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Humble Bundle: Best of European Sci-Fi (Izneo.com)
I hadn’t realized that this bundle was provided through a comics-reader site called Izneo.com rather than the usual pdf bundles, which might have influenced my desire to buy it. I don’t love the online reading service; my monitor isn’t a great size and shape for reading scanned comics that are squashed into a page-reader. I actually had better luck reading them on my tablet and scrolling are zoomed in; but honestly it’s a crap way to read comics if you don’t have at least a 10” tablet to read on.
The bundle included a set bundle of comics but also a free month of subscription to the site’s premium service, so I read a bunch of off-list titles. Which was just as well, because the European Sci-Fi—which is mostly written by Brazilian author “Leo” Luis Eduardo de Oliveira—didn’t really win me. (My dad got more into it, so at least we got our money’s worth out of the bundle.)
The first thing I tried from the bundle collection was Betelgeuse, but I bounced off it and then didn’t go back to the bundle for months.
I made it through all of Aldebaran (volumes 1-3) - In the future, on a planetary colony cut off from Earth, a young man finds his life upended when he encounters two mysterious strangers and his home village is destroyed. Over the course of the series (which includes a three-year time-skip, but I think that’s only to age-up the younger girl so they can have a proper romance), we see a lot of bizarre local flora and fauna and uncover the mysterious creature in the water that’s clearly much more intelligent that humanity realizes. I get that this is supposed to be a coming-of-age story mixed in with spec-fic travelogue, but the beats feel wrong and the sexual politics are…not the greatest. I skipped returning to Betelgeuse or reading Anteres, which are apparently a semi-sequels.
I then tried Namibia (volume 1) on my dad’s recommendation: Famous nazi Hermann Goring is spotted in Namibia…years after his apparent death. British agents sent to investigate discover mutant insects and other strange goings-on. I read the first of the five volumes, but it didn’t hold me. Similarly, I glanced at a little bit of Distant Worlds, Orbital and Valerian and Laureline, which were also in the bundle, but I just couldn’t get into them.
Fragments of Femininity – A set of “slice of life” vignettes about seven women, most of which are kind of pointless but all of which are about breasts. (The author, unsurprisingly, is a middle-aged French man.) The story about the woman who volunteers as a nude model in exchange for some of the artwork before having a double-mastectomy was clever; the story about the bra store owner was overdone but cute. The rest were forgettable.
Atomic Sheep – Teenage Tammy goes off to a private boarding school, makes friends and gets better at art. Low-stakes teen drama, fun but forgettable. Apparently while it’s not autobiographical, it’s also not-not-autobiographical. No sheep appear at any point.
No Romance - A tale of three buddies who each meet a new woman at the same time, and the cycle through their various romances. It’s good that the dudes emotionally support each other, but good god, they’re idiots. Sometimes more self-aware than others, but idiots.
Giselle and Beatrice – It’s fairly often that, if you think about it, you’ll realize that a lot of comics could potentially be the author putting their fetishes onto paper. Occasionally, you read something where you have absolutely zero doubts about this. Beatrice uses a magic potion to transform her abusive, sexually-assaulting boss George into Giselle, an immigrant maid who speaks broken English and is trapped in her apartment, allowing Beatrice to turn the sexual-assault tables. The sexual politics of this are a goddamn nightmare--it goes beyond “problematic” into “WTF”--but I’m also not going to deny that some of the scenes are pretty hot.
Overall: I wasn’t huge into this bundle, but it was worth a shot. Izneo.com is closing their English-language store at the end of this month, and I’m not terribly depressed about it.
The bundle included a set bundle of comics but also a free month of subscription to the site’s premium service, so I read a bunch of off-list titles. Which was just as well, because the European Sci-Fi—which is mostly written by Brazilian author “Leo” Luis Eduardo de Oliveira—didn’t really win me. (My dad got more into it, so at least we got our money’s worth out of the bundle.)
The first thing I tried from the bundle collection was Betelgeuse, but I bounced off it and then didn’t go back to the bundle for months.
I made it through all of Aldebaran (volumes 1-3) - In the future, on a planetary colony cut off from Earth, a young man finds his life upended when he encounters two mysterious strangers and his home village is destroyed. Over the course of the series (which includes a three-year time-skip, but I think that’s only to age-up the younger girl so they can have a proper romance), we see a lot of bizarre local flora and fauna and uncover the mysterious creature in the water that’s clearly much more intelligent that humanity realizes. I get that this is supposed to be a coming-of-age story mixed in with spec-fic travelogue, but the beats feel wrong and the sexual politics are…not the greatest. I skipped returning to Betelgeuse or reading Anteres, which are apparently a semi-sequels.
I then tried Namibia (volume 1) on my dad’s recommendation: Famous nazi Hermann Goring is spotted in Namibia…years after his apparent death. British agents sent to investigate discover mutant insects and other strange goings-on. I read the first of the five volumes, but it didn’t hold me. Similarly, I glanced at a little bit of Distant Worlds, Orbital and Valerian and Laureline, which were also in the bundle, but I just couldn’t get into them.
Fragments of Femininity – A set of “slice of life” vignettes about seven women, most of which are kind of pointless but all of which are about breasts. (The author, unsurprisingly, is a middle-aged French man.) The story about the woman who volunteers as a nude model in exchange for some of the artwork before having a double-mastectomy was clever; the story about the bra store owner was overdone but cute. The rest were forgettable.
Atomic Sheep – Teenage Tammy goes off to a private boarding school, makes friends and gets better at art. Low-stakes teen drama, fun but forgettable. Apparently while it’s not autobiographical, it’s also not-not-autobiographical. No sheep appear at any point.
No Romance - A tale of three buddies who each meet a new woman at the same time, and the cycle through their various romances. It’s good that the dudes emotionally support each other, but good god, they’re idiots. Sometimes more self-aware than others, but idiots.
Giselle and Beatrice – It’s fairly often that, if you think about it, you’ll realize that a lot of comics could potentially be the author putting their fetishes onto paper. Occasionally, you read something where you have absolutely zero doubts about this. Beatrice uses a magic potion to transform her abusive, sexually-assaulting boss George into Giselle, an immigrant maid who speaks broken English and is trapped in her apartment, allowing Beatrice to turn the sexual-assault tables. The sexual politics of this are a goddamn nightmare--it goes beyond “problematic” into “WTF”--but I’m also not going to deny that some of the scenes are pretty hot.
Overall: I wasn’t huge into this bundle, but it was worth a shot. Izneo.com is closing their English-language store at the end of this month, and I’m not terribly depressed about it.