The elevator pitch that got my attention for this novel was “a woman falls in love with a printer” - not a person working the job of printer, but the actual office machine. Alright, that might be fun. And a similar tagline is on the cover too: “This is a story of girl meets printer.” (Hard Copy - geddit, the innuendo, hoho!) And it is that, but it’s also not much more than that - and that’s not enough for a novel.
I read Frank Miller’s original Ronin years ago and don’t remember much about it besides it fused Japanese samurai with robots. Which sounds ok and probably was - it was the ‘80s and back when Frank Miller was still capable of ok!
1973, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Before Dahmer, there was The Deviant Killer. Dressed as a mall santa wielding an axe, he killed three people - including two teenage boys - before he was stopped. Randall Olsen, a closeted store manager, was convicted of the killings.
In Ultimate Invasion, The Maker made it so that the origin stories of superheroes in an alternate world never happened - which means no magic spider ever bit a teenage Peter Parker and this world never had a Spider-Man! Instead, this world’s Peter is a middle-aged photojournalist at the Bugle, married to MJ, a PR exec, with a couple kids. The perfect life - except Peter can’t shake the feeling of dissatisfaction… that he should maybe be doing something else with his life…
After boring readers with his tedious recounting of how Bruce Wayne learned the skills in his youth to become Batman (he trained with masters of multiple disciplines around the world - whodathunkit!?) in The Knight, Chip Zdarsky does a truncated version of that same, needless story with The Joker. Yup, unfortunately Zdarsky’s Batman run still isn’t improving in this third volume, The Joker Year One.
Batman’s had more than his share of crossovers over the years and at this point DC are scraping the bottom of the barrel with this latest one. That’s right, it’s the crossover nobody asked for, featuring a character most English comics readers will be thinking “...who?”: Dylan Dog.
A dying man and his young son walk a blighted landscape littered with the mass dead, dodging roaming cannibals and surviving on whatever they can find, heading south, to the coast. Will they make it there alive - and what is at the end of the road?
We’re living in a particularly uncreative era for art where a great deal of what’s being produced by the big companies is an endless raft of unwanted prequels, sequels, spinoffs and remakes rather than imaginative original stories and challenging ideas. So here’s another useless prequel: Batman: The Knight!
Volume 1 is an interesting way of framing a book that starts with issue #301!Larry Hama has been writing GI Joe comics on and off for over 40 years. His first run started at Marvel in 1982 and ran until 1994. The series went on hiatus and was picked up by IDW in 2010 with Hama writing again and ran until 2022. This third iteration began at Image/Skybound in conjunction with Robert Kirkman’s Energon Universe endeavour in 2023, so, if the pattern holds and Hama lives until he’s 86 (he’s currently in his mid 70s), there’s another 11 years of Hama/GI Joe comics to follow! Gawd help us…
Born with spina bifida, John Moore overcame his physical obstacles and grew up to become a brilliant inventor. Among his inventions was a powerful armour that turned him into the superhero Caliburn. His childhood friends watched as their friend amazed the world - until today, when Caliburn was found brutally murdered. Whodunit? His old pal Kasia thinks it was someone in their childhood club known as The Tin Can Society…
Mid-20s cynical semi-drunk Megan is obsessed with her co-worker, Jillian, a single mom in her mid-30s, relentlessly upbeat and full of love for the Lord. Obsessed in a negative way because Megan hates Jillian. Megan hates full stop. Except when Jillian’s life starts to go tits up and then Megan l-u-v-s the fallout. But how will Jillian react to unending Ls?
There suddenly exists a distorted mirror version of Gotham called Gotham Below where everything’s a little bit spookier for no reason. Now it’s affecting the rogues in the real Gotham and Batman Below (who has tentacles coming out of his mouth for no reason) has kidnapped some kid to be his Robin for some reason. Batman and a Talon from the Court of Owls have to portal over to save the day. Yay…
Hunger is literally the story of the starving artist! An unsuccessful writer (yup, that tired trope of a writer making their main character a writer like them), he’s a hungry boy because he’s got no money for food. He writes, he sometimes gets money, and occasionally something mildly interesting happens, but mostly he staggers around hungry.
Absolutely fascinating and totally distinct main characters Generic Man Hero Character and Generic Woman Hero Character are on the run for alien treason. Kylo Ren-wannabe Proximus is dispatched to kill them. Couple of Transformers cameo. Do not read Void Rivals while operating heavy machinery!
In this sixth volume of Boy’s Abyss, we learn the backstory of the cult author Esemori (his younger self is on the cover) and his doomed romance with Rei’s mother, Yuko, when they were in high school. Back in the present, Rei’s former friend and sometime bully Gen finds out about his relationship with their teacher Shibasawa while Rei’s morbid death fascination finally leads him to a place he thought he wanted to go - or does he?
