Brian Blessed v Olympus: Piles Of Reading

[Steven]

#148 - Adventures of Superman José Luis García-López by JLGL, Lein Wein, Gerry Conway, etc

A moderately random collection of tales from across Superman, DC Presents and the originally tabloid sized All New Collectors' Edition Superman vs Wonder Woman. The stories are quite variable, with the epic being the best of them, but generally always at least mildly engaging.

[Steven]

#149 - All That Earthly Remains by C.C. McNapp

A blast from the past, though it does seem timely now. A nuclear scientist comes to a South American country, recently turned totalitarian after a religion-led revolution, to investigate a mysterious explosion that might be nuclear. The story then proceeds to read like an X-Files episode as a small group descends into the crater, having heard the Indio legends about glowing beings with fiery spears. What they find upends *everyone’s* view of the world. It’s a smart tale, an inversion of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness that just as effectively plays hell with its characters.

[Steven]

*drumroll*

[Steven]

#150 - Star Trek: New Visions by John Byrne

By no means perfect (Byrne had quite a learning curve to do these) but undeniably fun. Basically, these are new “Star Trek” original series stories, but done jn the style of Where No Man Has Gone Before — that is, Fotonovels, themselves a riff on fumetti, the European style of graphic storytelling using photographs and matted backgrounds.

Byrne took huge numbers of stills and set to work doing photo manipulation with occasional CGI work, generating new images for his stories. His editing is sometimes rather obvious and at times a bit crude, but given that the original series was often rough around the edges, it works.

In this volume he does follow-ups to “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “Mirror, Mirror” as well as a faintly clever story that takes the crew to the galactic core and a sad story that explains Janice Rand leaving the Enterprise.