This is where it all ends, the fire-writing in the sky the chicken plague, the food-based powers, the battle of wills between Chu and Savoy, the good the bad the ugly and my God that final page. Extraordinary stuff, though there's a lot of filler here, a Poyo special and the Revival crossover. Not everything is tied up, but Chew has always been a chaotic narrative full of sprawling messiness that refelcts the character's lives and the world it's set in. Great read, though. Top notch comics.

I reviewed the volume collecting the first few issues of this series a few years ago, and I remember leaning heavily on the Buffy comparisons. Then they went and made it into an ensemble TV show, which I like quite a lot, but now that I've read the whole thing, I rather regret the Buffy comparison. It's nothing like Buffy at all. It doesn't even engage that much with its own premise of zombie-girl-detective, it's way more about Gwen trying to come to terms with her condition and make friends and live her new life surrounded by ghosts and monsters and monster-hunters. The book is packed with classic horror tropes and characters out of cartoon television and old-time comics, and Mike Allred's glorious pop-horror art immerses you in this crazy, colourful world of mummies and were-terriers and vampire paint-ballers. I loved it, though I think it's a pity some of the ideas weren't given a chance to expand a little. In the end though, it feels gloriously packed and thronging with ideas and stories and plots. Never mind either Buffy or its own TV adaptation, this is very much its own thing.

Terse toughs tackle techno-zonbies after crashing in the desert with a nuclear missile and not much hope of rescue.

The Avengers are not happy with each other. There are now three Avengers teams, maybe four, okay five, and they are having a disagreement with how to deal with the end of all of reality. They fight. Someone tries to reason with them! No, fight. Wait betrayal! Tune in for more fighting, and megadeaths.

Stuff blows up a lot. Like, a lot. I mean, this is pretty good as these things go, but I'm really hung up on the whole release of the terrigen mists at the end. How come Black Bolt never got brought up for crimes against humanity for that one? It's like and act of global chemical warfare which, at its most benign (and lots of people die from the effects or get kidnapped for evil experiments, or accidentally kill people when their power manifests, and I believe it later turns out to be deadly to Mutants), ignores completely the consent of everyone it effects. This annoys me more than it should, not that he did it, but that he doesn't get put in some sort of prison for it, or treated as a villain. Grumble.

Bit of a fix-up this, as short stories and novellas are stitched together to chart the rise and rise of Labienus as he plots across millennia to overthrow his human masters, defeat his immortal rivals, and commit lots of germ-based genocide. It's chilling and horrifying, bit also funny and warm and clever. I quite like it when the books skip across time like this, plot threads and characters weaving in and out, gives it a great sense of epic scale and impending crisis.

Some excellent short stories about the immortal cyborgs seeded through time by the time-travelling company as part of an immense scheme to make immense amounts of money in the future when discoveries and antiquities carefully hidden for hundreds or thousands of years and which can now be sold for a mint. Life ain't easy for an immortal cyborg and there are always difficulties and problems to overcome, to say nothing of the machinations of both the Company masters and of certain powerful immortals who think they'd be better off in charge. Baker writes engagingly, it's easy to become addicted.

Bit complicated this. I was reading that Eleanor of Aquitaine book, and a friend of mine suggested I read When Christ And His Saints Slept by Sharon Penman, because it's set during the Anarchy. I checked the library, and alas they had no copy. Then I read an interview with Anthony Price, and in it he recommended a book by Cecilia Holland and said it was the best historical novel he'd ever read. Off I went looking for that. Alas, the library had no copy, but it had lots of other Cecelia Holland books, including this one, set... during the Anarchy. I'll have that says I.

To be specific, it's set during the tail end of the Anarchy. The future Henry II is in working his way around the south of England subduing castles and drawing barons to his side. One of them is Fulk, Earl of Stafford, an old supporter of Henry's mother the unpopular Empress Matilda, and now he's busy working for Henry and safeguarding his own interests. Fulk is a highly competent man, with experience and skills in leadership, warfare, organisation and basic political intrigue. As he engages in a forced march, storms a castle, joins a siege, fights in a tourney, subdues unrest in a town he displays again and again his abilities and his shrewdness, though Prince Henry and some of his fellow barons have plans and ideas of their own. What he cannot control, however is his own family. At the heart of everything he does is the hatred between him and his uncle, an outlaw now inveigling himself into Henry's good graces and held in affection by Fulk's son, Rannulf.

Similar to Wolf Hall, in that it's a portrait of a man of his time in his time, and that man is a prosaic, practical exemplar of his type, Hammer Of Princes is written with wonderfully crafted prose, as deceptively plain as its protagonist, strong and unromantic but with unfussy hints of emotion and an occasional appreciation for beauty when affairs allow. A terrific novel.

Doctor Strange goes off in search of more power while everyone else gets mildly depressed for the nth issue about the impendingness of the doom. Doom and its impendingness are the basic themes of this whole thing and there's a lot of doom and a lot of impending and a lot of feeling mildly depressed while billions die meaninglessly. Yay!

All the various types of Avengers are all together and though they aren't exactly getting along they've at least stopped fighting and are listening to a big plot to take down the nasty Cabal who are blowing up planets and killing all around them. Take that Cabal! Meanwhile doom impends! Someone returns from the other side of existence and there's something afoot in the Ultimate universe and troubling rumblings in the Shi'ar empire. Very doomy and impending.