I often feel I was a bit spoiled for manga. My first encounters were this, Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind, Akira and Lone Wolf And Cub. These blew most comics of any type and from any region completely out of the water, but with manga in particular I always ended up comparing them unfavourably with these three, and they usually came up short, though admittedly lots of otherwise great manga turned... skeevy, let us us say, which I found off-putting. I shall have to see what I can find via the library and maybe remedy that.

The final volume of Nausicaa, and I finally run completely out of bits that I sort of vaguely remember reading before. Nausicaa is in charge of a god-warrior with a mother-fixation. Everyone's racing towards the crypt at Shiwa where the knowledge that lead to the recent daikasho came from. It must be sealed, but there are some final truths about the nature and origin of the Sea of Corruption that means such an act could ensure species extinction for humanity. Nausicaa may have more in common with the emperors and the vipers, Kushana's brothers, than she realises. The rather huge problem of human suffering and the nature of death hangs over this crowded, fast-paced climactic volume. Nausicaa is becoming all to well aware of the problematic nature of her own role as messiah, as saviour and destroyer.

In the end, the upshot is that humanity continues to move towards futures always made uncertain and dangerous by our own actions. We are often the authors of our own, or other's suffering, but life survives and we try to carry on. And really, it's hard to dispute those truths at this time.

A locked room mystery, an industrialist plotting a coup and battling artists all form part of Inspector LeBrock's latest adventure in Grandville. Automatons stalk the streets and doughy-faced humans march for equal rights and the Inspector deduces punches kicks and shoots his way through to the heart of the conspiracy, and we discover that not only was the female character in the first volume fridged, he actually came with a pre-fridged wife in what appears to be one a number of set-ups for future plot-lines. It's all gorgeously drawn fun with lots of little throw-away jokes and it does at least have a female character who survives to the end of the volume. Two, even.

With the UK invaded and the population depleted by swarms of horrible monsters, the surviving populations has been forced to live in hiding. A Cockatrice Corp is formed to battle the menace, travelling the country on an armoured train powered by wind, solar and stellar energy and compressed diesel bricks. Drummer boy Dakin Prestwich is on board, and soon so is his cousin Sauna, along with her mysterious precognitive powers. Travelling first to Manchester and then to Scotland and the heart of the outbreak, fighting monsters every step of the way, can the Corp defeat the monsters once and for all?

A brilliantly demented book that manages to be hilariously funny even as characters get devoured and vanished and turned to stone by the score. The premise is amazing, though, and the whole thing is fantastically entertaining.

The onward march of mad bad science, Nazis and communists and capitalists uniting together to take over the galaxy. Everyone's horrible, except maybe Yuri Garagarin and Laika. It's the secret history of science on the rampage. Funny peculiar.

It's impossible to deny the power of the title story, arguably one of the great short stories of the English language. An utterly devastating portrayal of the artificial and imposed morality of war and duty overcoming simple humanity. One might expect the rest of the stories are more of the same, but while they all have that distinct tone of tragic regret and loss of innocence, some are quite funny - 'a flippant attitude dominates' the blurb quotes reprovingly, but these are the stories that almost burst with life. It never gets very far from the sense of danger and the horror of the split - most of the stories, barring the first, are set during the Civil War rather than the War Of Independence, though it can be a few pages before this becomes clear. I wonder are there cues I as an Irish person should be picking up on quicker, or was O'Connor letting the information present in its own time? Anyway, some funny stories, some odd stories, some sad and poignant ones, and one puzzling one - I think I worked off the point of The Sisters, but I'm not sure.

They are wonderfully well written pieces of social realism, firmly, earthily grounded and full of Irish voices, mostly Corkonian, and Irish attitudes and their tiny squabbles and concerns set against the backdrop of a struggle that might not be epic but was certainly bitter and brutal. Certainly they are world class stories from a master of the form.

God that cover.

Irony of being a middle-aged middle-class Irishman living in the 21st century and trying to lose a bit of weight while reading about people starving in the 19th century. It's not even the Great Hunger, it's one of the earlier famines of 1826. Oh good lord. This is my history, our legacy. We cry into our whiskey and curse the sassenach and the treachery of our fellow Irishmen and lament the great suffering and the appalling injustice, which were a byword for backward and repressive agrarian policies.

Before we get to the famine, though, there's the life of Dualta Duane, who flees Galway after knocking a landlord's son off his horse. Fired by anger at the general awfulness of landlordism, he dabbles in rural agitation, but finds at the end he has no stomach for wanton destruction and murder even in a good cause. He settles in a Clare valley, but tithes and rents and gale days and cronyism and corruption squeezing the poor unmercifully, trouble is never very far away, despite the best efforts of the great Liberator, Daniel O'Connell, who strides the land like a behemoth, driving the country towards Emancipation and Repeal.

Dualta is an engaging and likable hero, his decency and good nature sorely tested by his times. will he survive? Will his family? Will anyone? The last few chapters are a guided tour of hell, but Macken is sure-footed and clear-eyed and guides us through the grief and horror to the point where there can be a future again, however frail.

William Buckley, transported to Australia in the 1790s, escapes, intending to walk north to China, then turn left for England and home, and end up spending thirty years amongst Aboriginals, taken in as a resurrected warrior and becoming a beloved and respected holy man. He eventually returns home.

And that's the story, and a strange, powerful and beautiful story it is, but with Garner it's the language. The words and folk dances of Buckley's home, the babble of dialects and cant on the ship, the precise and evocative language of the Aboriginals that reflect a whole different way of being. The language represents community, gang, tribe, and Buckley is initiated into each and is subjected to injustice, privation brutality and the ravenous incursion of colonialism, but the language lives on in Bukley, as does the Dreaming, fused into a transcendental final Dance at the climax of the book.

It's an incredible, beautiful, funny, mind-expanding, heartbreaking book. Garner working at the height of his not inconsiderable powers. There really is nobody else like him.

Hap and Leonard go PI, though they're not that good at it. Fortunately Hap's girlfriend Brett takes over the business and she's better. Hired to track down a young woman who went missing five years before by a mean old grandmother, they quickly find themselves in a mess of prostitution, blackmail, bikers and hired killers. Help from Jim-Bob, Booger and even the deadly Vanilla Ride might be enough to do what needs doing, but not necessarily enough to get them through alive. Funny, thoughtful, rude crude and vulgar and spectacularly violent - classic Hap and Leonard.

I haven't had a Jonathan Carroll in a long time, and this short sharp little novella is a bracing reminder of his lovely prose, his insights and meditations on life and love and art, and how quickly that can swerve into deep strangeness, terror, and even horror. In Black Cocktail, a grieving man is introduced to an affable and generous raconteur, a pleasant and rewarding relationship until somebody from the past intrudes and it becomes apparent something fantastic and surreal and terrible has happened, and it's still happening. Gorgeous, mind-bending, lovely, creepy, rich and deliciously poisonous. That's a Jonathan Carroll book all right.

Ross Thomas protagonists tend to be cool, urbane, witty, well-read, and have voices to match. These cool, urbane voices can be a little at odds with the depravity they describe and the nastiness they encounter. If You Can't Be Good is a real box of horrors, but Deek Lewis is the usual jaded, cynical narrator trying to make sense of events, In this case working with a journalist to find out why a Senator wrecked his career in a befuddlingly wasteful and stupid manner. It's all about motivations and reasons, and what a squirming can of worms they are. Otherwise it's the usual twisting and turning of a Thomas thriller, snappy dialogue and insider's dirt on politics, espionage, policework and journalism. When corruption is a way of life it takes some doing to pull of something really twisted - and that's what you get here.