Echo: Collider by Terry Moore

Rating: WORTHY!

This is not the last in the series, but it is the last which my local library has for loan. Now I have to dig up the last two volumes or preferably find the entire series, which I believe is available in a single volume now.

I recommend this whole series - at least this far, and I have to add that it's hard to believe it will fizzle when it's been so strong so far. We learn that Ivy has a young, sick daughter - to add to her many other facets. We also learn something of a bombshell about her - or at least we see it hinted at - at the end. We also get a new and deadly assassin hired to take out Julie, and the return of a character who "died" in an earlier issue - Hong. Somehow, he is resurrected, and turns into something out of a fifties B horror movie - The Mummy meets The Creature From the Black Lagoon, or something! We also learn what HeNRI's end game is - they don't want Julie dead so much as want her armor so they can put it into a collider and smash the substance at itself in order to create a black hole.

Terry Moore's understanding of how dangerous black holes are has a huge black hole in it. A black hole does not have infinite gravity. It has only a fixed amount which is, as with all gravity, proportional to its mass, so if you create a black hole the same mass as a tennis ball, it's going to have no more gravitational pull than does a tennis ball. In order to destroy Earth, you'd have to have a truly massive black hole which you can't generate in a particle collider because the masses of those particles are minuscule. And you can only collide particles - not alloys, so I have no idea where he got this physics from - or worse, where HeNRI got it from. The fact is that if their understanding is so disgracefully flawed, then they're no threat at all!

But I was willing to let that slide for the fun of the story and the excellent way it's told. I can see this making a fine movie, if it's handled right, and if so, I would definitely pay to see it.

Echo: Desert Run by Terry Moore

Rating: WORTHY!

Volume Three of this six part (30 issue) series was another winner for me. It opens in the crater blown into the desert highway by Julie in defense against the vagrant dude. Thinking he is dead, Julie also thinks Dillon is dead - or near to it, and she hauls him off in the truck, but unaccountably stops short of finding as hospital and hugs him, thereby healing him. This, she did not expect thinking of herself solely as a weapon. Ivy meanwhile visits Julie's home and finds a box with something intriguing inside, but we do not learn what it is.

It's in this volume that we learn that Julie's new suit isn't just the Plutonium alloy, but also contains some of Annie, Dillon's supposedly dead girlfriend. Now Julie starts feeling what Annie felt, and thinking what she thought. Is this the start of a meld, or a takeover? Julie doesn't know. Ivy, now embarking on a phase of this relationship that is less chasing down Julie and more getting to know Julie and becoming highly suspicious of the secret agency HeNRI. When Ivy learns that Julie healed Dillon, she realizes that she has an off-label use for Julie for herself.

The story continues to thrill and intrigue, art work continues to please - what's not to recommend?

Echo Atomic Dreams by Terry Moore

Rating: WORTHY!

Volume two of this six volume series starts out right where volume one left off. Dillon the ranger and Julie the super-girl are hiding out in a desert motel, ostensibly protected by some of Dan Backer's motorcycle group. Dan is ex military and is highly suspicious of what's been going on in those desert military bases. What none of them know is that the vagrant who shared Julie's plutonium rain experience is a religious nut-job who thinks poor Julie is the harlot of Babylon. The Bible has a HELL of a lot to answer for.

When Vagrant Man shows up at the motel - how he tracked her there is a mystery, but I have an idea of my own - there is a showdown that leaves sand turned to glass, and Dan's biker boys dead. Julie and Dillon are once again on the run across the desert.

Meanwhile Ivy has tracked down Julie's sister Pam, who is in a psychiatric institution, and she calls Julie and tries to talk her into surrendering to Ivy - who promises protection. Doing this will implying, intentionally or not, a threat of something happening to Julie's sister isn't the best way to engage with Julie's benevolent side, but before this can be resolved, Vagrant Man arrives, and all that's left after that encounter is a crater in the desert, which is how volume three begins.

Once again we have interesting characters who change and grow, particularly Ivy who is slowly coming to a realization that this isn't your normal person-tracking job. The art work continues to be simple but not simplistic, and it was very much appreciated; it's clean, definitive, and illustrative - everything you would want in a graphic novel. I do not require color, indeed, it can sometimes ruin a story, so this wasn't an issue for me. I recommend this volume as part of this complete series!

Echo: Moon Lake by Terry Moore

Rating: WORTHY!

I found this in the library and liked the first volume so much that I went right back and got the next three, which is all the library had. Bless that library! I was hoping that this is the whole set because this was initially issued as a relatively short run of individual (and indie published) comics, and later collected into sets, but it turns out there are six of them, each containing five of the original issues: Moon Lake, Atomic Dreams, Desert Run, Collider, Black Hole, The Last Day. How he got it to be exactly 30- issues is a bit of as poser - that's like writing a novel and deciding it's going to be exactly three hundred pages long regardless of how you tell the story and whether it naturally ends on page three hundred! However, as I write this I'm half way through and I can't fault it for being too fast or too drawn-out.

The art work is excellent, but note that it's black and white line drawings, no coloring involved. Once in a while the text is too small, which is a pet peeve of mine, but other than that, I can't fault this at all, so it all came down to the usual test, for me: whether the story was any good, of course. For me the story is the most important thing, with art being secondary, and this story did not fail me.

The main character is Julie Martin, typically curvaceous as comic book females are, but not improbably so. I liked her sister better - she was drawn more realistically and looked pretty damned good, especially since her personality was adorable. And in the end that's what overcame the skin-deep appearance of these female characters - they were realistic, all three of the main ones.

Julie is a down-and-out photographer whose husband has ditched her for reasons which were not exactly clear to me. She's not happy with this, but she's just about dealing with it, and trying to work on her photography portfolio. Evidently her starboard-folio is already completed....

This is how she happens to be in the desert in the south-west (note that North America sports many Moon Lakes!) when a new flying suit is tested - one that bonds to the skin. It's being tested by a woman Named Annie, and the air-force considers the test to be a success and orders the destruction of the suit, with Annie still in it. This causes a literal rain of particles which come down rather like hailstones, but which are soft, like they're made from modeling clay. They cover Julie and stick to her skin, and to her truck.

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She evacuates the area quickly, but soon discovers these hailstones are, in a way, alive. They begin to flatten out and stretch, and cover her skin, eventually forming a breast plate - literally. It covers her neck, upper chest, and breasts rather provocatively, like a prototype designer swimsuit top. It's not like a piece of metal armor - it's more like a thin coat of chrome. The doctor who Julie visits cannot remove it, and actually is injured by it. Julie is tossed out of the ER as a prankster.

The air force is now trying to recover all the pieces from the explosion, but can find less that 30% of them. They discover that two people were in the area - a vagrant, and Julie. They just don't know the identity of these two people two begin with. A woman with the cool name of Ivy Raven, who is an expert at tracking down people and reading crime scenes - this woman is observant and sharp - is called in to find Julie, but she isn't told the whole story.

There are several interested parties, including a park ranger named Dillon Murphy who is the boyfriend of Annie, the original test pilot. He eventually encounters Julie when the army try to arrest her, and end up all knocked out due to some explosive power of Julie's breastplate which evidently triggers when she's stressed. Now she and Dillon are on the run with Ivy in hot pursuit.

I wasn't thrilled that Julie had to end up with Ranger Rick (or Dill) - yet another woman in distress who evidently can't make it without a guy to validate her, but the characters were written realistically (they even have realistic names! LOL!), and behaved appropriately, and there was no ridiculous love at first sight, so I let that problem slide in this case. Plus, it's Julie who actually gets them out of various scrapes with her "super-power", so this balanced out. Overall, I rated this a worthy read and I was looking forward to volume two at the end of this one.

They're Not Like Us by Eric Stephenson, Simon Gane, Jordie Bellaire, Fonografiks

Rating: WORTHY!

This is volume one of a new series. "Syd" is hearing voices; she has done so for a long time, and can't stand it any more. She tries to kill herself, but she survives and is sprung from the hospital by a guy who whisks her away to a charming old house hidden behind iron railings and deep foliage, where she meets others who, like her, have some sort of telepathic ability. The house is so representative of what these people have done to themselves, it's almost like it was planned that way....

In a tableau of introduction we meet: Fagen (pyrokinetic), Wire (invulnerable), Runt (strength and agility), Blurgirl (super speed), Moon (Illusions), Misery Kid (delusions), Maisie (clairvoyant), and Gruff (telepath). The guy who rescues Syd (her super-hero name) is named The Voice. He can communicate telepathically, too. What Syd doesn't expect is the lifestyle these people lead: violence and robbery. If they see something they want, they take it and woe betide whoever gets in their way. This sanctuary is so important to them, that even parents aren't allowed to trip it up.

Starting on page forty-nine, it felt like I might be reading an excerpt from the graphic novel version of the movie Fight club which I haven't seen and have no interest in seeing. It was bloody and violent as Syd and Gruff fight each other - presumably as training. But after punching each other in the face several times they're suddenly kissing. This felt not only inappropriate, but also entirely predictable, and it marked the point where I started losing interest in this comic.

It got worse when we went through a bunch of adolescent posing, angst, and machismo, to say nothing of the soul-searching and he dramatic plans which fell through. All the tedious back stories flooding-out really brought the main story to a screeching halt. After that, it picked up again and turned out, by the end, to be a merit-worthy read. It's not often I can say that, so this makes a pleasant change.

Since this blog is about writing, here's a writing issue. On page one hundred, Maisie is talking to Syd, and she's saying that The Voice isn't perfect, and she follows it with "none of us are". Should she have said, instead, "none of us is"? It can be used either way, but the number has to agree, I think. Strictly speaking, in this case, Maisie meant that no individual is. If she had said, "This group isn't perfect, no groups are" this would have worked, but it seems to me that this isn't the case.

She's talking in the same frame as when she said "The Voice isn't perfect," so it seems to me that since she's talking about an individual, in which case, correct use should be "none of us is", as in "He isn't perfect; none of us is." However, this is not a narrative, it's a person speaking, and people in general use poor grammar, so while it might sound odd, I think it works here. But you're welcome to disagree, since I am far from a grammar expert. The important thing to keep in mind is that what works in your narration may not work for a given individual's speech, and vice-versa.

So overall, I rate this graphic novel as a worthy read, which surprised me given the way I thought it was going - downhill! It turned around and so did my opinion. I'd be interested in reading volume two, which is also a nice change from the position I've been in vis-à-vis some of the graphic novels I've reviewed recently. The dialog - apart from a sorry bit just after the middle, was good, and the art work was superb. I recommend this.

Wonder Woman Who is Wonder Woman? By Allan Heinberg

Rating: WARTY!

Colors: Alex Sinclair

It's day three of the July Smack-Down, and we have Girl Genius up against Wonder Woman. I have to tell you that I'd take a girl genius over a buxom wench any day of the week, including weekends, but I shall try to remain neutral if not neutered here! Wonder Woman: Who is Wonder Woman? is a graphic novel about Donna Troy, the new Wonder Woman - or is she?! It's part of a series of which I have read none but this, so my grasp of the arc is limited, and Wonder Woman's history is such a rat's nest of re-invention, rebooting, and reduplication that I defy anyone to make a coherent narrative of it all anyway, so that's not going to stop me tackling this one!

Troy arrives at a hostage scene where the hostage-takers are demanding to speak to Wonder Woman - the real one, who was, of course, Diana Prince (not to be confused with Princess Diana, although this is how the original Wonder Woman is referenced in a flashback). Sarge Steel (seriously?), the director of the Department of Metahuman affairs explains this to Troy while he lights a cigar. Seriously? How pathetically clichéd do you want to get? Well, it turns out that this story was destined to apprise us of that in all manner of ways. And what's with that expression on the cover?!

Donna Troy is purportedly Diana's sister (kinda sorta maybe?), although there's no explanation as to her choice of name. Is it her real name? Is it an alias as Diana Prince was for Princess Diana of Themyscira? Wonder Woman has had a score of origin stories over the years, but originally, she was made from clay and went to the US to return Steve Trevor to his homeland. She came by her name by way of the real Diana Prince, who was an army nurse who was prevented from following her fiancé to South America because of a shortage of funds (and of course by the fact that the army didn't post her there - what was she planning on doing? Going AWOL?). Wonder Woman gave her the money to go in exchange for her credentials and name, and since the two looked alike, she took over the real Prince's name and job, and was able to take care of Steve in the hospital. I want to read the real Diana Prince's story.

The hostage-taker is Barbara Minerva, but she isn't working alone. She's in league with the hilariously named Doctor Psycho, and the bigger-than-life Giganta - who evidently can change her size at will since there's no other explanation for how she came to be in a place for which the entrances are too small to accommodate her. Dr Psycho is evidently into cross-dressing and transgenderism, because he shows up disguised as the original Wonder Woman. It's all very confusing, especially since none of these three is really the mastermind.

It gets worse when we learn that Cassie Sandsmark - who is Wonder Girl - is hallucinating that she sees Superboy, We know she's hallucinating, we're told, because Superboy is dead. Then how come Superman is alive? I guess that's "explained" somewhere back down the line but it makes zero sense.

From there this comic devolves into a mishmash of set pieces, and more and ever more heroes are brought in for one panel appearances, including Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, Hercules, Nemesis, Robin, Superman, Zatanna, and a host of others who are unnamed but probably recognizable by fans of this world. Circe shows up and she's actually the only one who I'm rooting for, because she's the only one who has a real take on what's going on and what the root problem is with all these super-so-called-heroes.

In the end Circe turns out to be the good guy and Nemesis the bad guy. The end. I can't recommend this mess at all, especially not since it's told and drawn by a largely male team who seem to be obsessed with how improbably curvaceous they can make their heroes. In medical parlance, DC means discontinue (or even deceased) and this seems to be good advice with this graphic novel series! I can't recommend a novel which smacks itself down.

Ms Marvel Generation Why by G Willow Wilson

Rating: WARTY!

Art work: Jacob Wyatt and Adrian Alphona
Colors: Ian Herring

Today is the first of July. It marks the end of my year of living dangerously, wherein I published two reviews per day, 365 consecutive days, didn't miss a day! I am so glad that's over! It was a great discipline, though, which hopefully gave me a better work ethic for creative writing.

The advent of July also marks a change in that I'm through with posting book cover images with my reviews. This blog is about writing, and unless you self-publish, the cover has nothing to do with the author and typically nothing to do with the story either, so why indulge Big Publishing™? Yeah, kids books and graphic novels are perhaps exceptions, but I don't do that many of those compared with regular chapter books I review. Besides, covers change too, so as soon as you post your image, it's likely obsolete. Enough already! I'm writing about the writing from now on. If you want pretty pictures try Pinterest or DeviantArt.

So for fun, I'm starting out this month with a Smack-Down! Yeah! I was in the library a few days ago and they had a display of literature about women or written by women, and part of the display was a set of graphic novels about female super heroes or other characters, and they happened to have Captain Marvel and Ms Marvel sitting side-by-side, so I immediately thought, let's put 'em in the cage together and see who rings whose bell.

The Ms Marvel graphic novel is very much written - and indeed illustrated - for juvenile readers. The first thing to happen after the appallingly boxy-looking Wolverine (really, he looked like a rectangle with arms and legs tacked on) shows up is that the kid hero gets a pet sidekick. Yawn. This dog is a pit bull variety of the Bulldog kind, which has a weird antenna sticking out of its head which looks like it's some sort of homage to Meowth, and no one remarks upon it - at least not initially. The dog can teleport which is conveniently just what Ms Marvel needs right then.

The kid that Wolverine and Ms Marvel rescue is in a coma. This kid was actually on her way to the Jean Grey institute when she was abducted, yet no one thinks that Prof X ought to see if he can get into her mind and discover what happened....

Lettering had randomly bolded words. Yuk! I have no time for letterers. On the plus side, this was a Muslim super hero: Kamala Khan is originally from Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan. the problem was that she was insultingly stereotyped as was her religion. Her mentor was called Abdullah, because you know that all Muslims are named Abdul or Abdullah, right?

I did like the magazine name: Pedantic Monthly. That was inspired, but it was about the only amusing thing in this book. The weird bird-man hybrid who plays a lackluster villain is concerned about global warming, and so, in a plot ripped straight from The Matrix, abducts children to use their bio-electricity and body heat as batteries for his devices - not one of which seems to be doing anything about global warming.

In short, this story was brain-dead and beneath Wilson's skills, and the art work godawful. Plus some of the cutesy layout was seriously confusing. On one occasion there was a full page spread where Ms and Wolvie were climbing up through a sewer, but it was hard to tell if it should be read up or down. I ran into problems both ways. I finally decided that up from the bottom was the intended direction, but it still made less than sufficient sense! I can't recommend this at all. It smacked itself down!

Captain Marvel Down Vol 2 by Kelly Sue Deconnick and Christopher Sebela

Rating: WARTY!

Art work: Dexter Soy and Filipe Andrade
Colors: Dexter Soy, and Veronica Gandini Jordie Bellaire

Erratum:
"Whether the tunned collapsed...." should be "Whether the tunnel collapsed...." (no page numbers of course)

Today is the first of July. It marks the end of my year of living dangerously, wherein I published two reviews per day, 365 consecutive days, didn't miss a day! I am so glad that's over! It was a great discipline, though, which hopefully gave me a better work ethic for creative writing.

The advent of July also marks a change in that I'm through with posting book cover images with my reviews. This blog is about writing, and unless you self-publish, the cover has nothing to do with the author and typically nothing to do with the story either, so why indulge Big Publishing&Trade;? Yeah, kids books and graphic novels are perhaps exceptions, but I don't do that many of those compared with regular chapter books I review. Besides, covers change too, so as soon as you post your image, it's likely obsolete. Enough already! I'm writing about the writing from now on. If you want pretty pictures try Pinterest or DeviantArt.

So for fun, I'm starting out this month with a Smack-Down! Yeah! I was in the library a few days ago and they had a display of literature about women or written by women, and part of the display was a set of graphic novels about female super heroes or other characters, and they happened to have Captain Marvel and Ms Marvel sitting side-by-side, so I immediately thought, let's put 'em in the cage together and see who rings whose bell.

Here's Captain Marvel in précis: fight giant robot. Next day take cat to vet, and on the way, fight giant dinosaurs along-side Spider-Woman. Later, rescue subway train. Be spied upon by hawk-like humanoids who later attack and drop you thirty-three stories while your energy is low from earlier activity. Earth's mightiest super hero? Doubtful! Take home wandering child with whom you have a discussion about whether or not Captain Marvel could beat the Hulk. Get bawled out for living in apartment block and since you have no secret identity, by your presence endanger everyone who lives in that block with you. Get a visit from Captain America on a flying motorbike. Have brain growth diagnosed which could wipe your memory if it does what the doc fears it might do.

Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, is with her friend Monica Rambeaux, another super hero type, investigating some sort of Bermuda triangle event but not in the so-called Bermuda Triangle. There is all manner of sunken ships and downed, drowned airplanes in this one area. Cap'n Marvel has no cape, thank goodness. Marvel super heroes tend not to sport them, but Monica wears a long overcoat for no apparent reason, so it that might as well be a cape.

Sounds boring, huh? Well that's exactly how I felt with this completely lackluster story supported not at all by hopelessly indifferent art work. This was volume two, and I hadn't read volume one, but I don't get the impression that it mattered at all. That's what happens, though, when there's absolutely nothing whatsoever on the cover to indicate that this isn't a standalone, or that this isn't number one in a series.

For me, this comic smacked itself down and I can't recommend it.

Ex Machina Volume 3 by Brian K. Vaughan

Title: Ex Machina Volume 3
Author: Brian K. Vaughan
Publisher: DC Comics
Rating: WARTY!

Pencils and covers by Tony Harris
Inks by Tom Feister
Colors by JD Mettler.

Well, I had a good run with Ex Machina - two whole volumes I enjoyed, but the third, well, the third fell flat for me and I just didn't feel like reading any more after that. Time to move on to something more engaging. The art work was fine, but I don't read the comics for the art work - that's like frosting on the cake for me, but the cake's the thing, otherwise it's just meaningless - if pretty - pictures. I read them for a good story, and if that isn't there, then there really isn't much left.

This series started out great, but volume three was like entering a different universe. It wasn't as witty, as engaging, as devil-may-care, as irreverent or as funny as the previous two volumes. I don't know what went wrong. it's like the writer lost track of what he was doing or where he was going. The artifact, which had figured large in the previous volumes was essentially irrelevant here. Why?

In addition to that, the previous outing was a mad rush through assassination attempts and all kinds of other entertaining issues, and now this is like Mitchell finally made it to some cover and feels so scared to venture out that the spends the entire volume cowering down and staring blankly at the wallpaper!

The best plot idea that can be scared-up for this volume was that Mitchell has to do jury duty. Hello, he's the mayor! And you know it's bad when the only other thing going on is flashbacks to parent issues. It was truly sad, and I can't bring myself to read any more of this series at this point.

.

Ex Machina Volume 2 by Brian K. Vaughan

Title: Ex Machina Volume 2 Tag
Author: Brian K. Vaughan
Publisher: DC Comics
Rating: WORTHY!

Pencils and covers by Tony Harris
Inks by Tom Feister
Colors by JD Mettler.

Volume two of this entertaining and colorful (in many different ways!) graphic novel starts out with a distractingly dead disemboweled dog deep in the dark domain of the subway. Soon denizens of the city begin disporting themselves dressed-out in the same demented demeanor. In addition to this, the weird glyph that's tied to the source of The Great Machine's power starts appearing as graffiti in the subway, turns into anime, and infects a traveler on the subway, causing her to stick a pen in her eye, Orphan Black style!

The featured governmental problem in this edition is Hundred's desire to marry off his close advisor's gay brother which will be a bold challenge to state statute. That goes off, of course, with a hitch - duhh! - but not before we get all kinds of grief about it from all kinds of people including one guy who sneaks a bow and a quiver of arrows into the crowd and attempts to shoot Hundred. He has a freaking bow - why would he not simply get up onto a building roof and shoot from there? This makes no sense! It makes even less sense how he ever got in there! We're told the bow is folding, Hawkeye-style, but the quiver full of arrows sure as hell isn't.

The villain here was a little bit predictable - it's a trope in fiction that when they don't find the body, the 'victim' is still alive. Were it that way in real life, but it's not - it happens pretty much only in fiction. Other than that the story was amusing and inventive, and quite engrossing.

The art work has always been rather simple in this series, which is fine because it does its job, but I have to say there are inconsistencies in character depiction. For example, on around page twenty (the pages are not numbered), Hundred's assistant, named Journal, is depicted as a voluptuous woman reminiscent of Lily Corazon Kwamboka or Josie Goldberg, whereas just 14 or so pages later, she's as willowy as she originally was. I have no idea what's going on there any more than I did with the curiously variable cup size of the reporter, Suzanne's bosom..

Overall, it was a worthy read, once again full of life, humor and the pursuit of weirdos, and I recommend it.

Ex Machina Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Ex Machina Volume 1 The First Hundred Days
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: DC Comics
Rating: WORTHY!

Pencils and covers by Tony Harris
Inks by Tom Feister
Colors by JD Mettler.

This began as a pretty cool comic but by volume three it had become rather tedious. I can recommend volumes one and two, however, which are funny, original, and entertaining. I doubt I will continue it now though, especially since it runs to some fifty issues! Be warned that this novel has adult situations and language. It's not for young kids or for people who are easily offended.

The premise here is that Mitchell Hundred, a New York City engineer, was somehow changed or infected, or whatever, by an artifact found in the river. He adopted a persona known as The Great Machine, after something Thomas Jefferson said (either that or it's right out of Babylon 5) about the great machine of government or of society depending on which of his quotes you refer to. The dick-head was obsessed with great machines in an era where great machines were virtually non-existent - go figure!.

After saving a handful of lives as the World Trade Center collapsed on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Hundred ran for mayor and won. Not a single cop or fire-fighter was elected to mayor. Only plushly-padded businessmen and super heroes. Being merely heroic just isn't enough, I guess. So the title of this graphic novel is therefore a play both on his name and his first one hundred days in office which is somehow deemed by the popular press to be significant.

As a result of his enhancement or however you like to refer to it, Hundred can communicate with machines. No one knows or explains how this is supposed to work, but by issuing spoken commands (in a weird green font, yet), he can tell a machine to turn on or off, he can make hidden listening devices generate white noise, and he can tell a gun to jam, and so on. This, together with his rocket pack is what makes him the world's first and only super hero. This 'rocket man' idea is pretty much purloined from the Rocketeer comic book of 1982, which itself stole heavily from older sci-fi movies such as 1954's King Of The Rocket Men.

The comic, which also has a slight tinge of steam punk to it, but is mostly rooted in fifties sci-fi, is rife with flashbacks, most of which are actually interesting until we reach volume three, but the most entertaining parts are the contemporary scenes where Hundred tries to get the work of government done while all the time having to deal with ghosts from his past and attempts on his life, as well as with a coterie of fascinating support characters (which includes some sassy women), all of whom seem to be as combative as they are supportive.

In volume one, his major problems are a person who seems to be dedicatedly assassinating snow-plow drivers, and a work of art (so-called) which consists of a large portrait of Abraham Lincoln with the word 'nigger' painted across it which is causing problems because it's being exhibited in a show in a publicly-funded museum - but mostly because people take art way-the-hell too seriously.

I recommend this comic for its wacky humor, and its interesting situations and and events. If TV sit-coms were this well done I'd actually watch them! One of the best parts about this for those interested in how comic books are put together, is the section in back which demonstrates just this in this case, using real people to pose for the scenes, and then translating those real life scenes into finished art-work, thereby getting positioning and perspective just right. I recommend this volume.

The Superyogi Scenario by James Conner

Title: The Superyogi Scenario
Author: James Conner
Publisher: Sky Grove
Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"...Captain Davis' wiry main mechanic..." should be "...Captain Davis's wiry main mechanic..." (similarly used on pps 52, 53, & 94). Davis is singular, so adding the letter 's' after the apostrophe is appropriate.
"That pulled more g forces of the most aggressive roller coaster" (p118) makes no sense as it's written. Try 'than' instead of 'of', and 'g force' (singular)?
"...entitled Dangerous Yogis..." should be "...titled Dangerous Yogis..." (p13) but so many authors conflate these two words that this point it's pretty much a waste of time objecting with a language as dynamical as English.
"I'm not saying there is any eminent danger of this mountain collapsing..." (p239) should be "I'm not saying there is any imminent danger of this mountain collapsing..." The author uses it correctly on p275.
"...I put the dresses in your closest personally" (p245) should be "...I put the dresses in your closet personally"

So, this was yet another Adobe Digital Editions book that started on page minus five. Way to give a negative impression! I don't know what does this. It isn't the author's fault. Something evidently got lost in translation between the typescript and the ADE. It's not an insurmountable problem - just annoying, but I never saw this problem until recently, and now I've seen it three times in three different books. Authors and publishers beware!

There were too many flaws in this story. On the one hand, this made it very little worse than your average super hero story, all of which are flawed in some way - notably how the hero got their powers and how those powers work. The biggest flaw was that there were pictures - in a book that's supposed to be about denying self - demonstrating how good-looking and hot these cool super-heroes were. In the ADE edition, the very first picture, of Physique, the villain, was cut off. Only the top portion of the image was visible (in the iPad edition it was all visible), so we didn't even see her face (see image on my blog). I was sorry it wasn't showing only the bottom, with the top cut off. At least then I could have maybe garnered some hits for my blog by telling everyone she appeared topless! LOL!

This story at least had the advantage of taking the road less traveled and for the most part, it's well-written apart from some rather glaring gaffs listed on my blog. I liked the way we're told that it's "A novel" on the cover - like we might mistake it for fact! In the end though, for me, it collapsed under its own weight. At times it read far more like a yoga training manual than an exciting novel, which was tedious at best, but this wasn't even the worst problem. I go into detail on my blog.

The grotesque sexual objectification of the female characters was what killed it for me. There are no everyday real females here and it was - even for a super hero story - completely unrealistic. I had initially thought that going with the yoga scenario would either be a joke or refreshingly different. The latter possibility was what made me look forward to reading it, but in the end it was just another trope super-hero story with nothing essentially different at all except for the yoga lectures.

I didn't like the genderism one bit, and adding brainy after beautiful, and mentioning (as opposed to showing) it just the once, does nothing to redress what is clearly and blatantly objectification. When we meet Agent Rollins, a guy, all we get is that he's tall, wiry, skin as black as midnight (which actually isn't very black when you're in times Square). No mention of handsome - or ugly for that matter, but this author cannot introduce a single female character (and they're all single) without larding her up with buxom, beautiful, voluptuous, or otherwise waxing gratuitously as to how thoroughly all-around hawt she is.

First we meet Physique, aka Tina Hinsdale - the villain. She seems to be the only one who doesn't come swaddled in a super-costume of sexist superlatives, although even she is described as "athletic". After that, though, all restraint fails:

• "...Surat Banal, the beautiful and brainy assistant..." (pc)
• "...instantly found her attractive..." (pc)
• "...no woman so attractive had ever..." (pc)
• "To Detective Brennan - an attractive but hardened woman..." (pc)
• "...blonde and buxom..." (p78)
• "...an attractive woman in an olive green flight suit..." (p83)
• "Samantha simply enjoyed being the beautiful translator..." (p137)
• "...accenting her voluptuous chest..." (p137)
• "...if she's going to become a beautiful slugger..." (p186)
• "Samantha looked at her beautiful, glowing body..." (p189)
• "...on the dramatic cover, a buxom brunette..." (p198)
• "...she was glowing and attractive..." - attractive to moths maybe? (201)
• "...her voluptuous figure..." (p204)
• "...a beautiful blonde woman..." (p235)
• "...their sponsor's attractive niece seemed..." (p239)
• "...spirits looked like beautiful angels..." (p261)
And my personal favorite:
• Arial Davis, "...a beautiful woman who smelled like roses..." (p112)
Seriously, roses? Roses don't actually smell of much any more - not like they did in Shakespeare's time. These days, they're all about looks, just like these descriptions.

So for example, when we meet female Surat Banal, the very first thing after her name is "the beautiful" with a side order of "and brainy" as a sop to try and weaken the fact that the most important thing about her is her looks. We get no indication of what Rollins is wearing, but a complete description of Banal's attire down to her pearl necklace, lustrous hair, and Bollywood smile. I am so tired of this, and was pretty much ready to ditch this novel at that point, only five pages in. I had hoped for better, but reading on and on, I quickly learned it wasn't coming. This novel doesn't take the less traveled path after all.

I know this is traditional in super-hero stories, but does that mean it's required? Does that mean we can never try a different kind of super-hero story and break this mold? The truly, truly hypocritical thing here is that Diamond Mind, aka Eric the super yogi, is constantly banging on about how important it is to shed the 'me' and broaden our 'self' to become selfless, and yet every single page, near enough, is larded with how firmly attached to the me and to the material these people truly are.

The 'enlightened one' himself tosses his hair out of his eyes with metronomic regularity. Can he not get it cut so it isn't a constant distraction to him? Do his super yogic powers not extend to holding his hair in place? This endless parade of references to physical appearance completely betrayed and obliterated everything the author was saying about higher consciousness, detachment, and all that drivel!

But on to the story. The idea here is that there are super-powered yogis. They have such control over their bodies that they can overcome the laws of physics (yeah, good luck with that!) and as we learn in the very first chapter, change their body density and crash an airplane, this we need good super yogis to beat them at their own game.

One major problem for me is that the novel had almost no humor except that which was supplied unintentionally, such as when Physique observes at one point, "One side of a mountain moved six feet, sixty years ago...this isn't earth-shattering stuff". Actually, it is! Here's another: the author describes Physique and Agnite clinging to the rail of a boat out on the ocean, fearful that if they fell into the water, no one would ever find them out there, but Physique can float and in the air, too! Why would she be scared? It makes no sense. The only intentionally amusing highlight I noticed was the use of the term "un-dynamic duo" to describe agents Rollins and Kirby investigating this truck that physique damaged. That was it for humor.

While I think it's great that an author has come up with something new to bring to the super hero story genre, taking this particular tack also brings problems along with it. The most obvious one is of course, why set it in the USA? There are shamefully obvious reasons for that of course, but it would have made a lot more sense if this had been set in a place where yoga has been practiced for centuries. The USA is hardly known for its spiritual enlightenment! But if it's super-hero, it has to be USA, right?! And USDA - certified pure beef, too!

Whole chapters of the novel are devoted to teaching yoga, which I routinely skipped because they were boring new age woo. Other readers may find this appealing, but I have no interest at all in reading a bunch of unsubstantiated religious claptrap, especially in a work of fiction. If I did, I'd get a book about the topic and read that. And no, I'm not interested in hearing arguments to the effect that the brain waves of meditating people have been measured and the brain structure of these people has been studied, and I'll tell you why.

Such claims are meaningless without controls. We don't know if those brain changes were there long before the path to meditation began. Neither have there been control studies testing other people doing other things for comparison, such as measuring the brain waves of an athlete when they're in the zone, or of a concert pianist or violinist performing, for example, or of a video-gamer, or of a fighter-jet pilot doing maneuvers.

Without a real honest-to-goodness scientific study, claims are meaningless and out of place in a work of fiction which certainly doesn't require minutiae to be highlighted, and detailed explanations provided for every little thing! Besides, even if all of this were proven, it still provides no evidence for other claims, such as yogis having super powers, or that there is any such thing as reincarnation. These things are fine for fiction. They're fun to play with, and can make for a really good story if handled well, but I can do without the lectures and training manuals in a novel.

A belief in past lives and migrating souls is nonsensical. Consider this: at a point in the not-so-distant past, there were only maybe 2,000 humans living on Earth. We almost became extinct. Now there are billions. Where did all those extra souls come from? If they already existed, what were they doing in the literal billions upon billions of years before Earth formed and life began, and finally, within the last few million years, humans appeared on the stage? Reincarnation ignores the facts of life and this is why it's nonsensical.

The author seems to know that it's the Medal of Honor and not the Congressional Medal of honor (perhaps people confuse it with the Congressional Gold Medal) on one page, but later he refers to it as Congressional Medal of Honor. He's wrong in claiming it was issued to one civilian. It's not issued to civilians per se, but it has been issued to at least seven civilians who were in the employ of the US military at the time it was earned.

"He's gonna have to learn how to lighten up. Having a sense of humor is a big part in making any spiritual progress" - this from Eric the yogi who has been telling these two women that they need to let go of the "me" and focus on others, and now they're being kitted out for super hero costumes by comic book artists - who evidently don't use pencil, ink, or paint any more but all use $2,000 Wacom graphics tablets! Neither Arial (now "Airspeed") nor Samantha (now "Samsa") raise a single objection to their being objectified. This is the point I quit feeling positive about this novel. After that I just completed it for the sake of it since I was so close to the end and hadn't yet finished counting the incidence of "beautiful," but I knew i could not rate it positively.

In a humorous book, calling in comic book artists to design the superheroes' wardrobes would have been a hilarious touch, but this was not that kind of story and it sounded completely ridiculous here. Why not get he movie costume designers? They're the real exerts, and they have been there and done that!

The genderism worked negatively in two ways with the costuming, too. The guys get full-body covering. In fact, the one who actually is impervious to bullets gets a full body suit of Kevlar. The two "girls" (as they're now referred to), are not only forced into the ignominy of wearing what is, let's face it, skimpy swim suits and thoroughly ridiculous mini-skirts, they're also the ones who have no protection against bullets, being forced to expose acres of vulnerable skin. Where is their protection?

The worst part is that neither of these women has sufficient integrity, professionalism or self-respect to raise any objections. Instead they're portrayed as lapping it up, and this wasn't the only dumb in play here. I was especially disappointed in Arial Davis, as a military officer, going along with this. It seemed completely out of character for her, but then the military isn't portrayed in a very positive light here.

At one point, after discussing a new threat from Physique, the commander of the Marine Corps supposedly says, "Then madam, it's time to deploy the Marines with some heavy weapons to defend the Capital," but the Posse Comitatus Act prevents just this kind of deployment, as a Marine commander ought to know. That's what the police forces and the National Guard are for.

So no, I cannot in good faith recommend this novel. All of this leaves only one unanswered question: If there was a naked Yogi living in Yosemite National Park - would that be a Yogi Bare? I'll let you know when I visit.

MPH by Mark Millar

Title:
Author: Mark Millar
Publisher: Image
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Duncan Fegredo.

This is a sharp and entertaining comic which borrows heavily from pop culture icons like the Matrix movie trilogy, lesser-known movies such as Clockstoppers, as well as the DC Comics character 'The Flash', and so on, but manages to tell its own story, and offer some original twists and turns, including a fun ending.

The story begins when Roscoe needs some cash and is caught delivering drugs in a police sting. He thinks he can do the time, especially if he takes rehab courses (even though he's not an addict), behaves well, and shows an interest in reforming to get his sentence knocked down. The problem begins when he learns from a friend on the outside that he was deliberately sent into a trap to get him out of the way, so his drug pusher boss can have free access to Roscoe's girlfriend.

Roscoe reacts badly to this and digs a hole for himself by fighting with another prisoner. After he gets out of solitary, his cell mate once again tries to interest him in a new drug, MPH. Roscoe had turned this down before, but now he decides to give it a try and he discovers that this drug actually speeds up his mobility so much that it looks like everyone else is frozen - just like in one of those "bullet time' scenes from The Matrix and Clockstoppers. If you haven't seen either of those, but you've seen X-Men: Days of Future Past, think of the scene where Quicksilver helps to spring Magneto from the pentagon prison, and you;ll know the kind of thing to expect here.

Of course, no one actually is frozen, it merely appears that way because this guy is moving so blindingly fast. In fact he moves with such velocity that after Roscoe has left the building, he still has time to turn right around and go back to grab the bottle of MPH his cell mate is holding, which he shares with three of his closest friends. He discovers that traveling at super speed is the perfect cover for robbing banks. The downside, of course is that it does tend to attract the attention of law enforcement.

If it had gone all Reservoirs Dogs and ended-up in a bloody shoot-out, it would still have made a readable story, but it wouldn't have been that interesting to me. Fortunately, Millar takes it away from that into all kinds of explorations of the characters and their power, which is what really made this a worthy read for me. I liked the dialog, the plotting, the story, the art work and the coloring. All-in-all it's a great little book. Given the neat resolution to this story, it's hard to believe there's a second volume, but there is. I have not yet read that one so I can't comment knowledgeably on whether it's a worthy successor to this, but I suspect it features new characters who get their hands on a new supply of this drug which really puts a whole new perspective on the drug term, 'speed'!

Gotham Academy Volume 1 by Becky Cloonan

Title: Gotham Academy Volume 1
Author: Becky Cloonan and Brenden Fletcher
Publisher: Time Warner
Rating: WARTY!

Illustrated by Karl Kerschel

This is an advance review copy ARC), which despite this age of instant electronics, we're cautioned to consider uncorrected and to not treat as final, but with a nod and a wink to that, I have to say that the reading experience in Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) was odd to say the least. It reminded me of that old Monty Python vinyl record (I think it was the Matching Tie and Handkerchief) which you can't really reproduce in any other medium. The record actually had two spiral tracks on one side instead of the usual one, and what this meant was that whenever you played it, you would randomly get one version or the other dependent upon where the stylus set down when you played it. It was confusing - even creepy - until you realized what they'd done, and this comic felt like that because of the way the pages presented themselves.

On the iPad, it was fine, but in ADE, the numbering on the bottom of the ADE app would sometimes jump two pages instead of one when you click to the "next page". I've seen this before and never noticed anything odd about it (other than the apparent jumping of a page), but in this particular case, the comic actually was jumping two pages, because if you click back having moved two pages forwards, you would not return to the page you just left, but to an intermediate page which you had skipped right over when you clicked forwards the first time! It was like the pages were almost randomly choosing to appear. Had this been a supernatural comic, that would have been really cool, but it's a super hero comic, so, not so appropriate!

In the opening pages, which were rather self-indulgent (the same image was repeated once in color and once in gray-scale for example, and there were several other random pages like this) and a grotesque waste of a good tree, this didn't matter from purely a reading perspective, but it made me wonder how many panels I would be missing reading the story if the comic was going to be randomly jumping pages like this.

Another issue was that if I slid the bar to return the comic to the first page (an orange-toned image of a startled-looking girl with a shaded bar down the right side proclaiming a welcome to Gotham Academy) and then closed the comic, it would open at a different "first page" - one which showed the current choice for cover as of this version! That image has a green-toned background and depicts two girls in plaid school uniform skirts descending a rope with an ominous shadow of batman behind them.

Starting from the opening cover, one page click shows the same cover (but now as page two), from which a click-back shows the "original" orange-toned cover described above. Clicking forward from the cover takes us to half of a "rogues gallery" image showing (presumably) a handful of academy students. Another click shows us the second half of this same picture. Another click shows us the green cover again, but with no text. Another click shows us the cover yet again, but in gray-scale, no text). The publisher and writers/artists must really hate trees! A click to page eight shows this same image, but a click back shows us what I took to be the first page of the actual story - a full-page image of a clock tower, showing, at five minutes to seven, a lightning strike on the tower. Maybe Marty McFly is parked nearby?

A click forward shows us the same gray-scale image of the two girls, descending via a rope from the top of the tower - but inside the tower, rather than on the walls outside. At this point I gave up on the clicking back and forth experiment and tried to enjoy the story, hoping I was missing no pages in the process! I didn't seem to be until we got the skip-page routine again around page thirty, where it was definitely jumping over a story page that you could only find by clicking back. Clicking forwards missed it every time. But let's move on.

The art work was good - moodily colored and very appropriate to the creepiness of the text, but the artist really needs to learn what a sabre (saber) is. It typically sports a curved blade, and has a hand guard. A regular sword does not. The lettering once again was way too small to read comfortably. Naturally you don't want it so large it obscures the images, but the story is just as important as the art - at least for me it is - and I certainly don't want to be rewarded with eye-strain for simply trying to follow the story!

So what was the story? It's Gotham Academy, an ordinary high school with nothing special about it except that it's housed in a creepy old building which was built from stones even older than the academy, which I thought was a rather evocative thought. Every stone, we're told, has a story. It's almost a Gothic tale, except that it's set in contemporary times.

My problem immediately was that the story we're being told here was scattershot. It seemed like it had a portion missing, and we were coming into it a few minutes late - like the movie had already started and I'd missed the opening couple of scenes. It was annoying, but it slowly came into focus after being all over the place.

One problem was that I didn't get the relationship between the girl named Mia "Maps" Mizoguchi and the other main character, Olive Silverlock. Olive is supposed to be showing Maps around the academy - like this is her first year, but it's clear that they knew each other from the previous year, so this made little sense. Maps is the younger sister of Kyle, the guy with whom Olive just broke up, so it's possible the reference is to them knowing each other outside of school, but it's not depicted that way.

Olive's idea of showing the "new student" around is to take her into the most dangerous parts of the school and almost get her killed. The weird thing is that big brother Kyle has absolutely no issues with this at all, but later, when Olive takes Mia into the North Hall, a trip which is a lot safer than what they went through with the fall from the tower, Kyle gets all bent out of shape. This tells me that at best he's a complete jerk, and at worst, an absolute moron.

There's a ban on students going into the North hall and there's a creepy eye - of which Olive is unaware - peering into her room from a tiny crack in the wall. A student with the highly unlikely name of Pomeline Fritch is playing Malfoy to Olive's Harry Potter, although to be fair, it's much more complex than that, and doesn't go the same way. There's even a character named Heathcliff. There's also, supposedly, a ghost in the North Hall, and Mia, Olive, Pomeline, and a guy named Colton Rivera, decide to break into the hall one night to investigate, and find something way more disturbing than a ghost.

I have to say that the story (even without the oddball hidden pages) was far too choppy. The cutting from one scene to another was startlingly abrupt making me think I'd skipped a page. An example of this is around page 80 where we go from the idiot thespian misidentifying his sword as a sabre to what feels like the middle of an interrogation of one of the students about a symbol he'd drawn in his notebook. It's obvious what the symbol is right from the start, so no mystery there. The scene with the actors could have been skipped and the pages devoted to a softer segue to the interrogation instead of the breakneck switch we got.

Overall I can see how the story might appeal to young, desperate, indiscriminate readers, but then the imagery is a bit scary for really young ones. Older children who can handle the story might well have a problem with it being less than thrilling. Neither of my kids showed any interest in it! It's for these reasons that I can't recommend this graphic novel.

Barry vs the Apocalypse by Ross Cavins

Title: Barry vs the Apocalypse
Author: Ross Cavins
Publisher: RCG Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
Kazakhstan not Kazikstan p54
"I decided to take another tactic." should be "I decided to take another tack." p160
"There's nothing like a sunset over a mountain lake, is it?" makes no sense - unless Barry is Welsh.

Since I'm on a superhero kick lately, here's a third one for consideration. It's very much in the mold of the other two I've been reading in that it takes the road far less traveled. One of the other super hero stories was a novel like this one (Normalized), and the other was a graphic novel (Jupiter's legacy). I very much liked all three of them. It was really nice to get three in a row. It's a rare delight and one which makes it worth plowing through the bad stuff to get really enjoyable ones like these. I think the reason I liked them was that they all of them eschewed trope like it was a bad cliché. Oh, wait, it is!

So this one is about Barry Glick, a super hero who keeps claiming he's retired, but who still uses his powers from time to time for his own purposes (he's not above 'x-ray' scanning the lottery scratch-off tickets for a winner he can buy or for a glimpse at a woman sans clothing), and on occasion for the public good, as in when he foils a liquor store hold up - but only because he happens to be in the store at the time buying beer.

Barry is pretty much an alcoholic, and even when completely sober he has very few social graces, and no illusions about himself. He eats bad food and sports a lot of red-neck traits, the least of which is his mullet. He's a regular down-to-Earth guy except for his super powers, and therein lay a problem. The author simultaneously is telling us that he got his super powers with puberty, but he also got them at fifteen, which is really late for puberty to begin - but not out of the question. I felt that this could have been written a bit more clearly. The question of how and from where these powers came is unexplored to begin with, building something of a mystery which later necessitates a rapprochement with his estranged and abusive father and another relative he didn't even know he had, to resolve.

Barry did his public duty - and not always in an exemplary fashion - until two decades ago, but he got into so much trouble doing it (he's a bit like Hancock) that he thinks he's earned a rest now he;s ion his forties and sporting a growing beer-belly. Super heroes are never paid, recall. They only exist by having a regular job under the guise of an alter-ego, or by being a billionaire. Barry lives alone and makes his living from lottery tickets. He's and is going to seed, his sole hobbies being drinking beer and watching crass TV shows every evening.

On that topic, here's a writing issue for you: is it correct to say "...he's always drank, as the author does on page 229, or "...he's always drunk"? Note that we're talking about the act of drinking, not the state of having drunk too much alcohol. I think the author got it right, but I confess that I had to really think about it and consult a couple of on-line sources before I made up my mind, and even now I'm not sure. I mean, is it correct to say "he's always ran"? or should it be "he's always run"?! I think I'd reword it; then I don't have to risk a headache making a painful and possibly wrong decision! The author gets it right again (I think!) on page 282 where he writes "I laid there for a few minutes." Lay and Lie really are a pain for writers.

Barry thinks he's one of a kind, and he's honest enough (sometimes) to realize that's not necessarily a positive thing, but he's about to get an awakening. His life takes a turn for the interesting when his friend Gordon Moser and Gordon's sister Kimberly show up. Kimmy is an analyst for Homeland Security, but she's always (amusingly in my opinion) impersonating an FBI agent, and she begins wailing on Barry to help find her partner, who's gone missing. How she has a partner when she actually isn't a field agent is a bit of a mystery, but there it is. Andrew unfortunately hasn't been missing long enough for HS to feel that there's a need to start looking for him, but Kimmy has a gut instinct, which is gut enough for Barry, who also has a gut, and a lot of instinct for self-preservation.

This novel is told in first person PoV which I normally detest, but some writers can make it work, and this is one good example of that. Barry is about as politically as incorrect as you can get, and still remain outside of jail and retain a friend, so it's not unusual to hear lines from him like the following one, but this one was also unintentionally amusing. At the start of chapter 20 we read: "She declined my offer to walk around in her underwear eating ice cream." I know what the writer meant, but this makes it sound like Barry is offering to walk around wearing Kimmy's underwear! Just a warning to be careful what you write and how you write it!

Barry is by turns endearing and gross-out nasty, so the author was walking a fine line with me between turning me off this character and making me want to follow his antics. There was a time or two when he ran over the line but he always veered back towards the straight and narrow just in time to keep me reading. Having said that I have to add that chapter thirty six was a disaster. This is where we get a visit from someone in the know and we get Barry's back-story and learn who his mom really was. I'm sorry but I can't take any of that seriously. I felt it was unnecessary, and it really bogged the story down without contributing anything useful to it.

I suppose it was intended to soften us up for a rapprochement between Barry and his dad, but it failed for me - I couldn't realistically see that happening given what we'd been told already. And why was this even deemed necessary? Does every story like this have to end with a kid getting all lovey-dovey with their estranged parent(s) again? Barf. But whatever.

This isn't a graphic novel but there are some pictures in it - at the end of every chapter. They look like first draft pencil sketches of characters, but they have nothing to do with what's been going on in the chapter or with what happens in the next chapter. A significant number of them feature a woman holding a camera, and it's not always the same camera. There's a newspaper reporter in the story but she's never described as holding a camera although she does come armed with pictures the first time she accosts Barry. I was wondering at one point if there was more to her than met the eye, but there really wasn't. The sketches were good but felt weirdly out of place.

I liked that Barry has a beard (after a fashion). That's something you never see on super heroes (except in Mark Millar's Jupiter's Legacy! which I reviewed yesterday). I mean come on - Superman cannot shave - he can't find a razor that won't break on contact, yet he's always as clean and smooth as a baby's patoot? I call super-bullshit on that one! I rather suspect, though, that Barry was perhaps modeled on the author in some respects! They do say write what you know - although in my opinion that's bullshit too. It's termed 'fiction' for good reason!

So, final analysis, and although it did come close a couple of times to failing for me, I recommend this one as a worthy read, with the caveats I've mentioned about Barry and his non-pc attitude and behavior. If you've read Normalized which I'm also reviewing today, you will more than likely enjoy this one and vice-versa.

Normalized by David Bussell

Title: Normalized
Author: David Bussell
Publisher: David Bussell
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
Footnote 28 on page 67 has "... who' d returned come back to life...". It can be 'returned' or 'come back', but it can't be both!
Page 77 "I guess it was the third wall he knocked me through that I realized something was off." Isn't quite right. Maybe, "I guess it was the third wall he knocked me through that made me realize something was off."?

"...pronto like tonto..." Tonto is a name - it needs to be capitalized - something Cap Might ought to know! (page 198)
Daphne from Frasier Benny Hill (which is true) p141, p221 (repetition).
"...Men's Warehouse..." should be " Men's Wearhouse" p259. Same letters, different order.
"...which would of course by quite small)..." should be "...which would of course be quite small)..."p266.
"...part of the Heroes Code..." is missing an apostrophe: "... part of the Heroes' Code..." p314.
"...klieg lights..." should be "Klieg lights" since the Kleig part (actually Kleigl) is someone's name. p350.
"Now there was a plan I could hang my coat off." Hang my coat off?! p357.
"... into Miss Transit, kiping her teleportation power" is nonsensical (kiping isn't a word. Should it be 'keeping'? 'crippling'? p396

This is the second of three super hero novels I'm reviewing one after another. The review of the other novel, Barry Vs The Apocalypse is here. Note that unlike yesterday's Jupiter's legacy this is not a graphic novel.

I really liked this story but it took some getting used to! Note that the version I read of this combined all four original parts into one story. It's written in first person PoV, which is far from my favorite voice, but here it works. Also note that this is not a story for the faint-hearted, and I say that not because it's scary or anything, but because it's a very adult story where both strong language and graphic sexual imagery as well as a plethora of gross-out comments are gainfully employed, but there's an odd fastidiousness to the bad language.

The narrator, Captain Might, has no problem with typing "goddamned" but refuses to type "shit" or "fuck" without replacing the vowel with a symbol - a skull and crossbones for the 'i' and a lightning bolt for the 'u'. I didn't get the logic there; the author seems at times to be quite religious (although I may have that wrong!), but if that's the case, why baulk at the F and the S words, but write 'goddamned' without hesitation? I don't know! I didn't get the mentality there, but in the end, it's not that important.

I used the word "typing" back there because that's exactly what the font looks like: thirteen point Courier with a ragged right edge, too, like this was actually typed on a typewriter, which I also didn't get. It wasn't an appealing font, and that can make a difference to a reader. Plus it was large - The conceit is that the super hero is typing this out himself, which (given how he spends his time fantasizing about fighting super villains) doesn't seem to fit - why would he waste time typing? Why not dictate or have a ghost writer? Who knows?

That said, my last comment about the presentation also extends to the extensive footnotes: they felt out of place in the type-written scenario which had been created here, especially since they were in a different font. They were often funny, but I wasn't keen on the one which ran to a second page, where it was the only thing on page 34 and occupied only two lines at the bottom of it. This happened several times.

Those gripes aside, I did like the tone and voice despite it being the detested first person, but I did find myself hoping, knowing from the author what was coming, that this pugnacious braggart would find some humility. Here's one example of a Captain Might sarcastic comment:

I watched Mimix through the interview room's one-way mirror (and it is one-way, guys, a two-way mirror would be glass).

That puncturing of misguided convention definitely hit my funny bone. One of the most amusing things in the early pages is the plethora of ridiculous super-hero names (and let's face it, other than the true comic book addicts, who really can take super-hero names seriously?).

Here we're treated to hilarious ones (at least they seemed hilarious to me) such as The Caped Crouton, Executie, Hot Flash: America's Only Menopausal Superhero, Mother Load, Nocturnal Emission, Polterguy: The World's Strongest Ghost, and Vaginamite among others. One of the funniest parts was where the narrator, flying overhead, points out five superheroes at a donut shop, lined up so their chest logos spelled "DICKS". These heroes had perfectly ordinary super-hero style names, which is why it was funny: Dynamo, Impervious, Cascade, Kilowatt and Switchback. And that's not to mention an LGBT team named Homo Superior....

So yes, loved the humor. Not too keen on the hero to begin with, but despite his obnoxiousness, he did kind of grow on me the more I read. He was an arrogant braggart, very full of himself and dismissive towards others. He reminded me of the guy in this one poem I wrote which I published in Poem y Granite.

So let's cut to the chase: Captain Might squares off against Professor D'eath, his nemesis, and the Professor has some serious new tricks up his sleeve, one of which is the ability to strip Captain Might of his super powers. What's he gonna do without them, and more importantly, what will happen to his ego?

Note in passing that Abe Lincoln never said, "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I'll spend the first four sharpening the axe" - not according to a search of the complete works of Lincoln here. I think it's simply a folk tale as are many of the things attributed to Lincoln in the hope that people will much more readily take to heart something which Lincoln reputedly said than anything the author who "quotes" Lincoln is saying. This is a huge problem with hero worship. It's delusional! Besides, I seriously doubt that someone as able as Abe was with his hands, would take four hours to sharpen an ax.

Of course, this story is being told in first person, so the author can get away with mis-quotes and bad quotes, and even non-existent quotes - depending on how said author wants his character to appear. If he wants him well-read and smart, then he'll get his quotes right, otherwise, the character will get them wrong and look dumb, arrogant ill-educated, or up to something! This is important to keep in mind when writing in first person. Your character is only as educated as your writing and research!

Describing the Mandroids' armament as Gatling guns makes them seem a bit out-dated. Maybe that was intended. But the Gatling gun was a hand-cranked rapid fire gun. If the gun is something that's automated, it really needs to be a Maxim gun, or more modernly, a Vulcan or a minigun. Again minor matter of taste and of course, of the writer's intended aim - especially if it's a gun we're dealing with!

I cheered when I read this footnote, however: "...That said, I do believe there are some people who deserve to be rounded up and caged off from the rest of us, namely Creationists, people who use the word 'methinks', and whoever it is watching 2 Broke Girls...". Methinks I agree with only one of the three for sure, since I've never seen 2 Broke Girls, but if it's anything remotely like your typical American sitcom, it probably sucks like a starving fly on the Inevitable Bulk's last will and excrement.

So yes, super and heroic this story was, and I recommend it for readers with a strong stomach!

Jupiter’s Legacy by Mark Millar

Title: Jupiter’s Legacy
Author: Mark Millar
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WORTHY!
Art: Frank Quitely
Colors / Letters: Peter Doherty

This is an amazing story by the creator of Kick-Ass and marks three reviews in a row I will do, starting with this one, of novels about super heroes. Funnily enough, this is the only one which is a graphic novel! It takes as its premise a question that really isn’t explored in comic books – not in any I’ve read anyway. The best known comic books tend to be about super heroes and super villains. They’re really never about family since the heroes tend not to have family. Batman lost his parents. Superman lost his. Spider-Man lost his parents and his uncle. Iron man thought only of himself – to begin with. Super heroes aren’t generally known for family life or family ties – or indeed for any real altruism when you get right down to it. Nor are they known for growing old.

This novel asks what super hero life would be like if those family ties were firmly in place, and if those families had issues just like everyday families, and it does a pretty darned good job of it, too. Some time ago, The Utopian and several of his friends gained super powers from a little trip to an island. How or why this happened isn’t explained in volume one. Now time has passed and the heroes have grown old – gray haired, a bit tired – and they have families. Some of them are not very happy with how things are, and their kids are even more disenchanted than their parents are.

Set in the USA (that hasn’t changed) during the recent economic downturn (and at other times) this story asks another question that super hero stories tend to fail at: why don’t the super heroes do more than simply punch out the villains and luxuriate in the subsequent acclaim? For example, with the genius that Batman and Superman have between them, they could revolutionize crime-fighting by helping law enforcement organizations with technology and advice, but they never stoop that low, do they? They selfishly keep all that finery for themselves.

The Utopian’s brother does ask these questions, and he’s thoroughly unsatisfied by the answers he gets. He’s even more incensed by The Utopian’s domineering attitude and old-fashioned view of the way things should be, but he can’t usurp his brother’s throne on his own. He does know that the hero’s own son is thoroughly disaffected and resentful of his father’s treatment, however. Maybe the two of them together might effect some change in leadership – of both the super heroes and the US government?

I highly recommend this graphic novel. It’s beautifully put together, richly worded, smartly conceived, and gorgeously illustrated and colored.