Snowpiercer Vol.2 - The Explorers by Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette
All of humankind is living on a single train. Oh sorry, as this is the sequel, make that two trains. Launched on the same tracks as the original Snowpiercer, but clearly at a slight remove, was a second mile-long behemoth of a train, designed with the latest high tech to be completely self-sustaining as it travelled ceaselessly on the tracks encircling a frozen Earth, waiting for the time the world was inhabitable once more. But the high tech on board, complete with lemon farms, and differing qualities of virtual holidays depending on cost and class of customer, has not put paid to one aspect of society – and in fact the sole aspect of society not featured in the first book – religion. Some people are fearing the end time, when the Icebreaker crashes into the original Snowpiercer. Some believe they're duped into the whole train idea, and are in fact on a spacecraft. Some people know something else – the rare few explorers who get to go outside the train into the world beyond, and see glimpses of what came before… Full review...
Line of Fire : Diary of an Unknown Soldier (August, September 1914) by Barroux
A scientist can tell a bit about an animal's nature just by observing the beginnings of its life ('it's in water, ergo it's probably a fish'). They don't need to study every ant in the colony to see how ants collaborate and work together, for the detail is pretty much shared from one ant to the next. So it is with soldiers, at least as far as this book is concerned. You can pick one soldier from all the battalions and learn something of soldierly life. You can see the nature of the war from what happens at the outset. And here all we get is the outset, for this graphic novel is based on a manuscript the artist found purely by chance, of a solitary soldier's diary that covers only a couple of weeks in 1914, and stops obliquely. Full review...
Snowpiercer Vol.1 - The Escape by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette
All of humankind is living on a single train. I know British commuters feel that way at times, but this is a much different circumstance – it is a train miles long, running non-stop as a self-contained unit across tracks circling a desolately frozen Earth, moving on endlessly until, perhaps some time in the distant future, the planet can recover from the cataclysm that froze it. It's certainly been going on long enough for it to have a culture – a hierarchical society from the rich and leisured classes near the front, through the orgiasts, past the useful carriages set aside for producing food, to the underclass at the end. It's all set in its routine, set in motion. But there are two fishes out of water – a man from the rear who escaped, and a middle-class woman working with civil rights campaigners. Full review...
Mouse Guard - the Black Axe by David Petersen
Long before there can be peace, there is war. Long before there is something to believe in, there is empty hope. Long before the legend, there is the truth. And so, long before the events of the first two collected Mouse Guard volumes came the story in this third, that of how the heroic, mythical character Celanawe became so notorious. Our tale starts with him just a guard mouse and tutor to those who would follow him, but an unlikely connection to an already fabled weapon is about to be shown to him, in the equally unlikely form of a scholarly old female mouse, Em. When she says the ancient legacy is situated far across unmapped seas, an unusual trio of explorers is pushed to the limit and beyond, in search of the unseekable. Full review...
Bugsy Malone - Graphic Novel by Alan Parker
One bunch of wise guys might think they have it all, but they don't. Another bunch of wise guys want it all and have the splurge guns to help them get it. Into the middle come a beautiful starlet-in-waiting, and our crafty innocent abroad, Bugsy Malone. Cue, at some incredibly random time honouring no discernible anniversary whatsoever, this reprint of the long-lost graphic novel version of the story, told for 'all those kids who find it tough reading books with just words'. Full review...
Asterix and the Picts by Jean-Yves Ferri, Rene Goscinny, Albert Uderzo and Didier Conrad
I've never been entirely certain if Asterix was written for children or adults. I am quite certain children were the original target audience, but it is equally apparent that many of the jokes are thrown in for adults as well. It does seem as if more adults are buying Asterix than children now, and comics in general have been taken over by the adult consumer, but Asterix still has plenty to offer the younger reader as well. If it is perhaps a bit more sophisticated than the average children's book today, all the better. I'm all for children's books that are light and easy to read, but I think we are doing our children a disservice by filtering out any book with a more complex vocabulary or a fair number of unfamiliar words. My children did find a few words like solidarity, fraternise and diaphanous challenging, but if we don't challenge them at all - how will they learn? Full review...
Hilda and the Bird Parade by Luke Pearson
Hilda is a young girl who has just moved from the mountainous countryside to the town of Trolberg; a major upheaval in the life of a girl who likes nothing better than to go exploring the woods and mountains and discovering magical creatures. Since moving into town Hilda’s mother is not so keen to allow Hilda out exploring believing a town to be a potentially dangerous place for a child. Soon though Hilda and her new friends manage to convince her mother to allow her out and the new friends give her a guided tour of the area and all the best places in town. Hilda seems to prefer animals to other children though and early on becomes separated from her friends and instead goes exploring with an injured bird she has befriended. Full review...
A1 Annual by Dave Elliott (editor)
It's perhaps a little surprising how few comics anthologies there are on the shelves of regular bookstores. The whole world of sequential art is so fragmented the choices to be made are infinite, everyone who comes into some renown soon wishes for a self-published collection of his favourites or her friends' work, and there definitely is too much out there for anyone in the audience of comix to fully grasp without some kind of editorial spoon-feeding. One such editor is Dave Elliott, whose A1 Comics has been collating what it deems the world's greatest since 1989, but even with that pedigree it's only now that full hardbacks of their greatest hits are being launched – hardbacks such as this book. Full review...
Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore by Lance Parkin
I don't think that I ever saw Alan Moore when I lived in Northampton, and I don't think I coincided with the publication of Maxwell the Magic Cat in the local newspaper. So I missed out on the memorable frame of someone else who is six foot two, albeit a generation older and looking so hirsute he would seem to be afraid of scissors. But I certainly would not have been alone in not recognising him for what he is. How many Northampton housewives flicked past the daily panels of Maxwell in complete ignorance of who Alan Moore actually is? – With no idea that the years he spent drawing that cartoon for £10 a week – later to be £12.50 – were just him gearing up to be the biggest man of letters in the comic book world? Full review...
Briony Hatch by Ginny Skinner and Penelope Skinner
Meet Briony Hatch. She's a fourteen year old schoolgirl, with a few too many curves for the trendy set, and want-away hair, who is fixated on the ghost who acts as romantic male lead in her favourite series of fantasy books, about a beautiful, feisty female, swashbuckling exorcist. But when the books finish, just at the same time as her parents divorce, it looks like the beginning of the end. Mum and Briony settle into the abandoned bungalow belonging to the latter's great-uncle and aunt, only for the girl to find a horrid malaise come over her. Has the books' conclusion done so much damage as to leave her wishing to retire from life, or can she find the ghost of a hope somewhere? Full review...
Fashion Beast by Alan Moore and Malcolm McLaren
Meet Doll. She seems to fit in with the world she aspires to – she has an androgynous look and a sharp tongue, and doesn't seem to hold many of the people around her in much deference. However, as someone else is very quick to point out, she is only a cloakroom attendant, however swanky and in vogue the nightclub she works at might be. That same someone else gets her fired, however, yet for every door that shuts… As she becomes an overnight modelling sensation, and finds her new boss a very singular individual. Full review...
The Weirdo Years 1981-'91 by R Crumb
Books are better than magazines – discuss. Certainly for the connoisseur of the contents of culturally important titles from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s it must be a lively debate. I remember my collection of New Worlds editions and how often the editors would take us through a long novel over seven or eight parts, then dump a 'sorry, due to space requirements this last part of what you've cherished for months is abridged – but wait for the novel version soon' on us. Is it better to be a completist, and witness everything the original editors deemed worthy (or just had lying around) or should we cherry-pick and note the best? This hefty hunk of book goes for the latter, anyway, taking R Crumb's output for the Weirdo comic, as edited by R Crumb, then someone else, then Mrs R Crumb, and giving us everything, warts and all. Full review...
The Hartlepool Monkey by Wilfrid Lupano and Jeremie Moreau
OK, I'll get the obvious pun over and done with – this graphic novel features a lot of monkeying around. It focuses on the village of Hartlepool, and the people who populated the small settlement on low cliffs overlooking the North Sea, with its couple of pubs and not much else. It looks at what might have happened when, as folklore has it, a storm put paid to a French ship and when a monkey washed up ashore afterwards the natives took it for a Napoleonic spy, tried to find invasion plans from it, and hanged it as the enemy. Here the poor creature is even shaved so it shows respect to the court-martial. Here too are some lovely choice lines of vernacular delivered in spite about the French and the English, and here too is a guest appearance by someone with a much more modern outlook than the ridiculous Hartlepool residents. Full review...
Celtic Warrior: The Legend of Cu Chulainn by Will Sliney
Queen Maeve wants the Brown Bull of Cooley and the lands of Ulster. With an army of 10,000 men, she marches to try to take them by force. The only man who stands between her and her goal is Cú Chulainn, the legendary hero. Can he save his country from the evil enchantress? Full review...
Big Nate Compilation 3 : Genius Mode by Lincoln Peirce
They say you should live your life like an adventure, and Big Nate certainly does that, even if it is only four panels at a time, meaning the full plot of the story can take a week or more to come out. For Big Nate is a star of an American newspaper comic strip, and this, believe it or not, is his tenth collection. We learn from this all about his friendships at school, his relations with his teachers and father, and just what a soppy thing his most unmasculine dog can be. Here are comics, baseball and laziness, as every American kid knows them. Luckily for us, though, Big Nate travels well. Full review...
The From Hell Companion by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Alan Moore will always be synonymous with two major books – Watchmen and From Hell, his look at the Whitechapel Murders. While the latter may appear to many to be a great, galumphing graphic novel loosely about Jack the Ripper, you ain't seen nothing yet. This volume is his illustrator Eddie Campbell's look at proceedings, and for a book that would appear to have no actual Moore input in it, he provides a welter of words for it. Full review...
Flutter by Jennie Wood and Jeff McComsey
When fifteen-year-old Lily moves to yet another new town, she falls for a girl who isn't interested in her. Lily, though, has a trick up her sleeve - she's a shapeshifter. She turns herself into a boy so that she can have a chance with Saffron. As Jesse, she starts to build a new life for herself at school -can this 'boy' get the girl? Additionally, why is Lily so resistant to any sort of harm, and who are the strange people who are trying to find her? Full review...
Superior by Mark Millar and Leinil Yu
Former basketball star Simon Pooni is now in a wheelchair and blind in one eye - at the age of 12. Mutliple sclerosis has left him in this state, praying for a cure. Then a talking monkey named Orman appears to him and offers him the chance to become a real life version of movie superhero Superior - for a week. But what will happen when the week ends? Full review...
Green Lantern Volume 1: Sinestro by Geoff Johns and Doug Mahnke
I've never been a Green Lantern fan - I've tried the series a couple of times in the past but seem to have picked bad times to give it a go. However, I've heard some good things about DC Comics recently so wanted to try a few of the New 52 books, which relaunched all of the publisher's ongoing monthlies, and this caught my eye. Full review...
Naming Monsters by Hannah Eaton
Monsters are all around us, we are told, and Fran should know. She opens each chapter of her episodic story here with a new monster – a golem, an incubus, or perhaps something less well known. But there are subtly monstrous events in her life as well – an alleged boyfriend with a measly attitude, a fake medium, a summer of retaking GCSEs, and more – as well as the biggest, blackest, visitation – something that should bring succour, family and friendship but cannot be handled. Full review...
Preacher Volume 1: Gone To Texas by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
Reverend Jesse Custer is losing his faith in God - but he's about to find out that He exists, and He isn't all that He's cracked up to be. After one incredible event, Jesse's life is turned upside down, and he sets out on a road trip that will lead him to try and get answers from God himself - if Heaven's angels, and the Saint of Killers, don't cut him down first. Full review...
Modesty Blaise - The Girl In The Iron Mask by Peter O'Donnell
n this volume our globe-trotting heroine Modesty and her faithful Willie land up at a jungle hospital, only to find the people providing it with useful drugs are also creating their own much worse drugs nearby; find the Mafia just one man away from taking over Australia – and therefore give him a male and female tag team back-up; and stumble into the wicked games of a pair of corrupt, evil billionaires in the Alps. There is no let-up in the global shenanigans, the daring-do, or the whipcrack action – and we wouldn’t want it any other way… Full review...
Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
The Nemo here is merely the daughter of the great Captain Nemo, as defined by Jules Verne, although given that heritage there is more than enough talent in her bloodline for piracy and adventure. Here, fleeing a royal family that has just been looted, Nemo turns to her father's logbooks and journals, and decides there is unfinished business in the southern polar wastes. But while she's off looking for more edifying action, others are off looking for revenge on her… Full review...
The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel, Volume 1: The Manga (Manga Edition) by Cassandra Clare and HyeKyung Baek
Meet Tessa Gray. Summonsed to London to be with her brother after living in America, she has no idea what she is going to be in for. A kidnap and training at the hands of two witches is only the start of it as she is forced to find the truth about the world about her – about the two different kinds of supernatural beings, and of how they constantly fight against each other, and about her own unique origin, character and destiny that makes her more than a pawn in this battle. You might have met Tessa before, but not like this – for this is the manga adaptation of the series. Full review...
Days of the Bagnold Summer by Joff Winterhart
Meet Daniel Bagnold. He is a surly, sullen, modern teenager, permanently in a black hoodie, with long, lanky hair and almost a monobrow, who one would call very quiet were it not for the metal music that forms almost his only interest. He has been forced to spend the summer, not in Florida with his absent father's new family, but with his librarian mother Sue, his best friend and his shyness. He doesn't want much, and neither it would appear does his mother – although she knows she has to get him some posh shoes for her cousin's wedding. This book is about their relationship – the two of them and the dog that completes the household – in telling, devastating and humorous manner. Full review...
The Secret of the Stone Frog by David Nytra
You know the drill – you are a young boy and find yourself waking up alongside your older sister, but with your beds beside the bole of a huge tree in an enchanted forest. The advice you get is straightforward, but impossible to follow, as you don't stick to the straight and simple path home that you should. As a result you find a tempting house guarded by bees who steal the words out of your mouth, hoity-toity upper class lions, angler fish on the daily commute and more. Full review...
Krent Able's Big Book of Mischief by Krent Able
It's come to my attention recently that Knockabout books, with their growing library of graphic titles, have no intention in being at all literary – not for them the gently observant characterisation of some original graphic novels. Instead they seem to have a wilful regard for going even further than their house name suggests – wild, wacky and not afraid to present an upsetting image. With Krent Able they have the collaborator who will surely help them live up to that ethos like no other. Taken from the Stool Pigeon musical magazine, with some extra cartoons, are these strips of depravity, death in unlikely ways and revolting selections of body parts and fluids. Full review...
Drawn Together by Robert R Crumb and Aline Crumb
This book is, as it says several times, the collected works of the world's only comic-strip creating husband-and-wife partnership. While this is to ignore the work Joyce does to co-write some of Harvey Pekar's titles, there certainly is not a couple such as this. Over several decades of work, we see just how joined at the hip they are. Most of the panels are drawn by him - R - with Aline drawing herself on top of his inked backgrounds. Later on, their self-created titles are split, with him doing half the pages, and her own opus on the other half - by this time she had had works out under her own name. But so close are the couple in each other's intimate works, they are never very far from the edge of the frame. Full review...
Dante's Inferno by Hunt Emerson and Kevin Jackson
It seems incredibly right, on only the third page of this text, that the Divine Comedy should be transferred to the black and white, cartoonish side of the graphic novel format. Our venturing hero encounters the 'leopard of malice and fraud', the 'lion of violence and ambition' and the 'she-wolf of avarice and incontinence', and leaves bemoaning living in a world of symbolism. You could see the beasts illustrated and captioned by name curving alongside their body, just as Hogarth may have displayed them, but no, Emerson goes down the path that is less cartoonish and less newspaper comic strip, and lets the picture and script stay a bit more separate. But later on he is delving into the more blatant, and immediate, by dressing The Furies up as multiple Maggie Thatchers. The good thing about this book is there is reason for everything in it - from the examples of artwork I have described, to the fact both creators claim it to have been 'influenced by childhood reading of MAD magazine', and a reason the publisher of this untouchable classic is known as Knockabout Books. Full review...
Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero by Grant Morrison
Consider the super-hero comic. Borne out of a need to create cheap and franchise-friendly content for newspapers in America, it's grown into a billion-dollar industry, with Hollywood jumping on the bandwagon of several major characters now their FX have finally caught up with the printed page. Disposable? - once upon a time, yet now collectable to the tune of a million dollars or more. Frivolous? - probably, yet not exclusively now, if ever so. At one point here, they are just one product of the infinitely powerful imaginary system each of us carries in our brain, and at the other 'ethereal, paper-thin constructs of unfettered imagination'. Full review...