Category Archives: Comics

PHOEBE AND HER UNICORN: Unicorn Theater makes me think Dana Simpson’s gotten better at the graphic-novel pacing since her earlier The Magic Storm. Phoebe and her unicorn BFF Marigold are heading to summer camp but to Phoebe’s surprise, Marigold’s traveling with her sister Florence; much as Phoebe reminds herself it’s only fair to share her buddy, she finds herself getting jealous. Light but engaging.

As a fan of the L. Sprague deCamp/Fletcher Pratt Harold Shea books, I had high hopes for deCamp’s THE UNDESIRED PRINCESS, which has another modern-day American sucked into a portal fantasy. In this case he ends up the designated monster-slayer in a world run by binary logic — not in the computer sense but in having everything divided with no middle ground. There’s blue and yellow but no green; people are either virtuous or villainous, with no moral ambiguity; the landscape switches from mountains to plains without any intermediate zone such as foothills

What sunk this was that the protagonist is mopey and grouchy: he doesn’t like having to have adventures, grumbles constantly about the strangeness of the world and doesn’t at all like the beautiful and perfectly charming princess he’s supposed to wed (until the end when he suddenly discovers she’s wonderful). He’s not at all interesting. David Drake’s The Enchanted Bunny, which was added in to fill out the volume, is a great deal funnier in its story of a modern man turned portal-fantasy monster slayer.

The seventh collection of LAZARUS by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark is less than overwhelming. We get two chapters dealing with Jonah Carlyle’s redemption, largely lost on me as I didn’t remember who he was, then a big conference between the Carlyles — including our protagonist, the “lazarus” Forever — and the head of House Hock. Which leads to the reveal everything that was going on is rooted in a second-rate melodrama from years ago. Perversely this makes me want to go back to the early volumes and figure out why they worked for me.

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LAZARUS: Cull and LAZARUS: Fracture 1 by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark (the Owen Freeman cover is from an earlier issue) continue the story I stopped following during the pandemic (I read Cull back in 2019 but forgot). With the head of House Carlyle severely injured, eldest daughter Johanna takes charge while Forever — the “Lazarus” with healing factor and deadly fighting skills — handles threats in the field. Can Johanna steer through the changing political landscape? Can Forever take down deadly adversaries such as the Dragon, another family’s psycho Lazarus? What about Forever’s clone Eve? Solidly readable but I can’t say I regret my decision to get these books from the library rather than buy.

While I liked Nicole Givens Kurtz’s Kill Three Birds, I think the sequel, A THEFT MOST FOWL: A Kingdom of Aves Mystery improves on it. The setting, a kingdom where society divides into avian sects (doves for spiritual guidance, nightjars for graveyard shift, hawks to investigate crimes), is as interesting as the first book but I think the mystery (dealing with the theft of a sacred relic) holds together better.

I get disappointed by a lot of self-published urban fantasy but as I live in North Carolina I couldn’t turn down WITCHWOOD: The Carolina Files Book 1 by Willa Blackmore. While I didn’t find it as Southern as Windmaster’s Bane (cover by Tim White) or Alex Bledsoe’s Tufa books, I did like it — I’ll probably try book two at some point (I don’t say that about all Southern fantasy).

Tula is one of the Whitlow witches who handle problems in their section of the Carolinas. They’ve never had to deal with the kind of threats Harry Dresden does and by and large the family’s a mess — mom’s never taught her girls half what they need to know and Tula’s sisters are respectively a fashionista and a drunk. Still, when an FBI agent asks Tula to help him investigate a supernatural force that’s put his sister in the ICU, how can she say no? Tula learns a local winery hides an evil Druidic cult that’s attempting to incarnate a Green Man and the sister is collateral damage; the Whitlow witches, however, are directly in the cult’s magical gunsights.

This was good entertainment though I find “witch” freighted with so many meanings (when I wrote a witch into an unpublished novel years ago, I made a point to establish she wasn’t wiccan) I sometimes wish authors would use “wizard” or “magician” instead (though I’ve had friends who think Harry Potter makes anyone else using “wizard” a no-go).

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Nnedi Okorafor’s SHE WHO KNOWS is a short prequel to Who Fears Death? telling the backstory of one of the supporting characters. The protagonist is a woman from a salt-dealing culture, nudged by inexplicable impulses to push against her gender role; the results make her family and their community rich but inevitably brings trouble as well. Coming-of-age stories don’t work for me but Okorafor pulled this one off. I found the ending too abrupt, though; possibly it would have worked better if I’d read Who Fears Death more recently than 2011 (it’s also setting up for a V2).

My friend Ross bought me BOMBSHELLS: The Death of Illusion by Marguerite Bennett and multiple artist as a birthday present, so I’m finally back in Bennett’s alt.WW II where the superheroes are all women. In this collection everyone from Zatanna and Raven to Poison Ivy, Lois Lane and Supergirl is slowly drawn to the brutal siege of Leningrad, but can they help its people? And what about Hugo Strange and his mad plan to breed a super-race to take over from humanity? As always, a fun series with interesting takes on DC characters.

WE ARE WATCHING by Alison Gaylin has a recently widowed bookstore-owner increasingly unnerved by the way people seem to be watching her and her daughter, and chatting about them online. Still, her paranoid pothead father, an aging rocker, has to be imagining it when he claims they’re all the targets of a vast conspiracy that tried to kill him just like they did JFK — right?

He is not, of course, imagining it.

This is a thriller for the age of Qanon and Pizzagate (there’s a reference to characters searching for a secret room in the bookstore where the human sacrifices are carried out), a conspiracy born online and formed by connecting up dots that don’t exist, which is enough to drive people to kill or die for it. I don’t quite buy it could stay this tight and obsessive for two decades but it’s still an excellent book.

Covers by Ant Lucia and Marguerite Sauvage (bottom). All rights to images remain with current holders.

After watching MY NAME IS MODESTY a few weeks back, I decided to dive back in to the world of Peter O’Donnell’s daring heroine, starting with the one volume of the comic strip Durham Library has that I haven’t read, Ripper Jax (by O’Donnell and artist Enric Badia Romero.

The best strip in this 1990s collection is the first one, in which Modesty learns a psychometric friend of hers is being coerced by knife-wielding gangster “Ripper” Jax, who’s holding the psychic’s daughter hostage. Can Modestry and her trusty dioscuri Willie Garvin rescue the girl and fix Jax’s wagon? Yes, of course, but there are some surprises along the way. The remaining strips are good, though not as good:

• The Maori Connection. Trouble in New Zealand where Modesty’s friend Sir Gerald’s niece is in peril from someone looking to eliminate competition for a large inheritance.
• Honeygun. That’s the nickname of a female assassin who did Modesty a favor years ago; now the bill’s coming due.
• Durango. Two of Modesty and Willie’s friends are hostages with the eponymous revolutionary leader in Guatemala. The rescue plan goes sideways when it turns out Durango knows and hates Modesty Blaise.

The introduction to the collection argues that while Modesty is frequently described as the female James Bond, they’re fundamentally different: Bond works on orders from M, Modesty acts according to her own sense of morality. Sounds about right.

I recently finished rereading AVENGERS: Behold the Vision by Roy Thomas and multiple artists (most notably John Buscema, who did the cover, and Barry Windsor-Smith) as part of my Silver Age Reread over at Atomic Junk Shop. While my assessment of this run hasn’t changed from the last time I read the TPB, it does strike me the team is surprisingly underpowered for “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.” With Thor, Iron Man and Captain America out of the book and Wanda and Pietro absent it feels close to the Detroit Justice League second-string level at times. Perhaps that’s why Thomas has Hawkeye ditch his bow and arrow in favor of becoming Goliath but that role never really worked for me. Still, I’m an Avengers fan from the Kookie Quartet days (the era when the team was Cap, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver) so I enjoyed this (as always with decades old comics, YMMV).

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