Event Leviathan #1 Review (Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev)

Talia Al-Ghul and her gang of baddies, Leviathan, are up to no good again. After blowing up a Coast City building, leaving Steve Trevor the only survivor, it’s down to DC’s finest detectives – Batman, Lois Lane(?), Green Arrow(???), and The Question(!) – to find her and figure out where she’s planning to strike next, before it’s too late. 

The Hustler by Walter Tevis Review

“Fast” Eddie Felson, a brilliant young pool hustler, travels from California to Chicago to take on the best player in the country: Minnesota Fats. Will the young up and comer beat the old pro? Of course - there’s no story otherwise! 

Lodger Review (David Lapham, Maria Lapham)

A serial-killing travel blogger rents a room in some kid’s family’s house, destroys the family and, years later, the kid grows up looking for revenge on the blogger killer. 

David and Maria Lapham’s Lodger is basically Stray Bullets if Stray Bullets was crap! Lodger is a similar kind of dark crime story but not nearly as compelling as the material in Stray Bullets. 

Superman: Up in the Sky #1 Review

A random kid from Gotham is abducted by an alien and taken away - up in the sky. Superman to the rescue! But the universe is a big place - how will he find her? 

I’m such a big fan of Tom King’s Batman, I really wanted his Superman to be equally as brilliant - and it’s alright but also unfortunately not. 

Cosmopolitan by Akhil Sharma Review

Recently retired Gopal is abandoned by his wife, who’s gone to seek enlightenment in an Indian ashram, and his twentysomething daughter, who’s moved to be with her boyfriend in Germany. Alone in New Jersey and unsure how to fill his days, he unexpectedly finds himself in a relationship with his neighbour and fellow retiree Mrs Shaw and begins to read magazines like Cosmopolitan to brush up on courtship after many years of being married.

Cemetery Beach Review (Warren Ellis, Jason Howard)

Warren Ellis and Jason Howard, the creative team behind Trees, reunite for a new series: Cemetery Beach. And I’m gonna stop there - I could describe the setup, the characters’ names and blah blah blah but it really doesn’t matter. 

Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku, Volume 1 by Fujita Review

Office workers by day, secret nerds by, well, all the time! Otaku are young Japanese people obsessed with games/manga/anime/cosplay, which is apparently stigmatized in Japanese society so our main characters have to hide their hobbies from co-workers/non-Otaku. Narumi starts work at a new company where her childhood friend Hirotaka also works and the two hook up. Joining them are another couple, Hanako and Kabakura, who also work in the same office, and the four of them happily nerd out in their spare time! 

The Boy in the Earth by Fuminori Nakamura Review

A depressed taxi driver and his alcoholic girlfriend stumble through life. They both hate living. That’s it! 

So this is definitely no Scorsese’s Taxi Driver - that film had a story! Not that Fuminori Nakamura’s The Boy in the Earth makes any attempt at one. It’s just one long misery-fest: the taxi driver hates himself and gets beat up, drinks, hurts himself some more, then we find out the sad details of his abusive childhood and the story’s over. 

Inuyashiki, Volume 3 by Hiroya Oku Review

The absurdly simplistic good/bad power fantasy that is Inuyashiki continues in Volume 3. The murderous sociopath from the last book is nowhere to be seen as a new baddie is introduced: a giant Yakuza scumbag who abducts women, shoots them up with drugs and rapes them until they’re dead – honestly, the villains in this series are so irredeemably OTT evil, it’s almost funny! 

B.P.R.D. The Devil You Know, Volume 2: Pandemonium Review (Mike Mignola, Scott Allie)

I have a bad habit of requesting galleys I’m not really that interested in purely because they’s freeeeeeeeeeee! Though I used to be a huge fan of all things Mignolaverse so I saw this and, even though BPRD hasn’t been good in years, my old self made me go for it because why not? It’s freeeeeeeeeeeee! And look, Hellboy’s back for no reason! Oh, you stupid man… 

The Last Days of August by Jon Ronson Review

In December 2017, pornstar August Ames (real name Mercedes Grabowski) found out that she was scheduled to shoot a scene with a male performer who had previously done gay porn and not been subsequently tested. As a result, she refused to perform in the scene and tweeted out this refusal and explanation to her followers on Twitter. This immediately led to a series of intense tweets from people calling her homophobic, demanding her to apologise and, in one case, telling her to swallow a cyanide pill! On 5 December 2017, she was found hanged from a tree in a park in Camarillo, California – she was 23 years old. But did she kill herself over online bullying – or was there more going on in the shadows that led her to take her own life…? 

Supergirl, Volume 5: Red Daughter of Krypton Review (Tony Bedard, Yildiray Cinar)

I’m really not sure what I was thinking with this one. I kinda like the Red Lanterns – the comically-angsty version of the Green Lantern Corps – and Tony Bedard’s not that bad a writer… yeah, I was wrong. Supergirl, Volume 5: Red Daughter of Krypton is terrible! 

The Kamandi Challenge #9 Review (Tom King, Kevin Eastman)

To celebrate Jack Kirby’s 100th birthday in 2017, DC published The Kamandi Challenge, a 12 issue maxi-series starring Kirby’s character Kamandi, where tag-teams of creators would produce one issue before handing off to another. Not that I’m much of a Kirby or Kamandi fan, but I am a Tom King fan which is the reason why I’m reading issue #9 only, the one he wrote (I’m not prepared to pick up the complete book and wade through the other 11 issues considering they’re written by the likes of Dan Abnett, Keith Giffen, Marguerite Bennett, Steve Orlando and Dan Didio – there’s not enough barf in the world to express how I feel about reading those writers’ comics!). And I guess it’s appropriate that Tom King got to write an issue given Kirby’s nickname was “King”! 

Cave Girls of the Lost World by Richard Sala Review

Richard Sala’s a cartoonist but his latest, Cave Girls of the Lost World, is NOT a comic! There’s maybe half a dozen pages that are but the rest is alternating full pages of text followed by a pinup.