I Kill Giants : Joe Kelly & JM Ken Niimura

I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s hard to precis a book like this without throwing immense spoilers around the room and pointing to said spoilers with neon flashing arrows. As a result of this, I hope you’ll forgive me for delivering a fairly bald synopsis albeit it one with a coda of ‘you really should read this’.

Barbara lives in a world where the fantastical and the real intertwine. She’s clearly struggling, locked in a world where the only friends she has are characters from her near obsessive interest in Dungeons and Dragons. And the other thing Barbara has is an interest in killing giants.

Kelly’s story is moving, harsh, and intensely funny at points. It’s one to go blind into in a way, though if you’re using or reccommending this professionally, I would suggest that you read it yourself in order to fully understand the thematic depth and elemental darkness present in this stunningly bold book.

Artistically it’s a vicious, intense ride. Coloured solely in black and white, starkly so at points, the dynamic Manga style allows for some stunning panels. Niimura’s splash pages are stunning, rarely not leaving you breathless. I had a great amount of love for his speech panels, bleeding storytelling with every stroke. There’s some stunning use of speech redactions in them, reinforcing the fact that this is Barbara’s story and some things are too hideous for her to be able to hear.

And now for that coda:

This book is Neil Gaiman meets Patrick Ness meets Molly from Runaways meets Ted Hughes. And if that does not make you pick up a copy, then I do not know what does.

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Angel & Faith : Daddy Issues – Christos Gage & Rebekah Isaacs w/ Chris Samnee

Angel & Faith: Daddy Issues by Christos Gage

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I adore Faith. I could (and do!) write her for days. She’s a gift, an utter gift of a character, and I’m so very much in love with this series.

Gage has Faith, he’s got her. Perfectly. Gage’s Faith is a hard won character, a woman who’s pushed through the darkness in her life, and living, every day, with a sort of permanent guilt at who she is and what she’s done. I think this is key to Faith, this survivors guilt and the hard, hard edge inside her that will not let others experience what she has. She’s a Saver, is Faith, more than a Slayer. Always was. Just took her a while to realise it, and the world a while longer.

So here, in this comic, she does her thing and she does it in the most glorious partnering with Angel. Now usually, Angel (“Aaaangel”) irritates me so much, and here he doesn’t. He’s purposeful, solid, and I believe in him and everything he does. This guy is a hero. Still trying to make up for the impact of his actions as Twilight, permanently caught in a redemption cycle, he’s a mirror to Faith.

The two of them work through a series of adventures (mishaps/dreams/pain filled relivings) involving one of the most unnerving demons ever, and one of the most perfectly unnerving vampires ever. I won’t spoil it. But I will spoil the little, wondrous spark you get inside of you at witnessing the splash page of his/her/its arrival.

The other lovely thing about this is that we have somebody who can draw these characters and draw them well. Isaacs is perceptive and graceful with her sense of movement throughout the panels, allowing the beats to happen when they need to happen and yet giving a sense of vital action to the entire piece. Faith and Angel have always been hard characters to draw, the former sliding occasionally into pastiche whilst the latter shifts into blandness. That doesn’t happen here. Isaacs catches the eyes, and that’s where it all happens. Not in the fists, or the kicks, or in the perfect perfect hair. These two are about their eyes. Always have been.

This is great, great stuff. This is the comic you come to when you’re over self-referential navel gazing. This is the comic you come to when you need a little Faith.

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Avengers vs X-Men : Brian Michael Bendis

Avengers vs. X-Men by Brian Michael Bendis

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Whilst doing my ritual X-Men and Avengers “Who’s Alive? Who’s Dead” Game proved somewhat easier in this book (basically everybody’s everything!), I remain somewhat disappointed at the final product.

The Phoenix is back. And I properly love the Phoenix and have done ever since the glory of the Claremont days. I even put up with the slightly rubbish moments the Phoenix had in Ultimate X-Men, just so I could get more of this ‘character’ that fascinated me. This time, she’s headed straight for Hope Summers as a host. Because of this, to go all Harry Hill, it’s one big fight in Marvel-land. The X-Men won’t let the Avengers take Hope, and the Avengers won’t let the X-Men keep Hope.

And the tragedy is that ‘fight’ pretty much sums this entire book. The level of actual character development remained minimal and in some cases, felt distinctly retrograde. Cyclops, so intriguing to me in Utopia, became so very flat and dull. He’s a character who borders on this at the best of times, and I didn’t connect with him in the slightest. Problem was that I also had a similar reaction to Captain America, leader of the other side – and when you’re struggling to empathise with two of your main characters, you’ve got a problem as a reader.

Artistically and structurally, it felt bizarrely balanced. There were moments which were superb, and others which felt like they were just rote panels on rote pages. Every now and then the artwork seemed to switch off simply to draw several Hulk Smash-esque panels that felt like they had very little to do with the story as a whole.

Hope is a character I find massively exciting. I was intensely disappointed in how she was used here and particularly annoyed with the ending involving her and one other mutant – both used in a fairly deus ex machina method.

Avengers vs X-Men is a comic that is nowhere near as good as it could be, and that’s a disservice to characters of this quality

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The Walking Dead (Volume One – Days Gone By) : Robert Kirkman & Tony Moor

The Walking Dead, Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye by Robert Kirkman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I came to this series after getting hooked on the TV adaptation. I’d heard of it, watched it fly off the shelves in my library, but never really connected with it. The stunning cinematography in the show and reading that a lot of this was directly from the comic book finally convinced me, and I’ve never looked back.

This is a series about growth, about survival, and about (ironically) living and it’s all set up so beautifully in this opening book. Kirkman writes in his introduction to the book about wanting his zombie series to question the fabric of society we live in, to explore how people deal with the extreme and how the extreme changes people. He makes no bones about the bigness of this series and that’s something rather brilliant.

Days Gone Bye then is the setup volume to the saga. It’s full of an almost effortless poetry that brings our key character into the centre of events. Rick Grimes. He’s the fulcrum of our series, our everyday cop forced to deal with events he can’t even initially begin to comprehend.

It’s a bloody, poignant, pained, vicious story with an emotional heart to it right from the first frames. Tony Moore’s art is very, very luscious. Coloured in greyscale, it’s a book that revels in shadows and light. There’s panels where you can see people breathe, their breath puffing out into the coldness of the night, and it’s moments like that are stunning. The difference between the dead and the living is explored in a thousand subtle ways and it’s when we get characters flirting with the edge of life, that’s when things get really interesting.

Moore allows space in his work which in turn allows the novel to really (no pun intended) breathe. The scenes of Rick in the hospital for example are superb. There’s so much in this, a dynamism to even the stillest of panels that makes this book epic.

Kirkman creates world here, and he does it very very well with what feels like an effortless glee. It’s the textual equivalent of an arthouse zombie movie done on a massive budget with an seemingly unlimited scope. It’s really, really unbelievable stuff.

I am not one for horror but I am one for this book. It’s a series that has, inevitably due to the subject matter, violent content but it’s not a series that *is* solely centred on this content. If you’re sharing this book with others, I would suggest that you read it first (there is some distinctly adult content) and make sure you critically assess the suitablity of it for your particular context.

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Maus : Art Spiegelman

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

With books like Maus, that have become epochal, it is sometimes hard to know where to begin. So this review shall begin at the beginning; at the start of things, where my knowledge of comics was that of the 90s X Men cartoon and my knowledge of World War Two was classroom bound and black and white.

Maus was the book that told me: This is comics. This is comics, tackling the awful, the hideous and the disturbing with a skill that could be rarely achieved in another art form. This is comics, drawing visual metaphors and pen strokes that combine to create an allusory whole. This is comics: where a construction of lines, shadows, and shape, can be greatness.

It’s always the little details that get to me in stories of great pain and tragedy. Sometimes numbers become too big. Sometimes they’re just numbers and we forget that they were people once. The great power of Spiegelman’s narrative is to not forget the people at the centre of this immense, horrific story. His characters, despite their outward forced similarities as dog – cat – mouse, are resolutely individuals. And that’s one of the utter strengths of Maus. Just by drawing and writing people as, well, people, Spiegelman skewers any ‘logic’ to classifying people by their racial identity. His truth comes from his quietly magisterial art and the animal masks sit uneasily on his characters.

Aesthetically and conceptually, it’s a tour-de-force. Spiegelman affixes each of his characters with an ‘animal’ identity drawn from their race. Americans are dogs, Jews are Mice, and Nazis are cats. Speigelman engages with his book, exploring his own sense of self and guilt to immense effect (his sessions with his psychiatrist are stunning).

It’s a book that was, and remains, a game-changing experience both on a personal and conceptual level. Maus is an unforgettable encounter.

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