BERLIN: City of Stones by Jason Lutes is a graphic novel set in late twenties Berlin, as a young artist and a world-weary left-wing writer find comfort in a city struggling with economic collapse, Communist activism and fascist thuggery. Good, though not really to my taste.
A STAR SHALL FALL when Halley’s comet threatens to bring the fire elemental that caused the Great Fire of London back to ravage England in the 1700s, unless the sidhe of London can find a way to destroy it at last. This is the third in Marie Brennan’s Onyx Court (which started with Midnight Never Come) and is thoroughly enjoyable, though definitely more of a series book than the first one.
As Berkely Breathed admits, BLOOM COUNTY: The Complete Library, Volume One, 1980—1982 is a very slow start to the comic-strip series. It’s not until halfway through the first year that Opus the penguin (unnamed and silent at this point——Breathed makes the interesting point that it’s rare to have an intelligent animal in a strip that actually talks to humans) debuts with Bill the Cat following a year later. Breathed concludes it’s more the shortage of satire at the time that let his series survive and comments at various points on his pop culture reference (“They were so unusual in comic strips, my editors weren’t sure it was legal.”). Not as rewarding as readering early Peanuts, but it picks up steadily as it goes along.
FOX WOMAN by Kij Johnson retells a Japanese folktale in which a kitsune falls in love with a lord recuperating from setbacks at court by withdrawing with his family to his private estate. Like City of Stones, this wasn’t really bad, it just didn’t appeal to me much.
LUNA PARK is a graphic novel by Kevin Baker Danijel Zezelj that starts out well with the story of a Russian veteran now working as mob muscle in Coney Island——where his lover assures him that her plan to double-cross his boss will absolutely positively work. Unfortunately it ends with a pretentious, surreal overview of Russian history (based on the protagonist somehow accessing all his past incarnations or the like) and then somehow switching to Lee Harvey Oswald … an incoherent mess, in the end.
DMZ: On the Ground by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli is set in a near future when right-wing militia have consumer America in a new civil war, with Manhattan as a free zone between the US and militia-occupied territory. A reporting intern finds himself stranded in the city when his boss is killed, and begins reporting on life during wartime … a strong start to this DC series.
THE GOON: Those That is Damned by Eric Powell is a collection from the hit series about a thug battling his town’s zombie infestation. In this collection he learns more about the curse on the town and the consequence if he chooses to keep fighting (leading to the line “When a guy learns he’s damned, it’s a big mistake to kill his bartender.”). I’ve never really cottoned to the Goon but I’m starting to see the appeal (killer baboons with razor-sharp boomerangs make everything better).
I’ve no idea what Rick Moody was trying to do with FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH, but I’m certain he failed. The idea is good——an eccentric writer tries to distract himself from his wife’s illness by penning a movie novelization (an SF film about an astonaut’s killer hand), but Moody’s prolix prose (at nigh 800 pages) doesn’t work for the material, whether he was shooting for parody or something deeper. A real failure.
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