Revisiting my own collection, here's a beauty. Joe R Lansdale and Tim Truman on the scarred ex-Confederate Civil War veteran bounty hunter. Hex is one of those fought-for-my-land-not-for-slavery types one tends to look on with some skepticism nowadays, but there isn't much in the way of soft nostalgia for ol' Dixie in these pages. The whole thing is mean and ornery and wild and violent.

Two Gun Mojo sees Hex, after a run-in with a town-turned-lynch-mob, gunning after a travelling circus wagon run by the strange and horrible Doc Williams. Williams may or may not be reviving the dead in some sort of voodoo mojo, or he may be just giving people brain damage, either way he has his little gang of zombie slves, including someone who may or may not be Wild Bill Hickock, and Hex intends to put and end to him.

Lansdale and Truman make a terrific team, the dialogue is funny and the yarn is downright demented.

The Manhattan Projects gang are trapped and betrayed, will the stranded alien kidnapped from another world and tortured and altered save them through sheer vengeful savagery? In a way! The Oppenheimers have their final showdown! Einstein returns! No, not that Einstein, the other one! Confused? Disturbed? SCIENCE! Completely unhinged.

Into the paranoid world of secret agents with special powers working for an elusive organisation. Mind Mgmt is supposed to be disbanded, its agent's memories wiped clean. But there are indications that Mid Mgmt are still operating. Meru, a writer who has been trapped in a cycle of remembering a terrible past, then forgetting it again, has teamed up with Harry Lyme - the man who, unbeknownst to her keeps wiping her memory of the terrible atrocity he caused - and other ex-Mind Mgmt agents to put a stop to it once and for all. They search for the pieces of a map that will lead them to the fabled Mind Mgmt base of Shangri La, but deadly immortals are on their trail, and the mysterious and terrifying Eraser is haunting their every step.

Absolutely cracking tale of secret agents and strange powers and shadowy cabals, packed with action and romance and betrayal and revelations. Intelligent and original in style and execution, and easily the best-designed comic out there.

This is such a wonderfully solid book, grounded in an ordinary but well-rendered setting with a large cast of characters and a lot of sub-plots and storylines developing - murders, crimes and mysteries, but with the strange supernatural element underlying it all. The fundamental mystery of why the Revivers have come back to life and what the strange yellow wraiths haunting the woods are are supplemented by a gruesome murder and an even more gruesome discovery after a crash on the highway. There are grisly goings-on in an outdoor shed and a well-armed and dangerous right-wing extremist is about to get a visit from the CDC. Meanhwhile, Dana Cypress is trying to find out who murdered her sister, but her sister isn't so-operating.

A great read, bit and meaty, with plenty of horrific touches to shock and unnerve.

Rasl is an art-thief, but he has an edge when it comes to staging getaways. Using some distinctive and unwieldy machinery, he can move into other worlds, thereby evading pursuit. It takes a heavy toll, and Rasl self-medicates with alcohol and meditation. Quite why an art-thief would have access to this technology, or why someone with access to this technology would choose to be an art thief, is the central mystery to this comic as it slowly unfolds. Rasl is attacked by a man of bizarre appearance - someone has found him and is determined to chase him down.

This was Jeff Bone's next project after the child-friendly Bone. Rasl is a tougher, grittier, adult work, with sex and violence, drinking and swearing, so don't go giving it to the kids if they're fans of Fone Bone & co. All Smith's skills as a cartoonist are o display, however, lots of silent sequences, natural landscapes and unhurried action. The volume ends with questions left unanswered, and I have the next volume already on order.

Kindt raises the bar yet again in an already amazing title. A sleeper agent belonging to the Russian equivalent of Mind Mgmt awakes slowly out of her cover as a suburban housewife and begins to lay seeds of paranoia, violence and destruction that will tear her neighbourhood apart. Harry Lyme and the Eraser race against each other to recruit mind-wiped Mind Mgmt agents, both hoping Meru will stay out of the coming fight. Meru herself is becoming aware of the extent of her own powers and knows she will have to make a decision soon. It all comes together as the suburban neighbourhood explodes into horror.

This is a brilliant, chilling, creepy volume, broadening the nightmarish world, introducing more agents and Mind Mgmt trainees and sets the stage fir the coming conflict between those who wish to revive the agency and those who wish to destroy it.

Can't believe it actually took me this long to notice that the only character in this book that isn't a white male is the dog, but at least she gets a chapter to herself recounting her adventures in space. She's a bit of a pioneer, because the mad bad science is on an outward trajectory, to other worlds and other realities, even as it consolidates power on Earth, losing Star City to an alien infestation that has taken over Russia. There's a lot of pondering the relative morality or lack thereof in this, mostly for the purposes of noting how that there isn't any. Hard to like, let alone love, Manhattan Projects is still a dark, nasty comedy of science in the hands of sociopaths.

The Kapital continues to chase the elusive signals and sightings of sister ship the massive, with one or two digressions and adventures on the way. It begins to resemble a strange mix of Moby Dick, the Flying Dutchman and the Marie Celeste. Captain Callum Israel is also searching for a purpose and some sense of meaning to life and to Ninth Wave post-Collapse. Perhaps it's to be found in the ad-hoc collection of oil-rigs in the Indian Ocean, an independent autonomous, pacifist community with a dark secret. With a crew losing heart and The Massive distant phantom, the oceans burning and clogged with waste and debris, and with some bad news of his own, Israel is finding it harder to keep a grip on things.

A crisp, vivid tour through a collapsed world trying to reshape itself, asking the big questions about violence and activism and environmentalism through an increasingly interesting cast of characters. Epic.

If Elidor was about a family haunted by a place, Red Shift is about a place haunted by itself. Three lives intersect at the far end of the perceptible spectrum, at a point triangulated by the stars of Orion, the the top of Mow Cop Hill and a prehistoric stone axe-head. Troubled young men at odds with their world and their time and their families and communities and with reality itself love three young women in circumstances that strain them to breaking point, and at the breaking point they break through time to each other in their trauma and pain.

A modern couple under pressure from distance and class and unspoken secrets. A Civil War -era couple besieged by fear and violence. A Roman-era couple mired in horror and savagery. Boundaries are increasingly less defined. Unattributed dialogue and prose so sparse it has whole worlds of meaning packed into each word. Raw emotions and uncontrollable inner demons set Tom and Thomas and Macey apart from everything, yet they yearn for the comforts of family and community and love, but in each era there is only one person who will accept them for who they are and their struggle to hold onto that person breaks time itself.

A raw, bitter, brutal book, but also painfully beautiful and filled with the power of place and time and myth. There is time, and there is space, and there is the person who must find themselves and find love somewhere in all that time and space, and the more connected to to the vastness of both, the harder that is.

From a deadly game of cat-and-mouse through the flooded ruins of New York with the remnants of the US Navy, hunting one of their own gone rogue in a nuclear submarine, to a deadly face-off in a Norwegian Fjord with post-Crash whale-hunting vikings that's as much about a bitter old grudge as it is about saving the whales, Callum Israel and the crew of the Kapital try to make their mark and do some good in a shattered world full of violence and compromise and brute necessity. Epic and sweeping in scope, global in outlook, perceiving the tangled knots of lives, needs and politics with a cool clarity, The Massive continues to be an adventure for the age.