Tag Archives: graphic novel

Phoebe and Her Unicorn

I have been making much of the fact that I’m basically reading nothing, or at a snail’s pace, or what have you. This is not entirely accurate, as a) I read rather a lot of comics (currently summer 1987, Marvel time) and b) I read rather a lot of kid books, mostly to the boy.[1] So many, in fact, that if I tried to write reviews for all of them, I would frankly have little or no leisure time left for anything else. Plus, kidbook reviews really don’t fit the aesthetic of Shards of Delirium, so I’d also need a new site (easy) and a new writing style (erm, less easy) to make it happen, and long story short, I opted not to go that way.

Plus also, imagine if I included a review per reread? Yeesh.

The difference, then, with Phoebe and Her Unicorn is that I did not read it to anyone but myself, egged on by Peter S. Beagle’s[2] effusive introduction. This is one of those comic strip collections, so my categorization may be off I suppose? Also, I have no idea where the comic strip exists. Newspapers? A website? Couldn’t tell you, unless maybe if I did research. A little girl is skipping rocks, and hits a unicorn in the nose, knocking her out of her narcissistic contemplation of her own reflection. For this favor, the unicorn offers to grant a wish, and the wish that comes out is for the unicorn to be the little girl’s best friend. Is it Calvin and Hobbes but for girls? Yeah, maybe, but is that fine? Yes, yes it is.

The book is endearing, sweet, and occasionally quite funny. I do not regret the 40 minutes or so I spent reading this first collection, and if more of them appear, I’ll probably read those too.

[1] I have really complicated feelings about how we started reading to the girl a lot later than to the boy, such that she has a hard time sitting still for it, which makes it hard to read to her, especially when someone else is competing for attention. Complicated feelings, also, about how this is an obvious self-perpetuating cycle. That is the number one thing I would change about how we have parented up to this point, if I could.
[2] The Last Unicorn guy

Hack/Slash Resurrection: Blood Simple

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I appear once again to have come to the end of the adventures of one Cassandra Hack, Esquire and her associate, Vlad. I don’t know if this is the end or not, but I’m definitely happy that there was no attempt at a grandiose Ending. It just feels like the kind of series that should trail off. Maybe it can be picked up again someday and maybe not, but I like that the possibility exists, and that even if they never come back, she can still be wandering America, looking for more slashers to dispose of, and we’re just not hearing about it anymore.

Blood Simple, despite everything I’ve just said about endings and such, seems in retrospect (i.e. now that I know it’s the last book) to have concerned itself mostly with tying up loose ends. The first bookend to the set revisits Cat and Dog Investigations, consisting of a teen wunderkind and her demonic skinless dog-thing named Pooch, as they (and Cassie and Vlad) look into a haunted house at the behest of area psychics, followed by our heroes and Vampirella versus a vampire town that maybe I should have recognized from previous Hack/Slash tales when it wasn’t a vampire town yet, but I did not, and then the closing bookend is Cassie versus censorship.

All in all, the book was fine. I’ve read better (the first half of the original run, before it got too far up its own ass with convoluted continuity and too big bads) and worse (the recent Vampirella crossover, for example, which really was bad at these characters, but also I do not remember Son of Samhain fondly), and maybe someday I’ll read better or worse again.

But I don’t think I expect to.

Fables: Snow White

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It’s funny, when you think about it a bit. Snow White has been a main character (arguably the main character; definitely top five all along) in the Fables series for the eleven years of its run that I have reviewed, and yet this is the first time Willingham has named a book after her. It was enough to make me wonder if he was running out of ideas, and… whether that’s a fair assessment or not, I am nearing the end of the series and its associated spinoffs both, brief research tells me.[1]

Anyway, the first bit of the book wraps up the stories of Bufkin and his barleycorn girlfriend Lily (from the Castle Dark arc), and the battle to free of Oz from one of the Emperor’s regional governors. It was… fine? Towards the end, I liked it quite a bit, but I definitely think it would have fit better at the end of a previous arc instead of the beginning of this one.[2]

Later, the story of a bro who shows up claiming to be Snow’s first common law husband, before even Prince Charming, which… my knowledge of the story of Snow White doesn’t precisely fit with her ever having met a man prior to the dwarves, much less pledged to marry one. Which makes the whole rest of what happened feel like this was an excuse to move some pieces around the board in very specific ways.

Don’t get me wrong, the sequence of events told a good story, and I still want to know what happens next, even as I’m left with difficulties envisioning that there has been much of anything left to happen next for quite some time. But the precipitating event here, I just can’t buy it, so everything else is at least slightly tainted.

Oh, well.

[1] I wouldn’t have opted to, but I also don’t own all of them, so I’d need to know what to buy regardless.
[2] Unrelated brief (semi-accidental) research here tells me most of these were at the ends of prior comics, but only collected together in graphic novel format here, all together. Which explains why they felt as odd as they did. I stick by my “end of a book instead of beginning of a book” assessment.

Hack/Slash vs. Vampirella

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I know very little about Vampirella as a character, save that she exists and dresses… provocatively, let’s say. However, I know a great deal about Cassandra Hack, so I am qualified to speak on two thirds of the factors that went into this book.

Well, three fourths if you count the name, which is a little odd. Hack/Slash Vs. Vampirella implies that the titles are fighting, rather than the characters. And that’s just weird, right? (I mean, obviously if the characters are all good guys in a crossover, their fighting will be resolved amicably before they deal with the real threat, I’m not talking about that; ‘sjust the way things are done. But who ever heard of books fighting? Get it together, title bro!)

Okay, I’ve lost the thread. Anyway, thing one I can address is the plot, and it was, y’know, fine. Cassie and her road trip buddy / fighting companion Vlad do the thing they do, dealing with a threat that could range anywhere from “might kill some teens at summer camp. again.” to “extinction-level event in the offing”, and they do so the way they usually do: messily.

To reiterate, I cannot address thing two, which is how was Vampirella’s characterization? Because I have no idea. Maybe Shawn Aldridge has written for her before, and maybe not. Her artistic rendering matched my vague memories of book covers past, so there’s that.

Thing three is Cassie’s characterization, and, um… it wasn’t actively terrible. I know it can be hard for some authors to correctly capture some voices. Honestly, it’s a testament to Marvel’s editorial staff over the first 25 years, that characters come across poorly so infrequently. But speaking, as we were, of Cassie’s voice… she had one mode the whole book, and it was vulgar bluster. Which is a thing she does sometimes, but honestly, the blood-spattered cheesecake in these books has never been good enough for me to tolerate a one note character, not for nearly this long. I really hope that whoever authors the next of these books has a better handle on what makes them tick. Or else, maybe this was simply a Vampirella book, and the target audience doesn’t care about my concerns at all?

Beats me!

Powers: Gods

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This is the last book in the Powers series!

Okay, it actually isn’t, but at the same time, if you’re going to figure out a way to wrap up the apparently third run of your series before rebranding it as something slightly different, and your series started out as “What if cops had to investigate when superheroes get murdered, and also what if one of those cops used to be a superhero but lost his powers?”, then it stands to reason that you have to end bigger.

Bigger, in this case, is solving the murder of a god, Damocles. Which… okay, it felt a little cheap, and here’s why. If you’re going to have had Greek (in this case) gods hanging out throughout the history of the series, there in the background all along, then you can’t wait to mention it until one of them is going to be your plot device. You especially cannot have your commentary track TV show that everyone (or possibly no one) watches, Powers That Be, talk about said gods and whether people believe in them as gods or as fancier heroes or not at all, like it’s a whole big theological issue, and also never have mentioned them in the previous thirteen volumes of your ongoing series. It’s a problem!

BUT: if you can ignore all that, which I was able to do until the composition of this missive you see before you, they act as a good plot device to reveal a lot of closely held character secrets and catapult the series into its next phase, which I will no doubt discuss next time, whenever that may be.

Fairest in All the Land

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The last Fables story was also a Fairest story, I guess? Also, the last actual Fables story was kind of a big deal, with repercussions still echoing around the margins. (These are the margins, since this wasn’t a main sequence story, you see.) Downside being, I read that a year and a half ago and only barely remember what happened. Which beats not remembering at all, don’t get me wrong!

Anyway, echoing repercussions aside, Fairest in All the Land is a murder mystery in which a certain mirror that may be evoked by that phrase and Cinderella (who has previously been the star of her own Fables spin-off spy series) square off against… and here we run into a wall called What Exactly Do You Think a Murder Mystery Is, Anyway? But the victims are a who’s who of, er, the fairest… in all… you know what, I’m going to pretend like I didn’t just get that reference.

Plot and plot arcs aside, this book was weird. It’s not that every story segment was drawn and colored by different artists. It’s that the story segments on average lasted three pages each, which… it’s just too many hard corners, is the thing. Whiplash, I’m saying. But the plot was fine, as was the plot arc progression. (And whoever was the artist for the bits that included the Page sisters is good at drawing the Page sisters. Sexy librarians equals best trope.)

Hack/Slash: Resurrection

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Some time back, I came to the [second] end of the Hack/Slash comic series, a little disappointed that it really was over this time. Well, joke’s on me, because three years later, someone came along and tried again.

The Resurrection series is another continuation by another author, but this one is a little more successful because she understands that the point wasn’t tying up loose ends from previous big stories, it was getting to the root of what makes Cassie appealing and restoring the status quo by bringing someone back. I mean, spoilers, but it’s really right there in the title, innit?

Basically, it’s this: Cassie is done with monsters, living in a trailer in the middle of nowhere making money off Twitch subscribers, which may be the most modern thing I’ve ever read in any comic in all of history. Except an acquaintance of her mother has opened a summer camp nearby, to help the victims of slasher trauma be strong and ready instead of ripe to get angry and disturbed and turn into more slashers themselves. And except zombies keep showing up outside her trailer. And except the nearby prison seems awfully suspicious. Before you know it: new story, continued from the prior series but without the weight of almost any continuity to worry about.

Worthwhile!

Powers: Z

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Considering how close I am to the end of the published Powers series, you would think I would not have gone three and a half years since the last one I read. That’s just weird. Even more contrary to expectations (well, mine at least), that gap is not the problem I had with the book.

Powers: Z is… well, okay, they’re all about murders. But this is about the murder of the guy who killed Hitler at the end of World War II. Who you would think would be popular enough to have been mentioned by now, especially since apparently our immortal main character used to hang out with Z during and after the war. But okay, comics retcon all the time, and that would not have caused me to blink if the rest hadn’t been so confusing. Which I cannot really explain without massive spoilers, and I’ll just respond if someone asks instead of assuming they’re needed.

But my problems, at broad strokes, included a) my occasional inability to distinguish between the present and flashbacks to the 1950s, b) caused in part (probably) by those flashbacks not actually being very important from either a plot or (worse) a character development perspective. Other than the basic “look, these guys were mobsters in the 1950s, and the people in the modern day plot are also mobsters” parallelism, there just really wasn’t anything there. Finally, c) the fifth issue in the book ended with some really big dangling plot threads, whereupon the sixth issue covered a completely new murder with no apparent tie to or resolution of the prior story, all for the sake of a last second character-driven cliffhanger. Which I sound negative about, but I would not if I hadn’t ended up feeling so much like I didn’t get a complete story in the service of said cliffhanger that I actually spent some research time seeing if there was a missing issue or a misprint of my book or something. As far as I can tell: there was not.

But all the Amazon reviews of the book are very positive, so maybe it’s just me regardless? I have no idea.

Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom

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I’m going to start in a couple of weird places. First, a word about Amazon. I understand that it has turned into something of a flea market, like, from an observational perspective. This doesn’t bother me because I can mostly tell what I’m buying and what I’m not. I hear people talk about counterfeits, and I believe it, but I’m either okay at this or lucky, and either way, yay. I bring this up because I just saw something unpleasant while preparing for this review. The link I found for The Hidden Kingdom indicates that it’s not Prime eligible and is being sold by a third party vendor, which is fine as far as it goes, except that it also shows the notification that I bought it from this link in 2013. When it definitely was Prime eligible and being sold directly by Amazon. Is that as messed up as I think it is? It seems deeply troubling. But where else am I going to buy, well, everything except food?

Then, a word about covers. I’m not a stranger to covers of comics collections that I read being only adjacent to work safe, and it’s not especially difficult to work around it. If I happen to have time for a reading break, it’s easy to read with the cover concealed, and when I do not I can just flip it over. So I’m a little annoyed that this book shows a different issue cover on the back side, which has an equivalent amount of Rapunzel nudity, only this time a kitsune is making out with her. Not a big help guys! And then, worse: the issues in this series were both written and penciled/inked by women, but the covers of the issues… you guessed it. Brotown. (The one to-be-fair is that the kitsune makeout scene cover is basically lifted straight out of the issue in question, but that doesn’t really alleviate much of my logistical or sexist concern. I don’t like being put in the position of having to come out against nudity in art, but, damn.)

Okay. That was a lot of words about not the book I’m reading. Cool. Moving on.

And then haha I didn’t move on, I did something else and later forgot I never finished the review, and now a month has passed. Super cool.

So, uh… there’s Rapunzel, right? And she’s on a quest to revisit her past between her early days as the adopted daughter of Frau Totenkinder[1] and her current days as a refugee in Fabletown[2], insofar as a) she wants to find her missing child that has been lost to her since its birth and b) she has been summoned by the past anyway, to Japan where the Japanese-style fables implausibly ended up while fleeing the expansionist emperor guy who used to be the bad guy of the series. Because that’s a lot of where she spent her time between child loss and fleeing the empire thing. Was in the land of Japanese fables. Before they went to Japan.

I am nailing this.

Then there’s also a one-shot wherein a tree lady dates a fox. With unexpectedly ominous hints about the future!

[1] Somehow, it never crossed my mind before to look up what the “toten” part of Totenkinder means in German. That’s awesome.
[2] This is a flashback, set some years before the series opened back in Fables #1.

The Walking Dead: Rest in Peace

I’ve been saying since… well, at least since the end of All Out War, that there are ways in which the Walking Dead as a series has outstayed its welcome. I kept reading because I still cared about the characters, but the story? Well, it has become at least a bit repetitive. Who was Negan but a better take on the Governor, and at a larger scale? The Whisperers were a good variant, but still ultimately not very different. And now the Commonwealth was gearing up to be a here we go again, but this time it’s different because, um… it’s geographically even bigger than the previous times?

You see my point, which is, come on Kirkman, get it together and find a new take or a conclusion.

What I did not expect (although the title perhaps should have been a giveaway[1]) was that, as of Rest in Peace, I’d learn that he has been listening to me and the story is now over. Of course, that was five years ago, but still.

With the benefit of hindsight: there have been too many characters to reliably keep track of, but except for that it was a pretty good five year continuation, and a quite satisfying end to the story, containing all the elements I personally deemed essential and pretty well sticking the landing. Go team zombie!, I guess? I mean from a literary tradition standpoint, not from a spoilers about how the story ends standpoint. That it ends at all is the one unavoidable spoiler in this post.

[1] Actually, it sort of was? Also, it’s a large volume. Between those, I had to check the collection info, and it ended at #193, so, nah, no way they don’t go to at least issue 200, for a big momentous event of some kind. Right? Right.