If you’ve read Anthony Horowitz’s Susan Ryeland novels, you’ll know the drill by now and if you haven’t they’re about a book editor who keeps finding herself embroiled in murder mysteries that have an uncanny resemblance to an Agatha Christie-ish mystery that runs parallel to her own.
The Ruskies have nicked weaponised water - “stalvoda”, literally “steel water”, which instantly freezes after exploding - from the Brits, who originally nicked it from the Ruskies during the Soviet era. Bond’s gotta - sigh - nick it back. International espionage, eh?
Apparently one of the great scientific mysteries of the 19th century was how exactly a horse moves at a gallop(!) with the keenest scientific minds insisting that they run like a frog jumps. It would take the fortune of the richest man in America, Leland Stanford, and the ingenuity of a British photographer whose parents didn’t know how to spell “Edward”, Eadweard Muybridge, to prove otherwise. All that and more in Guy Delisle’s latest book, a comics bio of weird Ed Muybridge!
It’s the future so the Matrix is real and Peter Parker’s stuck in there because. Where’s MJ? Well, the sensible thing to do is time-travel with a mini Black Cat and actual goblins(!?) to fight Venom as MJ to not prevent the dystopian future that an Akira’d out Kingpin will enact for some reason. Time to get your dumbrellas out everyone - we’re heading back into Kaare Andrews’ Reign!
There was a Justice League piss-take team called The Authority at the end of the ‘90s created by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch. Both The Authority and Ellis have been cancelled, in different meanings of the word, since then (Hitch is still knocking around) and one of the founding members of that team was Jenny Sparks, the Spirit of the 20th Century.
GI Joe, a toy that became a cartoon and a comic and is now a newer comic aimed at the same audience from back in the ‘80s except they’re old men now getting nostalgic for garbage that was never good - yo poo!
I forget why but I came across William Butler Yeats’ poem The Second Coming recently and was quite taken with it. I’d never read it before but recognised several lines and was surprised they all came from this short poem. Here’s some you too might know:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre… Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; … The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity… And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Aliocha Coll was a 20th century Spanish writer who produced experimental books, of which few were published and those that did failed to connect with a large audience - hence his name being practically unknown today.
If you unfortunately pay attention to the digital slurry that is online discourse then you may have noticed in the past week memes about how “Black Panther is WHITE!” with a fake image of Ryan Gosling’s increasingly-botoxed face (don’t do it Ryan, age naturally!) on the MCU’s Black Panther.
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes is a mid-16th century Spanish novella written by… nobody knows! And it’s about the title character narrating his rather rough yet sorta comedic early life as the downtrodden servant to a series of scumbag masters: a blind man who pretends to be a holy man, a priest who is even more stingy and cruel than the blind man, a sham nobleman who’s as poor as Lazaro, and another conman who sells papal indulgences.
The Deviant Killer, supposedly a gay peeping tom who chopped up the young boys he took pics of at Christmas, has been locked up since the early ‘70s. Half a century later and a copycat killer is recreating his MO on a new generation of victims. True crime aficionado Michael is arrested - his fascination with the case and his ID being found at a crime scene being enough to put him away for now. Meanwhile his boyfriend Derek and FBI Agent Hall continue looking into the case to see if Michael really was the new Deviant Killer or not.
George is just a guy. He doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life and goes through it, like most people, checking boxes: go to college, get a series of arbitrary jobs, get into a relationship, move into a series of crappy apartments, etc. And the book follows George from his teens to his late 30s as he bumbles around, has adventures. And that is the book. Of George.
Superman: Action Comics: Superstars: Volume 1: Jesus Can We Can We Get Another Fucking Subtitle In Here Already is a collection of three short stories that I guess filled up space in between the main storylines written by whoever drew the short straw to write this title. “Superstars” is a bit of a misnomer. Jason Aaron, sure, but Gail Simone and Rainbow Rowell? Definitely not - especially with the quality of their contributions to this book.
