All the slow-motion environmental catastrophes we're worried about happen, and a few more besides, all in a short, violent. globally devastating outbreak. Callum Israel is captain of the Kapital and founder of a direct-action environmentalist group called Ninth Wave. In the wake of the disaster the crew search for their missing sister ship The Massive and try to find a come to terms with the new world order, and find a way to carry on with their mission, if their ideals can survive the grim and chaotic reality, Callum in particular, hoping to leave behind a violent past, strives to keep Ninth Wave a pacifist movement even in the face of violent upheaval.

A slow-building epic of survival and reconstruction. It's not hard to imagine the world ending up like this after a decade or two (if we're very lucky) of global climate change) it's just been accelerated here (if we're lucky) for narrative effect. The Massive touches a massive raw nerve and covers the most massive and important theme of the modern world.

Tony Chu gets transferred to traffic duties, an abject humiliation that actually turns out pretty well from him - until he is violently kidnapped, tied to a chair, force-fed bits of dead baseball players, then beaten brutally some more until he starts to reveal their sex secrets. Also, his daughter has been kidnapped by his ex-partner.

Plenty to.... CHEW ON.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Yum.

Another fun, diverting adventure. Leia brings Dr Aphra to a secret rebel jail, holding the worst of thei Imperial captives. A mysterious stranger invades the jail and starts to kill the inmates - forcing Leia to fight to save Imperial scum. Meanwhile, Luke and Han bumble around having some bumbling adventures of their own. Leia is very much centre stage for all this, teaming up with Han's not-wife Sana and the twisted Dr Aphra. There follows a great deal of ethical debate and sheer snark.

This took me a lot longer to get through than Tom Holland's Rubicon, and the differences are salutary. The latter was a driving narrative dealing with tumultuous events and larger-than-life characters who actually bestrode the historical stage. SQPR is a far more thoughtful, analytical survey of Roman history from its dim and distant origins to the final flourish of the Augustan emperors. Mary Beard digs into the material, highlighting not only the gaps in the record, but the necessity of reading what is there with a skeptical eye. The relationship between the emperor, the senate and the people is central to her approach, how the idea of citizenship developed, how the idea of Rome was created and backdated. In the latter chapters in particular she makes an effort to appraise some sense of everyday life in various levels of Roman society and as usual in these things one is left with sense of how little is known. Still, for all that a great deal is known - through writings and tombs and graffiti and records and archaeological remains, and though not exhaustive, Beard introduces us to a great deal of it.

Well written, discursive, erudite and witty.

I remember this being such a massive bestseller when I was a bookseller, and it inspired lots of scholarly but little books popluarising odd scientific and historic stories that was rather wonderful to behold. Longitude itself is a wonderfully succinct, heartfelt account of the problem of longitude, that is, the problem of discovering which longitude you were at while at sea, a life-or death matter. Ultimately solved by the craftsman-genius John Harrison and his clocks as he more-or-less singlehandedly dealt with a number of seeming implacable mechanical problems associated with ocean-going time-pieces. His trials and travails in claiming his reward are somewhat heartbreaking, but ultimately this is a moving account of how one man's invention made one of those profound changes that has become part of everyday life and utterly taken for granted nowadays.

At one point, though, she remarks that Harrison's invention enabled the spread and dominance of the British Empire, which, even if an exaggeration, puts a different spin on it, and one which Sobel shys away from instantly. The uses of navigational tools for the purposes of global subjugation and domination would presumably be a different sort of story to the charming little biography that went on to become so massively poplar.

Some full-on moments of horror in this volume, as the revivers experience some dissociative affects of their return from the dead, and the strange wraiths haunt the woods. Dana Cypress hunts her sister's killer in earnest, with a little help from her sister, the murder victim. All sorts of strange troubles and doings sre brewing, from the white supremacist stirring things up, the journalist investigating the disappearance of the three brothers Em killed last volume, a figure in black setting fire to a university professor's office, and the professor himself possibly connected to Em's death. It's getting tangled and troubled in Wisconsin, and this is absolutely brilliant.

Tony Chu is in hospital after his brutally savage treatment last volume. While he's out of commission, his twin sister Toni, agent of NASA, now the most powerful agency since the mysterious alien fire writing in the sky, takes centre stage, except for when POYO does. Toni is friendly, lively, outgoing exuberant, and can tell people's future by biting them. Meanwhile, the Vampire is going around eating people to acquire their special food powers Also, there are chogs. Psychedelic chogs. And POYO.

A gender-shifted space-opera reimagining Homer's Oddyssey with phantasmagorical art and written with fluid, classical cadences and rhythms. It's one of the oldest of stories, of course: after the fall of Troiia, Odyssa and her warriors begin the long trek back to Ithaca. Having offended Poseidon and irked Zeus, she finds herself tossed by star-storms and cast adrift, beset by enemies and plagued by monsters. It's stunningly imaginative, dizzying and disorienting, filled with passion and poetry and hideous violence and insane divine familial relationships. Proper myth, then. If the superheroic and the divine overlap in The Wicked And The Divine, this propels pulp comics into the magnificent and sordid grandeur of ancient legend.

With the devastating tragedy of the last volume still jumping down on our feels, Tony Chu returns to work with a new drive and purpose and a determination to take no shot from nobody. meanwhile John Colby's life gets complicated in all sorts of interesting and hair-raising ways. The cult of the doomy chicken is on the rise, bring fearful death and destruction to chicken eaters; the Vampire is on the prowl, eating people and taking their powers, and the mystery of the fiery letters and the cause of the chicken flu still hang around uneasily in the background. This comic, wild and funny and cartoonish and surreal though it may be, has show it is more than willing to mess its characters, and its readers, up big time, and no-one is safe and oh yeah this is what suspense feels like.

A bunch of babies are inexplicably born - odd given baby births are fairly explicable - and a gentleman adventurer adopts seven of them to save the world. It turns out they have freaky powers and they fight monsters and villains as The Umbrella Academy, then they grow up, split up and generally fall apart. Reunited at the death of their adoptive father, about whom they had mixed feelings at best, they have to deal with an impending apocalypse brought about by one of their own.

This is a mad, sharp, acerbic, inventive, pulpish, modernist, surreal superhero tale that owes much in tone to Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol. Gabriel Ba's visuals are astonishing.