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?!
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
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.
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.
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?
There was a Justice League piss-take team called The Authority at the end of the ‘90s created by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch. Both The Authority and Ellis have been cancelled, in different meanings of the word, since then (Hitch is still knocking around) and one of the founding members of that team was Jenny Sparks, the Spirit of the 20th Century.
I forget why but I came across William Butler Yeats’ poem The Second Coming recently and was quite taken with it. I’d never read it before but recognised several lines and was surprised they all came from this short poem. Here’s some you too might know:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre… Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; … The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity… And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Aliocha Coll was a 20th century Spanish writer who produced experimental books, of which few were published and those that did failed to connect with a large audience - hence his name being practically unknown today.
If you unfortunately pay attention to the digital slurry that is online discourse then you may have noticed in the past week memes about how “Black Panther is WHITE!” with a fake image of Ryan Gosling’s increasingly-botoxed face (don’t do it Ryan, age naturally!) on the MCU’s Black Panther.
The Deviant Killer, supposedly a gay peeping tom who chopped up the young boys he took pics of at Christmas, has been locked up since the early ‘70s. Half a century later and a copycat killer is recreating his MO on a new generation of victims. True crime aficionado Michael is arrested - his fascination with the case and his ID being found at a crime scene being enough to put him away for now. Meanwhile his boyfriend Derek and FBI Agent Hall continue looking into the case to see if Michael really was the new Deviant Killer or not.
Superman: Action Comics: Superstars: Volume 1: Jesus Can We Can We Get Another Fucking Subtitle In Here Already is a collection of three short stories that I guess filled up space in between the main storylines written by whoever drew the short straw to write this title. “Superstars” is a bit of a misnomer. Jason Aaron, sure, but Gail Simone and Rainbow Rowell? Definitely not - especially with the quality of their contributions to this book.
Johan Harstad’s The Red Handler presents itself as the collected and annotated crime novels featuring a private detective called The Red Handler by a fictional Norwegian author, Frode Brandeggen. Except these are experimental micro novels that are mere pages long - some “chapters” are literally a sentence and there are maybe four or five chapters to a “novel”. So that’s how you can fit 15 “novels” into less than 150 pages (especially if you space them out to a sentence/chapter per page)!
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.
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.
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.
This short story collection was originally entitled You Know You Want This but quickly got changed to Cat Person and Other Stories because Cat Person became a hit online, got optioned and then made into a movie, and is by far the best story in this collection. It’d be amazing if the other 11 stories were even half as good as Cat Person but, alas, there’s only one other good story here - Look At Your Game Girl - and a middling one - The Mirror, The Bucket, and The Old Thigh Bone. The rest is cat litter.
