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chuckroThe biggest problem with this bundle is that the majority of the books are giant high-res files to do justice to the beautiful art and coloring…but that means my ReMarkable often won’t even load them and can’t display them well if it does. Ah, well, they’re still good reads on a screen.
The delight of this bundle was the works of Stjepan Sejic and Linda Sejic; some of which I was re-reading and some of which were new to me. I already owned all 7 volumes of Sunstone. It’s a lesbian meet-cute and extended romance that gets deep into the world of BDSM. Recommended to anyone who likes kinky/sexy comics.
I had also read Blood Stain years ago. It’s about a cute and lovable dork who becomes a mad scientist’s new assistant, where hilarity ensues.
Punderworld (volume 1) is a delightfully cute retelling of the Hades/Persephone myth, making it very much a love story between adorable dorks.
Fine Print (volume 1) takes place in the same universe, but it is very much an adults-only comic, as it revolves around the modern-day descendent of Eros (Succubi, Incubi and Cupids) and their romantic entanglements with each other and assorted chosen mortals.
Swing (volumes 1-4) left me irked that apparently volume 5 is the conclusion of the series, but that isn’t in this bundle (because it isn’t finished yet). But besides that, it’s the swingers version of Sunstone, following a middle-aged couple as they spice up their marriage with swinging. The couple is a pair of adorable dorks, in case you didn’t have a solid idea of what kind of characters the Sejics write.
I read the original Rising Stars back in 2016 as part of a slate of “realistic” Superman stories, and upon re-read it’s clearer that this was always more of a thought experiment than a character-based narrative. The story is told in a few major chapters: The 100+ kids growing into adults of varying power levels and the murder-mystery that drives that plot; the 100 remaining powered-up superhumans fighting a civil war in Chicago; the 30-someodd godlike superhumans changing the world; and the superhumans disappearing underground while one of them runs for President and the story runs its course. These only vaguely run together and involve big time-skips, and honestly the characters are barely continuous between them (characters critical to later chapters sometimes don’t appear in the early ones at all), but that’s okay, because really this is an excuse for JMS to explore a bunch of situations where superhumans actually change the world’s status quo. I disagree with some of what he comes up with (despite agreeing with 90% of his politics), but I appreciate the attempts.
Rising Stars: Bright (Issues #1-3) is a miniseries about Matthew Bright following his dreams and becoming a superpowered cop. Rising Stars: Voices of the Dead (Issues #1-6) is wildly uneven, as it follows Lionel, the special who can talk to ghosts, and explores his powers; but goes off the rails into an unclear musing on the nature of death in this universe, and then breaks the rules established by the original series by allowing the government to clone his powers without any influence from the Pederson Flash. Rising Stars: Untouchable (Issues #1-5) is a retrospective on the life of Laurel, the special who used her ability to telekinetically affect very small objects to become the perfect assassin. It’s not bad, but like Bright, it’s unnecessary.
The Freeze (issues #1-4) - An interesting setup, where every person in the world “freezes” into some sort of stasis, except for one man. He (and only he) can “unfreeze” people by touching them, so he carefully unfreezes a hundred-someodd people to manage a small society. The thing is, this is all explained as a flashback as this man rescues a specific frozen woman and a mysterious army tries to kill them both…and we’ve only got 4 issues, so we don’t get the full backstory. If the first TPB appears in a later bundle, I’d be eager to read the rest of the setup and decide if an ongoing series feels worthwhile.
The Clock (issues #1-4) - A miniseries contemplating an outbreak of a “viral cancer” that followers the main researcher and turns into a political spy thriller before the four issues are up. “Half the world’s population might die but it turns out to all be an evil plot” lands differently nowadays.
Eclipse – Ten years after a solar flare destroyed most of humanity, civilization has recovered by living at night and underground, because sunlight will now instantly incinerate anyone it touches. But a mysterious killer seems to be immune to the sun and is using it as a way to murder his victims. (The science here is…problematic. If the morning sun can char people in seconds, there isn’t going to be any surviving plant life, and it’ll wreak havoc on things like algae, sea temperatures and the like. Also, nobody’s going to spontaneously become immune to that.) Issues #1-16--the entire series--were included in the bundle; but after two issues it hadn’t won me.
Infinite Dark (issues #1-8) - Thousands of years after Earth’s destruction, the universe descends into entropy and the only thing remaining in existence is a space station in a “pseudoreality field.” with the last 2,000 people on board. The first four issues deal with a conspiracy to let the station fall into entropy, ending with a last-ditch attempt to save it. The second set feel like a sequel, dragging out the same concerns and issues with a variation on the previous disaster, finally ending with a reveal of whether entropy had won or humanity had made it through to the other side. Interesting concept overall, decent sci-fi, but middling execution and the second volume was unnecessary.
Stairway - In the near future, a billionaire discovers a secret code is embedded in human DNA and that combining the 666 rare pieces of it will build a giant cubic machine that will do…something! Most of the book revolves around his unethical choices to gather the DNA fragments and get the machine built, with the lesson apparently being, “You can’t enlighten humanity without a little indiscriminate murder and child abuse.” This is another self-contained story where the sci-fi concept isn’t bad but the execution is lacking.
A Man Among Ye (Issues #1-8) – Anne Bonney and Calico Jack Rackham are pirates terrorizing the Caribbean, but Rackham’s crew isn’t happy with a woman on board. A tumultuous series of events leads to Bonney forming her own crew of women who aren’t happy with the status quo. The pacing is a bit wonky (I’m guessing they didn’t know how many issues they were actually getting) and it’s pretty standard pirate adventure fare. Not bad, but nothing standout.
Madame Mirage (Issues #1-6) – The superheroic age is over, with heroes imprisoned and villains gone underground and into organized crime. But the villains are still out there, and a mysterious woman with disguise and illusion powers is on their trail, clearly looking for vengeance. Paul Dini wrote this one (and his love of Zatanna bleeds through despite the characters being unrelated), and it holds together pretty well as a single story.
Golgotha (Volume 1) - A soldier who does terrible things to get the job done is shipped off on an 80-year cryosleep journey to Earth’s first colony on another planet, but when he arrives, newer and faster ships have beaten him there and already established a colony and have no need for soldiers…or perhaps they do, because evidence of aliens has arisen and it must be contained. Despite some brief asides into violence (because the barbarians from the past is always better at violence) this devolves quickly into “humanity needs to accept that we aren’t special in order to survive.” In a discussion of philosophy on the colony of the future, Ayn Rand and objectivism are namechecked by the semi-villain, but for a work that’s clearly trying to be a philosophical discussion, it doesn’t actually manage to do anything with that. The aliens prove their points with what appears to be telepathic mind control and volume 2 could just as easily be from the point of view of the other colonies fighting an alien menace. Not recommended!
Symmetry (Issues #1-8) – The intro page of text tells you exactly what you’re getting here: In the future, a computer hive-mind links all humans, no-one has emotions any more, there’s no diversity or creativity. The children are raised by robots and choose their name and gender at age 13. Blah blah blah liberalism-gone-wild dystopia that only rugged individuality can defeat. (But with a side of “segregation is bad” so it can be nuanced.) Hawkins thinks he’s more clever than he is.
A complete set of Cyberforce comics (including Cyberforce: Tin Men of War and Cyberforce/Hunter Killer) are in this bundle. It’s…extremely 90s. Like, just glancing through you’d never guess that you weren’t reading WildC.A.T.S. or something from Malibu comics. They’re cyborg superheroes and they like murdering people with claws, lasers and explosions. I wasn’t into them in the 90s and don’t care now. Aphrodite V is a Cyberforce tie-in and I didn’t really care about it, either. Velocity Vol 2 is about a super-speedster who makes poor life choices, and I get enough of that from The Flash already.
Overall: There are three major buckets here: Sexy comics by the Sejics, the Rising Stars collection, and a pile of mediocre sci-fi experiments. The former is recommended, the latter generally aren’t.
The delight of this bundle was the works of Stjepan Sejic and Linda Sejic; some of which I was re-reading and some of which were new to me. I already owned all 7 volumes of Sunstone. It’s a lesbian meet-cute and extended romance that gets deep into the world of BDSM. Recommended to anyone who likes kinky/sexy comics.
I had also read Blood Stain years ago. It’s about a cute and lovable dork who becomes a mad scientist’s new assistant, where hilarity ensues.
Punderworld (volume 1) is a delightfully cute retelling of the Hades/Persephone myth, making it very much a love story between adorable dorks.
Fine Print (volume 1) takes place in the same universe, but it is very much an adults-only comic, as it revolves around the modern-day descendent of Eros (Succubi, Incubi and Cupids) and their romantic entanglements with each other and assorted chosen mortals.
Swing (volumes 1-4) left me irked that apparently volume 5 is the conclusion of the series, but that isn’t in this bundle (because it isn’t finished yet). But besides that, it’s the swingers version of Sunstone, following a middle-aged couple as they spice up their marriage with swinging. The couple is a pair of adorable dorks, in case you didn’t have a solid idea of what kind of characters the Sejics write.
I read the original Rising Stars back in 2016 as part of a slate of “realistic” Superman stories, and upon re-read it’s clearer that this was always more of a thought experiment than a character-based narrative. The story is told in a few major chapters: The 100+ kids growing into adults of varying power levels and the murder-mystery that drives that plot; the 100 remaining powered-up superhumans fighting a civil war in Chicago; the 30-someodd godlike superhumans changing the world; and the superhumans disappearing underground while one of them runs for President and the story runs its course. These only vaguely run together and involve big time-skips, and honestly the characters are barely continuous between them (characters critical to later chapters sometimes don’t appear in the early ones at all), but that’s okay, because really this is an excuse for JMS to explore a bunch of situations where superhumans actually change the world’s status quo. I disagree with some of what he comes up with (despite agreeing with 90% of his politics), but I appreciate the attempts.
Rising Stars: Bright (Issues #1-3) is a miniseries about Matthew Bright following his dreams and becoming a superpowered cop. Rising Stars: Voices of the Dead (Issues #1-6) is wildly uneven, as it follows Lionel, the special who can talk to ghosts, and explores his powers; but goes off the rails into an unclear musing on the nature of death in this universe, and then breaks the rules established by the original series by allowing the government to clone his powers without any influence from the Pederson Flash. Rising Stars: Untouchable (Issues #1-5) is a retrospective on the life of Laurel, the special who used her ability to telekinetically affect very small objects to become the perfect assassin. It’s not bad, but like Bright, it’s unnecessary.
The Freeze (issues #1-4) - An interesting setup, where every person in the world “freezes” into some sort of stasis, except for one man. He (and only he) can “unfreeze” people by touching them, so he carefully unfreezes a hundred-someodd people to manage a small society. The thing is, this is all explained as a flashback as this man rescues a specific frozen woman and a mysterious army tries to kill them both…and we’ve only got 4 issues, so we don’t get the full backstory. If the first TPB appears in a later bundle, I’d be eager to read the rest of the setup and decide if an ongoing series feels worthwhile.
The Clock (issues #1-4) - A miniseries contemplating an outbreak of a “viral cancer” that followers the main researcher and turns into a political spy thriller before the four issues are up. “Half the world’s population might die but it turns out to all be an evil plot” lands differently nowadays.
Eclipse – Ten years after a solar flare destroyed most of humanity, civilization has recovered by living at night and underground, because sunlight will now instantly incinerate anyone it touches. But a mysterious killer seems to be immune to the sun and is using it as a way to murder his victims. (The science here is…problematic. If the morning sun can char people in seconds, there isn’t going to be any surviving plant life, and it’ll wreak havoc on things like algae, sea temperatures and the like. Also, nobody’s going to spontaneously become immune to that.) Issues #1-16--the entire series--were included in the bundle; but after two issues it hadn’t won me.
Infinite Dark (issues #1-8) - Thousands of years after Earth’s destruction, the universe descends into entropy and the only thing remaining in existence is a space station in a “pseudoreality field.” with the last 2,000 people on board. The first four issues deal with a conspiracy to let the station fall into entropy, ending with a last-ditch attempt to save it. The second set feel like a sequel, dragging out the same concerns and issues with a variation on the previous disaster, finally ending with a reveal of whether entropy had won or humanity had made it through to the other side. Interesting concept overall, decent sci-fi, but middling execution and the second volume was unnecessary.
Stairway - In the near future, a billionaire discovers a secret code is embedded in human DNA and that combining the 666 rare pieces of it will build a giant cubic machine that will do…something! Most of the book revolves around his unethical choices to gather the DNA fragments and get the machine built, with the lesson apparently being, “You can’t enlighten humanity without a little indiscriminate murder and child abuse.” This is another self-contained story where the sci-fi concept isn’t bad but the execution is lacking.
A Man Among Ye (Issues #1-8) – Anne Bonney and Calico Jack Rackham are pirates terrorizing the Caribbean, but Rackham’s crew isn’t happy with a woman on board. A tumultuous series of events leads to Bonney forming her own crew of women who aren’t happy with the status quo. The pacing is a bit wonky (I’m guessing they didn’t know how many issues they were actually getting) and it’s pretty standard pirate adventure fare. Not bad, but nothing standout.
Madame Mirage (Issues #1-6) – The superheroic age is over, with heroes imprisoned and villains gone underground and into organized crime. But the villains are still out there, and a mysterious woman with disguise and illusion powers is on their trail, clearly looking for vengeance. Paul Dini wrote this one (and his love of Zatanna bleeds through despite the characters being unrelated), and it holds together pretty well as a single story.
Golgotha (Volume 1) - A soldier who does terrible things to get the job done is shipped off on an 80-year cryosleep journey to Earth’s first colony on another planet, but when he arrives, newer and faster ships have beaten him there and already established a colony and have no need for soldiers…or perhaps they do, because evidence of aliens has arisen and it must be contained. Despite some brief asides into violence (because the barbarians from the past is always better at violence) this devolves quickly into “humanity needs to accept that we aren’t special in order to survive.” In a discussion of philosophy on the colony of the future, Ayn Rand and objectivism are namechecked by the semi-villain, but for a work that’s clearly trying to be a philosophical discussion, it doesn’t actually manage to do anything with that. The aliens prove their points with what appears to be telepathic mind control and volume 2 could just as easily be from the point of view of the other colonies fighting an alien menace. Not recommended!
Symmetry (Issues #1-8) – The intro page of text tells you exactly what you’re getting here: In the future, a computer hive-mind links all humans, no-one has emotions any more, there’s no diversity or creativity. The children are raised by robots and choose their name and gender at age 13. Blah blah blah liberalism-gone-wild dystopia that only rugged individuality can defeat. (But with a side of “segregation is bad” so it can be nuanced.) Hawkins thinks he’s more clever than he is.
A complete set of Cyberforce comics (including Cyberforce: Tin Men of War and Cyberforce/Hunter Killer) are in this bundle. It’s…extremely 90s. Like, just glancing through you’d never guess that you weren’t reading WildC.A.T.S. or something from Malibu comics. They’re cyborg superheroes and they like murdering people with claws, lasers and explosions. I wasn’t into them in the 90s and don’t care now. Aphrodite V is a Cyberforce tie-in and I didn’t really care about it, either. Velocity Vol 2 is about a super-speedster who makes poor life choices, and I get enough of that from The Flash already.
Overall: There are three major buckets here: Sexy comics by the Sejics, the Rising Stars collection, and a pile of mediocre sci-fi experiments. The former is recommended, the latter generally aren’t.
