Altogether more sophisticated spy comic, seventies-set, hearkening to the style of the paranoid cynicism of the era. Velvet's a secretary to the Director, but she's also a retired spy in her own right, and when one operative is murdered and she's put in the frame as a mole, she goes on the run, following a thread into the past to discover who set her up. Action and intrigue, secrets and lies, moody art and hard-boiled storytelling makes this a perfect noir espionage thriller. Espionoir.

The coils of the plot tighten with a dreadful inevitability as the kids are beset by the attacks of the Dark lady from the outside and their own mistakes and uncertainties on the inside, not to mention the insidious Zack. Ty Kinsey and Bode are stronger than they know, however, even when n the dark, and they're slowly putting the ices together. Will they be in time. The horror mounts, the brilliant baroque fantasy of the powered keys set against the claustrophobic sense of pitiless and manipulative forces and the uncontrollable urges and pains of teenage emotions - or the absence of them, in Kinsey' case, which is even worse. Amazing writing and art create a compelling, driving, twisting narrative.

Clockworks being mostly about the past - the house, the caves, the strange and terrible door, and the keys and how they came to be made and why. All that goes back to the Revolutionary War, but closer in time was the father of Tyler, Kinsey and Bode, and how he and a group of friends used the keys to have the most amazing year of their lives, and how in the end it all went dreadfully wrong, leading to the current state of terror. And it turns out Lovecraft wasn't just namechecked. It all clicks together like, well, you know. At the end the plot has moved forward only in couple of small but crucial ways, but the decks are cleared and the blanks are filled in and we're ready for the big finale. Who, as they say, will survive and what will be left of them?

With the world under attack by invisible aliens and being turned into a deep freeze by their massive geo-engineering project, Earth is on a war footing as the ice slowly but steadily slides down from the Poles. Alice Dare, daughter of a heroic spacefighter pilot is evacuated with three hundred other children to a half-terraformed Mars where they are to be trained as cadets to fight the alien menace. It's daunting and lonely, but an amazing experience with new friends on a planet where you can jump as high as your own head. When things go horribly Lord Of The Flies, Alice and her friends are forced to make an epic trek across the Martian landscape, fighting for survival the whole way, and in the path of an even deadlier alien menace.

This was a fun, rousing, lively sci-fi adventure with great, spiky, likeable,characters and a brilliant setting, well-written, and sparkling with wit and humour, and lots of science fictional surrealism, like giant mechanical spiders and floating goldfish and pink seas. I tore through it. Excellent.

Despite the cliffhanger ending of Honky Tonk Samurai, this is still a Hap and Leonard book, with both hap and Leonard very much intact. Still working for Hap's girlfriend's detective agency, they're hired for not much money at all to look into the death of a young black man which may have been an incident of police brutality, or may have been part of something even worse. Cue violence and scabrous wit and dark secrets and nasty doings as the duo annoy lots of people in their unique style of investigating. Lansdale is top of his game and knows exactly how to wind things up and let them fly.

We've managed in the space of three volumes to run the available gamut of titles for books of tales of Irish fairies and come full circle, as it were. These aren't even the sort of fairy tales I was looking for, being mostly about Finn and the Fianna, but actually, there's a good deal of fairy stuff in here, so I think it was worthwhile from that point of view.

So it opens with the story of a man here since the first people came to Ireland after the flood and follows on down through mythical settlements and invasions, with the man transforming into a beast at each juncture and enjoying a long exuberant life as king of that species, until finally he becomes king of the salmon, gets caught by a fisherman of the King of Ulster, is eaten by the queen and born to her as a son. There's a lovely giddy logic to it.

Next comes the Boyhood of Fionn, a justly praised literary masterpiece, gorgeously lyrical, and I began to question why this wasn't part of a work with the stature of something like The Once And Future King. It's a work for grown-ups, maybe, more so at least than The Sword In The Stone, but it has flashes of rare wit here and there and is extremely readable. The Irish, however, have a complicated relationship with our mythical heroes. Like leprechauns they're to be pitied for the way in which they have become embarrassing cliches and caricatures, and of course the inevitable association of a glorious warriors past doesn't help, but neither does the humiliation of hundreds of years of defeat and foreign rule. There's that speech in Trainspotting about what is there to be proud of in being Scottish. Most Irish people internalised that lesson long ago.

Nonetheless, there is something here that surely transcends national ambivalence, something that surely should be part of the canon of fantasy literature. Except this is not a novel, despite containing the start to a great novel within it. Once Fionn becomes leader, his nature changes, the stories become episodic, Fionn is sidelined or barely present, and often powerless and even humiliated. The final story doesn't mention him at all, and one assumes it isn't a Fionn story until a line at the end which is the sort of cheat no 20th century audience would put up with for a moment.

No doubt someone has written a novel about Fionn - I remember Rosemary Sutcliffe's book fondly - but it's an awful pity James Stephens didn't because it would have been definitive and influential. Though it should be noted that there appear to be issues with women that are hard to parse. Most of the major female roles are negative, and it's hard to say whether it's because of the source material or the author, or even at times the author poking fun at the misogyny of the source material, though by the end he seems to embrace it fully. On the other hand, the relationship between Fionn and Goll mor mac Morna is an amazing one, uniquely Irish I would have thought.

A rich book, product of the great Anglo Irish Celtic Revival, it's just a pity he decided to let the fragmentary nature of the ancient oral tradition dictate the form, leaving us with yet another book of tales, rather than a brilliant novel.

Another James Lee Burke protagonist, good and decent, but haunted by his own propensity for violence, and by the past. In love with a beautiful, strong-willed young woman, best friend to a volatile self-destructive good-hearted thug. A decideldy lyrical bent when it comes to describing landscape, weather, love or the shimmering outlines of human souls. And in trouble. Lots and lots of trouble. Aaron Holland Broussard intervenes in a lover's quarrel and walks away with the girl and leaves the rich boy fuming. But the rich boy has mob connections and soon Aaron is being bothered in all directions, and he has to overcome his own fears and anxieties and step up to protect the people he loves. Another James Lee Burke book, another guzzled, gorgeous read.

A truly amazing novel, brimming with intelligence and wit. A Victorian Romance of fiery intellectual passion and physical consummation that pushes beyond the happy ending to pain and regret and loss; and a modern romance of restraint, silence, sensitivity and acute consideration, and the book manages to subtly bring a satisfying conclusion to both in one stroke that, after all the intellectual exercise, the avid scholarly detective work, the admiration for the talent and commitment in resurrecting lost voices through the letters and poems and stories of the long-dead poets, had me bawling like a big flippin' eejit. I'm not sorry, either, or embarrassed, I'm middle-aged, I'm married, I have kids, I write, I read: somehow Byatt brought all these things to a quiet, devastating crescendo. Anyway, even if you don't start blubbering like a sentimental fool, the novel is a richly rewarding experience, and just when you think it has nothing left to say, it delivers a moment of pure grace.

I don't think billions die screaming between panels in this collection, though at one point aeroplanes drop from the sky and nuclear power plants go pop all over the world, but the Avengers are shown engaged in boring old superhero activities such as saving people from danger, so let's assume nobody dies and everybody lives, though one supposes future volumes will make up for it.

Anywhoo, Thor and the Sentry raise some strange genetically engineered children in a way that is almost but not quite touching. The various crash sites around the world start acting in a fashion that suggests a damaged process and an alien mass murderer gets recruited into the Avengers because bad things are coming and the ends justify the meanies.

I come across as very hard on this series, but I do actually enjoy it. I think.

The original Hunter Rose story that kicked off Grendel always seemed more like an elegant, well-drafted curiosity than anything else, compared to some of the meatier later incarnations of the spirit of violence. An abbreviated biographical summation of an anti-batman - gifted, wealthy young man dons a costume and runs around the streets of a bustling city, except Hunter Rose is a sociopath who seeks to dominate all those around him. It really is a fantastically strange story, particularly the inevitable nemesis in the form of a brutal immortal werewolf/wedigo named Argent. But the whole tragedy is executed in a masterpiece of design and layout.

Wagner returned to Hunter Rose years later in a series of anthologies published by Dark Horse, scripting by hm and illustrated by him and a host of incredible artistic talent. I read them all, but out of order. technically impressive, often gorgeous, marrying writing and art in a wide variety of moods and styles, this is the first time I've read them all in one sitting, along with the original, and it really is an amazing achievement, building up into an epic of crime and violence with sinister supernatural elements that come into full flower in the final chapter. It's novelistic, albeit a novel of thematic progression rather than linear, layering stories and viewpoints to create a vision of an elegant brilliant monster brought low by his one concessions to the softer human emotions.

Anyway, a major achievement in the field of comics. Wagner's abilities and skills have grown impressively since that first impressive experimental exploration of evil.