Cautiously interested still. There’s some manga staples here I dislike, like a pervy teacher, of course there’s a teacher who says stuff like after she graduates they can be friends with benefits :\ gross. The actual plot is quite slow: aliens came to earth and destroyed a few buildings and some people died but the attack halted.

That was three years ago. Most of the time it’s two girl best friends who just… hang out, living with the spectre of a giant floating saucer and it’s little minion saucers floating around Tokyo. People have adapted to this new state of affairs, and young people, like the girls, hate the normalcy of it. They’d rather the Penny drop and have war or be wiped out, than the tension of not knowing if there will even be a future, and if working hard will be something worth putting energy and money into. It’s a fairly pat allegory for seemingly disaffected you and the eco disaster we are marching towards, though this is far more literal.

I’d read another volume, I think. It’s a lot more low-key than I expected. The artwork is great and the ending was ominous and possibly a cliffhanger, depending how it’s interpreted? Slightly baffling? Confused? Intrigued? I am these things.

I think it would take another pass to get all the nuances of the plot, since it’s got dual timelines and sometimes it seems the outcomes are completely surrealistic, or multiple outcomes are possible? I’m not positive. Either way, it was effective at raising the questions through the narrative. It’s unsettling and disturbing at parts through a primarily grounded story about kids growing up with trauma and the cycle affecting the main cast of characters.

King comes along and takes another esoteric character I had never heard of and manages to make a pretty subversive and transgressive narrative. At the start, we have Adam Strange’s return to earth and the publication of a fictional book, about the account of the war on Rann, where he met his wife, had a daughter, and repelled an alien invasion. He’s now a celebrity, and the limelight is ever so bright.

When an accusation from a fanatic about How he won the war on Rann raises questions about his account, Mr Terrific (another esoteric hero I’d never heard of) is commissioned to dig up the truth; with the notion from Strange endorsing this, ostensibly, to have him exonerated. But things get far more twisty. There’s a dual narrative of past and present, the past possibly being the actual fictional book that was printed, but I’m not sure that was ever expressly said - it just seems initiative based on what unfolds.

As the truth is being dug up an alien invasion is also coming for earth, and we slowly learn who this Adam Strange is, who is leading the force against the invasion, as he did on Rann.

What makes this very nearly perfect is how it transgresses from the comics to the real world immediately. It’s about fiction itself. The veracity of memoir and the stories we tell ourselves being who we actually are, and then the commodification of that. Comics are absolutely a form of story that resonates with the morality tales of myths, which is why they’re so successful. But What is a hero in modern times in modern war? What is good and bad? Through the interrogation of Strange and his actions, as well as what happened to him, his subsequent trauma from the war, we end up with an allegory that’s able to explore a lot of questions while delivering a super hero comic that is actually new and interesting.

It is so hard to find compelling stories that aren’t just regurgitating their own past. Everything about this is interesting because it’s not really a story that would be compelling to read to most readers of super hero comics. It does have some similar beats and some action, but it’s also methodical and slow, as is King’s way. It pokes at nationalism in a way that very few comics do. They gesture at it rather than actually do it, typically. And it’s willing to subvert more expectations, particularly around the hero archetype. It’s absolutely a story for me, but maybe that’s because I’m very bored with typical super hero stories and I am steeped in the lore of comics as a format.

Through a series of monologues by Doris’s husband, Harold, we come to know their lives—which are generally quiet and small, yet filled with much joy and drama. The impetus is Doris goal of wanting to do well in a garden safari competition, and the subsequent chapters nicely dovetail from the ending of that into the next obstacle, as Doris tries to essentially be very well regarded by the women’s institute.

You won’t believe the places it goes nor how funny and full of verve this is! I couldn’t help but picture Maggie Smith’s character in Downton Abbey, only middle class and with a much smaller family. The personality is similar; she is full of interesting contradictions, making her a capital C character.

And, interestingly, it’s all the while from Harold’s perspective, so there are things the reader will likely know before our simple man, who just wants to eat food ideal for his dentures and watch some specific television shows, or else nip off to the pub with the lads. He has some insight into Doris, don’t get me wrong, and it’s very much a generational marriage. Sometimes it’s antagonistic but it’s always adoring, too. You’ll be with them through all manner of trials and tribulations, and all of them make sense for who they are and their age, while not being ageist about it one bit. I dare say it even breaths some humanity into the more conservative aspects to Doris, who is not even remotely a saint. But if she were, she wouldn’t be a Character.

If you’re looking for a character with instant recognizability but is against type, has a very cozy vibe, wholesome humour, and easy flow, stemming from a conversational authorial voice—this one is probably for you!

I experimented with this one, reading only one or two short stories a day, because of some advice I’d heard about consuming collections like that. While it did help my overall enjoyment of each, since I rate things by the expectations set by the book, it’s still pretty difficult for collections/anthologies to get higher than a 3 star rating for me, simply because some stories are more successful than others.

You can clearly see the themes Lispector was interested in and plenty of kernels of things that were used or expanded upon for her long form work. I’d probably have spotted even more, had I read more of them by now. But some stories included don’t feel like much of anything at all, too, conversely. So, like basically every collection it ends up being just fine, even with some that I really enjoyed immensely.

A more sci-fi than fantasy noir book that reminded me a lot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Everyone has karma cards controlled by a central institution and our main man is a P.I on the outs. More like a tolerant instrument when people need much more common blunt tools, like bruisers. When he’s hired to look into a death that’s been case closed, he spirals down a rabbit hole of uplifted animals, femme fatales, drugs with names like forgetall, that keep the rats—like him—in their cages.

It’s undeniably very odd. Another touchstone might be something from Jeff Noon’s Vurt. People subsist off their allowance of drugs that take away the pain of living in (futuristic) modernity. It’s a wild world. But it’s also very much grounded in noir tropes, presentation, and “payoff”. Always enjoyable, if you’re into that kind of thing, which I am.

While the plot does get slightly contrived, this story about resistance against outward and inward forces was really exceptional in every way. The visual design is outstanding and the dystopic, future Canada with a dash of gonzo Prophet style hits all the notes it attempts to. Probably, this is a four star book but I just loved it so dang much. Is there bouts of wild surrealism and fugue dreams that make the plot twists a bit unearned? yes, I think so. But because it is over the top and wild all of the time I was more than prepared to roll with it.

This is really fun; basically a non-stop action romp, in which stories can be incursions into our reality. That idea, when malignant, spreading to more people, forms more incursions, and so on. The main character ends up going from a bundling virginal doofus to a literal Percival (all in the first issue), who saves the day - following in the line of his family, all of whom were monster hunters. Think supernatural, but they hunt actual stories, so they need to play into the story or disrupt it, depending on what is actually going down.

Even internally, the logic doesn’t make sense, and the soft worldbuilding techniques don’t do it much favours. This has to be a very much, turn off your brain and go with it to have fun, kind of book. And that’s fine! I DID have fun reading it. There wasn’t ever a point where it subverted my expectations, and there’s basically never a down beat. There’s just threat after threat after threat, so there’s not that much character growth either.

The artwork is mostly great. Especially the colour palette; it’s a bit weird, maybe grim dark, tainted grail type stuff, but with bright colours that really pop off the page. The binding is excellent in this version as well. It’s unfortunate it’s not oversized too, that would have been really great. But it’s a good time and great value for money, if you can nab it on sale and you’re into the whole retelling of Arthurian legend paralleling modern day Brexit UK and monster hunting mashup.

I can see why this won the Governor General fiction prize. It’s solid. While no story blew me away completely, it was consistently good and depicted Inuit people humanely and sometimes daringly. Handling some pretty heavy subject matter and stereotypes, acknowledging them and then contextualizing them for a story away from the harmful tropes. All while giving them flaws.

Sometimes the author does not provide a western-centric view, in terms of morally correct, which I liked. One in particular made me think quite a bit before turning to the next story because it’s about two homeless people, I think in Edmonton, and there are certain negative associations that feel pretty diminutive, all because she panhandles and will do sex work in able to buy booze. To forget her past, she says. Which seems like she has trauma. But there are also two spirits, one of which is a grandfather of the man who is ostensibly trying to help the woman by trying to get her to get some food rather than booze with him. But he calls her wife and continually laughs at her when she talks about her ability to call an evil spirit that could really mess up his life. Maybe kill him. And so the grandfather and this spirit are in a kind of conflict and the the two homeless people are as well, of a kind, what with him being offered booze by her and to not go to the food place. It escalates fairly quickly. And at the end, I have to say, I was a bit shocked and it took me a while to unpack the nuances of everything and what the story seemed to be saying. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a short story like that.

The prose work is what I would call contemporary. It wasn’t descriptive writing and neither did it get in the way of the reading experience. Dialogue feels natural. Character work seems good. Wide range of stories with a wide range of conflicts. And like I said, no story that was outright bad and I skipped; a rare thing. So I consider this to be pretty solid. Better than I expected.

Content warning for pretty graphic, but brief, sexual assault. Misogyny, racism, missing indigenous women. This collection isn’t shy.