Silver - Stephan Franck

Silver - Stephan Franck

1. Of Treasures and Thieves, Book 1: James Finnegan, con man and master thief, finds he and his gang are out of luck when after a daring escape, he loses the key to their loot.  Desperate, he looks through the old journals of Jonathan Harker and learns two unbelievable things.  First, there exists a massive silver hoard called the silver dragon, worth millions.  And second, vampires exist and this hoard is in the possession of Drakh-Kahn, king of the vampires.  With the help of a sword-wielding Van Helsing granddaughter, a future-telling child, and an old ham actor, Finnegan goes for the big score, undead blood rituals and monsters be damned.  This is an exciting and fun adventure, with writing that evokes Brian Azzarello and black and white art that evokes Sin City.  Franck pays proper homage to Stoker's work, while letting Finnegan be a modern, devil-may-care hero.  This collection has six issues, stopping at a cliffhanger just as the long con gets rolling.  [4]

Plunge - Joe Hill

Plunge - Joe Hill

A small salvage crew and a marine biologist are hired by an oil company to investigate why a 46-year-old wreck off Alaska has recently begun sending a distress call.  They find the crew, all right, but they aren't alive any more.  The problem is, they aren't quite dead, either.  The beings animating the former crew need the salvage crew to do something for them, and they offer trade, or violence.  The problem is, what these beings want could result in a something very, very bad.  This is a well-written, creepy story with an eerie atmosphere, a high body count, and a few clever twists.  It's a sort of homage to The Thing, mixed with a touch of Alien.  [4]

Top 10 - Alan Moore

Top Ten Compendium - Alan Moore, Paul Di Filippo, Zander Cannon

This weighty tome contains Top 10 #1-12, Smax, Beyond the Furthest Precinct, Season Two, and a couple of specials.  It tells of the professional and personal lives of a super-powered police squad in a city where everyone is super-powered (except the Smax series, which is an excursion to Smax's home dimension of elves, trolls, and dragons).  At first the conceit seems pretty labored, but in Moore's capable hands it develops into a chaotic but human story that manages to be over the top, silly, witty, winking, and even poignant at times.  There are references to and cameos of every fictional character you can think of, from Captain Haddock and Pogo to Marvel characters and creators.  The writing wanes a bit in the later series, not written by Moore, even undoing some of Moore's denouement, which grated on me more than it should have.  [4]

Motherlover - Lindsay Ishihiro

Motherlover - Lindsay Ishihiro

This bafflingly-poorly titled graphic novel tells of the friendship between Imogen, an awkward, hesitant mother of four whose husband keeps her firmly in her stay-at-home-mom identity, and Alex, a lesbian single mom of one daughter who's returned to her home town after the death of her strict parents.  Together, they bond over a shock to Imogen's marriage and Alex's own hangups.  Friendship turns to love as they realize they have come to need each other.  This is a well-crafted story, with fully fleshed-out characters and a lack of trite, quick resolutions.  The need to work on relationships and develop trust in all relationships is realistically portrayed.   The art is colorful and vibrant.  [4]

 

Night Fever - Ed Brubaker

Night Fever - Ed Brubaker

A disaffected book editor gets insomnia while at a convention in Paris.  He wanders into an underground masked ball for super-rich bored people, taking the identity of someone on the guest list.  This leads him into a dark world of drugs and murder.  Jonathan is not a hard boiled noir character, but an office guy who gets drawn into chaos and violence and finds he likes it, until it turns out he's the patsy.  This isn't Brubaker's finest work — it's not as intricately plotted as Criminal, and there are some odd plot points that don't really go anywhere (like Jonathan finding his own dream in a manuscript), but it's a fun read.  [3.5]

Space Dumplins - Craig Thompson

Space Dumplins - Craig Thompson

Craig Thompson is mostly known for Blankets, which I haven't read.  This one is about a girl named Violet who lives aboard a garbage-hauling spaceship with her father, a "lumberjack" (in this case hauling and refining space-whale excrement) and her mother, a fashion designer's assistant. When her father's deep-space fishing vessel disappears amid a crisis of — sigh — whale diarrhea, Violet sets off on a rescue mission with a fearful, erudite chicken and a small but exuberant orange alien.  The art is obsessively detailed: every panel is packed full of bizarre creatures, elaborate machinery, and throwaway visual jokes.  The pages burst with movement, and despite the density of detail, the storytelling is remarkably clear.  The emotional core is somewhat less successful. Thompson probably means the story to be about family, grief, responsibility, and growing up, but it's also a whirlwind of episodic adventures from a child's point of view, with childish physical combat being the deciding factor in many cases.  There are several comments about how the elite and the rich screw over the working class, and some examples of private school bullying, points which all land without being preachy.  Beneath the eccentric creatures, cosmic junkyards, and gleeful absurdity lies a charming adventure with genuine heart.  [3.5]

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]