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chuckroHumanoids is a European publisher, and The Incal and Twilight Man are two of their most popular titles, though I’ll admit I don’t really understand why. (I read The Incal in an earlier bundle and, seriously, it’s the most 70s I think science fiction can get. And that’s not a compliment.) Anyway, here’s some of their other output:
In Vitro – The story of one man’s struggle with his infertility as he and his wife tried to have children; and along the way, a look back on his relationship with his own father. Honestly, though, it feels unfinished: The last panel indicates they were eventually successful, but the story itself doesn’t carry to or through that resolution and also leaves off on the question of whether he ever meets up with his father again. It’s kind of frustratingly disappointing, really, because the pacing was good until it suddenly wasn’t.
Dog Days – A French man takes his two sons and his dog to a small beach town he had visited as a child. The dog runs away and (warning!) the man finds him dead; but he doesn’t tell his sons and ends up learning that there’s a whole string of missing dogs. But in case you thought he’d solve a mystery or something: NOPE. It’s all just a bunch of faffing about. His wife never arrives, he sleeps with an old friend, he tries to retrieve the dead dog but gets caught, and a bunch of hunters who think he’s the dog-poisoner beat him up. Then he goes home. No real arc and nothing actually resolves. This is, as the saying goes, a shaggy dog story.
Chasing Echoes – A story about a family of American Jews descended from Holocaust survivors…being jerks to each other the way only American Jews can be. (I have to keep a mapping of which of my aunts are speaking to each other; I can’t criticize.) They go on a big family reunion trip to Poland to try to hunt down their heritage (and the family mill that the Nazis took their grandparents from). On one hand, though this does have a proper arc and character development, it’s also a wandering muddle of a story that sets up plenty of things it doesn’t really know how to pay off. On the other hand, it’s very much For Me. If this description sounds like nonsense you might get from your own relatives, it might be for you too.
Fraternity - Childhood best friends reunite at college, but one of them joins a fraternity that’s actually a demon-possessed cult, which means the other needs to learn a lot about demon-hunting really fast. This has a decent setup but doesn’t actually use it well enough— too much time is spent setting up the family tragedy and the maybe-girlfriend for too little payoff; the cult itself is under-developed in favor is splash horror scenes and the cops basically arrive out of nowhere in the ending. It feels like a bunch of their original ideas weren’t working but they didn’t actually want to drop anything, so they just patched it all back together and called it good enough.
Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces – A story about a caregiver and her Alzheimer’s patient. It’s poetic, and clearly intended to call attention to the shortcomings of the French elder care system. My takeaway is that the French system of elder care is clearly underfunded and undermaintained...but comparing it against the American system? I mean, at least they’re trying!
Luisa: Now and Then – 30-something Luisa is living in Paris and is generally unhappy with her life. Then 15-year-old Luisa falls asleep on a bus and finds herself in Paris, and through the generosity of a stranger ends up face-to-face with her future self. Adult Luisa is honestly really an aggressive ass through this discovery period, and generally a jerk to her younger self throughout. Like, neither compassion nor self-awareness at all. I suspect this is a metaphor but it didn’t endear me to the character. This features flashbacks to the egregiously homophobic 90s, because Luisa is queer but severely repressed about it. Then things get even more complicated as the older and younger versions of Luisa start swapping traits, which is again clearly a metaphor—older Luisa needs to learn which parts of her younger self to reclaim and which to let go in order to move on with her life. And the stinger has younger Luisa getting home in an “it was all a dream for her” sort of way, though it’s entertaining to think she then builds an alternate future with the self-knowledge she gained.
Retroactive - Time travel shenanigans! We follow a US government agent who uses the government’s time-travel system to keep history on track, but “anomalies” are popping up in the time stream that they can’t figure out. And it involves the main character getting trapped in a time loop, and I love time loops. Though this leaves a rather large plot hole (Where do the advanced, untraceable time suits come from, given the sequence of events?), it’s a neat standalone plot and it works.
Swine - Jesus cast the swarm of demons named Legion into a herd of pigs and ran them off a cliff…but some of them survived! This is an action-thriller comic and it’s just absurd enough to be entertaining, as the ex-husband and younger sister of a visionary preacher go after the demon pigs who killed her, eventually joined by a tinfoil-hat-wearing renegade demon pig who doesn’t want to rejoin his brethren. And it’s revealed that the demon pigs have been a source of humanity’s ills for the intervening millennia: They sank the Titanic and cause the Hindenburg explosion, among other things!
Asphalt Blues – Our protagonist is Mickey, a middle-aged man who drives too fast and tries to avoid connections, in a near-future sci-fi world. His girlfriend Nina dumps him for his inability to commit, then we jump forward 13 years. Micky’s wife has just been severely injured in a car crash, Nina’s husband is liaison between the corrupt government and the power company that’s faking clean energy. Everyone is unhappy, everyone is cheating. Then Mickey blows up the power plant and Nina’s boyfriend gets arrested for reckless driving. Eight months later, everybody’s happier with their lives and get what they wanted. This is a ramble of a story that doesn’t really know what it’s saying. The most standout thing is the “lineless” art style.
Bramble (Volume 1) – I do not have a goddamn clue what’s going on here. A mute giant who apparently worships some kind of forest deity comes to the big city, hallucinates, and murders a bunch of people. A useless put-upon nebbish of a police detective tracks him down. The asshole bully cops get murdered by the giant. A mysterious cult calls the giant their messiah. Nobody is likable, there is deeply insufficient exposition, and I can’t bring myself to care what the story is. (And I skipped the other two volumes of this.)
Chronophage - Then we hit another good one: A single mom working two dead-end jobs meets a strange man at a bar, and suddenly her life seems to start getting better. It turns out that he’s been “eating” the bad moments of her life both to sustain himself and in a paternalistic (and selfish) desire to make her life better. But his idea of improving her life doesn’t match hers, and she figures out that though he’s moving through time differently, he’s still subject to causality. This is solid sci-fi that knows what it’s doing and pulls it off.
Tiki: A Very Ruff Year - An autobiographical story. During the pandemic lockdowns, a man buys a dog for his wife and daughter, but it turns out that Tiki the dog is just enough to destroy his already-fragile mental health and he has a complete breakdown. If you want to see a Frenchman have an anxiety spiral over an adorable puppy (and also unemployment, isolation, the pandemic, and unresolved family trauma), then this is for you. No dogs are harmed—Tiki ends up happy in a new home at the end. And the protagonist recovers and writes a graphic novel.
Ignited (Volume 1) – Survivors of a school shooting get superpowers. A power fantasy for our time, as conspiracy theorists and second amendment crusaders respond to the school shooting by bringing in more guns and the traumatized superpowered teenagers take them down. Though they’re doing okay at the end of this volume, it’s pretty clear they’re going to get in all sorts of deep shit in the continuing series. (This is in the same universe as OMNI, which I read some of in an earlier bundle, and Strangelands, which wasn’t included.)
Olympus (Volumes 1-2) – A group of archeology students find a mysterious urn when diving off the coast of Greece, and are attacked by criminals and shipwrecked during a sudden storm, which drops them on an island full of mythological beasts. The two volumes make one complete story, a quest to climb Olympus and re-seal Pandora’s Box. It’s a cute little action movie of a comic; Hollywood-ish and forgettable.
Exo (Volumes 1-3) – Humanity has figured out that life likely exists on an exoplanet dubbed “Darwin II”, but aliens have already arrived on Earth; they attacked a space station on their way in and have taken over several human bodies in an effort to hijack a NASA scientist’s work. While the aliens on Earth are being chased down by NASA, a military force has been sent to the moon to hunt down the aliens’ staging base. It turns out to be a massive misunderstanding: Humanity’s evolution was sparked by an alien virus delivered via comet, and the aliens believe that virus to be deadly to them and are trying to set off an EMP to destroy Earth’s technology before the space program expands. But the virus has mutated and is harmless to them—and once that’s all cleared up, humanity can make a proper first contact. This is another action movie comic; the three volumes tell a complete story but it doesn’t hold together as well as some of the others. (Too many disparate pieces that could have used a better editing pass.)
Thick Skins - Another sci-fi action movie one-shot adventure; this one taking place across spacefaring planets and revolving around a missing tribe of modified humans called “thick skins,” who both the protagonist and a bunch of other assholes have been hired to find. (“Shocking” twists: The protagonist is secretly one of them, the evil corporation is trying to have them exterminated because they witnessed a dirty secret, and the woman was evil the whole time.) The artist seems to have trouble keeping track of who he’s drawing from panel to panel—body and head shapes change wildly and the characters manage to all look alike without looking consistently like themselves.
Retina (Volumes 1-3) – I’ll admit, while this wasn’t my favorite of the sci-fi thrillers, I’m really appreciating that they’re including full stories in the bundle. Like Exo, each volume of this was only 50 pages, so the trio makes a full trade. This follows a cop in 2050 when he’s presented with a mystery corpse whose eyes identify her as two different women, with the twist that she’s an ultra-secret undercover agent (and not really dead), and her handlers are a pair of bumbling idiots (and their superior doesn’t seem to understand that he can just tell the cops to drop the case). This was meh; it spends too much time with cops chasing a synthetic heroin deal at stupid cross-purposes with each other, and far too little actually working with the sci-fi premise.
Count - And one more sci-fi action movie. Redxan is a commoner who worked his way up to success, until his brother-in-law betrayed him and got him sent to prison for 13 years for a crime he didn’t commit; and during that time the betrayer took over the government and everyone Redxan loved died. Fortunately, a fellow prisoner gives Redxan the location of a helpful robot, a magic sword, and a large fortune in credits, so that when he escapes he can pursue his revenge. This is a fantasy story “reskinned” as sci-fi—the technology might as well be magic, and the “protectorate” is just a kingdom run by inherited nobility—and it’s not bad but it’s entirely forgettable.
Thousand Faces (Volume 1) - A British doctor ends up on the American frontier, and is taken in by the Sioux when he rescues their chief, but there’s some kind of demon chasing him and apparently possessing the animals of the plains. How much magic is there? How the hell does this guy survive all the nonsense he goes through? What’s the connection between the doctor who understood hygiene enough to actually save patients and the demons chasing the protagonist? Why do I care? There were five volumes of this; I wasn’t pulled in enough to continue.
The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television - A biography comic of Rod Serling, tacking his time in the military as a WW2 paratrooper, his early television hits, The Twilight Zone, and the years after. It’s pretty decent, and doesn’t really pull punches with regards to both the crap Serling went through and the less-than-ideal choices he made out of ego. It also makes we want to rewatch some original Twilight Zone episodes.
Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Dracula – By the same author and with a similar style. Young Bela Lugosi was a charming scoundrel who got driven out of Hungary when the communist takeover there failed, and made it big in America (and with a lot of American women). He made a lot of lousy choices; he really led the “Hollywood tabloid divorce” trend, including a 4-day marriage to a rich socialite. And like many actors, he never let the truth get in a way of a good story, which the book does a decent job of making clear by contrasting the narration with Lugosi’s own claims. The later years of his career weren’t kind to him, marked by cheesy roles and drug addiction, but Ed Wood really comes off well in this.
Versailles: My Father’s Palace - The story of Pierre de Nolhac, the curator of the Palace of Versailles between 1892 and 1920, as told by his son Henri. It intersperses the personal details of de Nolhac’s family with the work of restoring the palace amid political struggles and then World War One. This was another of the interesting biographies, especially as I came into it knowing virtually nothing about the subject.
Hedy Lamarr: An Incredible Life - Lamarr did in fact live an incredible life, but this is a problematically-paced recounting of it that can’t seem to decide how “scandalous” it wants to be. It blazes through events and leaves out details everywhere; and spends far too much dialogue on the size of Lamarr’s breasts. (The second-to-last segment is a huckster recounting various headlines and scandals with no actual commentary on the truth behind them—I’m wondering if the author got bored of doing research at that point and just dumped a headline summary into his notes.)
I Am Legion - This takes a very different tack from Swine while referencing the same biblical passage: A blood-borne, body-hopping demon is maneuvering through the ranks of both sides of WW2, trying to stop a second such demon in the body of a little girl. (Turns out, the demon is Dracula, but he’s nominally the good guy because he’s given up on power in favor of security and is just upset the second demon is revealing them to the world.) This was a decent spy thriller, but there were too many damn characters without enough distinction to them, and by the end I couldn’t track which bodies Vlad had been in, who was and wasn’t controlled, and what the exact order of events was.
Miss: Better Living Through Crime (Volume 1) - The first of four volumes that revolve around a white woman and the black man she recruits as an accomplice on the mean streets of Harlem in the Roaring 20s. You see, she has a terrible, tragic backstory and everyone just uses her, so she gets very good at murder very quickly (but still has a heart of gold). Honestly, this is just a little too wacky to work as a serious crime comic (the series of increasingly improbably events as Slim escapes from the mobsters trying to kill him) but too dark to work as a farce. Also, it’s got a spotlight on American racism and sexism but is written by a European white man, which means everything feels vaguely like a caricature—and is still incredibly racist and sexist, just in a slightly different way.
River of Ink – Nominally answering a child’s question “Why do we draw?” this is a scattershot “history of art and also my family” that’s trying to make a poetic sort of artwork and is most succeeding at being up its own ass. (Also, comically worshipful of French artists and blatantly wrong in several statements it makes about religion.) There’s a bonus section with the artist and his favorite American influence, Scott McCloud…which, yeah, should have guessed that.
The Fires of Theseus (Volumes 1-2) – The “true story” of Theseus and the minotaur. In this version, Theseus is the discarded daughter of King Aegeus. She’s sold as a prostitute, and when she rejects that sent to fight in an arena. She eventually kills the slave master, escapes, and becomes the most feared bandit leader in Greece. When she hears Athens fell to King Minos’ minotaur, she goes to investigate, but is captured and sent as a sacrifice to it. There, she meets Ariadne and learns that the minotaur is her disabled (but entirely human) brother, used as a weapon by his father. Through trickery and guile, all the kings end up dead, Ariadne gets to rule Crete, and Theseus and the Minotaur live happily ever after. All that said…this is only a feminist story in the broadest strokes; among other things, Theseus spends a LOT of time naked for the viewer’s appreciation.
Wings of Light (Volume 1) is an adaptation of a Julia Verlanger Retroworlds story, and honestly I’ve never managed to get into those. So is Orion’s Outcasts (Volume 1), and that opened with the main character being branded a criminal by a false rape accusation, which made me even less interested. I skimmed Pandemonium (Volume 1) and Red Hand: Twilight of the Gods (Volume 1) and neither particularly grabbed me. I had downloaded Alice on the Run: One Child’s Journey Through the Rwandan Civil War, but then decided that it just wasn’t something I needed to read. And this was hardly everything in the bundle, but there were a bunch of series that I’ve either tried in other bundles or could tell right off the bat that I wasn’t interested in.
Overall: Chasing Echoes was For Me. Luisa: Now and Then was interesting, even if the execution wasn’t perfectly to my taste. Retroactive and Chronophage were clever sci-fi stories that worked well and had good art. The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television was probably my favorite of the biography comics. And Swine was a special kind of batshit that I had to respect.
In Vitro – The story of one man’s struggle with his infertility as he and his wife tried to have children; and along the way, a look back on his relationship with his own father. Honestly, though, it feels unfinished: The last panel indicates they were eventually successful, but the story itself doesn’t carry to or through that resolution and also leaves off on the question of whether he ever meets up with his father again. It’s kind of frustratingly disappointing, really, because the pacing was good until it suddenly wasn’t.
Dog Days – A French man takes his two sons and his dog to a small beach town he had visited as a child. The dog runs away and (warning!) the man finds him dead; but he doesn’t tell his sons and ends up learning that there’s a whole string of missing dogs. But in case you thought he’d solve a mystery or something: NOPE. It’s all just a bunch of faffing about. His wife never arrives, he sleeps with an old friend, he tries to retrieve the dead dog but gets caught, and a bunch of hunters who think he’s the dog-poisoner beat him up. Then he goes home. No real arc and nothing actually resolves. This is, as the saying goes, a shaggy dog story.
Chasing Echoes – A story about a family of American Jews descended from Holocaust survivors…being jerks to each other the way only American Jews can be. (I have to keep a mapping of which of my aunts are speaking to each other; I can’t criticize.) They go on a big family reunion trip to Poland to try to hunt down their heritage (and the family mill that the Nazis took their grandparents from). On one hand, though this does have a proper arc and character development, it’s also a wandering muddle of a story that sets up plenty of things it doesn’t really know how to pay off. On the other hand, it’s very much For Me. If this description sounds like nonsense you might get from your own relatives, it might be for you too.
Fraternity - Childhood best friends reunite at college, but one of them joins a fraternity that’s actually a demon-possessed cult, which means the other needs to learn a lot about demon-hunting really fast. This has a decent setup but doesn’t actually use it well enough— too much time is spent setting up the family tragedy and the maybe-girlfriend for too little payoff; the cult itself is under-developed in favor is splash horror scenes and the cops basically arrive out of nowhere in the ending. It feels like a bunch of their original ideas weren’t working but they didn’t actually want to drop anything, so they just patched it all back together and called it good enough.
Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces – A story about a caregiver and her Alzheimer’s patient. It’s poetic, and clearly intended to call attention to the shortcomings of the French elder care system. My takeaway is that the French system of elder care is clearly underfunded and undermaintained...but comparing it against the American system? I mean, at least they’re trying!
Luisa: Now and Then – 30-something Luisa is living in Paris and is generally unhappy with her life. Then 15-year-old Luisa falls asleep on a bus and finds herself in Paris, and through the generosity of a stranger ends up face-to-face with her future self. Adult Luisa is honestly really an aggressive ass through this discovery period, and generally a jerk to her younger self throughout. Like, neither compassion nor self-awareness at all. I suspect this is a metaphor but it didn’t endear me to the character. This features flashbacks to the egregiously homophobic 90s, because Luisa is queer but severely repressed about it. Then things get even more complicated as the older and younger versions of Luisa start swapping traits, which is again clearly a metaphor—older Luisa needs to learn which parts of her younger self to reclaim and which to let go in order to move on with her life. And the stinger has younger Luisa getting home in an “it was all a dream for her” sort of way, though it’s entertaining to think she then builds an alternate future with the self-knowledge she gained.
Retroactive - Time travel shenanigans! We follow a US government agent who uses the government’s time-travel system to keep history on track, but “anomalies” are popping up in the time stream that they can’t figure out. And it involves the main character getting trapped in a time loop, and I love time loops. Though this leaves a rather large plot hole (Where do the advanced, untraceable time suits come from, given the sequence of events?), it’s a neat standalone plot and it works.
Swine - Jesus cast the swarm of demons named Legion into a herd of pigs and ran them off a cliff…but some of them survived! This is an action-thriller comic and it’s just absurd enough to be entertaining, as the ex-husband and younger sister of a visionary preacher go after the demon pigs who killed her, eventually joined by a tinfoil-hat-wearing renegade demon pig who doesn’t want to rejoin his brethren. And it’s revealed that the demon pigs have been a source of humanity’s ills for the intervening millennia: They sank the Titanic and cause the Hindenburg explosion, among other things!
Asphalt Blues – Our protagonist is Mickey, a middle-aged man who drives too fast and tries to avoid connections, in a near-future sci-fi world. His girlfriend Nina dumps him for his inability to commit, then we jump forward 13 years. Micky’s wife has just been severely injured in a car crash, Nina’s husband is liaison between the corrupt government and the power company that’s faking clean energy. Everyone is unhappy, everyone is cheating. Then Mickey blows up the power plant and Nina’s boyfriend gets arrested for reckless driving. Eight months later, everybody’s happier with their lives and get what they wanted. This is a ramble of a story that doesn’t really know what it’s saying. The most standout thing is the “lineless” art style.
Bramble (Volume 1) – I do not have a goddamn clue what’s going on here. A mute giant who apparently worships some kind of forest deity comes to the big city, hallucinates, and murders a bunch of people. A useless put-upon nebbish of a police detective tracks him down. The asshole bully cops get murdered by the giant. A mysterious cult calls the giant their messiah. Nobody is likable, there is deeply insufficient exposition, and I can’t bring myself to care what the story is. (And I skipped the other two volumes of this.)
Chronophage - Then we hit another good one: A single mom working two dead-end jobs meets a strange man at a bar, and suddenly her life seems to start getting better. It turns out that he’s been “eating” the bad moments of her life both to sustain himself and in a paternalistic (and selfish) desire to make her life better. But his idea of improving her life doesn’t match hers, and she figures out that though he’s moving through time differently, he’s still subject to causality. This is solid sci-fi that knows what it’s doing and pulls it off.
Tiki: A Very Ruff Year - An autobiographical story. During the pandemic lockdowns, a man buys a dog for his wife and daughter, but it turns out that Tiki the dog is just enough to destroy his already-fragile mental health and he has a complete breakdown. If you want to see a Frenchman have an anxiety spiral over an adorable puppy (and also unemployment, isolation, the pandemic, and unresolved family trauma), then this is for you. No dogs are harmed—Tiki ends up happy in a new home at the end. And the protagonist recovers and writes a graphic novel.
Ignited (Volume 1) – Survivors of a school shooting get superpowers. A power fantasy for our time, as conspiracy theorists and second amendment crusaders respond to the school shooting by bringing in more guns and the traumatized superpowered teenagers take them down. Though they’re doing okay at the end of this volume, it’s pretty clear they’re going to get in all sorts of deep shit in the continuing series. (This is in the same universe as OMNI, which I read some of in an earlier bundle, and Strangelands, which wasn’t included.)
Olympus (Volumes 1-2) – A group of archeology students find a mysterious urn when diving off the coast of Greece, and are attacked by criminals and shipwrecked during a sudden storm, which drops them on an island full of mythological beasts. The two volumes make one complete story, a quest to climb Olympus and re-seal Pandora’s Box. It’s a cute little action movie of a comic; Hollywood-ish and forgettable.
Exo (Volumes 1-3) – Humanity has figured out that life likely exists on an exoplanet dubbed “Darwin II”, but aliens have already arrived on Earth; they attacked a space station on their way in and have taken over several human bodies in an effort to hijack a NASA scientist’s work. While the aliens on Earth are being chased down by NASA, a military force has been sent to the moon to hunt down the aliens’ staging base. It turns out to be a massive misunderstanding: Humanity’s evolution was sparked by an alien virus delivered via comet, and the aliens believe that virus to be deadly to them and are trying to set off an EMP to destroy Earth’s technology before the space program expands. But the virus has mutated and is harmless to them—and once that’s all cleared up, humanity can make a proper first contact. This is another action movie comic; the three volumes tell a complete story but it doesn’t hold together as well as some of the others. (Too many disparate pieces that could have used a better editing pass.)
Thick Skins - Another sci-fi action movie one-shot adventure; this one taking place across spacefaring planets and revolving around a missing tribe of modified humans called “thick skins,” who both the protagonist and a bunch of other assholes have been hired to find. (“Shocking” twists: The protagonist is secretly one of them, the evil corporation is trying to have them exterminated because they witnessed a dirty secret, and the woman was evil the whole time.) The artist seems to have trouble keeping track of who he’s drawing from panel to panel—body and head shapes change wildly and the characters manage to all look alike without looking consistently like themselves.
Retina (Volumes 1-3) – I’ll admit, while this wasn’t my favorite of the sci-fi thrillers, I’m really appreciating that they’re including full stories in the bundle. Like Exo, each volume of this was only 50 pages, so the trio makes a full trade. This follows a cop in 2050 when he’s presented with a mystery corpse whose eyes identify her as two different women, with the twist that she’s an ultra-secret undercover agent (and not really dead), and her handlers are a pair of bumbling idiots (and their superior doesn’t seem to understand that he can just tell the cops to drop the case). This was meh; it spends too much time with cops chasing a synthetic heroin deal at stupid cross-purposes with each other, and far too little actually working with the sci-fi premise.
Count - And one more sci-fi action movie. Redxan is a commoner who worked his way up to success, until his brother-in-law betrayed him and got him sent to prison for 13 years for a crime he didn’t commit; and during that time the betrayer took over the government and everyone Redxan loved died. Fortunately, a fellow prisoner gives Redxan the location of a helpful robot, a magic sword, and a large fortune in credits, so that when he escapes he can pursue his revenge. This is a fantasy story “reskinned” as sci-fi—the technology might as well be magic, and the “protectorate” is just a kingdom run by inherited nobility—and it’s not bad but it’s entirely forgettable.
Thousand Faces (Volume 1) - A British doctor ends up on the American frontier, and is taken in by the Sioux when he rescues their chief, but there’s some kind of demon chasing him and apparently possessing the animals of the plains. How much magic is there? How the hell does this guy survive all the nonsense he goes through? What’s the connection between the doctor who understood hygiene enough to actually save patients and the demons chasing the protagonist? Why do I care? There were five volumes of this; I wasn’t pulled in enough to continue.
The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television - A biography comic of Rod Serling, tacking his time in the military as a WW2 paratrooper, his early television hits, The Twilight Zone, and the years after. It’s pretty decent, and doesn’t really pull punches with regards to both the crap Serling went through and the less-than-ideal choices he made out of ego. It also makes we want to rewatch some original Twilight Zone episodes.
Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Dracula – By the same author and with a similar style. Young Bela Lugosi was a charming scoundrel who got driven out of Hungary when the communist takeover there failed, and made it big in America (and with a lot of American women). He made a lot of lousy choices; he really led the “Hollywood tabloid divorce” trend, including a 4-day marriage to a rich socialite. And like many actors, he never let the truth get in a way of a good story, which the book does a decent job of making clear by contrasting the narration with Lugosi’s own claims. The later years of his career weren’t kind to him, marked by cheesy roles and drug addiction, but Ed Wood really comes off well in this.
Versailles: My Father’s Palace - The story of Pierre de Nolhac, the curator of the Palace of Versailles between 1892 and 1920, as told by his son Henri. It intersperses the personal details of de Nolhac’s family with the work of restoring the palace amid political struggles and then World War One. This was another of the interesting biographies, especially as I came into it knowing virtually nothing about the subject.
Hedy Lamarr: An Incredible Life - Lamarr did in fact live an incredible life, but this is a problematically-paced recounting of it that can’t seem to decide how “scandalous” it wants to be. It blazes through events and leaves out details everywhere; and spends far too much dialogue on the size of Lamarr’s breasts. (The second-to-last segment is a huckster recounting various headlines and scandals with no actual commentary on the truth behind them—I’m wondering if the author got bored of doing research at that point and just dumped a headline summary into his notes.)
I Am Legion - This takes a very different tack from Swine while referencing the same biblical passage: A blood-borne, body-hopping demon is maneuvering through the ranks of both sides of WW2, trying to stop a second such demon in the body of a little girl. (Turns out, the demon is Dracula, but he’s nominally the good guy because he’s given up on power in favor of security and is just upset the second demon is revealing them to the world.) This was a decent spy thriller, but there were too many damn characters without enough distinction to them, and by the end I couldn’t track which bodies Vlad had been in, who was and wasn’t controlled, and what the exact order of events was.
Miss: Better Living Through Crime (Volume 1) - The first of four volumes that revolve around a white woman and the black man she recruits as an accomplice on the mean streets of Harlem in the Roaring 20s. You see, she has a terrible, tragic backstory and everyone just uses her, so she gets very good at murder very quickly (but still has a heart of gold). Honestly, this is just a little too wacky to work as a serious crime comic (the series of increasingly improbably events as Slim escapes from the mobsters trying to kill him) but too dark to work as a farce. Also, it’s got a spotlight on American racism and sexism but is written by a European white man, which means everything feels vaguely like a caricature—and is still incredibly racist and sexist, just in a slightly different way.
River of Ink – Nominally answering a child’s question “Why do we draw?” this is a scattershot “history of art and also my family” that’s trying to make a poetic sort of artwork and is most succeeding at being up its own ass. (Also, comically worshipful of French artists and blatantly wrong in several statements it makes about religion.) There’s a bonus section with the artist and his favorite American influence, Scott McCloud…which, yeah, should have guessed that.
The Fires of Theseus (Volumes 1-2) – The “true story” of Theseus and the minotaur. In this version, Theseus is the discarded daughter of King Aegeus. She’s sold as a prostitute, and when she rejects that sent to fight in an arena. She eventually kills the slave master, escapes, and becomes the most feared bandit leader in Greece. When she hears Athens fell to King Minos’ minotaur, she goes to investigate, but is captured and sent as a sacrifice to it. There, she meets Ariadne and learns that the minotaur is her disabled (but entirely human) brother, used as a weapon by his father. Through trickery and guile, all the kings end up dead, Ariadne gets to rule Crete, and Theseus and the Minotaur live happily ever after. All that said…this is only a feminist story in the broadest strokes; among other things, Theseus spends a LOT of time naked for the viewer’s appreciation.
Wings of Light (Volume 1) is an adaptation of a Julia Verlanger Retroworlds story, and honestly I’ve never managed to get into those. So is Orion’s Outcasts (Volume 1), and that opened with the main character being branded a criminal by a false rape accusation, which made me even less interested. I skimmed Pandemonium (Volume 1) and Red Hand: Twilight of the Gods (Volume 1) and neither particularly grabbed me. I had downloaded Alice on the Run: One Child’s Journey Through the Rwandan Civil War, but then decided that it just wasn’t something I needed to read. And this was hardly everything in the bundle, but there were a bunch of series that I’ve either tried in other bundles or could tell right off the bat that I wasn’t interested in.
Overall: Chasing Echoes was For Me. Luisa: Now and Then was interesting, even if the execution wasn’t perfectly to my taste. Retroactive and Chronophage were clever sci-fi stories that worked well and had good art. The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television was probably my favorite of the biography comics. And Swine was a special kind of batshit that I had to respect.
