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chuckroLighter Than My Shadow – An autobiographical graphic novel (500 pages, though with a lot of filler panels) about a woman growing up dealing with anorexia, anxiety, depression and sexual abuse. If that wasn’t enough warning, it also contains nudity and some body horror. I was grateful to reach the later chapters where she gets a competent therapist, because I feel like a bunch of her problems could have been lessened or prevented outright if her concerns had been adequately addressed when she was 17. But that’s the rub, isn’t it? Our system is shitty at addressing root problems or acknowledging illness in anything other than a sickness/recovery model, which allows bad actors to abuse it. (This obviously has a happy ending—she gets better help, she recovers, and she writes a book.)
Lost At Sea (Anniversary Edition) - This is by O’Malley, the guy who wrote Scott Pilgrim; it was his first big work and it’s a coming-of-age story about a girl who finds herself on a road trip with classmates she barely knows. It’s really about the emotional beats, because the plot is a big collection of loose ends and unresolved potential red herrings. What was up with the picture of Raleigh in the diner? The soul-selling and cat-sisters thing was probably all just late-night teenage nonsense…but no attempt is made to resolve it. What was up with the letter from the boyfriend? We’ll never know. It might be magical realism, it might not; it’s an interesting read for the emotional arc but it doesn’t hold together much as a story.
Green Almonds: Letters from Palestine - A collection of illustrated letters from a Belgian woman to her sister during a six-month stay in Palestine. This one pissed me off. Granted, as a Jewish American, I have Complicated Opinions about Israel, but this was very much experienced and written with an agenda (the first chapter is her lying to Israeli customs about what she’s going to do in the country) to show a tourist’s-eye-view of how terrible the “colonial” Israeli government is to the “native” Palestinians. She has the understanding of geopolitics of a teenager on Tumblr…or at least she’s writing for an audience who does. Give this propaganda a miss.
The Sunken Tower - An orphaned young wizard is captured by an evil cult and makes friends with a pair of lesbian adventurers to escape. This was formulaic but witty, and I give a lot of credit to witty.
Taproot - A story about a gardener who can inexplicably see ghosts, and the ghost who falls in love with him. This builds a mythology that seems like it’s going to be horrifying, then takes a sudden turn into wacky rom-com and never looks back. Which is to say, the pacing and tone aren’t perfect, but it’s still pretty cute.
The Underfoot: The Mighty Deep - In the future, the Giants-That-Were have all died in a great flood, but an assortment of uplifted animals survive in their wake, and we follow a community of hamsters that earn the favor of other animals by acting as a strategic task force. This has the most depth of worldbuilding of anything in this bundle (though the jargon takes a little getting used it), and both the art and character dynamics are very good. I suspect there are plans for another volume of this—I wouldn’t be shocked if the writer has a 500-page series bible which we’ve only seen the first dozen pages of.
To Drink and To Eat: Tales & Techniques from a French Kitchen – An autobiographical comic done mostly in a daily strip format, but a French foodie and snob who has Opinions. I worry about actually trying most of his recipes and techniques because a number of things he says are Questionable: At one point, he suggests getting minute rice of you don’t own a strainer, which makes me very nervous about how he cooks rice. He puts parsley in or on everything, which is a terrible idea in my household because Jethrien doesn’t like parsley and I can’t taste it. And he has a strange obsession with black radishes.
Atomic Blonde: Coldest City - A cold war spy thriller set right before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with the caveat that I never saw the movie: I could not figure out the full list of who was double-crossing whom. Maybe I’m just not well-suited for spy thrillers, but the fact that this was told in a series of flashbacks interspersed with the main character and her superiors gasping at each others’ theories and revelations made it very hard to keep track of which details actually mattered.
Black Metal Omnibus - Teenage twin brothers get bounced between schools and foster families and find solace in only one thing: Black metal music! But when they listen to the new album by Frost Axe—and then play it backwards—it reveals the legend of a demon called “The Roth” that the boys are the twin reincarnation of. The claim his sword and blaze into Hell, claiming their rightful title in glorious battle. That’s the first volume, but then I stopped because I honestly didn’t care. I can see what they’re going for and I can see why people would enjoy this, but it isn’t for me beyond the original ridiculousness factor.
Costume Quest: invasion of the Candy Snatchers - A sequel adventure to the video game that focuses on some new monster characters going to the human world to find candy. I’m in the unfortunate position of not remembering enough about the game to get any of the references (I played it…five years ago? More?) but also being cynical enough to know exactly where the plot was going, even when they throw in random deux ex machina to get it there. Unless you have a particular love for the game, skip it.
Stumptown – A Greg Rucka comic that became a TV show I haven’t watched. It stars the Standard Female Private Investigator, a woman completely unable to keep her life in order but amazingly good at her job, except for the part where she gets beaten up a lot. (See also: Jessica Jones, October Daye.) A middling whodunit that’s trying a little too hard to be deep and walks the line on some racial stereotypes; but it does wrap up the story well in this volume.
Letter 44 (Book 1) – The new president (faux Obama) takes over and reads the letter from his predecessor (faux Bush), which informs him that aliens are building something in the asteroid belt and everything he did during his administration was a cover for preparing for their expected attack. And it turns out that everything Obama promised but didn’t do was because of dealing with this situation. Interspersed with the politics on the ground are the adventures of the joint military/scientist team sent into space as it reaches “the chandelier” and initiates contact with the aliens. (I went and read a plot synopsis of the rest of the series—it was interesting and I was curious, but not quite interesting enough that I wanted to hunt down the other books. Spoilers: In the end it turns out that the aliens were well-meaning, but the Republicans were not.)
Courtney Crumrin (Volume 1, 2) – What the newer “Sabrina” TV show ought to have been: A girl thrust into a world of witchcraft and monsters discovers an aptitude for it and makes herself the scariest thing around. The art style is rather odd, in that Courtney herself is quite a bit more cartoony that every other character, including not having a nose when the rest of the cast does. I think the first volume is stronger, when everything is a bit more mysterious—the various conceits get old relatively quickly as Courtney learns what’s going on and we see how capable her uncle actually is. (Also, there was a reference to Rejected that no one else will get but warmed my ancient heart.)
I couldn’t get into Hopeless Savages, which is about a family of punk-rock musicians who need to find their estranged brother and rescue their kidnapped parents. The Whiteout Compendium and Queen and Country Definitive Edition are more Greg Rucka books that didn’t grab me. I also couldn’t muster enthusiasm for The Sixth Gun (Volume 1) or the Wasteland Compendium. (This bundle also had the first two volumes of Scott Pilgrim in color; but I read that years ago.)
Overall: This half of the bundle was often interesting but ultimately forgettable (and in the case of Green Almonds, infuriating). I don’t think there’s anything I’d say you need to rush out and find.
Lost At Sea (Anniversary Edition) - This is by O’Malley, the guy who wrote Scott Pilgrim; it was his first big work and it’s a coming-of-age story about a girl who finds herself on a road trip with classmates she barely knows. It’s really about the emotional beats, because the plot is a big collection of loose ends and unresolved potential red herrings. What was up with the picture of Raleigh in the diner? The soul-selling and cat-sisters thing was probably all just late-night teenage nonsense…but no attempt is made to resolve it. What was up with the letter from the boyfriend? We’ll never know. It might be magical realism, it might not; it’s an interesting read for the emotional arc but it doesn’t hold together much as a story.
Green Almonds: Letters from Palestine - A collection of illustrated letters from a Belgian woman to her sister during a six-month stay in Palestine. This one pissed me off. Granted, as a Jewish American, I have Complicated Opinions about Israel, but this was very much experienced and written with an agenda (the first chapter is her lying to Israeli customs about what she’s going to do in the country) to show a tourist’s-eye-view of how terrible the “colonial” Israeli government is to the “native” Palestinians. She has the understanding of geopolitics of a teenager on Tumblr…or at least she’s writing for an audience who does. Give this propaganda a miss.
The Sunken Tower - An orphaned young wizard is captured by an evil cult and makes friends with a pair of lesbian adventurers to escape. This was formulaic but witty, and I give a lot of credit to witty.
Taproot - A story about a gardener who can inexplicably see ghosts, and the ghost who falls in love with him. This builds a mythology that seems like it’s going to be horrifying, then takes a sudden turn into wacky rom-com and never looks back. Which is to say, the pacing and tone aren’t perfect, but it’s still pretty cute.
The Underfoot: The Mighty Deep - In the future, the Giants-That-Were have all died in a great flood, but an assortment of uplifted animals survive in their wake, and we follow a community of hamsters that earn the favor of other animals by acting as a strategic task force. This has the most depth of worldbuilding of anything in this bundle (though the jargon takes a little getting used it), and both the art and character dynamics are very good. I suspect there are plans for another volume of this—I wouldn’t be shocked if the writer has a 500-page series bible which we’ve only seen the first dozen pages of.
To Drink and To Eat: Tales & Techniques from a French Kitchen – An autobiographical comic done mostly in a daily strip format, but a French foodie and snob who has Opinions. I worry about actually trying most of his recipes and techniques because a number of things he says are Questionable: At one point, he suggests getting minute rice of you don’t own a strainer, which makes me very nervous about how he cooks rice. He puts parsley in or on everything, which is a terrible idea in my household because Jethrien doesn’t like parsley and I can’t taste it. And he has a strange obsession with black radishes.
Atomic Blonde: Coldest City - A cold war spy thriller set right before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with the caveat that I never saw the movie: I could not figure out the full list of who was double-crossing whom. Maybe I’m just not well-suited for spy thrillers, but the fact that this was told in a series of flashbacks interspersed with the main character and her superiors gasping at each others’ theories and revelations made it very hard to keep track of which details actually mattered.
Black Metal Omnibus - Teenage twin brothers get bounced between schools and foster families and find solace in only one thing: Black metal music! But when they listen to the new album by Frost Axe—and then play it backwards—it reveals the legend of a demon called “The Roth” that the boys are the twin reincarnation of. The claim his sword and blaze into Hell, claiming their rightful title in glorious battle. That’s the first volume, but then I stopped because I honestly didn’t care. I can see what they’re going for and I can see why people would enjoy this, but it isn’t for me beyond the original ridiculousness factor.
Costume Quest: invasion of the Candy Snatchers - A sequel adventure to the video game that focuses on some new monster characters going to the human world to find candy. I’m in the unfortunate position of not remembering enough about the game to get any of the references (I played it…five years ago? More?) but also being cynical enough to know exactly where the plot was going, even when they throw in random deux ex machina to get it there. Unless you have a particular love for the game, skip it.
Stumptown – A Greg Rucka comic that became a TV show I haven’t watched. It stars the Standard Female Private Investigator, a woman completely unable to keep her life in order but amazingly good at her job, except for the part where she gets beaten up a lot. (See also: Jessica Jones, October Daye.) A middling whodunit that’s trying a little too hard to be deep and walks the line on some racial stereotypes; but it does wrap up the story well in this volume.
Letter 44 (Book 1) – The new president (faux Obama) takes over and reads the letter from his predecessor (faux Bush), which informs him that aliens are building something in the asteroid belt and everything he did during his administration was a cover for preparing for their expected attack. And it turns out that everything Obama promised but didn’t do was because of dealing with this situation. Interspersed with the politics on the ground are the adventures of the joint military/scientist team sent into space as it reaches “the chandelier” and initiates contact with the aliens. (I went and read a plot synopsis of the rest of the series—it was interesting and I was curious, but not quite interesting enough that I wanted to hunt down the other books. Spoilers: In the end it turns out that the aliens were well-meaning, but the Republicans were not.)
Courtney Crumrin (Volume 1, 2) – What the newer “Sabrina” TV show ought to have been: A girl thrust into a world of witchcraft and monsters discovers an aptitude for it and makes herself the scariest thing around. The art style is rather odd, in that Courtney herself is quite a bit more cartoony that every other character, including not having a nose when the rest of the cast does. I think the first volume is stronger, when everything is a bit more mysterious—the various conceits get old relatively quickly as Courtney learns what’s going on and we see how capable her uncle actually is. (Also, there was a reference to Rejected that no one else will get but warmed my ancient heart.)
I couldn’t get into Hopeless Savages, which is about a family of punk-rock musicians who need to find their estranged brother and rescue their kidnapped parents. The Whiteout Compendium and Queen and Country Definitive Edition are more Greg Rucka books that didn’t grab me. I also couldn’t muster enthusiasm for The Sixth Gun (Volume 1) or the Wasteland Compendium. (This bundle also had the first two volumes of Scott Pilgrim in color; but I read that years ago.)
Overall: This half of the bundle was often interesting but ultimately forgettable (and in the case of Green Almonds, infuriating). I don’t think there’s anything I’d say you need to rush out and find.
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Date: 2022-05-03 02:40 am (UTC)