Difference between revisions of "Newest Graphic Novels Reviews"

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[[Category:Graphic Novels|*]]
 
[[Category:Graphic Novels|*]]
 
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{{newreview
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|author= Hurk
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|title= Ready for Pop
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|rating= 4.5
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|genre= Graphic Novels
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|summary=London, The mid-sixties. In what appears to have been a murder attempt, Britain's greatest pop sensation 'Vic Vox' has been left a foot tall – the effects of a 'shrink drug' administered by assailants unknown. As Detective Chief Inspector Ladyshoe and his team at Scotland Yard try to find who did it and why, comedian Tubs Cochran prepares himself for his big come-back show. Can he keep his old fashioned comedy instincts relevant enough to entertain a new generation? Will Vic Vox's big rivals, 'The Small Pocks' be given a boost in Vic Vox's absence? And will June Scurvy get her hit (or maybe not) new single featured on the show they're all waiting for…''Ready for Pop''!
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|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0861662504</amazonuk>
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{{newreview
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Nick Bantock
 
|author=Nick Bantock
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|summary=To start with, a rhetorical test.  How about God and Adam playing badminton day in and day out, until one gets bored and decides to create Eve?  Or the defeater of Goliath and the saviour of the Israelites being one Conan the Barbarian?  Or this as a test – Jesus Himself failing to have a successful session of tequila slammers with Gabriel due to the holes through His hands?  I barely need mention that in these pages God does battle with Superman, for you to have answered the test and put yourself firmly in one of two camps for this book – one very much opposed to buying it, and one very much in favour.
 
|summary=To start with, a rhetorical test.  How about God and Adam playing badminton day in and day out, until one gets bored and decides to create Eve?  Or the defeater of Goliath and the saviour of the Israelites being one Conan the Barbarian?  Or this as a test – Jesus Himself failing to have a successful session of tequila slammers with Gabriel due to the holes through His hands?  I barely need mention that in these pages God does battle with Superman, for you to have answered the test and put yourself firmly in one of two camps for this book – one very much opposed to buying it, and one very much in favour.
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0861662350</amazonuk>
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0861662350</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
 
|author=Patrick Modiano, Sempe (illustrator) and William Rodarmor (translator)
 
|title=Catherine Certitude
 
|rating=4
 
|genre=Confident Readers
 
|summary=What little I know of Patrick Modiano was gained from the number of 'no, we've never heard of him, either' articles and summaries that came our way when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the end of 2014.  They suggested his oeuvre was mature, slightly thriller-based but not exclusively so, and asked lots of accumulative questions regarding identity with regard to the Vichy government during WWII.  Identity is a lot more fixed in this musing little piece, for the adult voice-over looks back over a wide remove, and says there will always be a little bit of her living the events and situations of the book.  Those situations are of a young dance-school attendee, and her loving and much-loved father, living a cosy life in Paris – even if the girl never once really works out what it is her father does for a living…
 
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1783443022</amazonuk>
 
 
}}
 
}}

Revision as of 09:59, 28 August 2016


Ready for Pop by Hurk

4.5star.jpg Graphic Novels

London, The mid-sixties. In what appears to have been a murder attempt, Britain's greatest pop sensation 'Vic Vox' has been left a foot tall – the effects of a 'shrink drug' administered by assailants unknown. As Detective Chief Inspector Ladyshoe and his team at Scotland Yard try to find who did it and why, comedian Tubs Cochran prepares himself for his big come-back show. Can he keep his old fashioned comedy instincts relevant enough to entertain a new generation? Will Vic Vox's big rivals, 'The Small Pocks' be given a boost in Vic Vox's absence? And will June Scurvy get her hit (or maybe not) new single featured on the show they're all waiting for…Ready for Pop! Full review...

Griffin and Sabine 25th Anniversary Edition: An Extraordinary Correspondence by Nick Bantock

4star.jpg General Fiction

Oh Griffin and Sabine, where have you been all my life? I've loved epistolary novels and ones that take the narrative two-and-fro of letters and bring us closer to the sender than any omniscient narrator can hope to do. I've still got the childlike love of picking at an envelope stuck in a book to pull out a sheet of something else – not only is there the wonder at the handmade construction of something so bluntly and undeservedly called 'a book', but there is the frisson of being the first person to see this artefact ever. So how have I never seen this book before, and its cycle of sequels, concerning the correspondence between two completely different people? Full review...

The Beauty by Jeremy Haun and Jason A Hurley

4.5star.jpg Graphic Novels

Don't we all just want that one little fillup to our looks – that tuck there, those pounds or wrinkles vanished, that little tweak to make us more sexually attractive and virile? Well, if you catch The Beauty, you will indubitably end up, in what colloquial language has it, fit. But The Beauty is not to be caught as in a passing fad or itinerant beautician, but as a sexual disease. And it's hit half the population – most of those willingly. You feel feverish with it, but it's taken off big time, and Big Pharma is happy with the situation. Some violent anti-Beauty activists aren't, so special police units exist regarding it, but they, the Powers That Be, and the underground scientists working against the disease are only going to be swamped when The Beauty shows its true face… Full review...

Modesty Blaise - Ripper Jax by Peter O'Donnell and Enric Badia Romero

4star.jpg Graphic Novels

Is there any stopping Modesty Blaise? Well, inasmuch as there are only ten stories left that have not been anthologised in these lovely reprints, yes – just three books to go, by my reckoning. That reckoning should be quite accurate, if I can be immodest, for there is a lot that is routine about these stories. They all had three panels a day, six days a week (with one day's output being less relevant to the story for those papers that didn't carry the comic on weekends), for twenty-one weeks. But rest assured there is also a lot that is unusual about Modesty and her output, including a never-ending variety to the locations, to the manner of the baddy's crime, and to the action Modesty and her Willie are forced to undertake to win the day. And nobody, but nobody, has undertaken so much action and come out looking so attractive… Full review...

Alpha: Directions by Jens Harder

5star.jpg Graphic Novels

So, people might still ask me, why do I turn to graphic novels – aren't visual books with limited writing more suited to young people? Yeah, right – try pawning this off on juvenile audiences and the semi-literate. If you can't kill that cliché off with pages such as these I don't know what will work. I know the book isn't designed to be a message to people in the debate about the literary worth of graphic novels, but one side-effect of it is surely an engagement with that argument. What it is designed to be is a complete history of everything else – and in covering every prehistoric moment, it does just that, and absolutely brilliantly. Full review...

Hieronymus by Marcel Ruijters and Laura Watkinson (translator)

4star.jpg Graphic Novels

This is a book for those who find it amusing that a biography of someone who has been dead 500 years is called 'unauthorised'. This is a book where the detail is in the devil – people pissing in the street; the locals baiting blind people armed with cudgels in a pit with a pig, often failing to whack the beast and hitting their colleagues by mistake; farting demons visiting the sleeper. This is a book for those who don't mind a spot of ribaldry, an affront to religious piety or suchlike in their graphic novels. Whether or not this is a book for those seeking a biography of Hieronymus Bosch remains to be seen. Full review...

Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette, Max Cabanes and Doug Headline

3.5star.jpg Graphic Novels

Play. It's a weird verb – it can mean many different things. Aimee intends to play – she's already put paid to several men playing at being hunters, but she has a different game in mind. Arriving at a very insular little town she scopes the big-wigs out, watching them over the bridge table and across the golf tees, and, seeing them bicker about each other at both play and work, she knows she can play with them. But what might happen, given these undefined rules, if they chose to play as a team against her? Full review...

Scarlett Couture by Des Taylor

3star.jpg Graphic Novels

What, in the real world, would be the least likely cover for a secret agent but that of super-model? Apart from the advantage of everyone thinking you were gormless, there is the implausible clothing and having to run around after baddies in high heels to consider. But the world of comics isn't the real world, and so you have to ask the opposite – what would be the most visually appealing band of secret agents, if not for a whole cabal of them working undercover as bimbo-looking models? The Showroom is one such, and its main agent is Scarlett Couture, daughter of a male cop and a female fashionista-cum-agency boss. Looking wonderful is incredibly easy for her – but sometimes saving the world is quite a bit tougher… Full review...

World War Two: Against the Rising Sun (Campfire Graphic Novels) by Jason Quinn and Naresh Kumar

4.5star.jpg Children's Non-Fiction

World War Two – so often a lesson subject for our primary school children, even after all this time. Nazis, Soviets, Pearl Harbor – but wait. That last wasn't just the clarion call to the Americans to join in with the rest of our Allies – it was a mere episode in a fuller story – the half of the war that was never seen by those in Europe, beyond the fact the British Empire was certainly changed forever. The War in the Pacific is something I was certainly never taught much about in school, at any age. And here's a graphic novel version of the tale from a publisher in India that can serve at last as a salutary lesson. Full review...

World War Two: Under the Shadow of the Swastika (Campfire Graphic Novels) by Lewis Helfand and Lalit Kumar Sharma

4star.jpg Children's Non-Fiction

One of the most common subjects at primary school, getting on for three generations since it happened, is of course World War Two. It has the impact that sixty million dead people deserve – but only if it's taught correctly. One of the ways to present it is this book, which comes from a slightly surprising place – an Indian publisher completely new to me – but succeeds in being remarkably competent, complete and really quite readable. Full review...

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor, Volume 3: Conversion by Al Ewing and Rob Williams et al

2star.jpg Graphic Novels

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you want to judge the worth of a Star Trek TV series, you judge the theme tune. It's incontrovertible that they went downhill in unison, after all. It is also a truth universally acknowledged that the same applies to Doctor Who, for the opening credits have definitely had their ups and downs over recent years. But you can also define the entertainment value of a series through the companions. Or at least you can with the 11th Doctor comic versions, which decided to pick up a Token Smart, Ballsy, Ethnic one, a bizarre, mercurially disembodied robot-type-with-limited-vocab one, and, er, a cod David Bowie one who relives the entire Ziggy Stardust lyric sheet through his witterings. I know, right? No hope. But can you give up hope with the genius, energetic, effervescent and witty Doctor around? Full review...

The Quest for the Time Bird by Serge le Tendre, Regis Loisel and Ivanka Hahnenberger (translator)

2.5star.jpg Graphic Novels

In order to defeat a vengeful god, who is within days of getting out of his prison – a sacred conch shell – several things must happen. First, the conch must be united with the witch powerful enough to sustain the incantation keeping him locked up. Then she must use her helpers to endure great danger and find the information she seeks in the most perilous of places for knowledge of the ultimate part of the puzzle – the Time Bird. All this calls for heroes, but in the world of fantasy anyone can call themselves a hero – from the witch's own buxom daughter, Pelisse, to an old warrior called Bragon that the girl is forced to unite with and fight alongside. Full review...

Showman Killer: Heartless Hero by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Nicolas Fructus and Ivanka Hahnenberger (translator)

4star.jpg Graphic Novels

A long way away, in terms of both time and space, the most perfect assassin is formed – genetically bred, adept at magical transformations, with the most athletic and deadly abilities, and with the complete lack of emotion needed. All he will ever seek is the highest price for the best job – a job that will, now and again, force him to meet with the most unusual people… Full review...

21st Century Tank Girl by Jamie Hewlett, Alan Martin and others

3.5star.jpg Graphic Novels

I sometimes wonder, when keying in book reviews, if ISBNs are not constructed by design instead of the formal accident that is supposed to create them. Surely it's intentional that this book has 666 in its code – it's the most devilishly brash, ugly and foul-mouthed comic around, and people who like that kind of thing will like this. Especially as this book is a return to waaay distant form, and waaay distant creative partnerships, with the original artist Jamie Hewlett back on board. It's time to cuss and roll once more… Full review...

Trashed by Derf Backderf

4.5star.jpg Graphic Novels

For those people who think graphic novels are rubbish, this is the epitome of that baseless argument. Its subject is junk, it's trash, it's landfill, and garbage. That's not a verdict on its qualities, which are great and fine ones, but its very topic. Straight from school, our author was actually a bin man for a few seasons – riding on the back of something like Betty, the garbage van featured here. It's a job nobody wants in all honesty, of course – but the book is fine enough to actually make the subject something most people should read about. Full review...

Hilda and the Troll by Luke Pearson

4.5star.jpg Confident Readers

Hilda, a rather delightful small, blue-haired girl, is never far from an adventure. She is confident and excitable, brave and creative, and her stories are slightly mad, and very, very readable! Full review...

Wheels of Terror: The Graphic Novel by Sven Hassel and Jordy Diago

4star.jpg Graphic Novels

War books and anti-war books, in my mind, have a lot in common and only a couple of easy things need be changed to turn one to the other. This is dressed as an anti-war book, but here is the lead character surviving against all odds – the platoon whittled down several times while he and his few friends go strong; here he is overcoming all kinds of difficulty and adversity and still coming out the other end; here he is doing proper heroic deeds – or his colleagues saving the day at the last minute – and the war carries onwards towards its inevitable end. The difference perhaps is in the minutiae of what those difficulties and deeds need be, with the anti-war book having a simple honesty about them and their overall worth that the gung-ho, militaristic piece would patently lack. And when you face the guts and gore of the kind of warfare on these pages, you don't really expect jingoism and 'hoo-rah!' attitudes. No, even if the DNA is pretty much the same, the result here is definitely, grimly and firmly anti-war. Full review...

Username: Evie by Joe Sugg

4.5star.jpg Graphic Novels

Meet Evie. She's surprisingly unwelcome and alienated at school – for a trendy and attractive girl, nobody at all seems to have any time for her, apart from the geeky card-collecting boy with the milk-bottle glasses on the bus. Perhaps it has something to do with her father's thatched house – after all, she must be a witch to live there. It's not that she would wish to live there, with nobody else around, and the memory of her deceased mother. But luckily someone is choosing a place for her –her father is able to put all his work into a cyber-world for her, the E-Scape, which is close to the perfect world. All that remains is to programme the humans to be her friends, and make the connection Evie has with them and them with her in return to be of mutual, confirming, happy benefit. But someone else has entered the E-Scape, and their influence seems all that much more powerful than Evie's tentative happiness… Full review...

13 Coins by Michael B Jackson, Martin Brennan and Simon Bisley

3.5star.jpg Graphic Novels

For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. There, I've done it – quoted the Bible in a review. It's certainly pertinent in the world of this graphic novel, where the fallen angels have one get-out clause they have been seeking since those very lapsarian events. They turned a little section of chain holding their leader eternally captive into the titular coins, which can influence the human holders into sheer evil, but might just cause an open war on Heaven, whether they or the best of the holy on earth use them all. The best of the holy then, offspring of the good angels, are culled as a routine, but not one – John Pozner, who of course has no idea of his place in the celestial circle of life… Full review...

J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan: The Graphic Novel by Stref

4star.jpg Graphic Novels

Here's a quiz question for you – despite the uniform seventy year copyright rule, which work has been the sole recipient of an endless extension of it, courtesy of an ex-Prime Minister? The answer is obvious now at least, as this is one such volume. It's a very readable and pleasant variant on J M Barrie's original stage version and novel regarding Peter Pan, which of course helps and always will now help the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. And for a boy who never grows up, at 111 years old he's in spritely good health. Full review...

Modesty Blaise - The Killing Distance by Peter O'Donnell and Enric Badia Romero

4.5star.jpg Graphic Novels

Oh, such things just HAPPEN to that pair, Sir. The pair referred to, of course, are Modesty Blaise, sexy femme fatale with a head full of morals and a pair of legs full of kicking power, and Willy Garvin, the only man to call her Princess and get away with it – intelligent, practical and yet equally resilient in a fight with a baddy. The things that happen to them are legion, over many novels and 95 daily newspaper comic strips, and this is one of the better examples of the current collections of the latter. Where else can you get movie stunts going wrong, pregnant women in danger on the high seas, and people escaping from bomb-laden planes, all in a Jolly Hockey Sticks mood that smacks of pastiche and vintage ribaldry, were it not from the heady days of the mid-'90s? Full review...

The Evil Within by Ian Edginton and Alex Sanchez

3.5star.jpg Graphic Novels

What do you fear most? And when you've answered that, think on why – is it something that happened to you, something you saw or read, or something you yourself did? The nature of horror is looked at in this graphic novel, which spins the usual web of nightmares around some fit young adults, and tests them with graphic death on the cards at the same time as keeping them in the dark about what has brought the doom and gloom to them. Starting with Dana, a college girl seeking her kidnapped best friend, things get darker, weirder, and forever more violent… Full review...

Rutabaga the Adventure Chef: Book 1 by Eric Colossal

4star.jpg Confident Readers

Meet the latest adventurer to scour the land. He has a talent for finding the obscure and seeking out the rare, and surviving all the undignified fates the world has in store. He even has a magical companion. He will be open to any challenge set upon him, from locating dragon-smiting swords to besting the largest, most locally loved, rival. He is Rutabaga, and he is, of course, a chef. Full review...

Kick-Ass 3 by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr

3.5star.jpg Graphic Novels

At the start of this book, Hit-Girl is stuck in a super-max prison (don't ask why). The entire east coast Mafia command is up for grabs (you don't need to ask why – Hit-Girl killed most of them herself). As for Dave, or Kick-Ass, he's failing. He has a whole cohort of other super-heroes, which in this world means dweebish fans of comics with a stupid costume yet no power other than the determination to do well for society, but they're not going anywhere. They're not spotting crime or solving conspiracies, and they're certainly not getting their colleague and mentor Hit-Girl out of jail. Dave could in actual fact be in danger of the most heinous crime of all – growing up. Full review...

The Avengers Vault by Peter A David

3star.jpg Graphic Novels

It's not just because the third richest take of any movie is about to get a sequel that we have this pictorial background guide. There have been decades of action featuring the main characters of The Avengers, and they themselves are fifty years old as a collective entity, so this book has a lot of ground to cover. To its benefit there are hardly any mentions of the global behemoth that are Marvel films these days, beyond a couple of references where relevant. Instead we're looking back, with bright and eager eyes, to see what we can find, what the beginner may need to know, and what the fan will have fond memories of. Full review...

In God We Trust by Winshluss

4.5star.jpg Graphic Novels

To start with, a rhetorical test. How about God and Adam playing badminton day in and day out, until one gets bored and decides to create Eve? Or the defeater of Goliath and the saviour of the Israelites being one Conan the Barbarian? Or this as a test – Jesus Himself failing to have a successful session of tequila slammers with Gabriel due to the holes through His hands? I barely need mention that in these pages God does battle with Superman, for you to have answered the test and put yourself firmly in one of two camps for this book – one very much opposed to buying it, and one very much in favour. Full review...