A group of paranormal experts assemble for a heist on a haunted house. Their target? A ghostie!
Ghosted, Volume 1: Haunted Heist wasn’t bad but definitely had its flaws. I was going to summarise it as “a spooky Ocean’s 11” except that would imply the team was made up of necessary specialists and I wasn’t convinced that that’s what they were.
Uncle Prowler knows that his nephew Miles is the new Spider-Man and plans to blackmail him into his enforcer for his takeover of the NYC criminal underworld – but will Miles go along with it? Also, HYDRA attempt a second American Revolution as their ranks go toe-to-toe with SHIELD in open warfare and Cap gets made President of the United States?!
Copkiller. American Robin Hood. World-famous outlaw. Western legend. This is the story of William H. Bonney aka Billy the Kid, infamous for the murders of several lawmen and shot dead by federal agents in 1881 aged just 21 years old.
Saddle up, buckaroos - it’s another re-telling of the Petey Parker/Spider-Pants origin story! Brian Bendyman goes through the well-worn checklist: nerdy bully-magnet Peter gets bit by a magic spider, gets superpowers, doesn’t use them to stop crime, loses his Uncle Ben (the non-rice guy), and learns that With Great Blahblah Comes Blah Blahblah. And then decides to punch Norman Osborn who’s transformed himself into the Green Wheelie Bin!
It’s Jimmy and Sweetpea vs Hunter for the fate of the world in the last book in Jason Shiga’s Demon series. And it’s an absolute corker to go out on!
Twentysomething Jane wants to move out of her increasingly-toxic parents’ house but doesn’t have the cash for a deposit. Then her bestie from high school turned rich’n’famous H&M model, Natalie, comes back to town and, following some shocking revelations, Jane begins plotting a dark and bitter plan to get what she needs…
A smalltown sheriff gets fed up with being pushed around by the drunken louts employed by the corrupt local businessman and mayor and one day decides to push back. You can’t break the cold by breaking the thermometer…
Though he’s only been Spider-Man for a New York minute, Miles Morales’ secret is already out – his uncle Aaron knows that he’s the new webslinger! But the unmasking and secret-identity-reveals doesn’t stop there as Miles discovers his uncle Aaron is the super-thief, the Prowler! The question is: what will shady Uncle Prowler do with this valuable intel…?
Jessica Drew may be taking a break from the Avengers to pursue a career as a Private Investigator but her superhero past isn’t taking a break from her! Someone’s blackmailing Z-list supervillains into committing crimes and the unlikely duo of Spider-Woman and Daily Bugle star reporter Ben Urich are on the case.
Terry Pratchett's Discworld Imaginarium is a beautifully-produced art book featuring the remarkable work of Discworld illustrator Paul Kidby.
Kidby took over from the original Discworld covers artist, Josh Kirby, after Kirby’s death in 2001. And it’s because I grew up with the Kirby-illustrated Discworld covers that Kidby’s art never felt like the “real” Discworld to me but his skill and vision is undeniable.
Set in 1930s England, Irmina, a young German exchange student, befriends Howard, a black scholarship student from Barbados attending Oxford, but money problems force her back to Germany, prematurely ending their burgeoning relationship. Before she can make it back to England, WW2 kicks off – will the two ever see each other again?
My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs is Kazuo Ishiguro’s speech from when he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. It takes the form of a truncated career retrospective/autobiography, touching upon the creation of his more well-known books like The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.
Scott Snyder’s All-Star Batman continues to be an ironically-named series with yet another sub-par entry in The First Ally. Alfred’s old mentor shows up to do something while Bruce is doing something else with a trio of his rogues - yeah, it’s not a great story.
Let me attempt to put the brakes on the dog-pile by saying I’m just not a huge Spidey fan which is the only excuse I have for not getting around to reading Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, Volume 1 until now! But, really. Wow. Am I glad I finally did - this was a truly outstanding book.
Dani Moonstar is sent out into the world to recruit troubled young mutants, whose powers are just emerging, for Xavier’s school.
If you’re familiar with the X-Men in any medium, you’ll know that’s the classic X-Men setup. In fact, Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir’s New Mutants is an ironically old-school X-Men comic! And yet, despite its unoriginality, I thought this was the best X-Men book I’ve read in years because it’s written so well.
Christopher Hastings and Bong Dazo’s Deadpool tie-in to Fear Itself proves the rule that event spinoffs are usually better than the event itself!
Deadpool comes up with a convoluted get-rich-quick scheme that takes advantage of the nonsense going on in Fear Itself. He steals an ordinary hammer, glues on some cheap plastic jewellery, tricks a brain-dead Z-list villain – in this case, the Walrus – to terrorise a one-horse town, then gets paid by the scared townsfolk to beat up the hammer-wielding doofus. Except this is a Deadpool plan so, of course, things get FUBAR’d up almost immediately!
The Nazis looted a buncha art from France during the Occupation. Museum Curator Ila, along with others, hides as many pieces as she can – “Moving Pitchers” around, oooohhh, I gets the title now!! – before she’s caught and interrogated by her German Nazi boyfriend - or someone anyway. And then the book’s over… ?
I didn’t rate Kathryn Immonen as even a halfway-decent writer before and she hasn’t changed my mind with her badly-written comic drawn by her hubby Stuart, Moving Pictures. This book is poo.
Husband and wife creative team Gabriel Hardman and Corinna Bechko give Green Lantern the Earth One treatment - an alternate-world origin - in this fairly decent first volume.
It’s basically the classic Hal Jordan origin with a few minor tweaks here and there. Hal’s reimagined as an asteroid miner who stumbles across the corpse of Abin Sur, picks up his mysterious green ring and is thrown into the strange world of the Green Lanterns.
