Reviews - Review - FA Online

West Coast Blues

What else could you expect? I mean honestly, when you combine one of the finest living comic book artists with one of the greatest writers of hardboiled crime fiction. Really. Don’t even bother reading the rest of this review. Just buy the book. Is there anything I can do but state the obvious?

Incognito: Bad Influences 1

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have been making comics together for some time now. Incognito is an attempt to apply the approach seen in their Criminal to something bearing a closer relationship to mainstream superhero comics.

Ant-Man & Wasp 1

I am genuinely surprised that comics as bad in every way as this get published by a major professional company.

X’ed Out & Johnny 23

The cover of X’ed Out tells us immediately about the world that we’re going enter. We’re in a razed, post-apocalyptic landscape. Doug, one of the comic’s two main characters, stands before a mottled, oversized red and white egg. It’s a typical Burns scenario, but at the same time it’s a clear hommage to Tintin.

Avengers vs the Pet Avengers 1

Remember the 1960’s, when Marvel was ‘cool’ because they did flatulent cosmic bollocks like Silver Surfer, and DC wasn’t because they did all the stuff with Super-Pets? Well, time for us uncool ones to get our smug on, because Marvel, unexpectedly, has reversed the trend and restored fun to comics again.

The Weird World of Jack Staff 1-5

It’s hard to see anyone not enjoying this. Jack Staff is a great British superhero, and the stories revolve around him and a number of other unusual characters around him.

Dandy 3508

Veteran comedy weekly Dandy has been having a bad decade; It was completely revamped in 2004, ditching most of the long-running series, but, despite much publicity at the time, almost no-one noticed.

Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune

An epic title to match its importance, and mirroring the lavish nature of this big volume. It was the first major adventure strip, and hugely influential on that strand of newspaper comics and beyond.

Pride and Prejudice

It is a truth universally acknowledged in the United Kingdom that our American cousins, unencumbered as they are by a great deal of history, (my local pharmacist having existed for almost as long as the United States) tend not to fully apprehend historical requirements in reinterpretations of classic literature.

3 Lewis Trondheim volumes

Nouvelle Pornographie, A.L.I.E.E.E.N. and Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella: three books from the versatile Lewis Trondheim.