A mysterious tropical island, home to a strange fruit that tastes just like chicken when cooked, a governor with big plans, a partner with half a cybernetic face, murder, romance, a vampire on the rampage, even though there's no such thing as vampires and something to do with frogs. A hard-hitting thriller in a madly surreal world of mad food and mad food powers, hilariously funny and hilariously horrifying. Pure genius.

Year two of the Apocalypse: embrace the melodrama! War breaks out and one state falls to another, an alliance is made and the son of Death continues his education while the towering passion of his parents is rekindled, with foreshadowing. This volume includes a handy guide to the main political players, making a lot of subtext text, which is great for clarity, and a timeline that answers a few questions and poses a few more. There's a heck of a lot going on here, just enjoy the ride.

The sordid and spectacular soapy space opera continues! Hazel goes to kindergarten! In prison! With her grandmother and a terrorist who tried to kidnap her! Her parents search frantically for her from one end of the galaxy to another whil Prince Robot raises his son in the chivalric arts in exile and two reporters chase the story and run into a bounty hunter hunting for the dubious bounty of revenge! Enemies become unlikely friends and allies! Terrible things happen to nice people! Who become terrible enemies! or maybe they weren't very nice! Who can keep track? Anyway it's very much one thing after another, with hilarious bits and vertiginous suspense and Vaughan's writing is so clever and Staples' art is so great and whatta twist at the end.

Am I required to attempt to break down the plot of this? This doesn't have plot this has, I dunno, multiplots, living sentient narratives slugging it out on the pages and between the pages, it has a black hole hiding under the text distorting structure, it has secret chapters lying adjacent to the other chapters in meta-symbiotic relationships which basically means they're collected elsewhere and you're outta luck if they aren't handy. It's honestly hard to tell if bits of this are disjointed because of the mad flood of ideas from Morrison's brain or because of those missing chapters, probably both. I don't think this was designed to be a self-contained story with a beginning middle and end but that Morrison went with the fundamentally fragmented and incomplete nature of big mega-crossovers and wrote it as a river of stories in a moment of flash flood rushing past furiously, clogged with flotsam and jetsam and to read it is to swim or drown. Any other writer and this would be fanciful apologism, but with Morrison, you never know.

As far as I can tell, there's a plot by evil gods to take over the Earth by infecting and inhabiting human bodies, thereby concealing themselves from superhuman detection until it's too late. There's a murdered god and celestial Monitors watching over an orrery of creation being infected with the stories they're observing and a monster emerging and superhumans turned evil and Superman on a mission to Limbo and more superhumans from all over being collected to resist, prefiguring The Multiverse and trying to make coherent sense of it all is exhausting, it seems to consciously defy coherence, running on comic book physics and comic book narrative rules and comic book logic, distilled to their essence. Go with the flow, or find something a bit calmer to read. There is nothing remotely calm about any of this.

I was the hugest Star Wars fan when I was a kid, despite, or possibly because, I never saw the films until they had that big cinema rerelease in the eighties. I read the novelisations until they were falling apart and, when I could find them, I read the comics. The comics could be hard to find. I'm not so into Star Wars these days, though it remains fondly remembered, but Marvel put some top talent on the new comics when they acquired the license, and Gillen and Larocca on Vader is the most remarkable.

Set in the aftermath of the destruction of the Death Star, Vader's position as the Emperor's chief acolyte is precarious. Shut out, demoted and in danger of being replaced, Vader schemes and conspires and hires lackeys of his own, most notably being the evil-Indiana Jones-in-space Doctor Aphra and her sociopathic pair of oddly familiar bloodthirsty droid helpers. The Emperor expects no less of course.

Anyway, the whole thing is Vader at his formidable indomitable best but it's the scene near the end when Vader hears the name of the rebel pilot who destroyed the Star Wars that deserves to stand as his definitive character moment in any medium.

Probably one of the sharpest, most savage and on-the-nose comics out there at the moment, also the most firmly grounded - its horrors feel real and mundane, from a bus plunging off a mountain road to a pack of coyotes attracted by the smell of dead bodies to someone taking a drink downriver from a pair of rotting buffalo carcasses, and all the more unmanageable and difficult to overcome because of that. A mixed group of US students on a trip to remote village in South America to build homes and a school as part of an pre-freshman programme for Princeton. They're varying degrees of rich and pampered, but when their bus crashes far from help they have to become survivors. Nearly every decision, smart or stupid, makes things worse, and the presence of a large quantity of drugs on the bus and rumours of political unrest and bandidos in the hills suggests that many of their perils won't be just of the order of hungry animals and steep cliffs.

It's a brilliantly brutal thriller, initially cartoony and colourful, later dark and sinister and desperate. The bus crash is only going to be the start of their troubles. Congratulations De Campi and McNeil. You've brought genuinely sickening tensions and suspense to comics in a way I haven't seen before.

Science. Bad. Scientists. Worse. The Manhattan Project was the secret project to build the atom bomb. The Manhattan Projects were all the other projects hidden behind the atom bomb project to build weapons and space travel and fight secret wars with other bad scientists. It's all bonkers and full of terrible things and horrible people - Oppenheimer is really his evil psychotic twin who killed and ate the other Oppenheimer and has fractured into multiplying multiple personalities. The volume opens with an attack by Japanese Death Buddhists and Kamikaze Killing Machines and ends with the genocide of an alien species, so I guess it could go anywhere and everywhere from here doing terrible things as it goes. Just don't say you weren't warned.

One of the great ecological fables of our time, Nausicaa is a post-apocalyptic tale about the adventures of the princess of a tiny independent valley on the fringes of a poisonous jungle the periphery of a vast empire. A neighbouring state is attacked and destroyed by supposedly allied imperial forces searching for something, and that search also brings them to the Valley, where Nausicaa sees them off, but war is brewing and the Princess will soon find herself forced to serve under the treacherous and ruthless general Kushana, fourth daughter of the Emperor.

The lush and detailed imagery of the opening pages belies some clumsy story-telling - it was Miayazaki's fist attempt at writing and drawing a comic - but by the end of this volume the pacing of the action scenes become a wonder. The terrible epic majesty and horror of the gunship attack on the Imperial formation and the desperate flight thought the insect-filled jungle are breathtaking rushes of beauty and adrenaline. Meanwhile the strong moral heart of Nausicaa, with an inner core of rage, is sorely tested, and balanced by the more spiky and ethically dubious characters of the charismatic Kushana and her cynical and wily advisor, Kurotawa.

In the background the world of the Jungle of Corruption poisoning the air with miasma unfolds - a deadly place for humans but it has evolved to clean the soil of human pollution, though whether humans can survive in a cleaned world is unknown. War spreads and so does the jungle, humans heedlessly marching to their own destruction. it's a powerful and sobering vision, but also an epic and majestic one.

All appearances to the contrary so far, I have a very specific reading project in mind for this year: to abjure prose fiction in favour of non-fiction. There's a loophole there, obviously, for graphic novels, and, i hope, a few short stories here and there, but now i have the massive tomes of Absolute Sandman consumed, it should be primarily non-fiction, along with a few collections of myth and folklore for research, from here on out.

I'm so very bad at reading non-fiction. No matter how fascinated I am by a subject, no matter how well-written, my brain resists it the way I used to resist diving into the cold waters of the Atlantic on summer holidays. by the sea. So I'm going to spend most of the year retraining my brain and getting it used to the change in temperature. I may slacken a bot round September, we'll see how it goes.

Take this little book for example. A mere 163 pages, very well written, very insightful, and it took me four or five days to read the damn thing, and that wasn't because I was constantly fast in the pages of Morpheus. But I did it, a minor triumph. Perhaps some of the strength I gained from completing it can be put to use in her lessons about how to cultivate a writer's disposition and overcome a reluctance to write? We'll see. An excellent book, that addresses head on not craft or style but some suggested ways of, as the title says, becoming a writer. Its dated references don't detract from the sensible and level-headed and practical advice about the the cultivation of your own genius, so if you're having difficulty knuckling down this might be a useful, gentle, kick in the pants.

Anyway, wish me luck for the rest of my non-fiction reading project. I may need it.

It's my birthday, and if I want to lie around reading books all day, then that's my business. Still, I didn't expect to rip through a whole volume in one afternoon, but here we are. The terrible adventures of the Baudelaire children begins. Badly. The awful fire, the even awfuller Count Olaf and his terrible plot to steal their fortune. Well meaning adults who don't take the clever and perceptive children seriously. Bad luck and trouble following them everywhere they go. Wow, that was fast and funny and highly readable. The kids are great, the villain is monstrous and the rest of the cast are generally hapless or horrible, while the story moves with mordant wit and the grace of impending catastrophe.