Stuff I liked in 2015

As always, this list is purely personal, not just in terms of reflecting my tastes, but also because it's about what I found in 2015, regardless of when it was made.

Films

Mad Max: Fury Road
A masterclass in minimalist world-building. Fury Road paints a weird, vibrant, thrilling world that it trusts you to pick up as you go along, never slowing the action to spell out what you can infer or imagine.

Captain Philips
Naturalistic filmmaking that puts the audience on board as the captain of a container ship negotiates with the pirates that are trying to hijack it. An edge-of-your-seat story with a large dollop of veracity.

John Wick 
I feel like I’m losing my taste for slick, stylised violence, especially the kind that glorifies dudes taking out their grievances on strangers. Nevertheless, John Wick is a film that violences real good.

Books

Leviathan Wakes - James S.A. Corey
The first in a series of science fiction page-turners that manages to keep the space adventuring grounded and believable, even as a crew of misfits and a hard-drinking detective uncover a conspiracy that reaches far beyond the politically divided solar system.

Annihilation - Jeff Vandemeer
“Eerie and unsettling”, the blurb on the back of the book says. And then some. An utterly riveting journey into a bizarre wilderness.

A Darker Shade of Magic - V.E. Schwab
Alternate Londons, dangerous magic and sadistic tyrants make for a charming fantasy.

Comics

Ms. Marvel - G. Willow Wilson, et al.
If you read one superhero comic, read this.

Rocket Raccoon - Skottie Young, et al.
Colourful adventures in space with everyone’s new favourite interstellar rodent.

Fuse - Antony Johnston, Justin Greenwood, et al.
A police odd couple solve crimes on a space station. Given the restrained tone, I found it a bit disappointingly soft in the sci-fi stakes, but the characters are great and the whodunnits genuinely engrossing.

TV

Person of Interest
We’re only up to season 3 of this show in the UK, but it’s still some of the best science fiction TV out there (masquerading as, ick, a crime procedural). Three-dimensional characters deal intelligently with thought provoking and important themes - without forgetting to get mixed up in plenty of gripping drama while they’re at it.

The Flash
So at this point the Arrowverse is shaping up to be TV’s Marvel Cinematic Universe (only with lesser-known DC characters), and this is it at its fun, imaginative, colourful best.

Parks and Recreation
Imagine The West Wing, but with really low stakes. Then fill it with great characters that the show clearly has lots of affection for. Pierce lid. Microwave for five minutes. Excellent television.

Video Games

Soma
I loved everything about this game. It certainly has its flaws, but I didn't mind any of them. An unflinchingly honest exploration of some of the more uncomfortable ideas in science fiction, in a gruesomely beautiful underwater setting, with cool non-human characters, scary monsters, and tonnes of widgets to fiddle with. Loved it, loved it, loved it.

Alien Isolation
A remarkable love letter to Ridley Scott’s original 1979 horror film. The game may never be quite sure what to do with itself, but exploring a note-perfect extension of the world of Alien, while being stalked by cinema’s most memorable monster, was always going to be something that would win me over.

Invisible Inc.
I do like me some stealth games. I play them methodically, slowly, carefully - exploring everything. Invisible Inc. is a turn-based stealth game that aims to change everything calcified and clichéd in the genre, turning my play style on its head and encouraging nail-biting, carefully planned risk taking. I imagine people will be talking about the design of this game for many, many years to come.

2014: Stuff I Thought was Cool

Better late than never: the definitive list of stuff I found and liked in 2014. A lot of superhero stuff this time.

Films

Guardians of the Galaxy
Captain America: Winter Soldier
These two films, both critical and commercial successes, are radically different approaches to making a Marvel movie. One builds heavily on the shared universe, the other strikes out into strange new territory. Both barely seem like superhero stories.

Man of Tai Chi
So Keanu Reeves' directorial debut is a great kung fu film and also a solid bit of filmmaking. How 'bout that.

Honourable Mention: Sanjuro

Books

Railsea - China Mieville
It's Moby Dick on a train, only deeper and stranger than that.

The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
Engrossing, imaginative and magical.

Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie
A nuanced and carefully constructed space opera with a fantastic main character.

Honourable Mention: Embassytown - China Mieville

Comics

Ms Marvel - G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona, et al.
A nice balance of fun superheroics and down-to-earth character drama. A lot of bollocks has been written about Kamala Khan, but the simple fact is that she's a great everyman protagonist.

Hawkeye - Matt Fraction, David Aja et al.
A low key, character-led comic in which your least-favourite Avenger turns out to be a loveable loser trying to do best by those around him.

Saga - Brian Vaughn, Fiona Staples et al.
The new 20th Century Boys in terms of these end-of-year lists of mine.

Honourable Mention: Black Widow - Nathan Edmondson, Phil Noto et al.

TV

Person of Interest
I avoided this show reflexively at first, assuming it was yet another post-9/11 show about questioning rights and freedoms as though they were ambiguous or even undesirable. But no, it's actually a stealth science fiction show with a much better treatment of privacy and exceptional power than you might expect.

Arrow
That dark, gritty, camp, out-of-this-world action show about Robin Hood.

Smallville
The New Adventures of Superguy and Robin Hood, guest starring Martian Detective.

Honourable Mention: Sleepy Hollow

Video Games

Valkyria Chronicles
The World War 2 era fantasy land is beautifully realised, the melodrama can be surprisingly affecting and the real-time-meets-turn-based gameplay is addictive.

Shadowrun Returns
A solid and fun cyberpunk roleplaying game.

The Stanley Parable
Big, funny and clever.

Honourable Mention: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

2013: Stuff I Found and Liked

Film

A Cat in Paris
A short and delightful film about a cat's friendships with a grieving little girl and a professional thief.

No
Charting the party political broadcasts that aired against Pinochet during the referendum that ended his dictatorship, this film alternates between moments of levity and vulnerability, all filmed in a gloriously ugly-beautiful video cassette style.

Thor: The Dark World
It made me laugh, it used its London locations well and by now the Marvel Cinematic Universe has me hook, line and sinker.

Books

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
Relentless retro nostalgia can't hide the fact that this book cares for its characters, even as it puts them through virtual reality hell.

King of Air Fighters - Ira Jones
This hagiography of Edward "Mick" Mannock is as interesting for its undisguised bias as its charting of the life of one of the most important airmen of the First World War.

Blue Remembered Earth - Alastair Reynolds
A solid work of science fiction by one of my favourite authors in the genre.

Comics

Gunnerkrigg Court - Thomas Siddell
I caught up on the hard-copy editions of this webcomic a few months ago, and it's as imaginative and winsome as ever.

21st Century Boys - Naoki Urasawa
This two volume conclusion to Urasawa's 20th Century Boys wraps up what is probably one of my all-time favourite stories - a genre-spanning epic which always has more surprises up its sleeve.

Knights of Sidonia - Tsutomu Nihei
To some this is the comic where Nihei sold out, but in applying his strange blend of M.C. Escher and H.R. Giger to the space opera genre he's created something I find appealingly strange.

Television

Community
Is this a sitcom, or one long, carefully choreographed battle against genre, tropes and expectations? Inventive, imaginative and - beneath its cynical and sarcastic exterior - heartfelt and compassionate.

Fringe
The fifth and final season was by far the weakest, but it's hard to hold a grudge against such a genuine effort to bid fond farewell to this likeable cast of oddballs.

Adventure Time
Genuine characters experience mind-blowingly unreal situations across a bizarre fantasy land. What's not to like?

Video Games

Minecraft
I may be a bit late to the party, but this really is the game that has everything. Build a home, explore strange and dangerous countryside, fight monsters. Imagination is both encouraged and rewarded.

Kerbal Space Program
No shit, if you've visited here over the past year. Fun, challenging and open-ended.

A Dark Room
This game starts out simply enough that I dismissed it out of hand when I first encountered it. The next time, I lingered a little longer and quickly found a game that consistently ramps up the scale each time you think you've got a handle on it. Also a superlative example of minimalist world-building.

2012: Cool Stuff from the Year the World Ended

Belatedly, it's that completely personal and arbitrary annual list of stuff I found last year and really liked. This time for A.D. 2012: the year the media told us people believed the world would end, but almost nobody actually did, and it didn't.

---Movies

The Raid
A combination of incredible, relentless fight choreography and note-perfect direction make this the best action film in years - if not decades.

The Avengers (a.k.a. Marvel Avengers Assemble)
Not just the pay-off for all the fun Marvel superhero films that led up to it, but a special effects blockbuster where the dialogue is just as fun, if not more so, than the explosions.

The Artist
This beautifully filmed drama is a delightful homage to silent cinema.

---Books

The Scar - China Mieville
A typically uncompromising and imaginative fantasy from Mieville, this time taking a decidedly nautical bent and thoroughly conjuring the true immensity and depths of the sea - plus the strange terror of its uncommon denizens.

Knight of Germany - Professor Johannes Werner
The authorised biography of Oswald Boelcke, the father of air fighting tactics. Much of the book consists of Boelcke's letters home, offering a great insight into one of the world's most interesting historical figures. Werner's commentary, meanwhile, almost seems to embody the insecurity of thirties Germany all too neatly.

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters - Anna Anthropy
Like A Room of One's Own, but with more Mario.

---Comics and Manga

20th Century Boys - Naoki Urasawa
The third year running that this genre-defying epic has appeared on my end-of-year list. If I haven't conveyed my love for it by now, I guess I never will.

Batgirl - Bryan Q. Miller et al.
The first truly satisfying big-name superhero comic I've ever read, that provides a satisfying conclusion for a comic-book character with one of the most devoted fan-bases around.

Saga - Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples
Inspired in no small part by Star Wars, this science fantasy comic mixes space ships and magic, robots and ghosts - while also not shying away from fully fleshing out the ugly side of its unreal galaxy.

---TV Shows

Fringe
Some shows grow on you. Some shows you know you'll love from the first episode. For me, Fringe was the latter.

You could pitch this show as "The X-Files with real story arcs and a consistent mythology", but it's so much more than that. Starting out as a show about a mad scientist helping the FBI deal with mad science crimes, it sprawls into an epic saga with a broad cast of likeable characters, an endless parade of imaginative gimmicks and a ready supply of heart-wrenching drama.

Chuck
Superficially a nerd wish-fulfilment fantasy, this tale of a white-collar loser turned super-spy won me over with its self-awareness, lovably weird characters, cheerful tone and consistent knack for making me laugh.

The Yogscast
Video game content that values the experience of playing games rather than regurgitating advertising copy. Exactly the kind of stuff television channels seem to have no interest in showing me.

---Games

Dishonoured
World-building is the part of fiction at which games excel, and the world of Dishonoured is intriguing, imaginative, atmospheric and exactly my cup of tea. Also one of the year's many examples of something achieving success outside the narrow military shooter genre that seemed to be dominating the medium.

Xenoblade Chronicles
The Japanese role-playing game we've all been waiting for, set in a mindbogglingly massive and beautifully realised fantasy world.

Metal Gear Solid 3: HD Edition
The perfect storm of complex stealth gameplay, over-the-top characters and barmy storytelling.

Read it: Bryan Q. Miller's Batgirl Rising; The Flood; The Lesson

The problem with DC superhero comics is one of impenetrability. The characters themselves are great, but the stories told with them rely on knowledge of complex backstory, are frequently told over multiple concurrent titles, and are subject to editorial fiats more about repositioning franchises in the marketplace than creating solid drama. Coming from a background of television, writer Bryan Q. Miller is well versed in telling a story in linked but approachable episodes, while dancing to the tune of the men in suits - and the result is very much the superhero comic I have been looking for.

Miller focuses on a solid, entertaining story of costumed crime fighting, developing new Batgirl Stephanie Brown as a character, and fleshing out strong relationships with her unknowing mother and a sceptical Oracle. Where events from other comics intrude on this core, Miller actively skirts around the foreign plot, turning what could be unwelcome interruptions into fun diversions. This strong sense of a unified story, so uncommon in DC comics, extends to the entire series exhibiting a beginning, a middle and an end. Compared to the usual sense of incompletion, the three collected editions of Miller's run on Batgirl form a uniquely satisfying whole, and turning the last page provides an actual sense of closure for a character who (I believe) has yet to appear in the new DC continuity.

A variety of artists contribute to the visuals, leading to an uneven quality, but things are always colourful and there are enough contributions from the awesome Dustin Nguyen to keep me happy. Pere Perez, who pencils the final issue, also pulls out all the stops for a spectacular few final pages.

Of all the DC books I've read (admittedly only a tiny fraction of those published), these are the three that I'm happy to recommend unreservedly.

2011: Adventures in Fiction

2011! A year in which I consumed media of various forms! Here's my triple-picks of each category of stuff...

--Of the movies I saw:

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Thriving on believable tensions among a cast of likeable characters, this film is by turns funny, bittersweet and heart-warming.

Monsters
Character-driven, atmospheric science fiction; an otherworldly road movie; eerily memorable.

District 13
A toss-up between this and Ip Man as the two great action films I saw for the first time this year. I found the damsel in distress in this movie less off-putting than the relentless nationalism of Ip Man (not helped by that of every other Chinese film these past few years, it seems), but your mileage may vary. A perfect collision of bold cinematography and incredible physical prowess.

--Of the books I read:

The City and the City - China Miéville
The greatest achievement of this astonishing book is not just the imaginatively Kafkaesque culture it fleshes out – but also that it manages to be a gripping thriller throughout.

Above the Snowline - Steph Swainston
Although this lacks many of the more imaginative elements of Swainston's other books in the same series, it doesn't suffer from it, and still shows an unflinching veracity that's quite rare in the fantasy genre.

The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi
Despite embodying a fair few national stereotypes, this vision of a world in drastic decline kept me hooked both by teasing out the details of its bizarre future Thailand and with dramatic developments in its interweaving story threads.

--Comics and manga:

20th Century Boys - Naoki Urasawa
I imagine this will be here next year as well – an epic series that spans genres, decades and generations. Definitely a contender for my overall favourite thing on this list.

Pluto - Naoki Urasawa
The great detective Gesicht must find out who's systematically murdering the seven greatest robots in the world – not least because he's one of them. I read this series on the strength of how much I liked Urasawa's 20th Century Boys, and was not disappointed. Note-perfect storytelling frequently leads to deeply moving scenes.

Biomega - Tsutomu Nihei
Imaginative cyberpunk horror that envisions an almost unrecognisable future – and charts its utter transformation into something even stranger.

--Of the TV shows I watched:

Downton Abbey
Okay, the second series wasn't as solid as the first, but neither was it as appalling as many made out, and the Christmas special was a definite return to form. A beautifully realised period drama that embraces progress rather than fetishising the Good Old Days.

Avatar: The Last Airbender
The first season was pretty good, but the second and third tell an epic story full of likeable characters. For me, this lived up to the hype.

The Shadow Line
A show that was fantastically good only whenever it forgot that it knew it was fantastically good. Abundant with in-your-face symbolism and unnatural dialogue, and yet splendid all the same. Also possessed a perfect storm of acting talent in the form of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Christopher Eccleston and Rafe Spall.

--Of the games I played:

Red Dead Redemption
An open-world cowboy-stereotype simulator married to a character-driven shoot-em-up, this has gorgeous landscapes galore and the most unexpectedly likeable lead character.

Portal 2
Laugh-out-loud funny dialogue, head-scratching puzzles, understated poignancy. The last time I enjoyed the writing of a game this much was Grim Fandango.

Ghost Trick
A fiendish puzzle game that I found to be addictive and enjoyably challenging, but not so difficult that I needed to resort to a walkthrough. I probably wouldn't have been so sucked in, of course, if the gameplay wasn't so intricately entwined with exactly the kind of colourful characters and meticulously crafted, twisting-and-turning plot that you'd expect from Ace Attorney creator Shu Takumi.

--That's all folks...

Thursday Book

Terminal World - Alastair Reynolds

In one of the mid-level regions of Spearpoint - a city divided into societies of different technological levels - the pathologist Quillon is about to perform a post mortem on an "angel" that has fallen from the highest reaches. And then the subject turns out to be not quite dead. Fortunate, since it carries a terrible warning for Quillon, who is himself an infiltrator from another zone. It looks like his only option may be to flee Spearpoint altogether...

Terminal World is a heady cocktail of awesome ideas that never quite lives up to its potential. It seems rather similar to Reynolds' earlier Century Rain, but without the intensity or atmosphere. There are intimations that Reynolds might be setting up a new series of books here, but, although I enjoyed exploring this intriguing world, the story itself feels a lot like an author simply turning up to collect his pay cheque.

Thursday Comic

Batman: Streets of Gotham, Hush Money - Paul Dini, Dustin Nguyen et al.

Batman's dangerous foe Hush has now assumed the likeness of the deceased Bruce Wayne, and even when Catwoman and the new Batman and Robin apprehend him, his complex schemes continue. Meanwhile, a brutal new vigilante stalks the streets, the pyromaniacal Firefly is implanting incendiary devices in the unsuspecting citizens of Gotham, and self-mutilating serial killer Zasz is planning something so horrific, a key member of the underworld resolves to rat him out.

If that sounds like the set-up for a stirring superhero yarn, let me get to my chief problem with this book: I just described everything that happens in it. It's not that they ran out of space, the book's really thin. It's just that all we get are a few disparate beginnings all but one of which go nowhere, and then you've turned the last page. Dustin Nguyen's art is as lovely as ever, but even he disappointed me a little, toning down the prettiness of his Bruce Wayne (or Hush, in this case) in favour of a more typically beefy depiction. Boo-urns.

Almost Thursday Book

Forgotten London: A Picture of Life in the 1920s - Elizabeth Drury, Philippa Lewis

A collection of photographs taken from the contemporary book Wonderful London, and provided with modern commentary. Pretty much exactly what it says on the tin.

Thursday Book

Nights at the Circus - Angela Carter

Jack Walser, American journalist, has secured an interview with the famous aerialiste, "Fevvers", also known as the "Cockney Venus", a woman who claims to have been hatched from an egg with fully functional wings. Intending to debunk her as a fraud, Walser instead falls in love, and runs away with the circus to follow her across Russia. But with Fevvers an accomplished egoist and Walser very much a man of the Victorian era, it's not clear that either of them could ever bring one another happiness. Then again, this is the cusp of the onrushing twentieth century - so who knows what's really possible?

A barefaced work of literature that makes few, if any, concessions to marketability, Nights at the Circus is brazen, provocative and slippery, luring you in with strong writing and a bizarre cast of impossible characters, then bamboozling you with imagery both magical and political. Deposited at the end, dazed and confused, I can only conclude that I really like the thing. The final chapter, in particular, answers the question of what Fevvers "is" in a way that I found unexpectedly beautiful.

I have to add that, although it's possible that Dini's Peyton may have influenced my decision to spell my own character's name with an "e" when I found "Payton" on this Wikipedia list of unisex names, when, in Private Casebook she is suddenly always to be found with her hair over one eye, I did have a flashback to this.

Batman: Private Casebook - Paul Dini, Dustin Nguyen et al.

An eclectic collection of Batman stories that Dini manages to always make snappy and enjoyable, even where we're clearly only getting a fraction of a larger, more convoluted story. And the further development of his character Peyton Riley, I thought, worked particularly well.

And then there's Dustin Nguyen's art, which I love. In these stories he also seems to draw an unexpectedly handsome Bruce Wayne - a little touch that makes his playboy persona suddenly seem much more believable.

I am, at this point, pretty much just picking up all of Nguyen's art I can find in my local book and comic book shops, but I have to say that Paul Dini makes this whole book work well, art and writing both, even if the stories still feel a bit piecemeal.

Thursday Comic

Batgirl: Kicking Assassins - Andersen Gabrych, Alé Garza, Pop Mhan et al.

Sent by Batman to Gotham's neighbouring city of Blüdhaven, separated from her mentors and friends, Batgirl Cassandra Cain has to face up to some enormous challenges by herself. Yes, of course, there are the usual murderous psychopaths in strange costumes. But even worse for a girl raised from birth to be a merciless killer is the prospect of having to interact with other people at the local coffee shop...

Let me get this out of the way first: the worst thing about this book is the plotting. Maybe I didn't read it carefully enough, but a couple of times I stumbled over what looked to me like out-and-out plot holes. That doesn't matter, though. What Gabrych does do extremely well (aided by some bold artwork) is characterisation. Cassie treads that thin, but compelling and often unexpectedly cute line bordering damaged, dangerous and naive. Alfred is portrayed as protective of her, but confident in her abilities and never patronising. And Cassie's friendship with coffee shop owner Brenda is amusing and touching - the moment where Brenda realises Cassie is illiterate is probably the best in the book.

So, yeah, I really dug this thing, but it still has problems particular to superhero stuff. At one point I realised that something bad had happened to Cassie's close friend Stephanie Brown, so, to get the background, I Googled the answer. "Oh right," I discovered, "it was that." I mean, I knew about it, but how was I supposed to know that this book was from just after that event?

So, superhero comics.

I'll be the first to tell you that DC superhero comics have a problem. Plots spill over from one franchise to another, ostensibly to attract readers between books, but actually just making the stories inaccessible to newcomers and casual readers (of which I might be either the former or the latter); complex mythologies weigh down what should be punchy, action-packed stories; the periodicals take ages to be collected into incomplete, unnumbered books...

So yes, DC, looking to clear out the crap and focus on good, readable stories is exactly what you need to do to turn your fortunes around (especially compared to the kind of head-in-sand thinking you were engaging in a year ago).

But, for fuck's sake, you don't do it by destroying the best character development and backstory you have. Especially not while still leaving in a load of useless cruft.

You don't do it by taking pretty much the only consistently disabled superhero and subjecting her to the most tired and offensive disability trope in speculative fiction.

And most of all, damn it, you don't do it by getting rid of my favourite superhero. ;_;

Thursday Book

The City & the City - China Miéville

When an unidentified woman is found dead in the city of Besźel, Inspector Borlú quickly begins to suspect that this is far from a typical case for the Extreme Crime Squad. For Besźel is a unique place, where the inhabitants must live every day without seeing what's right in front of them. Anyone who breaks this taboo is subject to terrible penalties. Could this murder be tied up in the very nature of Besźel - and the other city?

Okay, this book blew me away. Kafkaesque is probably the most obvious adjective to use to describe it - not Kafkaesque like Brazil, I mean Kafkaesque like, you know, Franz Kafka. But that's not all there is to it, I mean Kafka was this guy who didn't finish much and died young, while this is a carefully planned and plotted book with memorable characters and a strong sense of cause and effect (at least, within its surreal premise). It has these great, obvious, seemingly overwhelming themes, and then it engages with them and files them down with nuance and complication. And, at the same time, it's a crafty crime novel with a fantastic setting.

The City & the City is, in my ignorant opinion, a stonking great work of modern literature - but, just as importantly, it's also a bloody good read.

Thursday Comic

20th Century Boys, vols 10-13 - Naoki Urasawa

So volume 12 sees Urasawa finally blow the lid on a mystery that has so far been central to the series. And then, reading volume 13, I couldn't help but think, "Wow. This is the book where it all kicks off."

Thursday Comic

Batgirl: Fists of Fury - Various

This is another victory for my local comic book shop. I've been interested in reading some Cassandra Cain as Batgirl stories for quite some time - she's always seemed like a character I'd appreciate - but until now I've not really had the opportunity. Fists of Fury is a collection of miscellaneous Batgirl stories: some stand-alone vignettes, others detailing Cassie's part in larger stories (apparently as opaque to her as to me).

Damion Scott takes the pencil for four of the chapters, drawing in a highly stylish, deformed style that turns Batgirl into a graffiti-esque silhouette flowing around her opponents like liquid shadow. The chapter pencilled by Phil Noto is a lot less interesting by comparison, but he does draw an extremely cute Oracle, which you should know is more than enough to curry my favour. And another chapter is pencilled by an artist who seems to be trying to emulate Scott's style, but in a way that feels like the collision of two artists' weaknesses.

As for Cassandra Cain, well, my instinct was pretty accurate if this book is any indication. It was a bold move to come up with a Batgirl who, in contrast to Barbara Gordon's lighter, fun-loving vigilante, is actually even darker and more serious than Mr No-Fun himself, Batman. The almost mute daughter of an assassin who brutally indoctrinated her into his line of work, Cassandra is frightened of her own capacity to kill and possesses a strangely innocent callousness. On reflection, it's no surprise that the strongest story in this collection is about Cassandra's interactions with the child of a bank robber. You can feel that this Batgirl is desperate to use her skills to help people, but not entirely sure just how to do that.

And then there's her costume, which is inspired in its simplicity, so inescapably bad-ass that even Ed Benes struggled to sexualise her during her brief appearances in Birds of Prey.

So, yes, I did really enjoy Fists of Fury for its star character. But even without that, this book is worth picking up for Damion Scott's art alone, and the chance to see such an atypically kick-ass superheroine rendered in such a confident, equally kick-ass style.

Thursday Book

1920s Britain - Janet & John Shepherd

A slim reference, with little interest in narrative or theory. A nice recap of things I've learned elsewhere.

Really, I just bought it for the pictures.

Thursday Book

Biomega, vols 2-5 - Tsutomu Nihei

The first two volumes of Biomega seem to set the pace for the rest of the series: synthetic human heroes ride around on supersonic motorcycles, blowing the shit out of biomechanical zombies and the masked transhumans responsible for them. At one point in volume two, the series' iconic talking grizzly bear, Kozlov, remarks that there now seem to be no normal human beings left. You might take this for a throwaway acknowledgement of a genre-typical setting, but Nihei has actually shown some measure of development in his world up to this point, and its an omen of things to come.

The third volume sees both hidden fracture lines and unexpected alliances become apparent in the frantic build-up to a massive conflict of post-human ideals. It's clear early on in the story that Nihei isn't afraid to follow strange speculations through to their extreme logical conclusion, and the culmination of this conflict in volume four results in such a stonking great development in the story that I don't want to spoil it, save to say that at one point a hole is blasted right through planet Earth.

But the thing that impresses me so much about this series is that for all its epic scale and unswerving commitment to massive ideas, this is always first and foremost a laconic action comic. Far from being laden with exposition, Nihei often has his characters barrel headlong into the surreal aftermath of a new plot point, only explaining it after the fact. Things which have a visual consistency with the otherworldly logic of the settings are frequently left satisfyingly unmentioned in the dialogue. In this way Biomega manages to be both fast-paced and also surprisingly thoughtful speculative fiction. I'm eagerly anticipating the final volume.

Thursday Comic

Batman: The Long Halloween - Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale

Shrouded in corruption, Gotham City's Falcone crime family seems unstoppable. But three different forces for justice have allied against them: police captain James Gordon, district attorney Harvey Dent, and masked vigilante Batman. And on the opposite side of the law, Catwoman, the Joker and the mysterious new Holiday Killer seem to have it in for the Falcones as well. Faced with the rising tide of Gotham's freaks, kingpin Carmine Falcone decides that his only option is to fight fire with fire...

Compared to his cramped and hyperactive introduction to Hush, Loeb has a lot more room to work in on this book, as well as a much more grounded story. The result is a gripping mystery thriller that's not quite as clever as it thinks it is, but still managed to keep me guessing to the end (even if it does seem to go a twist too far in terms of credibility). Some of the dialogue is pretty weak (every single one of Alfred's lines is painful), but for the most part this is the kind of dark, gritty, street-level story you want from a Batman book.

Tim Sale's art is beautifully stylish, evoking the shadowy aesthetic of a well shot film noir, but it's often loose and not very detailed, which is not really to my tastes. Nevertheless, after reading The Long Halloween, I can easily see why this is an oft-cited source text for Christopher Nolan's Batman movies.