Batman: Dark Patterns Review (Dan Watters, Hayden Sherman)

Batman: Dark Patterns is 12 issues of the dumbest Batman comics you’ll ever read.

It’s made up of four 3 issue story arcs, loosely connected to no effect, each increasingly stupid and more pointless.

The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner Review

Roald Dahl’s Matilda is the first time I saw mention of William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury as it was on the booklist the kindly librarian gives Dahl’s precocious heroine (by the by, I re-read Matilda years later and, miraculously, it still held up). I’ve also always been aware that Faulkner is part of that cadre of mid-20th century American writers - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck - and that he’s my blind spot in that group.

Betas by Nick Maandag Review

Xavier, Doug and Tim are three single men living together and working in the same local restaurant - Xavier and Doug are short order cooks while Tim is a dishwasher, aspiring to become a cook. The book follows their attempts at dating in modern-day Canadia.

Batman, Volume 1: Daylight Review (Matt Fraction, Jorge Jimenez)

In a weird tag-team move, Matt Fraction has taken over Batman from his Sex Criminals co-creator/artist Chip Zdarsky, so both the artist and writer of Sex Crimz have written Batman runs one after the other! What’s that aboot!?

A Deadly Episode by Anthony Horowitz Review

The first Hawthorne & Horowitz novel, The Word is Murder, is being adapted into a movie - but someone’s moidered the actor playing Hawthorne! Whodunit?1

Who cares?? is the better question. A Deadly Episode - the sixth novel in the Hawthorne & Horowitz series - is a sign that the series has run its course. That or Anthony Horowitz should really take a break from it until he has a worthwhile story to tell, because A Deadly Episode is absolutely fucking awful - boredom physically manifested in book form.

Uncle Scrooge: Earth's Mightiest Duck Review (Jason Aaron, Mahmud Asrar)

Aliens have come to Earth to steal all of its treasures including its greatest: Scrooge’s coin bank. Scrooge and pals gotta send them and their robot army on their way.

Statues by Junji Ito Review

Statues is one of Junji Ito’s worst story collections. Each of the ten 30-page comics are very weakly conceived and told in an almost comedically contrived, consistently sloppy way, to little or no effect - certainly not one of horror, or even vague interest.

Palookaville #25 by Seth Review

Like Norwegian cartoonist (and similarly mononym’d) Jason, Seth is a great cartoonist whose more recent work has gone from being published straight to paperbacks into fancy hardcovers with a higher price point. And, also like Jason, Seth’s work has gone from being superb back then (1990s-2010s) to boring now (2020s - although this probably has nothing to do with the fancier publications, it’s just an odd pattern I noticed).

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot Review

So here I go again on my own (goin’ down the only road I’ve ever knoooown) personal annual humiliation ritual where I read some poetry to see if I get it yet - it’s a new year and, nope, still don’t “get” poetry!

Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector Review

I’ve heard of Clarice Lispector, the arty farty Brazilian author with the cool name, for some time now and a year or two ago I tried her book The Hour of the Star, and just couldn’t get on with it. Then I found out it was her final book and I thought I’d give her another chance - maybe Hour was bad because it was written at the end of her life when her artistic powers might’ve been diminished, and not be representative of her best work?

Batman: Night Cries Review (Archie Goodwin, Scott Hampton)

Someone is killing child molesters in Gotham - and, according to one of the child victims, it’s Batman! Has everything the Dark Knight’s seen finally tipped him over the edge into becoming a murdering vigilante?

Absolute Flash, Volume 1: Of Two Worlds Review (Jeff Lemire, Nick Robles)

Flash might be my least favourite superhero. I’ve never read a good Flash comic and the character itself is so dated. He runs fast and can travel through time/across dimensions. So what - so do numerous other (better) characters. He looks like a parody of a superhero. His rogues gallery stinks: a psychic gorilla, a guy with an ice gun and a guy with a boomerang? THEY seem like parodies of supervillains! Flash has always been bad and yet DC keeps trying to make people care about this antiquated, feeble superhero.

Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film by Edward Ross Review

Have you ever wanted to read the most elementary first year film course communicated to you by a man with no personality - in comics form, drawn in a bland, lifeless style? Then Filmish is for you!

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman Review

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.

The Epic of Gilgamesh Review

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:

The Last Wolf by László Krasznahorkai Review

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.

Absolute Wonder Woman, Volume 1: The Last Amazon Review (Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman)

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.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Review

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!

Hunger by Choi Jin-young Review

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 by Fyodor Dostoevsky Review

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.