Comics Review: Penultimate Quest
Let’s start with the element that surprised me the most: Penultimate Quest is absolutely not a comedy. Going in clean, with no more information than what’s on the front and back covers, I was expecting much more of a genre parody than actually appears. I could make a case for the book as satirical, but it’s not the ha-ha kind of satirical; while there’s genre deconstruction taking place, its expression is far more tragic than comic. This is not a “Mornin’ Ralph” “Mornin’ Sam” send-up of adventuring as a grind.
Show review: Batman: Caped Crusader
It’s not essential viewing, but I found it refreshingly entertaining and intriguing, although it does go dark at times.
Comics Review: Failure To Launch: A Tour of Ill-fated Futures
Failure To Launch, in its theme, structure, and overall approach – the promotional material uses the phrase “bite-sized ‘pop-history’ vignettes” – reminds me a lot of the Big Book Of series published by Paradox Press (an imprint of DC Comics), between 1994 and 2000.
Comics Review: Looking at the 2024 Lammy Award Finalists for Best LGBTQ+ Comics
Happy Pride Month, everyone! Thinking about Pride of course got me thinking about the Lambda Literary Awards, and more specifically its Best LGBTQ+ Comics category. One good thing to come out of the (cursed) (seemingly never-ending) (and yet here I go talking about it) (Stephen Geigen-Miller: part of the problem) SFFnal Awards Discourse is the reminder that there are many awards out there that are worthy of our attention – awards that, because of their mission, focus, and audience, can help bring works to our attention that we otherwise might have missed. For 35 years, the Lambda Literary Awards (the Lammys!) have honored excellence in LGBTQ+ writers and writing, as part of Lambda Literary’s overall mission. “Lambda Literary nurtures and advocates for LGBTQ writers, elevating the impact of their words to create community, preserve our legacies, and affirm the value of our stories and our lives.” ( – from the Lambda Literary website) It’s always a good time to lift up and center LGBTQ+ comics and LGBTQ+ creators, and this feels like an especially good time – and not, sadly, just because it’s Pride Month. But let’s not dwell on that, just now. Let’s celebrate works and creators that deserve to have their impact elevated, by taking a closer look at the 2024 Lammy Award finalists for Best LGBTQ+ Comics. A quick reminder that, as usual, these reviews contain spoilers. Also, I was shooting for capsule reviews, but there was so much to say about each of these graphic novels that they ended up being pretty big capsules. The books appear alphabetically by title, as they do on the Lambda Literary website, and aren’t ranked in any other way. A Guest in the House Emily Carroll Published by First Second A dark, genuinely unsettling small-town Canadian gothic – none of which describes my usual reading. Indeed, I’m still not sure if I exactly liked this new original graphic novel from acclaimed webcomic creator Emily Carroll – but I do know that I’m still thinking about it. Abby is a woman who’s drifting – not aimlessly, more like a detached observer – through life in a cottage-country Ontario town. Recently married to David, a dentist who just moved to town with his young daughter Crystal after the death of his first wife Sheila, Abby becomes convinced that their beautiful lakefront home is haunted by Sheila’s ghost – and that David may not be as innocent in her death as he says. But Abby’s grasp on reality is fluid at best and it’s unnervingly unclear whether she’s seeing ghosts and revelatory visions or the products of her own unquiet mind. One thing that is clear is that Abby is falling in obsessive love with her husband’s dead wife – or the person she imagines Sheila to have been. Increasingly unmoored, Abby and the story careen towards a bloody conclusion. Carroll contrasts Abby’s mundane, even banal everyday life, depicted in clear lines in black and white with light grey shading interspersed with pooled shadow, with sudden shocks of vivid color in Abby’s dreams, fantasies, and violent intrusive thoughts. It’s a brilliant use of the storytelling potential of color in comics, and it’s seductively appealing. It’s no wonder that Abby is drawn more and more to the pull of her internal life. This is, obviously, a deeply ambiguous story. Who is the guest in the house? Is it Sheila, haunting a home she never lived in? Is it Abby, who feels like a guest in Sheila’s life, and in her own life? Heck, I’m still only about 80% sure what happened at the end, given how consumed Abby is by either Sheila’s ghost or her own fractured relationship with reality. Genre readers (like me) will especially be primed to believe in Sheila’s ghost and David’s villainy, but the violent and obsessive intensity of Abby’s visions and dreams belie those comforting assumptions. This is an intense graphic novel, and an ambitious one. My ambivalence about it is entirely down to the ambiguous ending, which is a device that I usually dislike. But I can’t deny how apt, well-crafted, and effectively employed it is here. This is a powerful long-form debut for Emily Carroll, and I recommend it. Belle of the Ball Mari Costa Published by First Second Without a doubt the lightest work among the nominees, this YA high-school romance about a love triangle between a popular cheerleader, her jock girlfriend, and the nerdy girl with a crush, who the cheerleader manipulates into tutoring the jock in English to bring her grades up – only to have feelings between jock and nerd ensue – is sweet, frothy, and effervescent. Basically, it’s ginger ale as a graphic novel. But light doesn’t mean insubstantial. While it’s a confection, Belle of the Ball manages to avoid being slight by eschewing easy expectations. The cheerleader, Regina, is manipulative, yes – but she’s not a mean girl, she’s smart and sometimes kind, and mostly it’s just really important to her that everything in her life go to plan, including her girlfriend having good enough grades that they can both go to an Ivy League school. Chloe isn’t a dim jock; she excels at computer science but has trouble understanding the point of analyzing English literature on a deeper level – and just really wishes her girlfriend would relax. Hawkins, the shy, seemingly introverted nerd, has a crush on Regina, but she’s not creepy about it, and she has an expressive, exuberant, assertive, deeply femme side that she locked away to cope with high school (it’s not really a spoiler that she’s, in name and in role, the titular Belle). There are no direct SFFnal elements in the story, but it’s charmingly fandom-adjacent. Hawkins writes fan fiction, she and Chloe share a love of JRPGs, and there’s a very sweet – goofy, but adorable – scene between them at a Ren Faire with Hawkins dressed as an Elf Princess. It is, however, very strongly within the contemporary romance genre,
COMICS REVIEW: Wine Ghost Goes To Hell
That’s why I was thinking about theology, about examples of Hell as a state of mind. I even read C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce in the hopes that it would better inform this review… only to find that I had kind of the wrong impression about the reality and meaning of Hell in The Great Divorce, and by that time it was too late to read any Sartre or binge The Good Place.
COMICS REVIEW: The Displaced #1 and 2
Brisson’s writing and Casalanguida’s art work in tandem to effectively establish the terror and the confusion of Oshawa’s handful of survivors and their increasing isolation as they swiftly fall down the entire world’s memory hole.
