The latest book in Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series was sadly a disappointment to me.  The main problem at this point may just be that its not the show, which has left the books behind in its wake.  Dexter is still a phenominal character and Lindsay does well by his creation, but the story this time is really lacking.

In this book Dexter returns from his honeymoon (note this is the same as the current season of the tv show) to encounter an artist who uses corpses as his chosen medium.  This isn’t such a bad gimick for a Dexter story, but Lindsay just doesn’t do a whole lot with it.  Dexter and the villain spend the book nearly encountering each other until they reach the climax where Dexter is stuck as a mere observer.  He’s the reason to read these books and yet he barely does a thing in the course of this entire novel.

The worst part is the character moments that ought to be here are largely lacking too.  The fourth season of the show is primarily about Dexter adjusting to his marriage, the plot involving the villain is almost incidental.  Here the marriage barely even enters the book besides the fact that Rita is put in danger in the final chapter.  And the best part of the novels, Dexter’s relationship with Rita’s kids, only gets a few scenes as well (but at least they’re good ones).

This isn’t an awful book by any means, just a forgettable one.

Starship Troopers in one of the benchmarks of the science fiction cannon, as well as just about the most troubling book in it.  This is the book that gave birth to proper military s.f; with everything from Aliens to Halo borrowing themes and idea from it.  It’s the first and possibly the best book about an interstellar ground war.

But what makes the book so fascinating and problematic is the central philosophy that Heinlein is using the book to promote.  That citizenship is not a right, but a priviledge that should be earned through service to the state.  He plays fair with this at least, mostly.  The chaos and horrors of war permeate the book, so he’s not trying to glamorize military service by any means.  In fact every last veteran to appear in the novel is missing a limb or two.  But on the other hand anything truly tragic happens off-screen.

It’s also impossible to think of this book without bringing up Heinlein’s follow-up novel, the legendary free-love masterpiece Stranger In a Strange Land.  Heinlein is an incredibly hard author to pin down, but one well worth struggling with.  Starship Troopers is one of the key pieces in that puzzle, as well as simply being essential reading for anyone in fandom.

Grandville is Bryan Talbot welcome return to the sort of storytelling he made great in his Luther Arkwright books.  This is one big ole s.f. tinged, very British, adventure story.  But of course this being a Talbot book there’s more to it than that.

The book is a tribute to the works of French illustrators J. J. Grandville and Albert Robida, winding up with a Steampunk, funny animal political thriller with a bit of Sherlock Holmes thrown in.  The result is a gorgeous book, possibly a lesser work from Talbot, but only because he’s clearly writing this for some fun after the tour de force that was Alice in Sunderland.  

The tone of the book is fairly dark, but he casts Snowy (the dog from TinTin) as an opium addict!  Not to mention throwing random tips of the hat to works like Maus and Omaha the Cat Dancer.  This is Talbot at play, and that’s wonderful to see.

Well the cover blub on the latest volume of Scalped (from the Philadelphia Daily News) states that this is “one of the best comics ever created”.  I’m not sure if that’s totally true, but it’s certainly in contention, and actually might be the best crime comic to date.

Jason Aaron is just an incredibly brave writer, crafting a painfully bleak work that lacks even a single sympathetic character.  In High Lonesome he tells a series of 5 interconnected stories revealing both the motivations behind the main cast and the answers to most of the major mysteries that have driven the plot up until now.  

It’s a ballsy movie by Aaron to unmask everything all at once, but it works incredibly well, and it really feels like the right approach for him to have taken.  And even with all that out there, there still seems to be plenty of story to come.  No padding, just plenty more misery to heap upon the residents of the Prarie Rose Reservation.  I can’t wait.

Well it took a decade for a mere 30 issues (counting the 3 specials) to come out, but the wait was worth it.  Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary is one of the key comics of the last decade and unquestionably a must read for any fan of the medium.
What makes the book such a standout is the two levels the story works on.  On its surface this is an adventure book about 3 adventurers dedicated to their catchphrase “it’s a strange world, let’s keep it that way”.  To do so the team of “mystery archaeologists travels the world finding wonders and trying to save them from the 4, a group dedicated to hording those treasures for themselves.

This is where Planetary goes from being a merely good comic to something special.  The four are clearly patterned on the Fantastic Four, who if you know your comics history, launched Marvel’s dominance of the comic stands.  The FF are explorers at heart, a quartet that goes into the unknown in order to define it.  In this book, Ellis instead portrays them as the death of the heroic age that came before them.  An age in which the pulp heroes sought out the same sorts of wonders, but soley to have the experience, and not to define them and limit their capacity for evoking a sense of wonder.

Ellis then combines this analysis of pulp history with his archaeologists to turn the comic into a tribute what was lost.  Up until the end when Ellis starts wraping up the story every issue serves as a meditation on a different part of that history.  There are issues dedicated to Doc Savage, Japanese Kaiju, the Justice League, and big dumb object s.f. tales (think Rendezvous with Rama), plus many more.  Ellis is always respectful of these inspirations, and Cassaday’s art, which made him a superstar, is the perfect compliment for it.

Just an incredible book.

Last year My Chemical Romance’s front man Gerard Way moved into the comics scene with the Umbrella Academy, and it surprised everyone by being good…REALLY good…like best book of the year good.  Now Way and his Eisner award-winning partner Gabriel Ba are back with Dallas, and it proves that they weren’t just one hit wonders.

Dallas is quite as strong an outing as the first book was but its damn close.  Way’s strong characterization and runaway imagination are on full display here, and Ba gets to show of exactly why he earned that Eisner.  

Really the only fault is that the story doesn’t quite hang together as well as it could, but that’s only natural given that this is the story of number five, a possibly immortal, time traveling assassin, stuck in a 10-year-old body.  Time travel plots often leads to a bit of chaos and Way does let it get away from him a bit, there’s one sub plot that never gets resolved, and never really ties in to the rest of the story.  But that only takes up 6 pages of the book and is easily overlooked considering you get to witness wonders like a 3-way battle between an ancient mummy, and man with the body of an obese gorilla, and a battalion of Viet Cong vampires in 1963.

But this book is more than just wacky over the top fun (although it’s that too).  Number 5’s life story is a deeply tragic one, that has left him as a complete wreck of a person.  And of course the rest of the cast isn’t much better off, certainly not by the story’s end.  Which just makes the wait for the start of volume 3 even harder.

Here’s a slightly different review.  The first 3 volumes (all my library had on hand) of Arvid Nelson’s Rex Mundi.  This covers the first half of the alternate history thriller comic.  So far so good.

It’s hard not to draw comparisons to the Da Vinci Code with this book (which began before Dan Brown’s publishing wunderkind was published).  Its another Knights Templar/grail quest/religious conspiracy theory story filled with bursts of random puzzle solving, only this one is pretty good.  

Besides the central mystery here, Nelson has engaged in some surprisingly massive world building.  Rex Mundi is a piece of alternate history, with some occasional fantasy elements thrown in.  The French Revolution failed, the South sort of won the Civil War, the Inquisition is still active in the 1930’s, and quite a few characters dabble in sorcery.  The background detail, particularly the news headlines included at the end of each issue definitely serve to make the book far more interesting, but not all of it (at least up to this point) actually has anything to do with the story.  But I really can’t fault anyone for showing some ambition, especially since the webcomic series (collected in vol. 1) shows that Nelson has ideas for further exploring this world.

I’m definitely intrigued to see how this story finishes, particularly after vol. 3 pretty much ended many of the mysteries and set up a great deal of action to come.  I definitely recommend the book.

Chuck Palahniuk has a knack for unearthing all the dark little corners of the human race.  Usually by the time I finish reading one of his novels I’m left feeling utterly horrified to be considered a part of the human race.  And yet I’m usually smiling at the same time, it’s a very creepy effect.

His latest novel, Pygmy, has done this to me yet again.  This is the story of a teenaged foreign exchange student living in middle America, who has been trained to be a spy and terrorist for his home country.  Palahniuk uses this protagonist to offer up an incredibly skewed (though hardly inacurate) view of high school life.  School dances are mating rituals, dodgeball is war, and Wal-Mart is something akin to Hell (complete with its own skeletal charon greeting people at the doorway).

I found this to be one of Palahniuk’s better novels, but I suspect that it won’t garner many fans because its not a terribly approachable book.  The story is written in the first person from Pygmy’s perspective and is full of incredibly broken English.  In other circumstances I think I would have just found this to be incredibly annoying (imagine reading 300 pages of Yoda speak), but somehow it works for this book.  Still I’d definitely suggest that people read a chapter or two on a trial basis to get a flavor for the language before committing to the full book.

The latest Felix Castor novel (for US audiences at least) is an enjoyable supernatural mystery, albeit one that doesn’t offer much that’s new to the series.  ”Fix” Castor is a freelance exorcist in a world in which ghosts, zombies, and werewolves have become fairly routine.  He’s also clearly modeled off of John Constantine, a character that Mike Carey wrote for years previously.  And I pretty much view this series as the stories he wasn’t able or allowed to tell while writing for Hellblazer.

This time around Castor is dragged into 3 cases at once.  First he’s investigating the sudden suicide of a colleague who had been working on the case of his career.  Then there’s the mater of a man on trial for murder whose claiming he was possessed at the time of the crime.  And in the background Castor has to fight to protect a demon possessed friend from becoming a paranormal lab rat.  

The multiple plot threads are all fairly strong but ultimately they don’t hold together quite as strongly as I would like.  Dead Men’s Boots makes for a decent perpetuation of the series, but Carey is definitely capable of better.

Nicholas Gurewitch is arguably the greatest artist to rise out of the present wave of web comics.  The man is a stylistic chameleon, ranging from blissfully simple line work to dead on impressions of legends like Edward Gorey and R. Crumb.  No two strips look alike, but all are absolutely gorgeous, particularly in this oversized edition.

Once you get past the art the Perry Bible Fellowship is a somewhat formulaic gag strip.  With few exceptions each comic consists of two panels of set up and one for the punchline.  A few fall flat, but by and large they manage to be brilliant.  The bunny pit strip alone wound up as part of four different conversations I had this past weekend.  If that doesn’t leave you howling with laughter than this isn’t the book for you, but if it did then you absolutely must read the rest!