The Nazis looted a buncha art from France during the Occupation. Museum Curator Ila, along with others, hides as many pieces as she can – “Moving Pitchers” around, oooohhh, I gets the title now!! – before she’s caught and interrogated by her German Nazi boyfriend - or someone anyway. And then the book’s over… ?
I didn’t rate Kathryn Immonen as even a halfway-decent writer before and she hasn’t changed my mind with her badly-written comic drawn by her hubby Stuart, Moving Pictures. This book is poo.
Husband and wife creative team Gabriel Hardman and Corinna Bechko give Green Lantern the Earth One treatment - an alternate-world origin - in this fairly decent first volume.
It’s basically the classic Hal Jordan origin with a few minor tweaks here and there. Hal’s reimagined as an asteroid miner who stumbles across the corpse of Abin Sur, picks up his mysterious green ring and is thrown into the strange world of the Green Lanterns.
How did Darth Vader get his red lightsaber? Better question: who fucking cares?! That said, while this may be the flimsy plot of Charles Soule and Giuseppe Camuncoli’s first volume in the rebooted Vader series, Imperial Machine surprisingly wasn’t that bad.
Snootchie motherlovin’ bootchies, what a fucking shitshow the first volume of Silent Bob’s Green Arrow was!
Ollie Queen’s dead, he’s not dead, he’s sorta dead, there’s another Green Arrow, there’s still another one – who can fucking follow, let alone care?! In TEN absurdly overwritten issues it takes Kevin Smith an age to get around to producing anything resembling a story and when he does it’s somehow even more boring than the meandering nothing that preceded it.
Wealthy businessman Aristide Leonides has been murdered after someone swapped out his insulin for poison! Leonides’ children are quick to blame their elderly dad’s young bride who looks to inherit his fortune – but did the gold-digger and her secret lover dunit or is the killer someone else in the household…?
Two men murder an acquaintance, stuff the corpse into a chest and then invite the victim’s father round to eat dinner off it! Will they be found out or will they get away with it?
The Comedian and Ozymandias square off for Round 2 – against a window atop still another skyscraper, naturally! – but Eddie died… didn’t he? Meanwhile, another supposedly dead Watchman, “Rorschach”, hangs out at Wayne Manor as Batman reads Walter Kovacs’ rambling, paranoid journal and Mime and Marionette sample the Gotham nightlife by taking in a comedy show – but will their antics amuse the city’s resident clown, Mistah J… ?
Gwen Poole’s a Marvel fangirl from the “real” world who’s been transported into the Marvel Comics Universe and reinvented herself as the amusing anti-hero Gwenpool - but how did she get there in the first place? Finally, her secret origin is revealed! Also, Gwen discovers that she’s her own worst enemy - literally! - as her evil future self appears to her in the present, along with future Miles Morales. Both are trying to control her destiny because of what she becomes. So what’s a girl to do: destroy the Marvel Universe, the thing she loves the most, or leave it behind forever and forget she was ever a part of it? Or is there another way…
Down-on-her-luck 40 year old governess Miss Guinevere Pettigrew needs to get a teaching job or she’ll be evicted. But little does she know when she stumbles into the glamorous life of socialite Miss Delysia LaFosse, her fortunes are about to change drastically - today, for the first time in her bleak existence, Miss Pettigrew will LIVE!
He may be trying to leave his murderous past as a masked vigilante behind him but the god-dang Russian Mob won’t stop hunting Dylan. To protect his loved ones, Dylan must… Kill or Be Killed!
Rick is an old-fashioned ice cream man out to serve as many happy customers as possible. What’s your favourite flavour - vanilla, chocolate? He’ll serve it up to you lickety split!
“This thing is so fucked up”
- Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America
Fire and fury certainly describes the response to Michael Wolff’s latest book - this thing is a runaway bestseller! It’s a shame then to report that the content is much less incendiary or compelling than some might hope - underwhelming even, like Trump’s first year as President.
I enjoyed Etgar Keret’s short story collection, Suddenly, A Knock on the Door, so it was disappointing to find out The Nimrod Flip-Out isn’t nearly as good.
Oh my criminy, I am so done with this series! What happens in The Wide Window, the third book in A Series of Unfortunate Events? The EXACT SAME STORY THAT HAPPENED IN THE FIRST TWO BOOKS! The Baudelaire orphans are placed with a distant relative, the villainous Count Olaf tries to do away with them and steal their fortune, he predictably fails, escapes, and the kids are relocated to some other hapless relative so the whole damn thing can repeat itself in the next book! I noticed this disappointing pattern in the second book, The Reptile Room, but hoped it was a one-off – nope, this looks to be the template for the entire series! I’ve read the same story for three books now and I can’t takes the formulaic repetition no more!
