hendrix gets involved.

The Atonement Bell ★★★
St. Louis is a terrific place to set this kind of spooky story. I grew up there and there's a ton of creepy folklore in the area to keep you awake at night. The story is about a boy and his mother who come to St. Louis over the holidays to visit her sister and nephew. While there they become the target of a coven that's been in the area for centuries. Good art, good story.

Baseball Heaven: Up Close and Personal, What It Was Really Like in the Major Leagues ★★★★
For those of you not in the know, Peter Golenbock is the Studs Terkel of baseball. He's written a ton of books over the years, quite a few of them in this interview style. The premise of this is that he's cherry picked interviews with players from the 30's to the 90's. all of them now deceased. Most of the interviews are from other books or were excised from his books before release for various reasons.

Last week's ARCs.

Chernobyl: The Fall of Atomgrad ★★★★
If you ever wondered about what actually happened with Chernobyl, this is a pretty good resource. The gross ineptitude, malfeasance and corruption that allowed this to happen is truly horrible.

The Secret Voice: Volume One ★★★
A sword and sorcery comic with a messed up superhero in it. He's been left scarred in more ways than what is just covered by his bandages, causing him to lash out at times without even realizing what he has done. Parts of this were interesting. Parts of this were odd.

Cosmoknights, Vol. 2 ★★★★★
Just a bunch of badass women fighting the patriarchy. This picks up right after volume one ends. The girls may have saved a princess but did she want to be saved? I like how everyone has different ideas about what to do to change the politics of the galaxy. Even without the mech fighting in this volume, it's still terrific. Great art, terrific art, characterization and world building. That Hannah Templar knows how to craft comics.

Penultimate Quest ★
This started off decent but by mid way through I had no idea what was going on. It starts off with these people trapped on an island with a never-ending dungeon filled with monsters. It feels like an old-school Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Part way through though it changes to god like beings and all these different worlds and it get really incoherent.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man & The Return of Effie Kolb ★★★★
We're getting a new Hellboy movie this year with Effie Kolb as the villain. I'm hopeful it'll be good since Mignola wrote the script. The original story, The Crooked Man, with Richard Corbin on art is terrific. It's a very cool, hillbilly witch story.

The Midnite Show ★★★★
This is the best Cullen Bunn book I've read in a while. But then again Bunn has made some of his best comics with Brian Hurtt. Yeah, I'm looking at you The Sixth Gun. This is fun. I would have liked to see it be a little more decompressed. It would have been even more fun with 12 issues instead of just 4. It's about old monster movies that are clearly meant to be the old Universal monsters. The movie comes to life and the monsters start killing people.

The Flying Ship Volume 2 ★★
Just not very good at all. A manga for kids from the dialogue. The art is in the most generic manga house style. Basically 200 pages of fluff.

Skeeters ★★★
A small town gets attacked by giant mutant mosquitoes. Cheesy, B-Level, SyFy channel horror at its best.

Last week's advance reads even if some of them are quite late.

Medea ★★★
A retelling of Medea's story replacing most of the magic with science of the day making Medea a herbalist. It's interesting and portrays her as a complicated character, a strong woman trying to make her own way in a world run by men. Yet, she continues to make plenty of horrible mistakes of her own.

Whistleblowers: Four Who Fought to Expose the Holocaust to America ★★★★
Four powerful stories of people helping Jews during World War II. Each issue is a different story, all are true and important to keep in the zeitgeist to make sure they never occur again.

Blue Book Volume 1: 1961 ★★★
I'm not really sure why this exists. It's documenting one of the more famous cases of alien abduction without really adding anything new. Tynion tells the story mainly through exposition as if he's writing down the details clinically. Where this book shines is the art. I really like Oeming's art here. Using only shades of blue adds to the experience.

Maskerade Volume 1 ★★★
When Kevin Smith and his partner from the Edumacation podcast, Andy McElfresh, got turned down for a DC show, they reworked it into their own comic. (I'm dying to know what character this originally was. The Question, maybe?) It's a revenge story, set in a Gotham like city without a Batman. There's the typical Kevin Smith humor, though it's not quite Jay and Silent Bob level of juvenile for the most part. (There's still a couple of fart jokes.) I do wish the whole story was in one volume. It's only 8 issues. Instead we get 2 4 issue volumes.

Maskerade Volume 2 ★★★
Kevin Smith's and Andy MdElfresh's revenge story featuring someone who is batshit crazy doesn't pack many surprises in its second half. It is fun in a dark version of The Mask way, with a crazy protagonist cracking jokes while murdering people.

Silver Vessels ★★
This starts off pretty good before it goes off the deep end. Three friends go to spend the summer with one of their grandpas and his husband in Key West. They went down there to find a lost pirate treasure. That's when things get goofy. You'd expect it to be lost underwater. For some reason instead it's buried under three Civil War forts that really do exist. Put they are all way below ground and filled with dinosaurs for some inexplicable reason. The first time it happened I thought it was some strange museum display because they didn't seem to move at all until one of the kids took something. The bad guys are these ultra rich guys who wear shark hats. It's just the kind of dumb I've come to expect from Steve Orlando.

The Lonesome Hunters: The Wolf Child ★★★
Our two main characters come across a kid that needs help along with his giant wolf mother. It's a strange, roadside attraction story that doesn't advance the story much at all. Crook, of course, makes it look great. But it does leave me wanting another story with more substance.

The Day the Klan Came to Town ★★
While based on a real event, this is a fictional story. It feels a bit hokey. The art makes it look really hokey. Everyone has these oversized werewolf hands. It looks like the man hands episode of Seinfeld. The body proportions are all wrong. The story adds all of these unnecessary asides about where these fictional characters were before they came to America. None of it is explained well. I'm all for bringing the event to life. I just wish the creators had done a better job of it.

The Pull ★
I'm not sure that Steve Orlando and Ricardo Lopez Ortiz set out to make the world's worst manga, but they may have succeeded. The story is incomprehensible. The art is awful. At one point the main character loses his arm and I had no idea until pages later. The art is so filled with explosions and speed lines, I couldn't tell. Just way too chaotic and fugly.

Algernon Blackwood's The Willows ★★
I know the original story was supposed to have even frightened Lovecraft but I find the writing very dry. It's about two people on a canoe trapped on an island in the middle of a river. Most of it is just imagined and still told through the words. While the art was interesting, a lot of it was still so nameless that made it hard to make out details. It's only 60 pages long and I was still looking to see how much was left.

Scales & Scoundrels Definitive Edition Book 2: The Festival of Life ★★★★
The creative team moved this book over to TKO from Image so they could finish off this series. We start off with a solo story from Durgo, returning home with her brother's body. Then we see what Luvander has been up to, with some nice world building. Finally, Luvander visits Aki and Koro's desert kingdom for a story about someone trying to sow chaos in their country. It's a cool series with some fun art by Galaad.

Advocate: A Graphic Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice ★★★
Eddie Ahn's parents immigrated to the U.S. from Korea. Eddie himself moved to San Francisco from Texas for college and decided to stay. He was a community activist before going to law school and starting a non profit. He's also a very skilled artist. I loved the artwork and coloring. The story though wasn't all that interesting and could have been edited down some. I'm a big admirer about what he's doing though.

Revenger and the Fog ★★
This was like watching a low budget 70's action, revenge flick. Revenger's lover is kidnapped by her crazy father and Revenger goes to get her back. The ultra-violent artwork looks like it's going out of its way to make everyone look ugly. The utter lack of backgrounds makes the clumsy art stand out even more.

Noblesse Volume 2 ★
I really don't get how this is popular at all. The English translation is so bad. I can't make heads or tails from the story. The move from Webtoons to traditional print doesn't help either. The panels are just randomly plopped on the page. Supposedly this is about Frankenstein in modern times but he's barely in it.

The Boy from Clearwater: Book 1 ★★★
This is an important and true story about a Taiwanese boy put in prison for 10 years, but it's REALLY long. The first half is about his childhood growing up under Japanese rule, then Chinese after the end of World War II. It's way too long and not very interesting. He's sent to prison for joining a book club in high school. The second half is about his ten years in prison, moved to an island become prison. The style of writing sometimes made it hard to connect as it felt just like a list of facts.

Lonesome Days, Savage Nights ★★★
A werewolf goes after the gang who killed his girlfriend. It's OK. It's got that Steve Niles thing of not trying too hard to escape clichés thing going on. Unfortunately, Kudranski still hasn't run out of black ink. This guy could be a decent artist if you could actually see his art.