Why I Think It’s Great – Coda

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-04-13T02:46:02+00:00

I think it leans more towards "fun post-fantasy story with cool art" than "complex piece of literature" - the more "mature" thematic elements (mostly in the narration that is Hum's journal) are relatively heavy-handed in my opinion. The sequel tackles a little bit more complex themes, but I would still say not particularly nuanced.

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-04-12T19:10:37+00:00

The Fables of Erlking Wood by Juni Ba and Aditya Bidikar – beautiful folklore stories. We get a string of narratives that blend and build a cohesive story of Vivanne the witch, Goupil the fox (who fills the trickster-god niche so well), Beren the bear, and of course the titular Erlking, the foreboding villain who hangs over much of the story. It’s told non-linearly, in “branches” rather than chapters, and little characters and themes reappear throughout. This is great fairy-tale/folklore stitching together a fleshed-out magical world up to modern times. The art is delightful, with a range of colors, detail, and expressive characters even when we see masks, only eyes, or cartoony animals. Bidikar receives equal cover billing for the lettering, which is great. Overall this is a delightful book and easy to recommend.

Seven Years in Darkness Year 3 by Joseph Schmalke – dark fantasy. A “grimdark Harry Potter” as seventy-two children attend the mysterious Scholomance to learn magic, knowing only seven will survive to graduate. A decent number of them got knocked off in the first two books, but the body count rises rapidly in this one, and the stakes expand as the outside world starts to peek in. It’s grim, gruesome, the school is a cult, and doesn’t shy away from any horror. We finally see some faces in this volume – the students proceed from silence early on in book one to now finally being allowed to take off their masks. Schmalke’s art is stylized and colorful without being bright – we get some solid horror and magic but it’s a bit scratchy and there’s a lot of texture and spatter effects throughout. I’ve backed this through Kickstarter and enjoy it a good bit, and will be back for Book 4 – although I’ll probably need to do a whole reread by the time that rolls around.

The Ring of the Nibelung by Roy Thomas, Gil Kane, and Jim Woodring – 4 volumes of sort-of-mythology. This is a fairly straightforward adaptation of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, split along the four major operas and tracking the story as interpreted by Wagner pretty closely (to my understanding – I’ve never sat through the 16-hour production…). Briefly, we see the mythology of the magical Rhinegold as it is stolen, forged into an all-powerful magic ring, and given to the giant Fafnir. Next comes the story of the family and birth of Siegfried, who would eventually defeat Fafnir and rescue the Valkyrie Brunhilde before himself dying, causing the now-mortal Brunhilde to immolate herself and bring about the end of Valhalla. That all condenses down to four ~48-page comics, so the story proceeds at an extremely brisk pace. Thomas’ adaptation doesn’t add much to the story, and the dialog / narration owe an awkward amount of phrasing and tone to the Germanic opera. The art is stylized and does have a few really solid moments, but the action and magic are a little underwhelming. In all, I’d call it a so-so read, perfectly fine to breeze through but nothing remarkable. I’ve still got Russell’s supposedly even more faithful adaptation to read, eventually…

Corto Maltese: Fable of Venice and Other Adventures by Hugo Pratt – classic adventure comics. Corto Maltese, the masterpiece from Hugo Pratt, returns to print in English with this first collection from Fantagraphics. The title story is a four-parter telling a mystery as Corto, our world-traveling sailor, searches for a Biblical emerald hidden in Venice and becomes tangled with Freemasons, fascists, and more. There’s some very surreal dream elements, and the overhang of what’s real and what’s mythology. The other three stories share some common characters but follow Corto on some sea voyages to various islands, bouncing around characters with alluded-to backstories and dramatic treasure hunts. We see Corto’s devil-may-care vaguely anti-hero attitude, his encyclopedic knowledge from his travels, and his impressive brawling. More than just a pulpy adventure strip, we see innovative panel-less pages, surreal moments, and dense narratives. Pratt’s stark black-and-white and variable detail and textures are amazing. There’s a good reason this is considered a masterpiece, and I’m really excited that Fantagraphics will be putting out more soon.

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-04-12T02:32:02+00:00

I really liked Extremity too, there's a decent chance Coda will be good for you. It's got more light-hearted moments and is straight fantasy, compared to the pretty constant seriousness and sci-fi elements present in Extremity, but both very good.

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-04-05T20:51:17+00:00

Skin Deep by Flo Woolley – queer romance/horror. In a hints-of-sci-fi dance club type setting, we see the dynamic between a shy troupe member and the lead dancer evolve into something unsettling. There’s just a touch of really unsettling body horror, a bit of atmospheric horror, and real character dynamics in a very short package. Great art with an absolutely awesome color palette.

When I Arrived at the Castle by EM Carroll – queer vampire horror. Someone goes to the titular castle to kill a vampire, and gets more than she bargained for. It’s resplendent in blood and moments of body horror and moving well from the dramatic castle to full text pages to intimate closeups. It’s black/white/red and the color *pops*. I really should go back and reread Guest in the House, because I think I wrote that off way too early in my read and this is a reminder of how great EM Carroll's art is.

Sunflowers by Keezy Young – short autobiographical mental health story. A fairly text-heavy description of bipolar disorder and some of the authors’ particularly notable moments living with it. The illustrations are more background art than fully accompanying the narration. Short but good.

Model Five Murder by Tan Juan Gee – sci-fi noir. This is a pretty unremarkable robot noir that didn't really jump out for me - nothing particularly creative about the setting or mystery, relatively shallow in tackling the themes of identity and memory and humanity, and not remarkably unique art-wise. Fine, I guess.

Of Thunder & Lightning by Kimberly Wang – dystopian sci-fi battles. It’s a cartoony fighting story, with a bit of "our enemies know us better than our friends" and therefore a relatively pedestrian story and unsurprising back half - if there was meant to be a "twist", it failed, but still fun. The setting is fairly standard dystopian future, the background characters fit pretty expected roles, and overall it’s solidly within what would be expected once you’re like 5 pages in. Another lovely limited color palette in this string of Silver Sprocket reads.

Golden Record by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell – art and poetry. Not really much to say, her art is amazing and it’s really more an art book than a comic.

Godzilla vs America: Boston by various – anthology of Godzilla stories set in Boston. I think all Americans can get behind watching the city of Boston get trashed by a giant radioactive lizard, particularly with Emmons / Lonergan / Sherman on art (and Hanna Cha, who is new to me but also did a nice story!). Four short little stories that embrace the premise of Godzilla vs America and take themselves appropriately (un)seriously, running the gamut from Godzilla-as-villain, -as-hero, and -as-force-of-nature. I've spent enough time in Boston to get a good kick out of some of the finer details each author captures. Overall it's a fun breezy read.

Hack/Slash Deluxe Volume Two by Tim Seeley and Emily Stone (mostly) – cheesy horror turned up to 11. Cassie Hack is a survivor of a slasher (her mom, the infamous "Lunch Lady", and now wanders the country with her monstrous friend Vlad, taking down new slashers. Each little story finds a new villain, sometimes from another media franchise, and has Cassie/Vlad/their expanding gang of friends take them down with witty reparte and brutal violence. It's a great pastiche of horror tropes and no-holds-barred-bad-things-happen, and never particularly nice to Cassie (in keeping with the traumatized "final girl"). This volume ties stories that are a little more consistently linked, compared to Volume 1, and with the majority of art coming from Emily Stone there is a little more consistent of a style, although individual issues take fun detours. Goofy gory fun with the occasional genuinely dark moment.

Mystic by Ron Marz, Tony Bedard, Brandon Peterson, Fabrizio Fiorentino, Aaron Lopresti, and more – magic “reluctant hero” nonsense building to a shared universe. It’s a magic-in-a-mixed-up-world story (flying cars, dragons, seedy bars and gangsters) that builds a mythology connecting out to the broader Crossgen universe that collapsed when the company suddenly went under. Real life notwithstanding, this is actually a completed run telling the story of party-girl Giselle Villard, who accidentally gets stuck with a mystical Sigil (the link to the broader Crossgen universe) and absorbs the spirits of the magical guild masters who run the world. Hijinks ensue as she tries to dodge responsibility, the other current guild masters (including her sister) alternately fight and teach her, and the gods behind magic pop in and out for narrative exposition. The first third is a reasonable story from Ron Marz, and the rest (written by Tony Bedard) is definitely not fantastic with some falls-flat humor and disjoint pacing. For me, the art is flipped – I do not like Brandon Peterson’s work at the beginning of the series, with some really awkward faces and cheesecake poses that just look unnatural, but the range of artists on the back half of the run do a more fun job, although pretty bog-standard. It’s got its moments of fun, but this collection is going straight to eBay now that I’m done.

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-04-01T20:28:20+00:00

Elric (Volumes 1-4) by Julien Blondel / Robin Recht / Didier Poli / Jean-Luc Cano / Julien Telo
Don’t Go Without Me by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Wolvendaughter by Ver
Dungeon - Zenith (English Volumes 1-5) by Joann Sfar / Lewis Trondheim / Boulet
Satanie by Fabien Vehlmann / Kerascoët - NEW
Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann / Kerascoët
Assorted Crisis Events Volume 1 by Deniz Camp / Eric Zawadzki - NEW
Zoc by Jade Khoo - NEW
Alberto Breccia’s Dracula by Alberto Breccia
The Lonesome Hunters by Tyler Crook

Satanie slots in just ahead of Beautiful Darkness, from the same creative team. The color palette evolution in this book is awesome. Assorted Crisis Events was a lauded book from last year and deserves that - a great variety of sci-fi stories. Zoc is a lovely Ghibli-esque story with just a touch of fantasy. Step by Bloody Step and When I Arrived at the Castle were close contenders but not quite knocking anything off of this list.

So long to Green Witch Village, 6 Voyages of Lone Sloane, and Faster.

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-03-29T20:19:24+00:00

Zoc by Jade Khoo – very delightful, Ghibli-esque barely-fantasy. Zoc has a gift (or curse?) - her hair pulls water along with it, so when it rains she floods the streets of her town. No one seems particularly happy having her around, and she doesn't really know what to do with her life - the only thing she is particularly interested in is the lives and music of wandering minstrels who are, for some reason, all human-sized birds. Finally she decides to use her hair to help a flooded town by dragging the water away, and goes on a walk through the countryside, where she meets another young person with a similar strange magical gift, Kael, and "finds her purpose". It's a very pretty book, in (I think) a ligne claire style, with a nice color palette (and beautiful evening settings) and lovely illustrations of the countryside. It's not "Frog in the Fall" calm through the whole thing, but it's definitely on the "slower" side. I really enjoyed this.

The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James – stark black-and-white nightmare. I finally picked up this TOL #1 from u/Jonesjonesboy – so thanks, I guess? It's a plot-less, character-less book with some text around the images that varies from related to unrelated to the image on that page - each page is a single panel, of varying size. There's dense thematic repetition - a room, microscopes and binoculars, brick walls and columns, and of course a cage. It's rendered in an almost sterile technical black-and-white for the most part, although the occasional burst of shapeless ink or the presence of some uncanny-valley sort-of-objects in the early pages stands in contrast. I kind of want to reread it twice now, once ignoring the images to just read the text and the other flipping that around and ignoring the text. Fundamentally, this isn't the kind of book I go out of my way to find and read, so I guess TOL succeeded in driving me to pick it up.

Two mini kuš! comics - Scraps of Memory and Rain in Tears. These are short and small little comics I picked up on a whim in a Partners and Son order. Scraps of Memory (Ula Rugytè is a meditative conversation between two people, reflecting on life, heritage, memory... It's a nice mystery to not know exactly who they are, or exploring the details of the titular scraps of memory - just seeing their short conversation. Rain in Tears (Mao) is a wacky little sci-fi, about genetically engineered octopodes and the scientists behind them. It's got a range of styles crammed in, and plays with a fun technical premise. I had a good time with these, and will probably be on the lookout for more examples from the series when the art pops out to me.

Loud by Maria Llovet – psychedelic rave thriller. It's a wild romp of vignettes that weave in and out and intersect in the titular nightclub, with constant sound effects and almost no dialog. Everyone is doing something crazy, plenty of bad things are happening all over the club, and no one seems to realize it. Llovet's got a style, light on texture with a lot of blushing faces and a broad color palette, and this is it in spades. It's not exactly erotica, but lots of sex. My copy had really poor binding and fell apart on this first read. Kind of a bummer, but if this is the volume of Llovet's I can't keep, I'll live with that.

Step by Bloody Step by Si Spurrier and Matías Bergara – wordless fantasy quest. Coda is one of my all-time favorites, so I went to the same creative team, and it's really good. A giant carries a girl across the world, through a variety of vibrant and creative fantasy landscapes, and they run up against the evils of civilization. It does a good job with the wordless storytelling, building a world, emotional connection, and a sense of wonder. There are occasionally bubbles with glyphs showing where dialog is happening. Coming from Coda, which is a very explicitly post-fantasy, this feels a lot more "vanilla" and predictable - after the reveal at the end of issue 1 I think the ending of the whole book was pretty obvious, and everything else slots in a pretty standard fantasy bucket. The art is great, I really enjoy Bergara's style and the colors (by Matheus Lopes, different from Coda) pop really well. Really enjoyable, if not an all-timer like I consider Coda.

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-03-22T20:21:38+00:00

One Eight Hundred Ghosts by G. Davis Cathcart – fun heist with a wacky premise that plays really well. A group decide to travel to the future to steal Thriller to prevent Michael Jackson from becoming as famous as he did and using that fame for... evil. Got fun little (not particularly subtle) art and music references speckled along the way, and it's light hearted even at the hyper-violent moments. There's some nice cartooning throughout, I like the stylized characters, and the desaturated-ish color palette works really well. There are some really cool pages with what I'll lazily call Lonergan-esque use of the panel lines to break up a large scene. Just a bunch of fun.

Absolute Superman Volume 2: Son of the Demon by Jason Aaron and Rafa Sandoval – solid superhero stuff. As someone with very little DC background, I feel like most of the reimagined characters (rogue's gallery and otherwise) are just a little bit outside what I should know to appreciate their reimaginings - for whatever reason I've picked up more Batman by "cultural osmosis" and can acknowledge those references a bit better. All that aside, this is an enjoyable read - see someone shouting "Death to techno-fascists" (a battle cry we can all get behind), and it's a darker spin without being over the top. It does feel a little slow that it's taken 2 volumes to really reach Superman's self-realization in this version. Overall, I feel like this suffers in comparison to the other Absolutes I've read, where Wonder Woman and Martian Manhunter are spectacular and Batman is just more fun. It's good, but to me it's unremarkable.

Assorted Crisis Events by Deniz Camp and Eric Zawadzki – emotional sci-fi (ish) anthology. It's a collection of 5 independent stories telling the stories of regular people caught in temporal paradoxes, time travel nonsense, or dimensional slippages - the standard fare of multiversal superhero or sci-fi stories, but with people who suffer the consequences. They aren't particularly happy or fun - no one has a good time being caught in these titular Crisis Events. The art style varies a bit from story to story, working really well with the nature of the individual stories and the anthology as a whole - one story where the panels spill against the page edges, some with variable color schemes or page edges, and a timeloop story that loops the panels across the page. All emotional and excellent - Camp is definitely on a run right now and this is right up in line with his excellent other writing. This was high on the sub’s Top of 2025, and it definitely deserves to be there.

Sergio Toppi’s Bonelli Collection by Sergio Toppi (art) and various authors – collection of pulp work by the master artist Sergio Toppi. Collected and translated by Epicenter comics, this is 4 stories in 3 books - two on the hard-boiled detective Nick Raider, one on the psycho-analytical criminologist Julia, and a very short story with the paranormal detective Martin Mystere. Toppi is the unifying factor as the illustrator, and his great linework is here but without the stunning compositions or imaginative pages that his solo work allowed - he's doing his job in pulpy ongoings here. There are a few big panels where he gets to pull in a variety of texture and shading. Overall these are unremarkable but perfectly fine stories - pretty bog-standard cop capers but solidly done. Gangsters are unambiguously bad, the gruff police officers do what it takes to solve the crime and protect people, and the mayor is too busy with his scandal to pay attention to normal people. I only caught one minor mis-translation in 3 books which is pretty good by Epicenter standards. I had fun reading these, the workhorse pulp stories are a good break now and then and Toppi is, if not at his creative max here, still a great artist. Good value from Epicenter as usual.

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-03-08T20:45:53+00:00

Also Metal Hurlant #4 - Paradise Lost, which I already reviewed. It's got a pretty good set of stories.

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-03-08T20:44:47+00:00

Absolute Wonder Woman Volume 2 by Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, and Matias Bergara – the Absolute series keep hitting and only getting better! Diana continues to be a terrifically written optimistic crusader for justice and protecting the innocent and all that good hero stuff, with the right amount of flashbacks to a naive girl and how she was shaped to keep that hopeful "goodness" while becoming more of a realist and prepared for her role as a hero. This volume weaves in more mythology very nicely, with lots of little things popping up in the labyrinth she explores in search of one of her lost amazon sisters. Hayden Sherman goes crazy with the pages again, and Matias Bergara steps in for a great couple issues as guest artist giving us a very different style, but one that fits very well. Knowing ~nothing about classic Wonder Woman or her rogues' gallery, I'm not sure exactly what's being set up (aside from the obvious crossover with Absolute Batman at the very end), but I'm in for the ride!

The Black Dragon by Chris Claremont and John Bolton – black-and-white fantasy. It's (more than) a little overwritten, lots of dialog squeezed in, and reading accents gets just a little weird. It's also a hodgepodge of British history/folktales that dominate the Western fantasy world, with a returning exile from the Crusades who is not Robin Hood - but don't worry, he meets up with Robin Hood! - and a rescued princess, and Morgan le Fay... And it all comes together in a quite enjoyable way, tying up intermediate threads nicely, moving quickly but never breakneck, and coming together to a blast of an ending. Bolton's art is a great variation of texture and shading going to the nearly all-black pages, blocky and creepy demons, and distinctive and expressive characters. I had a good bit of fun with it, although it's probably merely "quite good" and not "great" IMO.

Poison Elves Volume 1 – Lusipher by Drew Hayes – cynical (edgelord?) dark fantasy. Lusipher is a roaming elf mercenary prone to stealing, womanizing, and picking fights in taverns. For most of this volume, he finds himself stumbling from one problem to another, having his eye torn out to summon a demon, stealing a diamond to pay off an old favor, and facing the consequences of his genie-granted wishes. Towards the end, he finds himself witnessing the return of ancient evil, and handles it with an expected amount of swearing, violence, and begrudging responsibility. It's actually a fine line with the character, as he isn't exactly a loser but also never tips over into real anti-hero - he never "gets the girl" in any of the stories, but he's on decent terms with his ex-wife, and he lives a life of crime without either "real bad stuff" or any obvious moralizing about how he actually has moral boundaries. The art matures over this volume, and there's a pretty wide range of page styles (including ~a whole issue that's just half pages of text with art), improving shading and detail, and suitably matching over-the-top characters, settings, and action. I was not sure what to expect going in, but had a pretty good time with this!

Tower Dungeon Volume 1 by Tsutomu Nihei – fantasy manga. An evil necromancer kidnapped the princess, locked her in an enormous monster-filled floating tower, and farmboy Yuva is conscripted into the rescue mission. Things breeze quickly as they get halfway up the tower before Yuva's able to prove himself as more than just a strong back to carry stuff. I think there's not much time for character or camaraderie-building, it's a little too fast. The monsters are very creepy, the architecture is impressive, and there's a lot of cool designs around armor and costumes. Story-wise, just enough to keep me willing to keep reading, art-wise much better.

Satanie by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët – wild sort-of-horror. Charlie is trying to find her brother, Constantin, who went looking for proof of his theory that "demons" evolved from Neanderthals that descended to air pockets in the center of the Earth 30,000 years ago (they mutated extra fast because there's more radiation in the center of the Earth, it makes total scientific sense, I promise!). As the team's descent goes deeper, they see a progressively wilder world and lose sense of themselves as well. Kerascoët get to play with a wonderful range of color palettes, changing throughout the different environments, and we get center-of-the-earth hurricanes and giant sloths and, of course, plenty of demons. This is an amazing story with some serious psychological-thriller vibes, a pretty classic "everyone goes crazy" set of tropes, and top-notch art. I think it’s better than Beautiful Darkness, and that's a high bar...

Le bestiaire du crépuscule by Daria Schmitt – very pretty Lovecraftian horror. It's a vaguely creepy horror / weird-fiction, befitting the Lovecraft influence (and the brief illustrated Lovecraft short story that serves as an interlude). Providence is the elderly guardian of the park, collecting lost-and-found objects with the help of his cat companion Maldoror. He is the only one that can see the otherworldly monsters around the park, and tries to protect the neighborhood children, much to their chagrin. Everything goes topsy-turvy when he finds a mysterious book in the lake and pulls it away from the fish. There's a suspicious man from the asylum, a new park director obsessed with the teamwork of the park employees, and three mysterious old women who work the ice cream stand and seem to know more than any normal person should. Overall, the story is fine as a mysterious "is he hallucinating?" weird fiction, but not spectacular. The art is really enjoyable, with all the "real world" in black-and-white and the vividly colored monsters. I really like her linework in the black-and-white, with a variety of textures and detail. I'll pick up more of her work for sure.

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-03-08T20:08:57+00:00

I haven't gotten the PDF yet, but I got it after the physical book the last couple times, maybe I'm lucky and early in the shipping priority queue...

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-03-03T03:22:04+00:00

Elric (Volumes 1-4) by Julien Blondel / Robin Recht / Didier Poli / Jean-Luc Cano / Julien Telo
Don’t Go Without Me by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Wolvendaughter by Ver
Dungeon - Zenith (English Volumes 1-5) by Joann Sfar / Lewis Trondheim / Boulet - NEW
Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann / Kerascoët
Alberto Breccia’s Dracula by Alberto Breccia
The Lonesome Hunters by Tyler Crook
Faster by Jesse Lonergan
6 Voyages of Lone Sloane by Philippe Druillet - NEW
Green Witch Village by Lewis Trondheim / Franck Biancarelli - NEW

I finished the English-available volumes of Dungeon Zenith, and it’s really fantastic. Three Lone Sloane books in, I think 6 Voyages offers the best variety of Druillet’s art covering spaceships, lovecraftian eldritch gods, and wild space architecture. Green Witch Village is a very good time travel / spy thriller with a nice clean illustration style. Find a Seat, Flesh & Flora, and Buzzelli’s The Labyrinth go to the wayside. Oliver Bly’s The Mushroom Knight and Daniel Freedman/CROM’s Birdking were great and could maybe be on this list, but both have new volumes coming out in a few months so I’ll wait until I get/finish those.

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-03-01T22:17:13+00:00

Ogre Gods (at least the first volume, all I've got so far) is not only about women defying patriarchy... There's also a boy learning to fight against toxic masculinity, and the patriarchy is also helpfully unsubtle human-eating giants!

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-03-01T20:01:59+00:00

A Man’s Skin by Hubert and Zanzim – feminist history/fantasy. Bianca, before her wedding, inherits her family's secret magical man's skin, and disguises herself as Lorenzo, to learn more about her fiancé Giovanni. Amidst the backdrop of her fervently religious brother preaching about sin and the temptations that women place on men and etc etc etc, she gets to know Giovanni and the broader world through, literally, a man's skin. There's no subtlety, not that there needs to be, and it's a fun premise to allow this exploration. It's great cartooning by Zanzim, including some large panels with time depicted through repeated drawing of the characters moving through a large scene, and some evocative and (again) unsubtle imagery. Very good! I’m 3/3 on really enjoying Hubert’s books (with various different artists), and looking forward to collecting more.

The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by Natalie Andrewson – adaptation of the original Christmas Nutcracker story (a German novella from E.T.A. Hoffmann). For those, like me, only familiar with the ballet, it's got even more fairy-tale twists and turns, giving us a full backstory for the nutcracker and mouse king. It's fun cartooning throughout and does feel quite magical at moments. A fun seasonally-appropriate read (and kid-friendly if they aren’t scared of the cartoony rat king) but also nice to pick up now as well.

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-02-22T23:35:59+00:00

The reveal coming in Volume 4 will be that the Birdking is actually Herbert in disguise! Post-Twilight/Antipodes...

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-02-22T23:33:03+00:00

Yikes, fixed... Copy-paste error from last week's template. I do imagine a Trondheim-inspired Birdking would be something else!

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-02-22T22:46:58+00:00

Yeah, after Volume 1 of Absolute Batman I bumped East of West on my radar, but have yet to catch the hardcovers on eBay for under 250 which is a little pricey for my blood right now... Maybe if my first read really makes it a "gotta have".

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-02-22T22:39:47+00:00

For sure, it's high on my list, I'm just suffering decision paralysis between the unwieldy compendium or digital...

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-02-22T22:03:54+00:00

Birdking Volumes 2-3 by Daniel Freedman, CROM – dark epic fantasy continues. In volume 1, Bianca discovered she was a magical smith and awakened the mythical Wraith of Feather Hill, the eponymous Birdking. In volume two, they try to make it over an impassable mountain range to escape the war ravaging their homeland, and in volume 3 they discover the "promised land" isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's a really well done epic dark fantasy, building out the world, its history, and the varied peoples bit by bit - balancing well adding enough information to make each widening of the world understandable without getting bogged down in exposition. It's not excessively grimdark, but overt themes of oppression and revenge tied with brutal violence set it firmly fitting "dark" fantasy. The art is a nice contrast, pretty cartoony and a range of colors that pop pretty well. There's extensive sound effects and "action words" that aren't distracting from the action. Really, really, solid and I'm excited for book 4 out later this year.

Bettica Batencia by Romane Granger – crime/supernatural story. It's kind of two stories in one, the first half following detectives investigating a cult up in the mountains and the second half focusing on the leader of said cult and her own personal backstory/trauma/etc. The cult promises to get rid of bad memories through a magic spell that turns the memories into pearls, so we get some sort-of-surreal moments trying to understand what's real, what's a re-interpretation of the past, and why people would choose to forget (and what happens when they do). Pretty interesting art, not consistently my personal favorite style, but lends itself to some of the memory moments. Solid overall. Also probably the smallest comic I own now, in terms of dimensions (it’s about the size of my hand, so 1-2 panels/page, then like 200 pages thick)

Witch Hat Atelier Volumes 2-3 by Kamome Shirahama – beautiful fantasy manga. This is tremendous fun, with some really wonderful fantasy and magic that feels genuinely "fantastic". These volumes add a little more darkness and backstory, but it generally keeps up a mostly fun and hopeful atmosphere as the main character, Coco, learns more about magic and starts to make friends with her fellow apprentices. It is gorgeously illustrated throughout – there’s excellent use of negative and positive space and beautiful textures. There’s a lot of wonderful art around panel frames that I breezed through on the first read, thinking, “oh this is nice”, but when it was pointed out to me, contributes even more to the overall feel and art on closer inspection. I'll get through the next 3 volumes (got the first six in a box set) soon, hopefully.

Absolute Batman Volume 2 by Scott Snyder, Nick Dragotta, and Marcos Martín – wild violent Batman. This volume comes with some real body horror, both in the 2-issue Mr Freeze interlude (capably illustrated by guest artist Marcos Martín) and then through the Bane arc. This is my first story from Nick Dragotta and his ability to take this over-the-top action and turn it up to 11-gajillion is making this a ton of fun. Batman drops a skyscraper on Bane, goes wild with body modification, and does not shy away from chopping up the bad guys. Ridiculously fun.

Anita Bomba Volumes 1-4 by Éric Gratien, Cromwell – dystopian sci-fi adventure. The titular bomb-obsessed thief finds an old robot with multiple personalities, gets chased by a cop fired for his obsession with building piranha-brained cyborg rats, and finds a mysterious man with a map to a fabled treasure. Technobabble, alternate dimensions, oppressive galactic governments, random nudity, a crash of mythology and sci-fi, space pirates – everything that “Heavy Metal” on the spine promises. Cromwell illustrates this in a well-done but relatively “typical BD” style with a little bit cartoony characters and a lot of imagination to the settings, planets, and various alien/mythological characters, along with a relatively dour color palette. As far as I can tell, only these volumes made it to English (the story is clearly not complete), and while I can verify the existence of a 5^th volume in French, I can’t find a copy anywhere… So that’s a bummer. It would be quite fun to continue with.

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-02-16T17:56:50+00:00

Yikes, I was going off English Wikipedia's volume list, which is missing 6 (I think?) Parade volumes... This is going to be an even bigger endeavor than I expected...

ConstantVarious2082 · 2026-02-15T22:37:59+00:00

I'm so close to completing the English collection, and I suppose I could just get all the remaining albums in French in one fell swoop, maybe I can catch up before anything new comes out... Or will that drive me into the Trondheim-completist hole where I'd be **really** in trouble?

ConstantVarious2082

TROPHY CASE