Batman’s in prison because… And Zur is in Failsafe and he’s Batman because… Then Absolute Poo-er means more robots and Batman’s gotta… Yeah, so Batman the series is in shit shape. Chip Zdarsky’s run has been about as bad, if not worse, than Tynion’s, and DC needs to change things sharpish.
Of the nine stories in Will Wiles’ short story collection, The Anechoic Chamber and Other Weird Tales, about two were ok and the others were generally quite bad.
I’ve known of Dorothy Parker for a while now - she was this fabled female American Oscar Wilde wit, writing for the New Yorker and part of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of artists from the 1920s - but never read her until now. And maybe her wit comes across more strongly in her non-fiction because I didn’t see anything funny or clever in her fiction, three stories of which are collected in this small book.
“Oh, England’s fantastic for this kind of thing,” - Alfred Hitchcock on the 10 Rillington Place murders
Reg and Ethel Christie had lived at 10 Rillington Place, London, since 1938 but strange things had happened in the winter of 1952/53. Nobody had seen Ethel since December and Reg disappeared from the flat altogether in March 1953. When their landlord instructed a workman to clean up the Christies’ kitchen, the workman found what appeared to be human remains behind an alcove. Three womens’ corpses were stuffed in there. And the mystery of Ethel’s absence was soon solved: her corpse was under the front room’s floor. As the manhunt for Reg Christie began, the police would soon unearth more horrors on the property…
It’s the summer of 1920 and Tom Birkin, fresh from the trenches of World War One and slowly acclimating back into civilian life, arrives in the English countryside town of Oxgodby on a commission to uncover/restore a medieval painting on the wall of the local church. And there’s where he meets the one that got away: Mrs Keach, the Reverend’s wife.
Back in 2007/08, I was a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish at The Atlantic and, when I finished his articles, as I often did (I was working a particularly dull desk job at the time that afforded me plenty of time for reading), I’d read other writers’ pieces on the site. Ta-Nehisi Coates was one of these writers and I enjoyed his work much less than I did Sullivan’s - everything was race-related to Coates and, worse, his writing and points were both forgettable and vague.
Because story, Magus - the evil manifestation of the evil-sounding but actually good Adam Warlock’s personality - is somehow free and trolling around… trolling for POWAH! And what says more powah than the Infinity Gauntlet? That’s right, it’s another Jim Starlin comic starring Thanos with Infinity in the title, involving a bad guy after the Infinity Gauntlet and Earth’s Mightiest Heroes out to stop him - it’s time for The Infinity Gauntlet 2 aka The Infinity War.
“May you live in interesting times” - apocryphal “Chinese curse”
A woman begins making rich home-made treats for her office - much to the quiet indignation of her secret co-worker boyfriend, whose culinary tastes run to the more basic side.
A male feminist pushed too far. A couple of friends hook-up, destroying one of the friend’s lives. A closeted man represses his very strange fantasies from everyone - until he doesn’t. A hyper-driven type A personality’s bizarre life goal clashes with his girlfriend’s. An identity-obsessed individual changes the internet. And presiding over all of it is Tony Tulathimutte (hereafter referred to as TT), a writer and potential character/s in the novel Rejection.
In 1949, aspiring New York playwright Helene Hanff saw an advertisement for an antiquarian bookseller in London that shipped books internationally. A fan of obscure and old books, she reached out to them with a list of books she’s looking for, thus beginning a 20 year correspondence between herself and the principal bookseller at Marks and Co, Frank Doel, based at 84 Charing Cross Road.
You know how a lot of people think Superman is a boring character because he’s overpowered - nothing really hurts him besides the green rock and he can do whatever, whenever, however, effortlessly. Because he’s Superman. But it’s too much and makes it really hard to get people invested in a character so wildly unrelatable. Now imagine the entire cast of a series were ALL Superman. That’s The Power Fantasy.
The Turtles are broken up and scattered across the world: Donnie is enslaved and forced to fight cage matches against mutant-haters; Mikey’s starring in a hit Japanese TV show about his life; Raph’s in prison; Leo’s in India, meditating with non-mutant flesh-eating turtles. Meanwhile in New York City, a brutal new mayoral candidate seeks to consolidate his populist anti-mutant platform with the help of the Foot Clan.
The Daughters of America finals boxing tournament in Reno takes place over a couple of days where female teenage fighters gather to see who’s the best boxer in their class.
Political blogger Christopher Swann attends a conservative conference, uncovers secrets and gets killed - but whodunit? The answer lies somehow in an obscure 1980s novel called My Innocence, the last book by conservative writer Peter Cockerill - or more precisely, an early proof copy of that book…
