7. Weird stuff starts happening to 7 people in an apartment building. 7 is a number you will see often in this book because 7 is important (not really). One of the 7 dies, leaving behind a key - but to a door to where? One thing’s for sure: 7 will be involved! Or will it…? 7.
Over the course of ten letters from February 1903 to December 1908, Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke gave artistic advice to a younger chap from a similar background who was aspiring to follow in his (only slightly older) footsteps. After Rilke died in 1926, Franz Xaver Kappus, the young poet of the title, collected and published them to share the good advice and insight into Rilke’s life with everyone.
Keanu’s back from space or somewhere and talking psychically with a doctor who shoots ink from her eyes. Why? Cos he wants to grow a giant red metal bird from his chest. I know, THAT old chestnut again! Let’s get stoopid one last time with John Thicko, Kindter Surprise and Garney the Dinosaur in RTRDD, Volume 3.
There are few things more tedious than listening to someone who begins a sentence with “I had a weird dream last night…” so imagine how unutterably dull an entire book of that drivel would be to read. Well, I must be dreaming myself because someone actually published that horrendous idea for a book and it’s by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast!
This is the story of Emily Grimes, from her childhood in the 1930s to her late ‘40s in the 1970s, and the people in her life: her older sister Sarah, her mother Esther or “Pookie”, and her father Walter, as well as the numerous men she has relationships with.
Contained within a mech suit/car filled with water, a mermaid and her pet fish roam the… San Francisco desert?! Not an ideal place to be stranded then when you need to refresh your mech suit/car’s water before the toxicity levels kills ya. The race is on for the mermaid to find water in a place filled with sand!
Hulk and Banner are back on Earth but Hulk is mad at Banner for having mentally locked him up for so long. And if there’s one thing you wouldn’t like Hulk to be, it’s… y’know. Meanwhile, an ancient evil is resurrected and with it awakens a new Age of Monsters. Their sights are set on the biggest monster of all: yo mama! Hulk.
The Universal Church of Truth is back from the future to brainwash the past to save the future from death - or something. But if it’s not Adam Warlock/Magus in their latest cocoon, who is it? Meanwhile, Rocket battles space cancer - gee I wonder if he’ll overcome it? Have Faith.
Thanos is dead but has one last trick up his gauntlet: he’s uploaded his consciousness into someone else and lives on in a new body. But whose? All eyes point towards Gamora, who’s missing, presumed green. It’s a veritable Royal Rumble of the Marvel Cosmic as multiple teams set out to beat the other. This is Thanos’ Final Gauntlet!
A couple of pilots from warring sides crash-land on a rock and must put their differences aside to work together and make it back home. But it turns out that beneath their armour there is… (Transformers -) More Than Meets The Eye!
Monsters spook people while the Cat-Eyed Boy watches on. That pretty much sums up every story in Kazuo Umezz’s Cat-Eyed Boy, Volume 1, the least compelling manga of his I’ve read to date.
On the run from SHIELD, the Fantastic Four hide out at Ben’s Aunt Petunia’s farm - but is it haunted by g-g-ghosts?! Sue and Alicia visit a town where everyone forgets everyone, the Four save a stranded alien vessel, and Ben and a dog wake up in a falling house - wass happenin?!
The Starship Hulk lands on a planet with a thriving Hulk society, created accidentally from an incident earlier in the series. But Titan lurks within Hulk’s decaying brain - and is about to emerge…
James is Percival Everett’s retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of N-word Jim. My review’s full of spoiler-y stuff so if you’re planning to read this book and that sorta thing bothers you, stop reading the review now. But if you’re simply after a TL/DR version of this review: Everett’s novel is unnecessary, adds little - worse, detracts even - to the original source material and Twain’s novel remains the better book to read of the two, yes, including the “problematic” language and racial stereotypes.
Wanted on Earth for supposedly murdering a bar full of patrons in El Paso, Bruce Banner’s turned Hulk into a starship and piloted it into deep space, never to return - though the Avengers are still after him. So when the grieving, newly-crowned King of Asgard, whose dead dad now inhabits Mjolnir, hears the Starship Hulk is nearby, Thor realises he can do some Avenger-ing and work out his grief at the same time. Is time for Hulk vs Thor - ding ding!
Peacemaker finally has a friend: a lil pug he names Bruce Wayne. Mais sacre bleu - an evil brain in a jar called The Brain and his French-speaking gorilla henchman have kidnapped him! To get him back, Peacemaker must steal Deathstroke the Terminator’s DNA so Brain can have a badass new clone bod. And who’s coming to Peacemaker’s party on Saturday?!
“These waves do not crash on me. They break on me. Because I am strong.”- Bruce Banner, mad scientist par excellence
Ben and Alicia find themselves in 1947 small town ‘murica. Sue and Reed are stuck in another small town - full of Doombots what don’t know they’re Doombots?! And Johnny plays at being a convenience store woman. All puzzling situations, but how come they ain’t together - wha hoppen to the Fantastic Floor?!
50 years ago, an MI6 00 Agent stole Soviet Russian research for a form of weaponised water: Stalvoda (“Steel Water”). Now, the Brits having perfected its use, the Russians have stolen it back. The man tasked with retrieving it and killing the thieves? Bond. Jamesh Bond. Da da duun da da! Doo doo doo doo… etc.
Feeling silly? Nick Maandag sure is in his latest collection of absurdist comics, Harvey Knight’s Odyssey!
A lonely young American student living in England gets invited to her friend’s posh ancestral mansion in the country for Christmas. What could possibly go wrong - certainly not murder most foul?! Moo ha ha ha haaaa…. zzz…
Swan Songs is a collection of six comics loosely connected by the theme of the end of something, ie. the end of the world/a marriage/a sentence, etc. W. Maxwell Prince specialises in these kind of one-and-done comics collections - his Ice Cream Man series with Martin Morazzo has the same format and subversive, dark tone - but unfortunately Swan Songs isn’t one of his better books.
Woohoo, new Charles Burns book! Oh… it’s just a series of covers. For comics that don’t exist. Hmm.
Edward Nashton is a brilliant but underachieving and meek accountant who discovers his accountancy firm is laundering money for the mob but feels helpless to do anything. Which is why he becomes so fixated on the new masked vigilante that appears in Gotham: The Batman. He represents justice and positive change to all the wrongs Edward sees in his everyday life. But the obsession soon sours, warping Edward into the Riddler we meet in the 2022 movie.
Betwixt looks like another Junji Ito book - same publisher, same format, same genre - and, though he draws the cover and provides a foreword, this is actually a horror manga anthology from other creators. Half of them are Asian, the other half are American, so the book is divided into stories from the two halves and you can read it either way - the traditional manga right to left, or the western-style left to right.
1891 and Marshal Azrael William Holt is sent out to the Utah Territory to investigate a series of bizarre and horrific murders. Signs point to the abandoned mine near the town of Canary whose water might be contaminated and could be driving people in the surrounding area to madness and despicable acts. But what’s really going on under the ground of Canary, and what does an old case of Holt’s, involving a demented child serial killer, have to do with all of this?
A young costumier goes on a temporary assignment to make outfits for a circus in Vladivostok. Which she does. And then she goes home and makes costumes for other people someplace else.
Mimi’s Tales of Terror is Junji Ito’s adaptation of Shin Mimibukuro (“New Earmuffs”) by Hirokatsu Kihara and Ichiro Nakayama which is a collection of “true” ghost stories. Though, as Ito explains in his afterword, he took more than a few liberties in adapting it - adding details, expanding stories, although he did it with the original authors’ consent - so it’s more like an interpretation of the original than a straight adaptation (but it’s unlikely anyone would know if he hadn’t mentioned this as the book is out of print!).
Nightwing needs to protect Maroni long enough to testify in court - but his former associates are determined he won’t live long enough to do so. Tony Zucco, the man who killed Dick Grayson’s parents, leaves prison early and is soon up to no good, while Heartless continues his terror campaign in Bludhaven.
Teresa, an Italian girl in her early 20s, gets a job in Berlin as a scientific assistant to prepare an exhibit on King Tut’s treasure. There, she meets the bohemian Ruben and the two begin a whirlwind romance. Also, the story of Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. And the two are connected… buh?
Marvel lost the Conan licence to Titan Comics along with the creative team of Jim Zub and Roberto de la Torre who also moved over, having previously worked on Conan at Marvel. I’m not a big fan of Conan or fantasy in general but I heard good things about this one - and maybe the title would be good without Marvel editorial’s stinkbomb touch?
Charlie Swift’s crew is gunned down by a rival mob boss and his own head honcho, Stan, gets taken. Out for revenge, Charlie swiftly (hehe) finds himself in the midst of a complex plan involving the Feds and the case he was supposed to hand over holds some very valuable secrets - secrets hired killers are after him for. Everybody’s on the run and everybody’s packing - but is Charlie fast enough to beat em all?
Carolanne and Lee fall in love. They get married, she gets pregnant, leaves her job, plays homemaker - everything’s going perfectly! But who’s that strange shadowy figure living in the nearby apartment that haunts Carolanne…
Doc Ock wants to mess up Norman Osborn’s good streak - but Normy don’t wanna be baaad! Spider-Man gets astoopid agin for anuvver book!
A young girl on a summer holiday program in an abandoned shopping mall meets Jen, a mysterious older girl with a secret. In the flooded basement car park is a giant egg and elsewhere in the building are hundreds of tiny brains. Somehow it’s all connected to a massive explosion that took out twenty city blocks 12 years ago - and whatever caused it is back to do it again…
