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

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

Last week's ARCs.

The Banks ★★
Neat premise but doesn't execute all that well. It's about 3 generations of women in the Banks family. The family business since Grandma's day has been being a high end burglar. Now these 3 generations are on to one big score. The problem is Roxone Gay in no way did her homework on how anything technological works. She just waves her hands like Obi-Wan Kenobi to tell us "These are the not the hackers you are looking for." She doesn't have the first clue about how any of it works and doesn't even try and explain it. It's just "Oh, I put the thing on the thing and I'm done."

Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia Part 1 ★★
I just don't understand the purpose of this. It's a straight up adaptation of an episode of the TV show, beat by beat. The manga adaptation didn't add anything at all new. It's like the artist just watched the episode and then drew it. Just go watch the show instead. It's great. This is not.

Curses ★★★
A collection of short stories of various quality. The opening story really dragged on. It was a Victorian story about a man who saw visions of a monkey that wanted him to kill himself. It droned on and on. My favorite was the story about a man from Michigan who was trying to get pregnant with his wife. Nothing was working so he sought out the feather of an ogre to make them pregnant.

Storm King Comics Dark & Twisted: Long Haul ★★★
Bunn's horror is hit and miss but I thought this was pretty solid. It's about a trucker family whose sister has went missing. Now her brothers are trying to find her as they come across a group of serial killers called the Nine who are all truck drivers. It's the kind of thing where people can easily disappear and never be seen again so it's a perfect setting. My only complaint really is that it wasn't longer.

Tokyo Rose - Zero Hour (A Graphic Novel): A Japanese American Woman's Persecution and Ultimate Redemption after World War II ★★★
This was interesting. It's a true but dramatized story about the woman scapegoated as Tokyo Rose during World War II. (Tokyo Rose was actually several women. It was a radio broadcast from Japan made towards American sailors.) She was an American that was trapped in Japan while visiting family when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

Suzy Samson: The Gorgon and the Basilisk ★★★★
This was terrific. It takes place in a city full of super beings and a police force willing to use excessive force to stop them. Suzy Samson was the premiere superhero 10 years ago but gave it all up to get married. Now she's hit forty and her husband just asked for a divorce. When one of her friends does something really bad, she has to get back in the game.

The Tribute ★★
Apparently this was a major influence on Avatar and I get it. It has some of the same basic story. The storytelling is kind of obtuse considering these are also the guys who created Snowpiercer.

The Marble Queen ★★
340 pages long and hardly anything happens in it. It moves SOOO slowly. It's about a princess who becomes betrothed to the princess of another land in order to bail her own made up country out of debt. So you've got something of a Sapphic love story, just not a very interesting one.

Blood Oath ★★★
Vampires vs. gangsters? I'll allow it. During Prohibition, vampires had a difficult time finding alcohol to preserve the blood they drink, so they created a truce with the gangsters of New York.

Bad Dreams in the Night ★★★★
I quite liked these short stories with a darker bent. I thought they worked both for adults or teenagers. I was surprised at how good the art was too. I've never heard of Ellis before and his illustrations were quite good.

Once Upon a Workday: Encouraging Tales of Resilience ★★
A little Dr. Suessian book for adults about dealing with anxiety, self doubt, etc. If you like self-help books you may be into this. I was not.

The Last Session ★★★
A group of diverse friends who have been playing role-playing games since high school get together one last time before they all graduate college, move away and get jobs. The DM now has a girlfriend who wants to play and she disrupts the group dynamics during their last campaign. It's a story that's been told before, probably because it's happened so many time before. It's really difficult for someone to join these types of close D&D cliques after so many years of playing together. I still remember what a disaster it was when our girlfriends asked if they could play with us in high school.

The Lonesome Hunters ★★★★
The rare artist turned writer who succeeds at doing both. With this new series, we've got this scared old monster hunter who has been hiding for years. We also have a teenage girl who has lost all her family and is quite brave when thrown into the fire while also being terrified. We kind of step right in the middle of this, so at 4 issues, there is still a lot to learn. But I'm sure as hell looking forward to more.

Kingdom on Fire: Kareem, Wooden, Walton, and the Turbulent Days of the UCLA Basketball Dynasty ★★★★
I greatly enjoy college basketball. This book is about the most dominant team in the history of college basketball. UCLA won 7 NCAA titles in a row and 10 in 12 seasons in the 60s and 70s. They had two of the best centers in NCAA history in Lew Alcinder and Bill Walton. I do like how the book isn't all about college basketball. In fact, a large portion of it isn't. It's about how the players and John Wooden reacted to the civil unrest of the era, each of the 3 main characters had very different attitudes and ways of looking at the social upheaval of the era.

Baba Yaga's Assistant ★★★
Masha's mother passed away ten years ago and her father has been remote and distant ever since. She was mostly raised by her grandmother who passed away more recently. One day, her father comes home and tells Masha he's getting remarried and her new step sister is an evil little brat. Feeling abandoned she answers an ad in the paper to become Baba Yaga's assistant. That's where the real fun begins as she goes through a series of trials to get the job.

The Cold Ever After ★★★
This is a really messed up queer fairy tale story every bit as dark as the Grimm fairy tales. It's about a captain of the guard who was banished for the last 12 years. Her queen and lover recalls her when the princess disappears from her tower and her betrothed gives the kingdom a week to find her or he'll raze it all. I was shocked at how dark this got.

Conan the Barbarian: Bound in Black Stone, Vol. 1 ★★
Hearkens back to the old school Conan comics of the 70's which I thought would be a good thing. But this thing is packed with so much overwrought prose that it drags and drags. I'm really surprised because Zub's wrote a bunch of good fantasy comics. De La Torre seems to be channeling some John Buscema on art too. But this thing was a stinker.

The Nightmare Brigade #2: Into the Woods ★★★
An Inception like comic. It's about these kids and their scientist father who go into people's nightmares and try to fix them. The stories can get confusing into what the root story is and if you're actually still in a dream or not.

The Hunger and the Dusk, Vol. 1 ★★★★★
Not the most original fantasy story, but a very well done one. Orcs and humans have been fighting over dwindling resources for generations. When a third race, the Vangol, comes to their shores, they'll need to put aside their differences and create an alliance to stop the Vangol threat. I love how different the races are and that the Orcs aren't just dumb warriors. They have their own society that's actually better off than humanity.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vs. Street Fighter ★★★
Your standard crossover affair from IDW. The Turtles head to Atlantic City to fight in a tournament and meet up with some of the Street Fighter folks.

Cat Fight ★★★
I think the blurb fails this book. It is in no way "John Wick meets Kill Bill meets Cats". But it is an entertaining story about a notorious thief whose grandmother is killed and he's framed for her murder. And almost everything having a cat motif just seemed silly.

Degas & Cassatt: A Solitary Dance ★★
The visuals are much better than the tedious, droning words. You'll certainly get that Degas was surly and hard to be around, if you're like me to the point of wanting this to be over.

Last week's ARCs.

Tomahawk Angel Volume 2 ★★★★
I don't get into a lot of manga but this one sucked me right in. It's set 30 years in the future where monsters have taken over the Earth. An amnesiac girl is experimented on and given powers to fight back.

Blessed Be ★★
Hearkens back to old school alt comix. It's about a small town full of Satan worshippers, drug dealers, incels and teenagers. It was alright.

The Hard Switch ★★★★
A pretty cool sci-fi comic about a crew operating a small freighter in a universe that is running out of fuel for interstellar flight. People are getting desperate and someone thinks they may have found something that could change it all.

Kommix ★★★
I was all excited to see a new Charles Burns comic, then I realized it was really just an art book. It's still welcome because I love Burns's art but it's not the same. This is 80 pages of covers for comics that never existed.

Heat Seeker: A Gun Honey Series ★★★
I have to say, I never expected a Gun Honey spin-off. It works OK. It's about a woman who comes up with plans to fake the deaths of those in serious trouble.

The Secret of the Ravens ★★★★
A very good graphic novel for kids. It's about a brother and sister living on the streets in a fantasy world. They are digging through garbage to find things to recycle in order to buy food when they learn that ravens give out out quests that reward them in coins. Their lives continue to improve as the quests get more difficult until they get in over their heads.

Walt Disney's Mickey and Donald: Mickey's Craziest Adventures ★★★★
I like how they built this up as a lost comic with missing pages, tears and water damage. The art's great. The story is fun. Good stuff.

Good: From the Amazon Jungle to Suburbia and Back ★★★
The true story of a man torn between two worlds. His father is an anthropologist and married a woman from a tribe in the Amazonian jungle. After going back and forth between America and their jungle village for a few years, she could no longer handle it and abandoned her family and children. David grew up angry and confused, embarrassed of his heritage especially after seeing himself with the tribe in a documentary. The story is about how after many years he was able to come to terms with things.

Mothballs ★★
A story about a woman in Argentina who inherits her grandmother's house when she passes away. The granddaughter then discovers her diary and learns about what a troubled life she led. The art style in this was just plain fugly. Everyone was drawn to look like Lurch from The Addams Family including the women. The story also makes the cardinal sin of using cursive in the lettering.

Mark Twain's The War Prayer ★★★★
Mark Twain's short treatise he wrote at 70 on warmongers who wrap themselves in the flag, now assisted by illustrations from the 93 year old Chwast. It reads almost like a picture book meant for adults as god stands in front of a pulpit praying for the death of his enemies.

Tender ★★
This was strange. It's about a woman who is looking for the perfect mate, the perfect family, the perfect life. The first half flashes back to how they met and fell for one another. Then we get back to now and something really bad happens and her life begins to unravel. Then it just gets strange.

Signals Volume 2 ★★
There's a ton going on in this. It's about a psychic helping the police investigate a woman's disappearance. They somehow get involved in a gang war. There's a lot of people to follow and it's hard to keep them straight. What they are supposed to be investigating isn't much more than an afterthought.

Last week's ARCs.

Hypericum ★★
Two very different stories that are only tangentially related. One is Howard Carter finding King Tut's tomb. The other is about a young Italian woman who has come to Berlin to set up an exhibit about King Tut in the late 90's. That story is a whirlwind romance between her and a lazy hipster boy she meets. As a warning, their story is very sexually explicit so maybe don't read this one in public. Other than both stories also having a passing acquaintance with the title (Hypericum is the scientific name for St. John's wort.) there's no real reason why both stories are in this book.

Return to Eden ★
There may have been something lost in translation here. It never really came together. It's about an old woman looking back on her life in post-war Spain. They are very poor and we take a look at all of her family members but not much at herself or how she got to where she is in life. It's all very depressing and the family members aren't very kind to one another. I felt very disconnected to the whole thing instead of being brought into the story.

Kingdom Riders ★★★★
It's pretty easy to tell Denton comes from an animation background. This reads like a fantastic cartoon from your childhood. It's set in a fantasy world where most people are part of the low caste with a select few ruling over them. The only bright spot people have is to watch these epic and deadly races with humans riding these behemoth creatures in deadly races. The main character is a young girl with a special rapport with animals. She and her mud toad that she rides on can seem to wiggle out of any mess. She gets the opportunity to race for her freedom and attempts to make the most of the opportunity. This was fun and action packed. Marcus To's art is so good and he makes it look so effortless.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine--The Dog of War ★★★★
A "lost" episode of Deep Space 9 for the 30th anniversary. To place it in the timeline, Jadzia is still kicking around and in a relationship with Worf.

The Mushroom Knight Vol. 1 ★★★★★
Every once in a while you come across these obscure, magical comics that make reading stuff you've never heard of all worth it. This is about a tiny little knight living just out of sight in the woods. He's made of mushroom and is investigating the murder of a squirrel with his frog steed. Along the way he gets hurt and needs to borrow something from a little girl in order to heal himself enough to get home. Now he's trying to get back to the human realm to repay her generosity. I can't wait to read more of this. The art is absolutely gorgeous. It's so detailed I just found myself staring at the pages.

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth ★★★★
A raw, unfiltered look at depression and low self-esteem. Zoe Thorogood decides to record what it's like to be her for six months. This isn't really a memoir. At 23, she hasn't lived much of a life yet. It's more what's it's like to be in her head for a time. Where this excels is the art. She uses a variety of ways to portray herself and others, sometimes all in the same panel.

Ranger Academy Vol 1 ★★
I'm not familiar with this setting for the Power Rangers. It's way in the future. A girl lives alone with her father on an isolated moon when two academy students crash land and she has to save them. She sneaks off with them to go to the academy and that's where things begin to get really boring.

Underground: Cursed Rockers and High Priestesses of Sound ★★★★★
This is a terrific successor to the Big Book series of comics Paradox Press put out in the 90s. It's packed with stories from outsider artists from all kinds of genres. There's more recognizable artists like Jonathan Richman or Captain Beefheart all the way to people I'd never heard of like Yma Sumac and Eugene Chadbourne (who used to sell cassettes at shows tucked into a sock). I really liked that the writer is French so that there were plenty of European artists in there as well.

Ghostlore Vol. 1 ★★★
This started off pretty cool. It's about this father and daughter that can suddenly see ghosts. But then it loses some focus, giving us smaller ghost / body horror stories in each issue by guest artists.

Space Story ★★★
A love story set on a dying Earth told from 3 different time periods differentiated by the color palette. The first is about this queer couple falling in love. The other two are about them separated, one up in space while the other is trapped on Earth. There's not much to the story itself. It's more about the two of them and their feelings of being forced apart. The art is very cartoony. I kept thinking of Alice the Goon from Popeye for one of the characters.

Monster Crush ★★
Well, this was kind of terrible. It feels like it was written for really young children. It's about a girl figuring out she likes girls. But it's also about some kind of monsters that are werewolves without being werewolves and some generic scientist that wants to catch them and experiment on them.

Lies My Teacher Told Me: A Graphic Adaptation ★★★★
This was first written in the 90's. It isn't so much that your teacher lied to you as it is that your textbooks take a revisionist version of history to make the U.S. look more positive removing many of its warts from history. Most of the book looks at atrocities in American history such as our treatment of Native Americans, slavery, income inequality and the U.S.'s involvements in the overthrow of foreign governments throughout our history. Powell's graphic adaptation of the content doesn't make this any less dense, nor does it make it less powerful. It's sobering stuff that makes you think of all the whitewashing we try to do to our past. Powell does add in some 21st century events into this version such as 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.

Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever ★★★★
Still even after one of them has been dead for over a decade and the other a quarter century, they are the most well-known film critics in history. That's for a very good reason. Their show was the best. I loved the dichotomy of the two differing on whether a film was good or not. I love how Singer captures not only their history but how much they were rivals even years down the road when they had also become friends.

Last week's arcs.

The Horror ★★
This is meant to be a prequel to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It works okay. There are a lot of characters and it's hard to follow at times.

In Utero ★★★★
I thought this was interesting. It's about some kids at a daycare in a dilapidated mall. They come across a life form and this turns into kind of a monster movie. Points for coming up with an original, enjoyable story. Points off for not coming up with any kind of meaningful backstory for why things were happening.

Confabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography ★★★★★
This isn't a comic, but it is a biography from one of the biggest artists of the last 40 years. Not a traditional biography, but a terrific one. Dave Gibbons has presented this as an A to Z guide to his life, giving him the ability to tell anecdotes from throughout his life. It feels like going down to the pub and sitting with Gibbons for several hours while he regales us with stories over pints. If you aren't familiar with Dave Gibbons, you should be. He's the artist behind Watchmen and Martha Washington along with one of the best one off Superman stories ever told.

Usagi Yojimbo Saga Legends ★★★
All of these stories are little offshoots that are not part of Usagi's official canon. The first half of the book is all of the Space Usagi issues. I don't really get it. It's clearly influenced by Star Wars. At the same time, it feels like the regular Usagi comic with laser blasters and goofy stuff like a castle floating in space on an asteroid and everyone is still wearing kimonos. It's weird.

Masters of the Universe: Forge of Destiny ★★★
This is billed as a prequel to the Netflix show but it equally works with the original cartoon. It's basically the origin of Sy-Klone.

Quentin Tarantino: A Graphic Biography ★
A Quentin Tarantino biography that doesn't really tell you anything new if you've seen his movies. It's all surface level stuff. Either there are some translation issues or Michele Botton writes really poor dialogue. Maybe it's both. These don't sound like real people. They sound like people written by A.I. software.

Hogbook and Lazer Eyes ★
This was almost completely incoherent. It's like random asides noted down in a diary, but by dogs. I thought it was going to have a point, but the only point seems to be that Maria Bamford and her husband like to adopt elderly pugs.

Atana and the Firebird ★★
A cutesy fantasy stories for young girls. It's about three girls, a mermaid, a firebird and a witch who become friends while trying to keep a prophesy from being fulfilled. It drags on for too long at 250 pages and this is only half of it.

Nina Simone in Comics! ★★
I'm just not a fan of how this was constructed. NPM used to put out some great biographies. Now they are a mixture of comics and prose and it just doesn't work. The comics never seem to tell you much and then that's followed by a couple of pages of text that goes more in depth and it'll go back and forth like that throughout the book.

ARC's from the last week.

Superman: The Harvests of Youth ★★
Superboy vs. the Incels. Clark is a junior in high school when someone at their school commits suicide. The first part of the book is how the kids are dealing with this and it's not bad. Although Kent does very little to hide his identity, constantly flying around Smallville in street clothes and knocking steel doors off their hinges at school. Come on, Superman should be way more careful than that or he wouldn't have made it out of high school without being outed. The latter half of the book delves into a friend joining a vague incel group with half baked plans.

On The Way ★★★
A nice story about a woman who makes a pilgrimage in Spain. It's kind of the Spanish version of the Appalachian Trail here in the U.S. It's about her healing from a bad breakup and the other hikers she meets along the way.

Brynmore ★★★
About what you'd expect for Steve Niles these days. An OK horror story that sometimes feels like an outline more than a full plot.

Under filters, choose Review Copy Availability from the Attributes dropdown. Then select Available for Immediate Download.

But what I typically do is go in there once a week and just look at the new books that have been added since the last time I checked. The button will be yellow if it's available for request and green if it's available for immediate download. The trick is to not fall into the trap where you download way more than you can read. You want to be able to read and review everything you download or you'll start getting denied by certain publishers all the time.

Some arc's I read last week.

Harlem ★★★
The story of Queenie, a self made woman during the Harlem renaissance who runs a numbers game in Harlem. She refuses to back down to anyone including Dutch Schultz or the police who are both looking to end her rule of the area.

Heart Attack ★★
An OK update of the X-Men in a post COVID world. 30 years in the future variants were created due to some gene therapy or the like. It's only vaguely explained. The powers don't really matter either. It's about the disenfranchised in Austin and some wall that was built around a section of it. None of the setup makes a lot of sense. The storytelling gets better after the initial setup is forced to tell the story the creators want to tell. The main two characters fall in love out of nowhere after one night together. It mainly an extension of the politics that have taken place since Trump came on the political scene, just expanded and extrapolated for vague superpowers.

The Werewolf at Dusk: And Other Stories ★★★
A collection of three stories, two of which are adapted from other authors. The title story is about a werewolf that has grown old, both in his human and werewolf form and is no longer as dangerous as he used to be.

Monomyth ★★★
A story about 7 people who arrive at a haunted castle where they are told the last one standing will gain magic. It's alright. Much isn't explained. You're just supposed to accept what you are given with little backstory or worldbuilding to support it.

Ink Girls ★★★★
A middle school graphic novel about the power of the press. It's set in the Italian Renaissance. It's about a girl who is learning to be a printer. Her Mestro is arrested for printing papers that implicate the city's magistrate for extortion. Her apprentice, Cincia, escapes meeting the Principesca along the way. The two sneak out of the palace in order to gather evidence to save Cincia's Mestro. From there it's all about tracking down sources and getting them to vet things while hiding from the palace guard in order to save the day. It's a great story of people rising up to take back the power from those exploiting them. The art is detailed and bright, propelling the story. This is an all out terrific read for kids.

Batman: The Doom That Came To Gotham ★★★★
One of those Elseworld books where everything just clicks. Batman's world easily mashes up with Lovecraftian horror. Mignola has a long history with C'thulhu and it shows. I would have liked to see the Wayne family's backstory expanded and the Robins be more than cannon fodder but all in all a well crafted story with great coloring and pretty good art from Troy Nixey.

How War Begins: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Invasion ★★★★
Terrible reports of what is happening in Ukraine from the earliest days of the war. Some of these are harrowing. This will really make you feel for the people of Ukraine who just want to go on with their lives while Russia is bombing entire cities down to rubble.

Conquest: Julius Caesar's Gallic War: A Historical Memoir & Graphic Novel ★★
This was like reading a dusty text book. It's filled with a gazillion different European tribes and characters as Caesar conquers most of Europe.

From the World of Minor Threats: The Alternates ★★★
This was alright. It felt like something that would have popped up at Vertigo back in the day. Don't expect Patton Oswalt's humor in this. This is a straight up take on minor superheroes that have saved the world. They spent years in another dimension where they reached their full potential. Now they are back in the real world and have formed a support group now that they are back to their normal minor selves.

Life Is Strange Vol. 6: Settling Dust ★★
This is the epilogue to the game that makes the game pointless. And it is boring. It's the happy ending to every movie that doesn't have one.

Dungeon: Twilight - Vol. 1: Dragon Cemetery ★★
I had no idea what was going on here. There may have been some things lost in the translation to English. This is set on some fantasy world where the main character is walking somewhere to die. There's lots of absurdity and very little of it makes any sense.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles x Stranger Things ★★★
This worked better than I thought it would. It takes place right before season 3 of Stranger Things and uses the original 80's version of the Turtles. The kids are in New York on a field trip when they are attacked by demodogs. Someone has opened a portal in the subways under NYC. Things escalate from there.

Scum and Villainy ★★★
Some fluffy stories featuring characters on the skeevier side of Star Wars. The stories are all one and done and don't pack much of a punch. This is really only for the completists out there.

Rosa Parks ★★★★
A story that needs to be retold every few years because people keep forgetting things like this happened only 60 years ago and keep rising back up.

Magical History Tour Vol. 7: Ghandi ★★★
A good primer for kids on Gandhi's life. It's not going to get super into details but what do you expect for a book for children.

Godzilla: Here There Be Dragons ★★
Setting Godzilla's monsters back in the time of settling the New World is actually pretty smart if done well. Seaman talked of sea monsters all the time back then and they would appear on maps. This only worked OK though.

Hound ★★
An extremely dark story about a new soldier arriving to the front during World War I. Due to his experience working in sewers, he's assigned to the Hounds, a group that goes off on its own, always wearing gas masks. He's given an initiation that he must pass in order to stay alive. Things continue to head south from there.

I Run to Make My Heart Beat ★★
This story was all over the place. It's adapted from a book but not all that well. It's about a girl in Paris who is part Jewish, part Senegalese. It starts off with her getting kicked out of ballet at 14 for having darker skin. Then the story jumps ahead to college without telling you. It took me about half the book to pick that up. For some reason, she's recruited to run track but it seems like it's outside of school. (Maybe that works differently in France.) There she's sexually assaulted by the hammer throwers but she tells no one and is told the track program will be shut down if she tells anyone. The focus doesn't seem to be about that though even though she went through a violent assault by three men. Instead it becomes about a boy on the track team that Nina likes. This plot is so scattered it makes my head hurt.

Janus Silang and the Struggle for Kalibutan: Volume Two in the Janus Silang Saga ★★
I know these books are super popular in the Philippines but I had no idea what was happening in this adaptation reading it in America. There needs to be a glossary to look up all of these terms that are only found in Filipino folklore. It's a frustrating read of nonstop exposition.

Vixen NYC Volume One ★★★
This was originally on Webtoon and it sometimes shows in the paneling. Webtoon comics are out of continuity. In this Vixen comes to NYC to attend college. She has just inherited the totem from her grandmother and has no idea

Zombillenium, Vols. 5-6: Black Friday/Sabbath Grand Derby ★★★★
Vol. 5 is a fight to save the guests in the park from being sacrificed to Hell while Vol. 6 is a combination of quidditch and roller derby between witches.

A bunch of arcs I read before Christmas.

The Fox Maidens ★★★
Based on some of the Korean folklore about fox demons. This could almost be split up into three books. The first third is about a girl in Korea's past who's father lets her train in the martial arts with the other men and her brothers in the household. Then it shifts gears completely into the fox demon's story after not having any supernatural elements at all. The last third is a love story of redemption. It's fine but probably should have been edited down some.

The Great British Bump-Off ★★
The creative team behind Giant Days reteams for this combination of Agatha Christie and The Great British Bake Off. This is so over the top as to be a farce.

Stranger Things: Tales from Hawkins ★★★
These are some pretty inconsequential little side stories. They are made better by Jody Houser writing them. However, it doesn't remove the fact that Dark Horse has picked the Stranger Things carcass clean.

Young Hellboy: Assault on Castle Death ★★★
Kid Hellboy is hallucinating from a fever. He's jetting around the BPRD, thinking he's fighting monsters with Lobster Johnson while in reality he really is being pursued by a monk who is trying to kill him.

After: The Graphic Novel ★
Oh my god, this was terrible. This may be the most unrealistic version of college life I've ever read. This girl breaks up with her long term boyfriend for a severely toxic guy covered in tattoos and piercings. She goes from a virgin to living with this guy in less than two months. It's all so terribly stupid. Then the big ending made me want to throw my tablet across the room. Give me a goddamn break. How is this so popular that they turned this series of novels into graphic novels? It's like bad fan fiction. Who knows, maybe it'll be the next Fifty Shades of Gray except even worse.

Call Me Iggy ★★★★★
Iggy (Ignacio) is entering his Freshman year of high school in Columbus, OH. He's the child of first generation immigrants from Columbia. He's what they call a Gringo Latino as he doesn't speak Spanish and knows little of his parents' culture. He takes Spanish in order to meet a girl and is having difficulty until one day he knocks over his Abuelito's urn in the basement. From that moment on, he can talk with his grandfather's ghost. The book is really well done. You really get a look at different view points from different families and how they think of themselves. I had a very interesting time with this.

Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures, Vol. 2 ★★★
I was excited to see Maz Tanaka and Dexter Jettster in this, even if it's just barely. I guess both species live for an extremely long time. It's about a new Padawan who has went undercover with a pirate gang that Maz is running. She's been captured and these guys are trying to get her back. It's mostly fighting across Jedha and Takodana but has a lighter tone for younger readers with the main character having some self doubt. It's honestly better than any of the Phase II novels I've read.

Hunt. Kill. Repeat. Vol. 1 ★★★
The Greek gods return taking over the Earth and ruling through fear. Artemis has found love and secretly pregnant. But Zeus will have none of it when he finds out. Ten years later Artemis returns out for revenge and starts taking out the other Gods.

Order and Outrage Volume 1 ★★
This was alright. It's got that old school sci-fi comic vibe you'd expect from Jim Starlin. It's just that very little is explained. A woman walks into a temple, it blows up and she gets powers and starts taking down the Order. The back and forth between two different time periods every time you flipped the page got old real quick as well.

Death Sparkles and the Sacred Golden Cupcake: Book 2 ★★★★
A fun comic for kids. The art is soft and sweet like ice cream. Sparkles the unicorn and Death are best friends. Sparkles is the only unicorn left but in the past, unicorns were awful to some moles and now the moles are out for revenge. They are all after the Sacred Golden Cupcake. The moles in order to remove a curse, Sparkles because he thinks it has magical powers. The story is irreverent and fun.

Panya: The Mummy's Curse ★★
Panya's history centuries ago in Egypt. It's all very lackluster. I think Mignola needs someone else to partner up with besides Chris Roberson. He's been phoning these Hellboy related stories in for years now.

Hide: The Graphic Novel ★★★★
I haven't read the novel this is adapted from yet, but I think this stands well on its own. It follows some tropes but is done well. It's part Hunger Games, part And Then There Were None. It's about 14 twenty somethings invited to a defunct amusement park. They are playing Hide and Seek and then the winner collects 50 grand. Of course, that's not the real story at all.

A Visit to Moscow ★★★★
In 1965, a rabbi went with a group of rabbis to Russia on a speaking tour and to see if they could learn if reports they'd heard about conditions for the Jews there were true. What he told no one is that he'd been contacted by the sister of a Jewish man who lived in Russia. She hadn't heard from him in over 10 years and wanted to make sure he was OK. So one day of the trip in Leningrad, he pretends to be sick and wanders off to find this man. He finds more than he could have imagined.

Takio ★★★
Bendis and Oeming make a comic for their kids. There's not a whole lot to this. It's a real basic story about two sisters who get super powers and have to fight off the mad scientist who accidentally gave them to them and his daughter who happens to be Taki's best friend. This is a Bendis book you can safely let your kids read.

Some recent advance reads.

The Pale House Devil ★★★★
From the author of the Sandman Slim novels, comes a stand alone novella about two contract killers, one living and one undead.

Deadbox: The Complete Series ★★★
An anthology of weird stories taking place in this small town. They revolve around a Redbox filled with unreleased movies.

H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth ★★★
Tanabe continues his Lovecraft adaptations with the only full length book of Lovecraft's that was published in his lifetime. This is long, really long. 450 pages long which is extremely long for a graphic novel. Lovecraft wasn't the best writer and this is a faithful adaptation so it takes a LONG time to get going. It's about a man travelling through Massachusetts. He hears word of a town, that is turning into a ghost town. The only way to reach it is by a daily bus. Many of the inhabitants there are mutating. When he finally finds out what happened there, he learns he has to spend the night and that's where the book really picks up.

The World After the Fall, Vol. 1 ★★
In the near future these towers spring up around the Earth killing off much of the population and challenging people to get to the top. This whole thing uses a lot of video game logic instead of common sense so a lot of this won't make sense. As people climb the tower, items pop up like video games and about half way through the crux of the story changes. That's when it really lost me. At that point, I was thinking "Well, this is kind of stupid." It did not get better after that.

Villains Are Destined to Die, Vol. 1 ★
This was so stupid. It's about a girl who is basically a modern day Cinderella who then gets sucked into a video game where she has to try and get the best catch in the Victorian age while being labeled a villain. You know what's not interesting? Comics about video games. You know how to make them even less interesting. Set them 150 years ago and make them about trying to get boys to like you.

Nature's Labyrinth Vol. 1 ★★★
This is a story you've seen several times before. The Battle Royale type story where strangers are left on an island containing a changing maze and have to kill one another to win a treasure. The subplots are very much secondary to the fighting.

Third Shift Society Volume One ★★★
A burgeoning witch and a guy with a pumpkin for a head investigate supernatural mysteries.

Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea ★★
It's starting to be diminishing returns with the Hellboy universe now that they've mined pretty much every story. This was terrible. It wasn't at all helped by the rudimentary art and coloring.

Last week's arcs.

Cages ★★
Finally got around to reading this after letting it set on the back burner for years. Yes, McKean was the cover artist for Sandman and the artist for Arkham Ayslum which made a mint for him and Grant Morrison. But he's a very divisive artist. And not all that skilled of a writer. This is 500 pages long and there's enough story here for less than half that. It suffers from the flowery verbal diarrhea that a lot of the early Vertigo comics did.

The Many Deaths of Barnaby James ★★★
This was odd, because it wasn't so much about Barnaby Jones. The first issue is. Then the perspective changes to a new character with each issue and the book gets darker and darker with things like cannibals and slavery involved.

Cosmic Detective ★★★
The story is pretty much what I expected once this got going with few surprises. It's about a detective who is investigating the death of a God. The writing isn't great. What is great is David Rubin's art.

After Lambana: A Graphic Novel: Myth and Magic in Manila ★★★
An urban fantasy set in Manilla. It takes course over the span of a night. A boy finds out he has some kind of supernatural plague around his heart that is going to kill him after meeting up with a man who is from another land or dimension who becomes his guide. Basically the Filipino version of Faerie I think. They walk around the city all night finding out more about what has happened to him.

Ghost Roast ★★★
A kind of fluffy YA book about a teenager who can see ghosts while working for her ghostbuster father who thinks all spirits are evil but has never seen one.

Know Your Station ★★★
A murder takes place on a space station for billionaires. One of the help is left in the lurch to figure out who did it while she's also suffering hallucinations from weaning herself off drugs. There's too much going on with the side plots and not enough with the main plot.

Love Kills ★★★
Helena is a loner vampire who meets a human chef who helps her when her old coven comes after her.

Specs ★★★★
A new spin on The Monkey's Paw. It's the Eighties and Ted is the only black kid in this small Ohio town. His best friend Ken is secretly gay and in love with Ted but never told him. They find an ad for a pair of X-ray specs in the back of an old comic and the specs mysteriously show up on their porch in the middle of the night. They discover that the specs grant small wishes. But when their high school bully finds them in the woods one day, something bad happens and that's where the story turns darker.

Last week's ARCs.

Young Alfred: Pain in the Butler ★★★★★
This is how you do a comic for kids. It's a flashback story to when Alfred went away to servant school. It's fun and smart with terrific art by Sam Lofti.

Clark & Lex ★★★
A middle school story about a Clark Kent with powers who is kind of a jerk. He's very full of himself. He gets invited to be part of a contest to be an intern for the Daily Planet over the summer which quickly and very obviously becomes something else. Clark and Lex become friends and Lex does a heel turn that isn't earned.

The All-Nighter Season Two ★★★
This is very much a middle volume. Other vampires start using the superhero loophole while the bad guy also builds an army in secret. You can see this isn't going to last long before the Takers arrive again. The story may have well ended "To be continued".

The Black Bestiary: A Phantasmagoria of Monsters and Myths from the Philippines ★★★★
A prose book from the creators of Trese in the vein of World War Z. It's part Monster Manual of the Philippines, part untold stories of monster hunters. It's written as if by a long time monster hunter in the area, giving accounts of stories of encounters he's been told.

Survival ★★
30 Days of Night done poorly. Some Russian vampires with no rules come to Alaska and meet survivalists who aren't at all threatening.

Hellsing, Vol. 1 ★★★
This was OK. It felt very 90's. Big on action and short on story. It's about an organization in the UK that hunts down and kills vampires with the main vampire hunter also being a vampire. There's some odd rules. If you're not a virgin and get bit by a vampire you become a ghoul instead (which in this is really just a zombie. It has no will of its own.)

Tales From Nottingham ★★★
Some ancillary stories set in the Nottingham universe. None of them are essential. I may have liked this more had it come out sooner after volumes 1 and 2 as it may have connected to those stories more then my memory did.

Confetti Realms ★★★
This was fine. It's yet another comic about being queer and a teenager. (This in itself is no longer enough. It also needs to be good.) This one's set over Halloween. 4 teenagers get portalled to another world where teeth are currency, yet everyone still has a full set of teeth. If teeth were currency everyone would be getting mugged and have their teeth pulled out. A lot of it just seemed odd just to be odd instead of having a purpose in the story. The kids have to get 5 molars to leave because "reasons".

Lovesick ★
This has every trigger you can imagine. It's extremely nihilistic and depraved. It's about a woman who talks people into coming onto her private internet show where she proceeds to murder them and eat them with the caveat being that they are asking , no yearning, for it. I kept waiting for some kind of story to develop but it seemed to be more about how many different fetishes could be put on display more than anything else. If seeing people get off while covered in blood and gore is your thing, this may be the book for you.

Halina Filipina: A New Yorker in Manila ★★★
A Filipino American goes to the Philippines for the first time to get in touch with her heritage where she meets a man with some self-esteem issues. Strangely the passages with few words were the strongest scenes. There are some sections where there is a lot of untranslated Tagalog. I found those very frustrating but I also didn't care enough to pull out my phone to translate them either. It's a decent enough rom-com story but too long at 225+ pages.

Bonnie wrote: "OK, I just requested it. We'll see what happens."

I did too. Always liked watching these two.

Last week's ARCs.

Where the Body Was ★★★
An OK one off story from the team of Brubaker and Phillips. It's about some neighbors on a block somewhere in Southern California in the 80's. Everyone has their secrets. The neighbors who are having an affair, the kid who plays at being a super hero, the teenagers on drugs. To me, it lacked focus though and it's the rare story by this team that's not 5 stars.

Monster Born ★★
A really barebones story about the daughter of monster hunters fighting monsters. Nothing is setup. Nothing is explained. If it wasn't for Tom Mandrake's terrific art and monsters, there would be zero reason to read this.

Black Solstice ★★
This started out as a trend on Twitter back when Twitter wasn't owned by an awful person. This is really half a story. It's three issues of exposition and then it ends right as the real story is about to begin. It's about black people getting superpowers on the winter solstice but then they go away the next day. The next year people are planning for them to come back again and in the hopes for that, a group is planning on robbing the Federal Reserve.

Noblesse Season1. 1: Awakening in the new world ★★
The art is really good. The panelling can be odd. I'm sure that's due to the reconfigure from Webtoon to print but often the panels look like they are floating on the page with little structure or arrangement. The story moves at a glacial page and doesn't make a lot of sense. There's a guy running a school in Korea who turns out to be Frankenstein except he's beautiful. His master wakes up out of a coffin one day after 800 years and starts going to his school. He makes a few friends. Meanwhile a vampire and another guy are killing people on the peripheral.

Skull and Bones: Savage Storm ★★★
A pirate adventure set in the world of the upcoming video game. Since it's pirates fighting, you didn't need any knowledge of the game to enjoy it.

Shelter for Lost Dreams ★
I felt like I was being wacked over the head by moral after moral. It was to the point where the opposite of the kid had just said would be the object lesson of the next story. Oof.

Dead Seas ★★★
A B-level horror movie plot set on a ship crewed by prisoners who are collecting ectoplasm from ghosts. They of course get loose and wreak havoc.

Barnstormers ★★★★
The best thing Snyder's written in quite a while. Tula Lotay's gorgeous artwork doesn't hurt either. The book is about a stunt pilot of the 20's who meets a girl looking to get away from her life. They end up flying from town to town performing stunts while making money however they can while being chased by her rich fiancee.

All Against All ★★★★
This one was pretty cool. It's about an alien race that pulls traits out of races it comes across. They've come across a long ago destroyed Earth and found one of the seed vaults that exist. From that they've grown habitats to explore what they pluck from the DNA of Earth organisms. This race is like Krang from TMNT. They are little jellyfish creatures who take over other bodies. I like how each issue approaches the story from another angle, one of the various characters. I like how this mutates into something of a horror movie as well.

Afro Samurai Vol 1 ★★★
The story isn't much more than a simple revenge fantasy. Afro Samurai's father was killed in front of him as a boy and now he's out to kill those who killed his father. If you're wondering, yes, this was turned into a anime with Samuel L. Jackson in the lead role.

Redfork ★★★★
Gives off strong Needful Things vibes. A man gets out of prison after taking the rap for his brother and returns to a failing coal mining town in West Virginia. Opioid addiction runs rampant through the town. The man's little brother is trapped in a mine collapse. He gets out but brings someone back with him. Someone who can take away your problems but nothing is free...

The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle ★★★★
Another really good book in this series. This time Ropa's out of her element. She's not in Edinburgh. She's at a magic conference on the Isle of Skye when something important is stolen. This becomes a locked room mystery with the room being the size of a castle.

Some arcs I read last week.

Heart Eyes: The Complete Series ★★★
This is very violent and full of Lovecraftian monsters tearing people apart. The series was interesting. It could have used another issue or two to flesh it out more. It's about this girl who can control the monsters that have ended the world and how she's looking for someone else who isn't afraid of them.

TKO Presents: Tales of Terror ★★★
A bunch of short horror comic book stories. These weren't half bad. I'd read "The Father of All Things" and "Night Train" before when TKO released their TKO shorts separately so you could have some deja vu here.

The Ones Volume 1 ★★
I remember when Bendis used to be one of my favorite writers who could do no wrong. These are no longer those days. This stunk. It's about a group of chosen ones who are then chosen to defeat the Antichrist. Then it's mainly standing around talking for 4 issues. Even with all this talking though, nothing is explained. The characters are still paper thin. The art isn't very good. Just an all around poopfest.

Last week's arcs.

Star Trek: Defiant, Vol. 1 ★★★
This spins out of Star Trek, Vol. 1: Godshock. A rogue group of Klingons are murdering anyone they consider to be Gods. Worf and Spock leave Sisko's crew and steal the Defiant to go on their own hunt for the Klingons because Worf's son, Alexander, has sided with the zealots. B'Elanna Torres of Voyager, Ro Laren, and Lore also get sucked into the crew.

The Liminal Zone ★★★
Junji Ito is back with four longer short stories written over the Pandemic. He's the first to tell you in the afterword that he feels he may be out of ideas.

Wash Day Diaries ★★★★
Four vignettes revolving around four female best friends living in the Bronx. Each story is about a different subject with the intricacy of black women's hair care being shown in detail in each story.

Pinup Girls Around the World ★★★
A bunch of pinups from around the world like the title says. There are all more recent but most have a retro feel to them. There's nothing really risque about these. It's all pretty tame especially compared to what you could find within five minutes of an internet search.

Asadora!, Vol. 1 ★★★★
A manga about a girl in the 50's looking for the doctor because her mother is about to give birth. Meanwhile she gets kidnapped by a burglar right as a typhoon moves in. The burglar is a down on his luck pilot and they both help the survivors. This ends on an odd cliffhanger.

Star Trek: Resurgence ★★★
A solid story set in the Star Trek universe but not about the characters from any of the TV shows or movies. It's about the Resurgence, a completely different Star Fleet science vessel. This is the prequel to an upcoming video game but it doesn't feel like it.

Bad Medicine ★★★★
Four indigenous teenagers sit around a campfire in Canada telling ghost stories.

Stranger Things Library Edition Volume 3 ★★
This collects The Tomb of Ybwen and the holiday specials. The Tomb of Ybwen tales place after season 2 when Will is trying to process Bob's death. The holiday specials are complete fluff like the majority of these Stranger Things comics.

Everything is Fine Volume Two ★★★★
A disturbing story about people living in this town where they pretend everything is fine while they are constantly watched to make sure they comply with the rules. In volume 2, our protagonists have just killed a police officer and have to get away with his murder.

Underground, Volume 1: Fight Club ★★
A manga about fighting. There's not much else to this than lots of fighting.

Star Trek, Vol. 2: The Red Path ★★★★
I thought this volume was an improvement over volume 1. The story is much clearer. Sisko takes the Theseus to Cardassia on the hunt for some missing Bejoran artifacts. The Cardassians put him on trial for all the people who died on Cardassia during the Dominion War. The rest of the crew go looking for the artifacts before the Red Path can get to them.

Freaking Romance Volume One ★★★
A manga about a girl who is told she's rented a haunted apartment. But it seems to be something else, maybe an alternate reality type thing as she can see a boy living in her apartment sometimes but he can't see or hear her.

Totem ★★★
Two lovers go on a road trip through the Southwest. Interspersed are meetings with the dead that I'm still not sure how it's all connected. The storytelling is sparse and the artwork is really good. By the way, if the artwork looks familiar, Laura Pérez is the woman behind the cool title sequence on Only Murders in the Building.

Graveneye ★★
It's an interesting concept. A horror story told through the eyes of the house itself. The narration is from the view of the house as its owner, Ilsa, wanders the woods hunting bigger and bigger game while timid caretaker, Marie, takes care of the house itself, coming in bruised and bloody.

Clear ★★★
It's a definite possible dystopian future Snyder and Manapul have come up with. Humanity is circling the drain and doesn't want to know about it so everyone is using augmented reality to hide the truth. In the middle of this scenario is a man searching for his ex-wife's killer. Francis Manapul's art is absolutely terrific.

Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis ★★★
An unproduced opera that was never performed because the authors were killed in a concentration camp during World War II. It's a really neat idea to finally show this to the world.

Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Secret of Chesbro House & Others ★★★★
Some better than average Hellboy stories mostly set in the Eighties. He tackles haunted houses, Greek Gods, men filled with snakes and ghosts in this collection.

The Weirn Books, Vol. 1: Be Wary of the Silent Woods ★★★★
A spooky book for middle schoolers where the danger feels real. The main character is a weirn. They have these odd familiars that float around them. There's plenty of other horror types represented as well. The kids go to the Night School, which is what the normal school turns into each night. While working at their grandmother's shop, the kids find out their great uncle went missing when he was a child and never seen again. Now the headmistress from that time appears to be back to abduct more children.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Armageddon Game -- The Alliance ★★★
A bunch of ancillary stories that fill out a bit of what's going on with all of the supporting characters in the TMNT universe.

Janus Silang and the Creature of Tabon ★★
There was definitely a lot lost in translation here. It has a ton to do with a lot of Filipino horror traditions. Most of it is explained very poorly though and there's subpar dialogue translations everywhere. I suggest you go and read Trese instead for your horror fix.

Black Mass Rising ★★★
It may be better to go into this cold without any expectations. It's something of a religious horror comic. These people in medieval times are plagued by demons until a monk appears. He and another young woman go off to track down the source of these incursions.

Two Graves, Vol. 1 ★★
Death and Emilia who apparently can't die go on a road trip. They stay in cheap motels while being pursued by some of Death's contempories. The storytelling in this is very vague. Little is explained. The best I can say about it is it's a thing I read.

The Forgotten Blade ★★★
An OK but tropey filled story about a few rebels trying to stop the all powerful church in this fantasy world of the Five Rivers.

TKO Presents: Tales of Terror ★★★
A bunch of short horror comic book stories. These weren't half bad. I'd read "The Father of All Things" and "Night Train" before when TKO released their TKO shorts separately so you could have some deja vu here.

Last week's arcs.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin - Lost Years ★★★
Just not nearly as good as the original The Last Ronin miniseries. Part of it was that the story wasn't nearly as compelling. This was about what Michelangelo was doing in the many last years between the regular series and The Last Ronin.

Box of Bones: Book Two ★★★
Volume 2 feels more like Hellraiser than a look at all of the atrocities committed against black people over the last few centuries.

Azula in the Spirit Temple ★★
These new Avatar stories lately just seem like leftover crumbs you're licking your fingers in order to pick them up that leave you unsatisfied.

The Flying Ship Volume 1 ★★★
A YA queer comic about a a one legged girl putting together a crew for her flying ship in a world where magic is outlawed but not always enforced.

Not a New York Love Story ★★★★
A quick read about a man in New York who keeps seeing his dead girlfriend. They go and do things they never got around to when they were together like go to the Mermaid Parade and then he wakes up alone each day.

Earthdivers, Vol. 1: Kill Columbus ★★★★
In 2112 the world is ending. Four Native Americans find a cave where they can make a one way trip to the past so one of them goes back to kill Columbus before he can discover America and start centuries of persecution towards Native Americans.

Stranger Things: Holiday Specials ★★
More Stranger Things fluff with these Holiday Specials.

Stranger Things: The Tomb of Ybwen ★★★
Another one of these kind of fluff Stranger Things minis. This one takes place after Season 2. Will is still sad about what happened to Bob. He finds an old map to a "treasure" that Bob created as a teenager and the boys go to find it.

Shadow Hills ★★★
People in a washed up town start popping up covered in an oily substance. Sink holes are also opening up. It's interesting but enough isn't explained. Things just happen.

Night Club Volume 1 ★★★
Three dumbass teenagers become vampires and decide to get famous on Youtube doing parkour. They end up coming across a stereo-typically bad group of vampires and a fight ensues. Kudos for the $1.99 cover price of each issue. I'm not going to say no to any comic that's only $2 an issue.

Frank Lee, After Alcatraz ★★
This is a hypothetical about what happened to Frank Lee after he escaped from Alcatraz, famously played by Clint Eastwood in the movie. This suggests he only moved 14 miles away and was taken care of by a married couple. The storytelling in this is pretty dry and obtuse and the art is often fugly.

The Lost King (The Queen's Favorite Witch #2) ★★★
Not as focused on the Queen's favorite witch as the first book. This gets more into the English politics of the time when Elizabeth was queen and wouldn't marry.

The Lucky Poor ★★★
A kid's comic about growing up poor in Canada. This was kind of a memoir and the focus keeps on changing, keeping it average instead of terrific.

Sea Serpent's Heir Book Two: Black Wave ★★★★
Aello goes all in as the reincarnation of the sea serpent that's destined to destroy the world. She begins to pull in her powers as necessary to unite the pirate clans against the religious institution trying to destroy them.

Milky Way ★
A really off-putting sexual story about a young couple. The guy suddenly becomes obsessed with lactating breasts and his girlfriend is babysitting this grossly overweight woman's baby who he has an affair with. All of the characters are very unlikable. The art is fugly. This will put you off from having sex for awhile. It's all just gross.

DEN Volume 2: Muvovum ★★★★
Richard Corben's tale of two humans trapped in a strange fantasy world continues. Presumably because this was originally serialized in Heavy Metal, there is a ton of nudity in it, both male and female. Most people in this world only wear cloaks and are otherwise completely naked for no apparent reason. Given that it's Corbin, there are plenty of grotesque monsters as well.

Mother Nature ★★
This eco-horror was adapted by a screenplay. Jamie Lee Curtis is clearly meant to be one of the characters in it. This may work better as a movie because it didn't work as a comic. Honestly, this is exactly what I expect when a star's name is attached to a comic book these days. They are barely involved and the comic is terrible. Keanu Reeves, Oscar Isaacs, Emilia Clarke, now add Jamie Lee Curtis to that list.

Doctor Who: Empire of the Wolf ★★★
The Eighth and eleventh Doctors team up when the Rose from the other Earth and Bad Wolf Empress Rose start having visions of one another.

Battlecats Vol.1 GN: The Hunt for the Dire Beast ★★★
Thundercats in a generic D&D setting.

Mad Money ★★★★
The last and first Nolan novels about a Robert Parker type thief.

Tracy Marie wrote: "I've never read a J. D. Robb book. What are the crime scenes like, in your face or closed door?"

J.D. Robb is a pseudonym of Nora Roberts's so I wouldn't think they'd be too bad.

Last week's arcs.

The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber ★★★
The story of a young monster who is picked on by the other monsters until he meets an old monster who used to be the best wrestler in the world. Juni Ba only drew this and I didn't think it was as appealing as his previous work like Monkey Meat.

Dungeons & Dragons Library Collection, Vol. 1 ★★★
These 2 stories honestly don't bring much new to the table even though they are both written by R.A. Salvatore.

Bad Karma ★★★★
The story of two washed up mercenaries. One is missing a leg, the other has major head trauma. They meet a death row inmate who they know didn't kill anyone 10 years ago, because they did it. Now they have to try and make amends.

Star Trek Vol. 1: Godshock ★★★
A solid extension of the Next Generation era of Star Trek. It's 3 years after the end of Deep Space Nine. Captain Sisko has finally returned from the Prophets and set on a mission. He puts together a crew of Star Trek's version of the Avengers (Data, Beverly Crusher, Worf, Tom Paris, and Scotty along with a couple of new bridge crew.)

Animalheads ★★★
This was alright. It's about 4 kids that graduate college and kind of fall into becoming criminals. It's all centered around this one event that they dance around for 300 pages. Just get to the point already.

Project Monarch ★★★
It's interesting to see Oeming and Santos team up because their art styles are so similar even though Oeming just sticks to writing this one. I gotta say though that this story about the Illuminati operating behind the scenes was really obtuse and not very entertaining.

Dungeons & Dragons: Saturday Morning Adventures ★★
Maybe David Booher should stick to creator owned stuff like Canto (which is fantastic) because this doesn't add anything to the terrific Dungeons & Dragons cartoon of my youth.

Cain ★★★
Basically this is a "What If?" story about if Matt Murdoch became a hitman who killed bad guys instead of a superhero.

Marvel Comics: A Manga Tribute ★★★
This is mainly a bunch of Marvel variant covers by Japanese artists like Peach Momoko and Sana Takeda. There's a few pieces of original art and covers specifically for the Japanese market. With all of the different artists involved some pages are excellent while others are awful.

Dr. Moebius and Mister Gir ★★
Surprisingly few drawings considering Moebius was an artist for his entire life. What it is is almost 300 pages of interviews Sadoul conducted with Moebius at three different periods of his life before he passed away. It's extremely in-depth. The kind of thing that only his biggest fans would want to read.

Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1957 ★★★
Collects all of the 1957 one shots. I thought the book end stories were the best of the 6 stories.

Illegal Cargo ★★★★
A bleak story about an El Salvadorian man who goes searching for his daughter after she goes missing in Mexico while trying to make it to the U.S. This was harsh but ends like it probably does for a lot of parents.

Box of Bones: Book One ★★★
A college student writing her dissertation decides to write it on the Box of Bones. It's kind of like the box from Hellraiser but with a whole history of being downtrodden and treated just awfully over the years. Each issue is a new stand alone story with a different illustrator. Some work better than others, especially when you get to panel structure.

Oni Ronin ★★
Some really generic, ronin claptrap. I couldn't keep the first half of the story straight. Too many characters that didn't matter to the story and the like. The last half is told in Hell and didn't make a whole lot more sense either.

Clementine: Book Two ★★★
Walden continues her tradition of making these Clementine books way too long at 280+ pages. Nothing happens for most of the first 75% of the book. Clementine and their friends find an island in Canada to hide out on from all the walkers until it inevitably comes crashing down at the end.

Spree ★★★★
The seventh book in the Nolan series, Nolan has retired and went legit. He's running a nightclub off the new mall and doing well. His partner, Jon, is still with the lead singer from his old band and making comic books. Things change though when the family of their old foes, the Comforts, come across them and realize they are still alive. What follows is the grand score, robbing every store in the mall back in the 80's when malls were still profitable. Nolan and Jon are forced into it and now they've got to get to the Comforts before the Comforts get to them, all in the midst of a score.