It’s the early ‘90s and Noah Van Sciver is a kid living in New Jersey with his Mormon family. The kids in the town he lives in are all obsessed with superhero comics, including Noah and his siblings, and this is the time of the great comics boom when everyone thought comics were great investments and creators like Todd McFarlane were becoming millionaires. Spawn #5 is the hot new comic - it’s sold out everywhere but luckily Noah’s brother Ethan has a copy. But oh no - in his perpetual nervousness, Noah’s accidentally torn and ruined it! How will he replace it without getting caught?!
The nameless narrator is a writer in a world where only a few dozen books have ever been written. He’s hounded by his ex Margaret, and, because talking tigers killed his folks, he lives in a compound called iDEATH where everything’s made of watermelon. A nearby villain called inBOIL lives in The Forgotten Works and grumbles about the integrity of iDEATH.… riiiiight.
Christie Malry, a young accountant, decides to apply the method of double-entry bookkeeping to his own life - if the world wrongs him, he will debit it and credit himself; that is, allow himself some form of revenge to “balance the books”. Except Christie begins to lose perspective over the value of the wrongs done to him and his reactions become more extreme and darker very quickly.
Batman: Dark Patterns is 12 issues of the dumbest Batman comics you’ll ever read.It’s made up of four 3 issue story arcs, loosely connected to no effect, each increasingly stupid and more pointless.
Roald Dahl’s Matilda is the first time I saw mention of William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury as it was on the booklist the kindly librarian gives Dahl’s precocious heroine (by the by, I re-read Matilda years later and, miraculously, it still held up). I’ve also always been aware that Faulkner is part of that cadre of mid-20th century American writers - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck - and that he’s my blind spot in that group.
I don’t think we’ll ever get a great David Sedaris book again - like Me Talk Pretty, Dress Your Family or Santaland Diaries - because he’s become too rich, famous and comfortable, and those books contained a relatability and desperation that comes from not having those things. And I think he told his best stories in those books and hasn’t got any more.
If you ever see a book marketing itself with the phrase “a meditation on…” then drop that book immediately because it will almost certainly be a total waste of your time. Unfortunately for me I didn’t notice that the copy on the inside jacket called this book “a brilliant meditation on…” until after I’d read the book but my theory checks out as Transcription by Ben Lerner is not good.
How I Make Comics is basically about anything but how Kim Deitch makes comics!The book is made up of random, some loosely-connected, stories, with of course Waldo making his usual appearance, none of which were that interesting to read or gelled together into a memorable narrative, let alone explore Deitch’s creative process in any meaningful way.
Xavier, Doug and Tim are three single men living together and working in the same local restaurant - Xavier and Doug are short order cooks while Tim is a dishwasher, aspiring to become a cook. The book follows their attempts at dating in modern-day Canadia.
After his mother’s death, a man goes to a village to find out who his father was - a strange journey that will take him through the past and the afterlife.
Aleksandra is a married mother of two living the life of a Russian peasant on their farm - until the war begins and her husband is drafted into the Red Army. And then the Nazis arrive. After helping her Jewish neighbour, Aleksandra and her kids must escape into the woods where they discover the Russian resistance to the German invasion: guerrilla fighters made up of non-army Russians called Partisans. So begins Aleksandra’s war where she does things she would never tell her husband… if she ever sees him again.
British Intelligence Agent George Smiley interviews a potential candidate for a role in the Foreign Office but decides against hiring the chap. The man, apparently mortally upset at being turned down, offs himself that night, blaming Smiley’s decision in his suicide note! When Smiley visits the man’s widow the following morning he picks up the phone for a call intended for the deceased - but why would a man choosing to end it all that night then arrange for an early morning wake up call?
In a weird tag-team move, Matt Fraction has taken over Batman from his Sex Criminals co-creator/artist Chip Zdarsky, so both the artist and writer of Sex Crimz have written Batman runs one after the other! What’s that aboot!?
Makina’s brother crossed over to America - “the Big Chilango” - chasing a spurious land deal. Gone for a while, she now makes the Mexico-USA border crossing herself in search of him, with a message from their mother. Will she find him - is he even still alive?
