Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-82) was a West German filmmaker who, in his short life, wrote and directed 38 feature films, several shorts and TV shows, including what many consider his masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and even produced films for other filmmakers. A one-man film studio, he created a new movie every 100 days. But his unhealthy lifestyle ended his life early when he died of a cocaine overdose at age 37.
WW2 has ended, the state of Israel is yet to be founded. In the years between these two events, a teenage Holocaust survivor, Elisha, is recruited into a Zionist terror cell to fight for an independent Jewish state in Palestine against the hated occupiers, the British. When one of their own is captured and sentenced to death, they capture a British officer in retaliation and propose a hostage exchange. If their comrade is executed at dawn, then so will the British officer - and Elisha will be the one to pull the trigger. Can Elisha reconcile going from being a victim of the Nazis to suddenly finding himself in the same position as they were - and will he go through with the killing?
Charlie “Little” Bigger arrives in the small town of Peardale in Long Island, posing as an older student enrolled at the local college, but is really there to whack a key witness in an upcoming mob trial. What’s a hitman to do in a small town? Apparently not much - including the very killing he’s been hired to do! Welcome to Snoozy Night by Jim Thompson.
Moan is one of Junji Ito’s better horror manga collections. It still has the same problems of other Ito books - character motivations aren’t so much underdeveloped as ignored and the endings are bonkers and often abrupt, while the shortest stories, included at the end almost like B-sides, are always the most forgettable - but the stories here are more entertaining than in others.
The Land of Sweet Forever is one of the literary events of 2025: a new book by Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, comprising 8 unpublished short stories - two of which feature her immortal character Jean Louise Finch - and 8 previously published nonfiction pieces.
Joe Wilmot runs the biggest movie theatre in his small town - but things aren’t going well for Joe. Stuck in a loveless marriage and with business failing, he and his wife Elizabeth hatch a plan to commit insurance fraud: take advantage of their double indemnity insurance by faking Elizabeth’s death in a fire then claiming the cashout. Except Joe isn’t as smart as he thinks and the people he’s wronged over the years are lining up to make sure this time he gets what’s coming to him…
Laura has a one night stand with a stranger she never sees again and gets preggo. Deciding to keep the baby, she raises her daughter Emma as a single mother, though luckily she belongs to an upper class Manhattan family which makes things easier. Laura & Emma is the story of the mother and daughter over the course of 15 years.
Lordy, life is difficult for some people, eh? Kabi Nagata’s previous autobiographical mangas have focused on her difficulties with her homosexuality, then becoming a drunk, then dealing with pancreatitis as a result of said boozing, and now her latest book, My Twisted Eating Disorder, is about her bulimia! She even mentions at the end of this book that there are other struggles she’s avoiding discussing so I dread to think what other burdens this poor woman is going through.
Bill “Dusty” Rhodes has it tough - he’d like to go to college but, with his mother out of the picture, he’s got to support his mentally-ailing, recently unemployed father by working nights at the local swanky hotel as a bellboy. There, he has to put up with a difficult manager, but meets interesting people like the gangster Tug and the beautiful Marcia Hillis, a newly-arrived guest at the hotel and an older woman who’s taken a shine to Dusty. Will she be the respite he craves from his life of unending drudgery?
Like a lot of cartoonists who became dads - James Kochalka, Jeffrey Brown, Guy DeLisle, to name just a few - Pascal Girard has made a bunch of comics about his kid and domestic life. Pastimes is a collection of four-panels-a-page diary strips, mostly about being a dad to his young daughter Lucie.
What’s “epic” about a story that’s only 58 pages long?!Ok, before I sound like a complete idiot, let me qualify what I’m about to say by first saying:
Hulk: Gray is a retelling of Hulk’s origin story. So: gamma bomb goes off, Bruce Banner caught in the blast, Ahab-like Ross immediately makes Hulk his white whale, and Hulk smashes army stuff. Hulk was originally gray when he appeared in the comics, hence the subtitle, and then eventually settled into the iconic green shortly afterwards, forevermore.
Ezekiel Farragut is in Falconer prison for murdering his brother. He’s also a heroin addict. There’s no story, just Farragut going through his time at the prison.
Clinton Brown is the best reporter at the Pacific City Courier, a small Californian newspaper - but he has a secret. Horribly maimed in the war after accidentally wandering onto an anti-personnel mine, Brown has left his wife believing their marriage is over now that he no longer has a penis - and worries that, now that she’s returned to try to change his mind, she will tell others about his loss. The only way to keep his secret: murder…
Besides a collection of his unpublished short stories appearing the year after his death in 2013, Picket Line is the first new fiction from Elmore Leonard in 11 years. An unpublished novella from his archive, Picket Line is bundled in with a couple of previously published short stories, Chick Killer and Ice Man, as they match Picket Line’s theme of law enforcement figures butting heads with ethnic minorities.
One of the many prestigious publications that Tom Gauld is the resident cartoonist at is New Scientist magazine and Physics for Cats is the latest collection of his cartoons for that magazine. And, having read everything Gauld’s put out over the years, and enjoyed much of it, I’d say Physics for Cats is the best book he’s made so far!
The Last Wolf is two short stories - the title story and a two-parter called Herman - by Hungarian writer, and this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Laszlo Krasznahorkai who’s famous for being extremely prejudicial against full-stops. But I wanted to sample this author without having to read a nearly 600 page sentence like Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming so I opted for this shorter piece.
The Android Davids have made it their mission to wipe out all life in the universe using the perfect weapon: Xenomorphs. But when they discover alternate universes, their mission changes to wipe out all life in all universes - including the Marvel Universe! Aww yee, it’s time for Aliens Vs. Avengers!
Erik Satie was a late 19th/early 20th century French composer whose work you almost certainly have heard without knowing who it was by (a constant for me who doesn’t know much about classical music) - if you listen to his Gymnopedies or Gnossiennes (nonsense words that he made up), you’ll probably recognise them from a thousand adverts selling anything from coffee to package holidays.
I want to talk about the book’s finale so, even though it’s not really a spoiler, I know the internet is full of people who don’t understand what that word means and thinks any detail of a story qualifies, so here’s the pointless but seemingly necessary fair warning at the top of the review:SPOILERS
Frank “Dolly” Dillon is a down-on-his-luck door-to-door salesman who happens across an even more desperate young woman who tells him a life-changing secret: her horrible aunt has a hundred grand in cash stashed away in their house! All Dolly has to do is murder the aunt and take the girl away with him - a helluva easy payday for a scumbag like him! But where did the money come from…
Some evil magical dude who thinks he owns Gotham is coming to Gotham to take ownership of Gotham with some other evil magical dudes. Guess Batman’s gonna punch some evil magical dudes? Buh huh.Not all Batman comics are slop but unfortunately quite a few are, including this one.
There isn’t really a story to Hunchback. A middle-aged woman with severe spinal curvature and a muscle disorder, who has to use a wheelchair and ventilator as a result, writes erotic fiction under a pseudonym online and posts provocative tweets like “I’d like to know what it’s like to have an abortion”. After we get to know what her day-to-day is like at the care home, something happens to her towards the end of the novella and then it’s over.
Robbers successfully knock over a bank and make it away with the loot - but the getaway doesn’t go as smoothly. Will they make it across the border down Mexico way or die trying?
Norwegian cartoonist Jason has made so many great comics I’ve enjoyed over the years that it’s an automatic must-read when I see a new book from him. Although, given the quality of his last couple of books and now this one, I’m starting to feel like his best work is behind him, unfortunately.
I know almost nothing about Natasha Brown but her debut novel Assembly feels like a cliched autobiographical first novel: she’s a black Oxbridge graduate who got a City job working in the finance sector - exactly like the nameless main character in this novel. Assembly isn’t a great debut though and reads like an author who’s still learning how to tell a story and didn’t quite know what she was shooting for.
Two Extinction Rebellion oiks squatting in a banker’s country house have a barney during a COVID rave with one lamping the other with a gold bar and then going on the run. But all is not as it seems at first and this self-righteous and neatly-packaged story of class disparity during late-stage capitalism turns out to be something more complex and disturbing…
The Absolute books are simply Elseworlds books - familiar characters with a twist set in an alternate universe but still essentially recognisable. Except for Absolute Wonder Woman. This series has so many changes to Wonder Woman that here she is basically an entirely new character - and a worse one at that.
The main Batman title has been in a creative funk ever since the end of Tom King’s run. James Tynion IV and Chip Zdarsky have both had runs on the series that were terrible and forgettable, so I’m glad DC have hired Matt Fraction, a writer who’s actually written some great comics, to attempt bringing this title back to its former glory.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky has been enjoying a strange renaissance on social media these past few years with people recommending his books, even though I’m quite certain these people aren’t reading them and nor are their largely consumer audiences. Because if they actually read his books, I sincerely doubt even half of them would be recommending them - his books are utterly terrible!
It’s a brand new imagining of Superman - get this: an alien boy sent via spaceship from his doomed home planet Krypton to Earth where he’s raised by the kind Kents and discovers he has superpowers. Superman grows up to be a paragon of truth and justice, using his superpowers for good against evil. Wait - “new”? Absolutely not.
Sheriff Nick Corey is in a bit of a pickle. He’s trying to get re-elected, only it’s clear to everyone he’s an incompetent sheriff who doesn’t do his job. His wife hates him and is probably cheating on him. Not that he cares because he’s cheating on her with other women around town. But it does bother him how the pimps at the local brothel don’t show him the respect his office deserves. What’s an honest god-fearing man to do? Simple: kill everyone.
Jacob’s comic Frank Kafka is being adapted into a TV show - and that experience is always a positive one, right? And then his elderly auntie gets ransomed. Meanwhile, Angie’s dad dies and the mob takes back his bar - she’s out of a home and a job in one fell swoop. What’s a girl to do - and how does her story connect with Jacob’s, and a lunatic called Tracy Lawless?
Ian Penman is a music critic and this book collects several of his most brilliant essays on such musical titans as Charlie Parker, Elvis and Prince, looking at their rollercoaster lives and legacies. I’ve never heard of or read anything by Penman before but I was really taken with It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (which is a line from Auden’s poem Walks).
Absolute Batman has been DC’s biggest hit comic of the past year - and I’m not really sure why as it’s quite… meh.It’s a striking redesign, I’ll give it that. The thinking behind the look seems to be “What if Batman looked like Bane at peak venom usage?” He’s more massive in this series than he’s ever been elsewhere. And he’s got… what are those things on his hands, umbrellas?!
Goes Like This is a collection of short comics and art pieces from 2002 to 2022 by Jordan Crane. And, like a lot of collections like this, it’s a mixed bag of good and forgettable stuff.
Anna and Tom are a young Italian couple living in Berlin, working their freelance, yet profitable, online advertising jobs. They have disposable income, they go to cool parties, they travel around Europe, and they document it all online to the supposed envy of their peers. They’re living the perfect life or are they oh wow I wonder if they’re not woah wouldn’t that be mind wooooahh
Gu and Dam are a couple. Then Gu dies. So Dam eats his corpse. As you do.What an absolute load of bollocks. I thought Choi Jin-Young was going to do something with her concept of couples’ cannibalism - which is the unusual and macabre angle that drew me to this novella - but she didn’t. The book is instead the boring story of a boring relationship, ending the way it began, to no effect, despite knowing more by the end about the “characters”.
The Grand Inquisitor is an episode from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s final novel The Brothers Karamazov, wherein one of the brothers relates a fantasy he has concocted for some reason of Jeebus’ Second Coming in 16th century Spain at the height of the Spanish Inquisition’s powah. After performing crowd favourite magic tricks, Jeebus is whisked away by the head of the Spanish Inquisition and talked to at length about the “true nature” of humanity.
Lex is dying of something mysterious - can Superman help him find a cure before it’s too late?Pretty basic premise and obvious from the title. But was it entertaining - could a story of Lex slowly dying and Superman carting him through a round robin of familiar Superman locales be? No and probably no - at least not in Mark Waid’s hands.
Fredric Wertham was a pioneer in 20th century psychiatric medicine. He was involved in examining convicted killers like Albert Fish and Robert Irwin, was instrumental in ending segregation in America’s schools, and played a key role in the censorship of comics, particularly crime and horror comics, leading to the creation of the Comics Code Authority (boo!).
If you like horror novels but wish they had more floor plans, this is the book for you!The author is approached by a friend who’s thinking of buying his first house - but it’s got a weird layout. Uketsu and his architect buddy look into it and wild theories - that of course prove true - start flying about this being a murder house. The previous occupants being the Japanese Bloody Benders, murdering guests who stay in their house! But whyyyy…
Magneto dies (again) creating an apocalyptic electro-magnetic pulse that wipes out all power on Earth, killing millions. With the remaining Brotherhood of Evil Mutants controlling the planet’s final reactor, Nick Fury rallies the surviving Avengers for a last ditch heist to secure it - and fails. With everyone dead at the hands of the Brotherhood, it’s down to Wolverine… to get Revenge!
Brian is a quiet civil servant who slowly becomes a regular patron of the British Film Institute (BFI) and a part of the small community of film buffs who congregate every night at the South Bank to watch that night’s programming.
Someone’s targeting young offenders straight outta juvie - their corpses found drained of blood! Batman’s gotta solve the case, etc.Fresh from his success reinvigorating Nightwing, Tom Taylor’s taken over the iconic Detective Comics title for a run that starts underwhelmingly with Mercy of the Father.
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!
