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!).
