Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees - Patrick Horvath

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees - Patrick Horvath

Sam Strong, an anthropomorphic bear and the owner of a hardware store in the tiny town of Woodbrook, has a secret.  Every now and then, she goes to the city to kill strangers.  Just to take the edge off, you know?  But she really does love her town.  So when someone else starts committing grisly (ha ha!) murders in Woodbrook, the usually serene community is thrown into chaos — and Sam needs to find the killer before the police start looking too closely at her own movements.  This is a pretty standard thriller plot with few surprises in the endgame.  It stands out in that the protagonist is also a serial killer, and the "talking animal" setting adds a novel, ironically cute layer to it.  Horvath’s illustrations reinforce this tone beautifully. His thin lines and warm, gentle colors evoke children's books and Sunday funnies, while his real strength lies in facial expressions: the animals' placid smiles, flickers of fear, and moments of barely concealed menace carry much of the emotional weight.  [4]

Shortcomings - Adrien Tomine

Shortcomings - Adrien Tomine

A black and white slice of life graphic novel set in the Bay Area.  It follows Ben Tanaka, a movie-theater manager, drifting apart from his girlfriend, Miko, who is involved in Asian-American organizations and art.  She suspects him of fetishizing blonde white girls.  He is indifferent to her flirtatious come-ons and spends his days looking at DVDs and venting to his only friend, Alice Kim, a sharp, socially confident lesbian who plays the field and occasionally punctures his self-image.  When Miko takes an internship in New York City for four months, Ben has no intention of accompanying her, and their already strained relationship threatens to break.  Tomine tells this story with his trademark minimalist precision: spare lines, controlled pacing, and a cool observational tone that lends the book a strong sense of realism.  But since Tanaka is such an unpleasant character — he is in fact all that his girlfriend accuses him of, and more, yet reacts to her suspicions, and Kim's mild criticisms, with outright hostility — I finished the story with antipathy and a shrug, not admiration.  [3]

The Mystery Play - Grant Morrison

The Mystery Play - Grant Morrison

In a small English village of Townely, a revival of a medieval mystery play is being put on, when suddenly the man playing God is murdered just offstage.  Enter Sergeant Frank Carpenter, a bearded, taciturn detective, coming to solve the murder in a rather peculiar way: "I don't want to examine the smashed pieces of an event, you see what I mean?  Fragments are no good to me.  I want to see it whole, in relation to everything around it."  Carpenter uncovers some rather unsavory practices in the local politician, and a reverend who lost his faith and didn't get along with the deceased very much, but none of it adds up to anything.  Then a reporter uncovers a macabre secret about Carpenter,  and things start to get weird.  Carpenter is haunted by his past and every clue he finds.  I didn't really engage with this one much, despite Morrison's erudition and the interesting twists.  I liked his clever coat motif and the mob frenzy at the end, but I'm not wholly onboard with Morrison's ideas that we're all part of a collective organism or story, and the individual pieces don't matter as much.  And the symbolism is just so heavy handed. I mean, his name is Carpenter? and he gets a wound on his hand?  "The house is empty"?  It's all a bit on the nose.  This book has some interesting themes and exciting moments, but ultimately I found it just a collection of ideas rather than a complete work.  [3.5]

Hakim's Odyssey - Fabien Toulmé

Hakim's Odyssey - Fabien Toulmé

1. Book One: From Syria to Turkey - With simple, two-toned line drawings, Toulmé tells the story of Hakim, a young Syrian who owns a gardening store in Damascus.  After Assad comes to power, there are protests that are put down with brutal violence.  Hakim is picked up by the state police for helping some protesters. After being interrogated and tortured, he is released, but decides he must flee his business, family, and country.  Moving from Jordan to Antalya, Turkey, he discovers that life as a refugee consist of low wages, suspicion, and anger from the locals.  In Antalya, he marries a fellow refugee, then leaves with her family for Istanbul, where the book ends.  Especially given the strongman tactics of the American wanna-be king in the 2020s, this is an important, chillingly relevant, and upsetting story.

 

Morning Glories - Nick Spencer

Morning Glories - Nick Spencer

Volume One -  The Breakfast Club, or maybe "Gossip Girl," meets Cthulhu.  The story opens in a prestigious boarding school, Morning Glory Academy, where six academically gifted but troubled teens arrive, and very quickly things seem eerie and off  The six characters find they all share the same birthday, and the teachers are adept at evading questions. Spencer leans into secrets, hidden agendas, and "something is very wrong here" energy.  The kids' cell phones lose signal, their parents claim not to remember their very existence, and the sinister teachers seem to have planned a series of deathtraps for the teens unless they toe the line.  However, I thought it was ultimately unsatisfying.  Spencer stirs a lot into the pot early on, including a set of murdered parents, with mysteries and questions building without immediate payoff.  I also found the characters thin and overly stereotyped, while the writing was of the self-conscious, quippy kind (think "Gilmore Girls" meets "West Wing") in a rapid-fire babble that doesn't match how anyone, let alone teens, talk.  "Our little suicide girl is your carrot on a stick, and they know it."  "This is Guantanamo Bay for the statutory set."  "Or we wave the white blouse and beg for clemency before these psychos get all Clockwork Orange-y with us."  Lines like that might dazzle in a writer's room, but no panicked teenager would ever say them. Joe Eisma's art is crisp and detailed, but I found it also glossy and flat, with little dynamism or depth, in that way matching the writing.  By the "shocking twist" on the final splash page, I found myself less intrigued than indifferent. The mystery may run deep, but the characters and dialogue never made me care enough to follow it further.  [2.5] 

The Bat-Man: First Knight - Dan Jurgens

The Bat-Man: First Knight - Dan Jurgens

Set in 1939, this story drops us back into Batman's formative nights, when he still had a hyphen, wore purple gloves, and relied on a handful of crude gadgets, a big red roadster, and raw nerve. There's no Alfred, no Robin, just a grim vigilante stalking Gotham's alleys as the effects of the Great Depression lingers and the shadow of global war creeps closer.  A mysterious zealot called the Voice seeks to turn Gotham into an isolationist fortress, commanding an army of brutish, inarticulate "monster men"—reanimated corpses of recently killed men. With moral counsel from a sympathetic rabbi and some unexpected tenderness from a Hollywood starlet, the Bat-Man, still dismissed by most as a myth or a lunatic, fights to stop the Voice before the city is consumed by his madness.  It's a stylish throwback with pulp grit and surprising heart.  [4.5]

 

Dark Night: A True Batman Story - Paul Dini

Dark Night: A True Batman Story - Paul Dini

Dini, a writer for Batman and Animaniacs, is brutally beaten and mugged, and uses his imagination to get through a difficult psychological healing process.  The determination and heroism of Batman in particular convinces him not to sink permanently into despair.  This is an honest, courageous tale, brought to life brilliantly by Eduardo Risso's art.  It's moving and troubling but at times funny and ultimately optimistic.  A real masterpiece.  [4.5]

Boy Wonder - Juni Ba

Boy Wonder - Juni Ba

Writer and artist Ba tells the story of Damian Wayne, the outsider whose brutal outlook seems to prevent him from fully joining the royal Bat-family: the king and his three adopted sons, brave and rageful and clever in turns.   Infusing the story of the Robins with Asian legend vibes, focusing on the confusion and need for acceptance of the skilled but antisocial Damian, and having one oddly unafraid hostage tell it like a fable to a confused robber, Ba has created an intriguing, quirky, and visually dynamic tale that stands out from the glut of Bat-books.  [4]

Spider-Woman - Steve Foxe

Spider-Woman (2024) - Steve Foxe

Gang War - Jessica Drew, just returned from being erased from the web of existence, searches for her lost baby with the help of the new Madame Web, Julia Carpenter.  But Diamondback and Hydra keep taunting her; they know something she doesn't, and it's not good news.  Hoping to clear her head, she goes to San Francisco, where she goes up against Hydra again, although a new group of young super-heroes seem to be defending the legal face of Hydra.  But there's more to these new heroes than meets the eye, and their suspicious past might have something to do with Drew's son.  This is very smart, fast-faced, fun super-hero action.  Foxe hits all the right notes, with humor, action, and even a little romance.  He uses a lot of history in his story, but makes it clear enough for a first-timer.  Brilliant stuff.  [4.5]

The Unwritten - Mike Carey

The Unwritten - Mike Carey

1. Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity - Tom Taylor is a minor and reluctant celebrity because his father wrote a series of wildly popular boy-wizard novels starring Tommy Taylor, a character suspiciously similar to his son. When evidence emerges suggesting Tom's own past may be a fabrication, he finds himself caught up in a conspiracy involving secret organizations, literary history, and the unsettling possibility that stories may have more power than anyone realizes. Before Tom can get to the bottom of any of his questions, he is framed for a massacre at his father's old house in Switzerland and arrested.  As a palate cleanser, this volume ends with a story about Kipling dealing with the powers that be behind stories.  [4]-two
2. Inside Man - In prison in France, Tom finds himself rooming with an embedded reporter.  With the help of Lizzie, the woman who first mentioned his possibly fabricated past, Tom starts to see that he has the power to make stories real.  A sinister power that once worked with Tom's father wants him dead, and in the midst of another massacre the three make their escape to a grim and tragic world, one that never existed.  Carey artfully alternates Tom's prison story with that of the prison governor, who has his own problems with the unexpected power of story.  Meanwhile, a brand new Tommy Taylor book is about to come out, despite the fact that Wilson Taylor has been missing, presumed dead, for years.  In one of the best episodes of the entire run, the interstitial story in this one is about a foul-mouthed rabbit who longs to escape his seemingly idyllic funny-animal world that is sinister underneath the surface.  [4]-two
3. Dead Man's Knock - The new Tommy Taylor novel is finally released, but it turns out to be a counterfeit written by Mr. Callander's cabal in an effort to discredit the story and undermine Tom. The real Wilson Taylor reappears to offer cryptic guidance, but the deadly Pullman, whose touch causes people to disintegrate, is never far behind.  Lizzie Hexam has a crisis of confidence, and in one of the cleverest chapters yet, Carey spins a "choose your own adventure"-style episode hinting at her tragic origins and how she became Wilson's willing tool.  Once again, Carey masterfully blends myth, literary geography, and the fictional Tommy Taylor saga with Tom's increasingly desperate flight for survival, producing a story that is both intellectually playful and genuinely suspenseful.  [4.5]-two
4. Leviathan - Every writer needs to grapple with his own white whale, and as Tom inadvertently becomes a character in Moby-Dick on his own, Carey cleverly merges and layers several whales from literature.  When Tom is inside a whale with Sindbad, Baron Munchausen, Pinocchio, Job, and possibly James Bartley, all figures who found themselves in similar predicaments.  Tom takes control of the story, but meanwhile back in the real world, the puppet master Rausch has captured Lizzie and Savoy, whose illness turns out to be story-related.  And the volume ends with an interstitial scene, in which the talking rabbit who was once the robber Pauly takes command of a troop of talking animals on a quest so blackly comic and childhood-trampling that it should come with a warning for the faint of heart.  [4.5]-two
5. On To Genesis - After putting his imprint on the Great American Novel, Carey turns to that inevitable American art, comic books.  Escaping from the whale, Tom joins his friends in a heist of the late Wilson Taylor's goods, specifically his journal.  It seems that years ago, Wilson Taylor, working for Pullman at the time, was tasked with stopping the nascent Tinker comic book. In true noir fashion, though, he falls for the dame who does the strip, and strings Pullman along.  Tom uncovers this story and discovers more family secrets; meanwhile, the cabal goes scorched earth on anyone in Tom's past.  [4]-two

Walking Dead - Robert Kirkman

Good solid horror storytelling with lots of raw human emotion, but unrelentingly bleak.  Like getting repeatedly hit in the gut.  Makes you feel masochistic for reading.  Begs to be devoured, but the unceasing roller coaster of depression-rage-epiphany-hope-depression gets old after a while.

• Compendium Two - collects issues #49-96.  This tome begins with Rick and Carl alone again, everyone having scattered.  Gradually, they find Michonne, Maggie, Glenn, and Dale.  They meet up with the military man Abraham and the scientist Eugene.  They try to make a life on a farm until it gets overrun.  Carl gets shot, Morgan comes back, and they are recruited into a small town run by a pleasant but ineffective ex-politician leader called Douglas.  Rick becomes constable there, but his paranoia and rage cause a lot of waves.  Then they are approached by a man who leads them to a group of two hundred peaceable citizens, but they're under the thumb of a killer named Negan...
• Compendium Three - collects issues #97-144.   Most of this tome covers the bloody war with Negan and his Saviors.  Rick connects with two other large groups, the Kingdom and the Hilltop, and forms a still-uneasy alliance against Negan.  And although many in his camp are ready to turn on him for his penchant for exercising droit du seigneur and branding people, Negan still has some surprises in store.  I like the way Kirkman makes Negan a fully-fleshed character who has his own moral standards and isn't just a mindless brutal thug.  Once the war is over, the narrative jumps forward in time, and the three communities have built a civilization with boats, barter, stores, and even a fair.  But just when things are going great, they meet the Whisperers...
• Compendium Four - collects issues # #145 through #193.  There's a war with the Whsiperers, with many losses.  But Rick is determined not to lose his precious civilization.  Just when they start rebuilding, they encounter a new, advanced, and suspiciously vibrant community called the Commonwealth.  It seems like paradise, but Rick and Michonne soon see the flaws in the place and wonder if they should take over.  Then, when you least expect it, there's a time jump, and the series ends.

Power Pack: Outlawed - Ryan North

Power Pack: Outlawed (2020) - Ryan North

Five issues.  The Power siblings are told by the police that they, as crime-fighting minors, must have an adult mentor in order to operate (a silly, ineffective, and unenforceable law, but hey, comics), so they sign on with the implausibly good Agent Aether, who urges the kids to use tier powers to provide free electricity to under-served communities... but of course he turns out to have ulterior motives, and isn't who he claims to be.  With a little help from a special guest star (the mandatory one, bub), they try to get some of their own back from this mendacious mentee.  It's a little heavy on the North-brand silliness, but it's got heart and I enjoy when writers wink and hand-wave away some of comics' more over-the-top tropes anyway.  [4]

Monica - Daniel Clowes

Monica - Daniel Clowes

A genre-blurring graphic novel that follows Monica, a woman trying to piece together her fragmented past and the mysterious disappearance of her mother, Penny, a counterculture figure who abandoned her during childhood.  The story unfolds across a series of interconnected chapters, each adopting a different genre—from war comics and horror to science fiction and supernatural noir—mirroring Monica's quest for identity and truth.  Along the way, she confronts conspiracy theories, strange cults, and elusive truths, from bizarre to banal, about family, love, and mortality.  I love the meticulously crafted art, each chapter rendered in a style that both honors and critiques the comic traditions it draws from.  [4]