August Book Haul

This month's influx of books consists mainly of comics. At this point I've got so many series to keep up with that I need lists to do so, and that when I occasionally check them I find that there's a whole bunch to catch up on. It's not all comics though: There are also a few regular books I'd been wanting to add to my shelves.

First of those, which has been on my wishlist for just about forever, is Steven Brust's To Reign in Hell, which takes its cues from Paradise Lost's opening chapters to write the tale of Lucifer's rebellion in heaven.

I'm curious to see how Brust approaches the tale. He's mostly known for the Vlad Taltos series, a high fantasy/ science fiction mash-up. I've never been much interested in them but apparently Brust experiments with narrative style a lot, which is something that tends to be interesting but detracts from an easy reading experience. He jumps around from book to book, and as the series currently has like 15 books out about now I could see that being rather irritating. As To Reign in Hell is rather short and stand-alone to boot, I don't think this one will suffer from those issues.

Next is the latest Vastarien issue, 2.2, the summer 2019 edition, this time with colour artwork.

I don't know though, I don't really pick these up for the artwork, though I guess it does add something. Haven't begun reading yet, but I'll do so soon. These days are dark, and if the previous issues are anything to go buy, I'll find what I need in here.

The issues themselves, though still of stellar quality, have gone down a bit in page count, which is a bit sad. I'm uncertain if the magazine will survive much longer.

I hope it will, but there's only so much nihilistic fiction the average reader is willing to put up with, so I can't see Vastarien lasting indefinitely.

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Next up are two videogame tie-in comics.

The Flesh and Flame one is alright, although the writing quality is certainly less than the previous Witcher comics, but it's still an acceptable story, easy fare and easily digestible art.

 If you want a really good Witcher comic though, you'd best pick up either comic 1,2 or 3. Fox children, number 2, in particular was very good, even though a lot of it was re-purposed from the Season of Storms novel. I found it a lot better than its prose counterpart though. Season of Storms kind of just felt like a whole bunch of short stories thrown together. Which again reaffirms my opinion that Sapkowski might have some damn good ideas, but that he just unremittingly sucks at long-form fiction.

The previous Bloodborne comic was really good so even though I haven't yet read this one I'm sure it'll be satisfying. The Bloodborne comics really manage to capture the dark melancholy mood of the video game quite well. Recommend you pick those up. Especially if you like werewolves and the gothic genre. It isn't exactly that but it's pretty close to it, and I don't think there's anything like it out there. Just like the video game it's minimalist in its storytelling but lush in its art.

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The Mignola section.

I confess I have come to almost dislike Mignola's comics, because whenever he tends to have an idea or when an interesting character makes their appearance, even if it's in the middle of an ongoing story, he tends to just hand it over to someone else in order to make it stand alone. This detracts hugely from the comic of which they're spun off from. The BPRD series just became plain awful after a while. Escpecially with that Ragna Rok ending, which if you want that to make sense you better be willing to explore the side-paths.

Don't get me wrong. Individually the different series are pretty good, but all together they're a bit of a mess.

Some people love this though, this type of interconnected universe thing.

But in my opinion it is the very worst type of storytelling, especially in a monthly medium.

I'm absolutely not a fan, as I find them unwieldy, inelegant and just a damn pain to keep up with. It also doesn't help that when all of these different characters come together it can't help but become a different beast than when you're reading them alone. I have more problems with it, but as I'm just kind of hung up on the Mignola-verse here I'm going to let it go.

(And despite Mignola's protestations about how faithful the recent Hellboy movie was to the source material, and his exclamations about how much he liked it more than the Guillermo Del Toro movies, the general audience tends to agree with me; a bloated, incoherent mess. It might be cool, and awesome, but it's just not fun to watch it because you can barely keep up with it.)

Sorry about that, sometimes it just spills out of me.

Crimson Lotus is tied into the Helboy universe via the Lobster Johnson series, where she is a one-off villain who stands alongside the Black Flame to wreck the Lobster's day. That is honestly a very good story in what is without a doubt my favourite Hellboy property, but I could have done without this spin-off. That being said, The Crimson Lotus could be very good.

Joe Golem: The Drowing City, then, is the long-awaited adaptation of the Drowning City novel by Mignola and Christopher Golden. That novel was one of my favourite books that I read... the year before last, I think. This comic is the third in the Joe Golem comic series, and they've been pretty good, fleshing out Joe's past (a bit) and giving the reader some cool flashes of some truly fucked-up witches.

The series takes place in the same universe as Baltimore, and I'm hoping that when it continues past the Drowning City it won't crash and burn like Baltimore did. But the record doesn't give much hope for it.That's just my cynicism talking, but in my opinion the ending to the Baltimore saga ended up being a colossal failure.

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Nothing bad to say about these beauties though.

The best Ongoing Sci-fi comics of the day.

Seven to Eternity is Rick Remender's writing at his best, and the artwork is still fucking stellar.

Saga on the other hand, I haven't read yet since volume 5 or so, but I think that now would be a good time to catch up with it. Once upon a time dubbed "Star Wars for Perverts" it has long since started to outshine the luster of its by now quite tarnished forebear. I'm just hoping it'll still take a while before this piece of perfection is stripped apart by Hollywood.

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My Occult Vertigo shelves are starting to strain the more I try to make my collection complete.

Vertigo is still continuing its re-release of the Hellblazer series in their handsome trade paperbacks.

 We're up to 21 now, and I'm guessing we're going to hit 26 by the end. It's a bit of a shitty number to end on, but at least the story arcs are still damn good.

Volume 20 was a very impressive collection of stories, all of impeccable quality, and I'm hoping this one will continue that trend. The Laughing Magician story line has been hyped up, at least. It's a bit sad to think that soon I'll have read all of Hellblazer. 

And, with that in mind, I've begun to look at the series and characters that also play around in Constantine's sandbox. I had already read the Sandman saga, but I bizarrely never picked up Death's stand-alone stories.

This was swiftly remedied though, and though it comes across as a bit throw-away to me, I did find it enjoyable to read. I've never been too enamoured with the Death Endless character but I don't hate her either. She's just a bit too much of a manic Pixie dream-girl for me I guess. One of Gaiman's idiosyncrasies and I've never like the man or his writings too much. He's got skill and fascinating ideas, but for some reason, he just rubs me the wrong way. I'm guessing that the Ink-Stained Beard and his unabashed love for all thing Gaiman might have something to do with it. Damn you Beard!

Anyway, it was an okay comic, a little bit empty, but I do confess to laughing out loud at a certain part.

Death talks about Life is a piece written during the whole 'Aids-scare' in the eighties, and though I did find it a bit eye-rolling to read at first, I actually appreciated it at the end.

I'm re-reading Lucifer right now, because I never actually got around to reading the last volume, and Death is slated to make an appearance soon. 

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Next one is Gideon Falls, of which I still haven't read the first Trade Paperback but of which I thought I best purchase the next copy anyway.

Murders and cosmic horror, what's not to like?

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And then there is this one... hmmm, seems to be something wrong with the quality of the picture...

Strange, cant' seem to change its colouring...

Hmmm... ah well...

Here it is, the cloth hardback edition of Simon's Necronomicon!

I've read it now, and eh... I'm obviously not the target audience for this one. I don't believe in magic, really, but there's people who do, and who make claims, and who look on this book and the contents herein and who state that it has value, but... eh, I think if magic is real then it doesn't need to be so needlessly obtuse, and this one was written to be so.

Of course, the book also states that it is not for beginners, but that shouldn't really matter, right? Some things should be made clear. My main problem with the book is that it didn't distinguish enough between its actual information and its myth-building (and with that last I mean that the book pretends to sometimes be other than what it is. For instance the Author's name just being presented as Simon, which is just a way to make the work mysterious and appealing.) The Sumerian background was interesting but it was here that that myth-building problem comes into being. How much of this can you trust to be fact? Of these things, what can you build on?

Anyway, I just bought it for curiosity's sake so I don't need to write an essay on the damn thing.

There's sites out there that dissect the book and can give you background and explanations on the minutiae to be found herein. 

Warlock Asylum International News is perfect for this.

Alright, that's all from me.

I do apologize for the serious lack of content these days. Stuff happens sometimes, and then that leads to a lot of stuff not happening, if you catch my drift.

Lessons from Seven to Eternity

"There's the way things are and the way you want 'em to be.

One way you can navigate with compromise.

The other you have to throw your life at with no promise of even affecting the smallest change."

"The balance between doing what's right an' the overwhelmingly human sense of self preservation.

Justice is a mortal-made concept and every man's definition's different.

A billion souls, all knowing what's right for everyone else, until their justice conflicts with their interests."

"No one is a good person.

You tell yourself people are good for an artificial sense of order and security.

We are simply machines fueled by desire.

Fulfilled by any means.

Men like you and your father punish themselves by adhering to values that the world around them does not share.

-Striving for freedom and helping others ain't a punishment.

That road isn't really about helping others...

... it's about making yourself a hero.

But the pragmatist lives on the graves of those idealists.

-An ideal gives a man something to live for.

It also makes them delusional and easier for men like me to manipulate them.

Convince a man he's a righteous hero and he'll march to any war with fervour.

He knows he's good and right, thus his enemy must be wrong and evil."

Yeah. I only finished it yesterday after the two available volumes had been sitting on my shelves for months and months, and I'm feeling a bit stupid. This one is going to grow bigger with time. If you want a comparison: It's like a mix of the ideas behind the Darkness that Comes Before, Tokyo Ghost's more fantastical elements (read: it's definitely more fantasy than sci-fi), and something that is obviously out of its mind on drugs. There's just so much going on: The constantly widening and opening up magic system, the insanely varied environments, the ideas, the story, the pacing, it's all just so damn fast.

This is by the same team that created that other super good sci-fi comic; Fear Agent, so there's no reason why this should've taken so long to get a look, and honestly, I have no excuses. Either way though: it was totally worth it.

As you can see, Jerome Opena's art style is insanely intricate.

It's maintained throughout 9 issues except where James Harren takes over in issues 7 and 8 where different stories start to diverge. Anything other than the art style featured above can only be a step down, so don't hold that against him.

And the story, man, the story is a moody one. Though, I'll admit, it can be quite hard to follow.

We follow around Adam Osidis on a quest of vengeance and self-preservation after an attack on his father's farm where he and his family live. The Mud King, the so-called God of Whispers, has finally come to deal with the last of the magic-wielding Mosak warriors. That's issue one.

By the end of Issue three we finally understand what the title is about* and we've been constantly bombarded with some rather original world building.

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This story and especially the art style needs a large print version though. I do believe I'll be getting the deluxe version when it finally comes out, probably somewhere, some months after volume 3 comes out, if Image does its usual thing. Volume 2 ended on a very nice emotional cliffhanger so as Volume three is slated for release somewhere in December so I'll be getting that when it comes out too.

*although I'm guessing it's one of those titles that's going to have multiple meanings when the entirety of the telling has been done.

Hellshock opener

A respectful and compassionate attitude towards mental illness and the lost; a philosophy of empathy coupled with melancholy introspection, pathos and moody art: Damn. And we haven't even gotten to the mythological aspects yet.

Hellshock, you and I are already off to a great start.

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I mean... holy shit.

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Edit: Hmmm.

Hellshock actually has my least favourite way of dealing with supernatural events or mythology; Presenting events in such a way that it leaves an interpretation up to the reader. Where the reality of the situation is up to the main character's perception (or the narrator, who then is unreliable). But I do have to admit that in this way, rather cleverly, Hellshock also addresses, point-blank, ontology for a short bit, and which was interesting, but ultimately; as this is about mental illness, and as the 'supernatural' elements were kept so vague, once the story was done I never bought that there might have been anything going on outside of the main character's slipping mental stability, making this, of course, even more about personal reality vs larger reality.

Mental illness in a nutshell, really.

Also, the cross iconography present in the awesome comic covers and the back-blurb implying christian mythology is blatantly misrepresentative of what's actually here.

This is pretty much solely about mental illness, and no religious themes are actually present inside of the cover, other than in a loose, hypothetical kind of way.

Oh, and points deducted for the original negative downer ending (which isn't even that different from the added stuff but which is very flat-out dark) that suggests that for people with these problems there is no real way forward.

This actually strokes with my own views and mindset, but, man, I didn't really need that right now.

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The added ending to the comic ends in three different points, ostensibly separate from each other,  differentiated by a shift in colour and tone. Scenes revisited through a different mirror, viewed through a lens that bestows an idyllic quality to earlier grime, a point of view on earlier happenings coloured by a mind become unhinged.

What this really is, is Jae Lee revisiting his comic, years later, with an ending that is a little meta, and which because of that then becomes (in parts) applicable to a broader canvas, allowing the reader to easily insert oneself into the narrative, and a longer resolution that seems cautiously benign and even hopeful, rather than the sobering gut-punch of the original ending.

First there is love, found in a hypothetical other, and in the main story this is present via the medium of Daniel, in which I mean that he grants Christina (wait, is that her name?) the awareness of something 'higher', a destination if not an outright goal and purpose. The reality is up for interpretation here.

What isn't up for interpretation is an ending of insanity, where we (and Christina) have to face a continuing reality in which anchoring in that other has been lost. Given enough time, this always ends up happening. This eventually leads to suicide, overt or not. Self-destruction takes over and leads the way until it becomes the only remaining, dwindling point of focus. It becomes the idealization of death and suicide and the ending to all.

This element isn't present in the added parts, but insanity is still the name of the game here.

And then comes part three, which doesn't seem to stroke with the original ending, although it doesn't contradict it so much as that it ignores it to give the reader a half-assed guideline to keep moving.

I say it's half-assed, not because it's bad advice, as really, it's the only thing one can do under these extreme conditions, but because it's presented sloppily and, where before things were presented in a broader manner, here it seems as if Jae Lee made his narration too specific to the point where things were cancelling each other out, where one type of advice doesn't lend itself to every type of mental illness. Mine's not yours, I'm saying, and where for me Hellshock's run up to this point had been perfect, here I found myself at a disconnect. It's a little unfortunate.

But still. A very good, interesting comic.

Favourite Comics: Clive Barker's Next Testament

In the desert, a man is running.

He runs blindfolded, acting on a dream, taking it on faith.

And his faith is rewarded...

... in a way.

Julian Demond unearths something that should have been left hidden, and breaking it open...

... releases something that was locked away...

...locked away for a reason.

It is called Wick...

... and it is God Himself,

freed from an imprisonment that has lasted for thousands of years.

The Creator at last stands revealed....

...beautiful, childish, omnipotent and...

... murderous.

The above is all from issue 1 of the 12 issue series. Forgive me if I went overboard on the pictures but it is quite the set-up and I wanted to convey that; this isn't a throw-away comic.

 It might be just another horror comic to the audience at large, but for me, as I already made clear in the Road of Faith posts,

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Which are three posts that are very personal, and centered around my faith, and on how it shaped me and how, because of it, I now have an occasional predilection for stories that are biblically coloured.

It also goes off on a long ramble on some of my theories for how Bakker's The Second Apocalypse would play out (and I still haven't read either the Great Ordeal or The Unholy Consult as of 31/01/2018, this part will be edited when I finally do)

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 anything that marries Biblical mythology with violence and supernatural overtones becomes very, very interesting, and I will seek out those tales like a dog sniffing for treats if the mood takes me.

Barker's Next Testament then, is perfect for me:

Insanely violent, horrible, blasphemous, beautiful and fascinating, it tells of God returning to Earth and proving to be an omnipotent, sociopathic sadist, giving an intriguingly plausible explanation for the 2000 year gap of divine silence since the death of Christ, while also shedding light on the contradiction between the bloodthirsty God of the Old Testament and the forgiving one of the new.

There's a quality and some genuine heart here, in both Haemi Jang's Art and Mark Miller's storytelling. The heart lies primarily in the Elspeth and Tristan storyline, who are important to the plot and its resolution, but who are so upstaged by Wick at every turn that it becomes simply uninteresting to either grant them pictures or to talk about them.

Three more pictures after the jump which do spoil issue 2, which I wanted to show you anyway because it's just such a perfect panel.

Small World

Though I've been browsing I haven't yet bought a copy of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Mostly that's because I told myself I shouldn't buy any more books until at least February.
But I still had a hankering to read something in that vein, but not a single detective or crime novel on my To-Be-Read shelves. Never really read much (or anything) in that vein. So instead I went to my unread comics section and picked up Fatale, thinking that this one looked like it might scratch that itch.

I originally picked Fatale up because it was described as a lengthy comic with Lovecraftian horror and an original spin on the Femme Fatale trope. I was in the mood for some good, epic horror at the time so this looked like it would be well suited for the job.

I read through book 1 in a few sittings. It was a lot sadder than I was expecting, but there is a lot of engaging mystery, some violence and the art style is aesthetically pleasing. The horror is there too and it is pretty much what I wanted. I'm curious to see how book 2 will wrap things up.

But here's the reason for this little post.

I tend to avoid reading the introductions first before plunging in these things, as you never can tell how much is going to be given away. So upon completion of the 2 stories in the book, and before reading the essays at the end of the collection, I doubled back to read the introduction.

Halfway through I was struck by how this was written with such an obvious level of thought and passion behind it and I looked at who wrote it.

Heh.

Small World.

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"I see these... coincidences..."