Fables Vol. 1, by Bill Willingham

Man, I really wanted to like this book. I tried to like it, all the way through, but save for a few moments of amusement I was largely unimpressed. This is not The Unwritten, sadly, and maybe my love for that comic colored my view of this one? I'll need to do some SCIENCE to find out.

In the meantime, let me tell you why this book should have been awesome:

First, I mean, fables. I have really grown to enjoy satires/homages of fairy tales and the like, and that's exactly what this is. In this comic series, the inhabitants of, like, any imaginary story have been exiled from their respective homelands by some mighty Adversary and now live mostly in NYC, except for the non-human ones (or non-able-to-pretend-to-be-human ones) who live on a farm upstate. Which sounds kind of ominous, actually, I hope they're okay. In this particular volume we have Old King Cole as the mayor of Fabletown, Snow White as his deputy, the Big Bad Wolf (aka Bigby) in pretend-human form as a cop/detective-type, and lots and lots of other favorite characters doing many and varied things. Oh, and Bluebeard shows up and I totally know who he is this time! Thanks, Neil Gaiman!

Second, it's a murder mystery. Bigby's case here is the mysterious disappearance slash probable murder of Rose Red, whose apartment is covered in blood almost like that one episode of Dexter and whose man-friend Jack (of Beanstalk fame) is eager to find out whodunnit. I love murder mysteries, and in this case I get to actually see the crime scene for a change! Graphic novels are cool like that.

So, fables and murder. Fantastic. But, here's why it failed for me: the writing. It was very comic-book-y with the emphasis on all the important words but also sometimes on words that seemed to be fine on their own and I was like, wait, what? He said that sentence how? Does he speak English? (Does he speak English? Does he speak English? I could do this all day...)

Ahem. And then also Willingham tried to be all cutesy and self-aware with the dialogue and it comes out instead all verbose and clunky and awful and like absolutely no one anywhere would actually talk, and I am like, omg chill out, which is easy for me to say from this end of an extremely run-on sentence but WHATEVER. It's a comic book! I want to look at the pictures!

Example: Bigby says to Snow White, "This isn't about Prince Charming. It's about your sister, Rose Red." And of course no one talks like that unless they're Expositing, and so Snow White calls him on his BS and says, "This may surprise you, Mister Wolf, but I'm not entirely an idiot. I actually know my sister's name." Unfortunately, this is ALSO not how anyone talks unless they're putting on a show for a listener, of which there are none that are not the reader. A simple "Yeah, that's her name, what about her?" or "Do I have another?" would easily have sufficed, but no-oooo, and that's how the whole rest of the book goes and it is tiresome.

The concept and the general execution are so good, guys, and if you are more forgiving of terrible dialogue than I am you will probably really like this series, which I imagine goes on in the same vein. But I can't do it. Let me know how it goes?

Recommendation: Fables, MURDER, pretty pictures. Is this your bag?

Rating: 5/10

The Unwritten Vol. 3, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

Nooooo I forgot to pace myself and now I have to wait some unknown amount of time for the next volume! Nuts! But my husband got his hands on it and he's the type of person who accidentally spoils things on a regular basis, so really I had to read it. Had to.

And it is so fantastic. Even if you don't want to read this series, track down this volume at your library and find the page with the amusingly terrible rip-off of His Dark Materials. And then flip forward to the other page that looks like that one and that gets in a dig at George Lucas with a reference to "meta-condrians." Totally worth it.

Other things that are totally worth it: one of the issues that makes up this collection is a Choose Your Own Adventure. Did I mention FANTASTIC? My husband and I proved our perfectness for each other by choosing the exact same path through the story (we apparently are fans of evil evilness), but I also went back and read through a few other iterations and a) they were all interesting and b) some paths made sly winks at other paths that you wouldn't notice except if you read them all. Oh, AND, the whole point of the choosing of your own adventure is to make the point that you, you know, get to do that with your life. Hands-on morals? How intriguing.

Story, you say? There is one, but why aren't you just reading it? Seriously. Okay, fine.

Our friend Tom is presumed dead but still on the run from the Shadowy People. Someone has written a terrible fourteenth (yes, fourteenth) Tommy Taylor book and even though the publishing house knows that it wasn't Tom's dad, they're totes willing to make a jillionty-twelve dollars off of it. It includes the aforementioned scene with Lord Gabriel explaining Powder to Tommy Taylor. Oh, yes. It turns out that the SPs wrote it to bring Wilson Taylor out of hiding, which may or may not end up working. Also, we find out who Tom's mum is and we sort of find out what Lizzie Hexam's deal is ("sort of" because part of it is the CYOA). And if they're giving away all this information now, I am very interested in finding out what they aren't telling me!

I'll just wait here, impatiently, until I can find out.

Recommendation: For people who don't mind parodies of beloved children's fantasy series, people who like to choose their own adventures, and fans of the garrote.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge)

The Unwritten Vol. 2, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

I held out as long as I could, but after The Unwritten's super-intriguing start, I just couldn't stay away! And it's still super-intriguing and also baffling and also heartbreaking.

So last time there was Tom Taylor, the namesake of a bigger-than-but-basically-a-ripoff-of-Harry-Potter book franchise who is either not actually his father's offspring and therefore not worthy of the Tommy Taylor franchise or actually Tommy Taylor and therefore an unknown-to-himself Man Wizard. Which is still pretty much where we are, sort of.

Now, at the end of the last book someone murdered a whole bunch of people and Tom was the only one around to take the blame, so this story arc takes place in a French prison overseen by a governor who is not sympathetic to minor celebrity. But the prison thing isn't really important, what's important is all the people in it. Tom makes unlikely friends and allies with some of the inmates and makes a huge enemy of the governor for what seems at first to be no reason at all. Except that then we go look at the events from the governor's perspective and you find out that he has these kids who are obsessed with Tommy Taylor to the point of believing in his real and actual existence, and the governor is not pleased that Tom has effed things up big-time. Oh, and then those shadowy people from the last book decide to burn down the prison. No big.

Also, a trip to Nazi Germany via magical doorknob and an... interesting meeting with Josef Goebbels. Also, also, in the non-Tom comic at the end, an adventure with a foul-mouthed rabbit in a sort of Winnie-the-Pooh land. It's all very delightful, really.

I think the best part about this series so far is that even with the ridiculousness and insanity, it's all very literary. It loves literature and references it, in the form of the aforementioned Pooh spoof and an extended riff on the Song of Roland and of course all of the Harry Potter/fantasy-in-general allusions. It is also way more than its premise; sure, there's adventure and potential wizardliness, but there's also a lot to think about in terms of the role of media, the effect of childhood heroes on children and the adults who love them, and the magical power of attention. That middle one is what leads to the heartbreak in this volume, big time, as it does in real life.

I am definitely in for the next volume, and almost definitely for getting off my duff and patronizing my local comics shop for the issue-by-issue comics when the time comes. It's good stuff.

Recommendation: Yeah, you'd better have that strong stomach for some of the violence in here, and also a strong heart. A love of the f-word can't hurt, either.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge)

The Unwritten Vol. 1, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

I don't remember where I first heard about this series... one of those blogs or podcasts or something that tells me what's good. I don't remember what I was promised, either, but whatever it was I liked it enough to give it a shot.

That forgetting posed a bit of a problem in the first few pages, which I read and thought, "Whaaaaaaaaat is this? This is not very good. What's with all these words? It's a graphic novel!" And I really almost gave it up right then, but I said to myself, I said self, you've done this before and maybe you should just give it a little bit longer.

And of course, I was right. The second time, with the reading just one more page. Because it turns out that first three pages or whatever are meant to be pages from a not-graphic novel series that is like Harry Potter et al. and therefore is written as a send-up of Harry Potter et al. And once I figured that out, I was much happier!

The real novel, the graphic one, is about this fella called Tom Taylor whose father wrote the aforementioned series that instead of Harry Potter is Tommy Taylor. Tom is emphatically not Tommy, but is still making a living going around to all the cons and whatnot signing Tommy Taylor signatures and talking about his father's work, which his father can't do because he's gone mysteriously missing, or possibly just abandoned everyone. And right now Tom has two opposing problems causing him no end of trouble — a group of people who think he's not really Tommy Taylor but some kid his father absconded with to make himself look good, and another group that thinks he's totally Tommy Taylor, magical wizardry and all. And some people in that last group would really rather him dead...

There's so much to this story, I've barely cracked the surface of it, which makes sense considering these are just the first 5 comics of an ongoing series. But other interesting things so far are Tom's obsession (given to him by his father) for literary locations, a mysterious staircase that has more stairs going down than coming up, people possibly made of words, and some revisionist-history backstory involving Rudyard Kipling.

I may or may not have gone right out the day after reading this volume to get the other two that currently exist. I might have to track down a comic shop if I get through those too quickly...

Recommendation: So far, I'd recommend for people with a good sense of humor about fantasy conventions and a slightly strong stomach.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge, A to Z Challenge)

I Saw You..., edited by Julia Wertz

This is an odd little book. It has a long subtitle, like so: "Comics Inspired By Real-Life Missed Connections, filled with near misses, brief encounters, strange sightings, lusty longings, and a little hope for love." I'm... not really sure what to say about it.

Okay, well, so it's a series of comics, that's a good start. And they're all based on Craigslist "missed connections" ads, which can be awesome or depressing, and are therefore sometimes awesome and sometimes depressing. I'm not clear if all of these comics are actually based on specific Craigslist postings or if some are just sort of made up, but they all sound pretty plausible.

Also, each comic is done by a different artist, so there are a lot of different art styles and different takes on how to illustrate a missed connection — some are straightforward and beautifully rendered, a couple take the Craiglist ad and turn it into something super-creepy (though I suppose some of the ads are!), most are somewhere in between. All of them give you a little insight into the kind of person that might find themselves writing to a hottie they've possibly barely spoken to.

For the most part, I found the comics a bit boring and/or predictable, but a couple really stood out and made me happy in my heart, so it wasn't a total loss.

Recommendation: For people who surf the missed connections, because maybe there's something you need to know. :)

Rating: 6/10
(A to Z Challenge)

V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore

...Interesting. That's how I would describe this book. I love the movie version, which I've watched at least once a year (on Guy Fawkes Night, natch) for the past several years, and this year someone reminded me that it was, you know, a graphic novel first, and maybe I should read it? Yes, maybe I should. So I requested it from the library, and it took forever to arrive, and then I renewed it a couple of times, and then finally I says to myself, "Self, you've gotta just read this thing. Go." So I did. It took a while, largely because I started a job in the middle of it and I'm still working out how to read print books (I listen to audiobooks at work) on my new schedule. But I read it and it was interesting.

The story is this: There's a dude, and he's called V, and he dresses like Guy Fawkes, and he blows some stuff up, and you're like, cool. He is blowing stuff up because he lives in a fascist state run by basically Big Brother, with help from a computer, so we've got some good dystopian tropes in there. At some point, he saves a girl called Evey from some police-type people who are going to do terrible things to her, and she sort of becomes his apprentice. Also, the fascist state does not like V and is hunting him down, and slowly learning his backstory (which is kind of nuts) in the process.

The book is actually quite different from the movie — and this necessarily is how I have to approach this review — with more creepiness in V's backstory and seedier government officials, and actually much less blowing stuff up, which is disappointing but understandable for the medium. I quite liked all of the extra things I learned about Larkhill, where V was imprisoned, because it made V make more sense, but much of the stuff I learned about the government officials (they're corrupt! promiscuous! ne'er-do-wells!) was rather tedious. More creepy smiling masked people, please!

All in all, I did like the novel, but it won't top my yearly dose of explodey things any time soon.

Recommendation: Definitely read it if you've seen the movie, or if you generally like dystopia and intrigue in pictorial form.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Y: The Last Man Book 4, by Brian K. Vaughan

I ended up reading this one pretty quickly after the last because I seem to have gotten Scott interested in the series and thus I didn't want him stealing this before I got a chance at it. Because I'm territorial like that. But now I think Scott's going to end up reading them first...

Okay, so, book the first was all exposition-heavy and kind of annoying, but then book the second was a lot better with the action and the plot moving forward, and then book the third was pretty equally okay. But then I got completely squicked out and a little derailed by this book, and I can only hope the squicky stuff NEVER COMES BACK AGAIN.

I'm sure it was at least a little on purpose, but these weird scenes in which repressed sexuality is made unrepressed and some odd form of torture happens really made me cringe. It was just so... weird and awkward and so seemingly completely irrelevant to the story (which is actually how I feel about the Israelis in this series, too, now that I think about it) that I just wanted that half of the book (yes, half) to be over now!

Luckily, once it's done you can see that there was, in fact, a point to all the awkward and it actually makes me feel a little less annoyed with Yorick because he becomes a slightly less annoying person. So that's a plus. And the second half of the book is fairly interesting, with yet another set of crazy people and an equally crazy throwdown between them and our heroes (who are still Yorick, Mann, and 355).

So... I think I'm going to put this series away for a little bit and come back to it once I can repress those unrepressing scenes. Makes perfect sense, yes?

Recommendation: Ehhhhhh... let me get back to you on this. If it makes sense in the overall story, I'll give it a thumbs up.

Rating: 7/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Y: The Last Man Book 3, by Brian K. Vaughan

More Yorick! Good times! Well, good for me. Not Yorick. Or anyone else, for that matter.

Let's see, who's a player in this book? We're still following Yorick, his monkey Ampersand, 355, and Dr. Mann on their journey to California. But there's a quick detour in Kansas when a terribly accented Russian shows up ready to rescue some male astronauts (well, one is obviously a cosmonaut) on their Houston-unsupported return to Earth. Which would be going fine, except...

The strange Israeli army people are back, apparently following the orders of Yorick's mother who thinks that 355 is going to do something terrible to Yorick... or something. It's not terribly clear. What is clear is that the Israelis' leader is bent on kidnapping Yorick for herself... not like that. Maybe like that? Okay, not as clear as I thought.

Who else, who else... there are some geneticists, which is cool. Oh! Right! And a troupe of actors who stage a play about the last man on Earth, make meta-commentary on this series ("If there's one thing I hate, it's crappy works of fiction that try to sound important by stealing names from the Bard"), introduce me to a work by Mary Shelley called The Last Man (which is on my TBR pile effective immediately), and piss off a bunch of Kansas ladies who really just wanted someone to continue their stories (you know, soap operas) for them.

OH. And then there is someone called Toyota who for some reason wants Ampersand. I imagine that will come back again quickly.

So all in all the series remains on a high level of ridiculousness tempered by an intriguing question and some fine illustration.

Recommendation: Yeah, you should probably pick up this series. It's pretty cool.

Rating: 8/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Rhinoa's Ramblings

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Y: The Last Man Book 2, by Brian K. Vaughan

This is definitely better than the first collection of the series, mostly because there is nearly 100 percent less exposition. So relaxing to just read a story!

The plot is still generally the same, of course — Yorick is probably the last man on Earth, making him a very hot commodity for many groups who want him in varying levels of alive. A government operative called 355 and a Dr. Mann would like to figure out why he's still alive and possibly clone him, because that would be useful, but the group farthest to the "dead" end of the aforementioned spectrum is hunting this little group down as they travel from Boston to California. They make it as far as Ohio in this book and stir up quite a bit of trouble in the process.

This series continues to provide an interesting answer to the "what if we got rid of all those pesky men" question, though the focus on the Daughters of the Amazon in this set got pretty tedious pretty fast — I get it, they're a cult, they're quite crazy, can we move on now? But of course we can't, because Yorick's sister has gotten herself caught up in the crazy.

With any luck, things will get crazy in a different direction in the next book.

Recommendation: Read the first set; if you like it, read this!

Rating: 8/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Y: The Last Man Book 1, by Brian K. Vaughan

I'm getting smart on this A to Z Challenge thing and picking books to read from my long TBR list on GoodReads. Birds! Stones!

This book is the first volume of the collection of Y: The Last Man comic books. In this set we learn that some mysterious and possibly ooky thing has eliminated all of chromosomally male creatures on earth (humans, monkeys, chinchillas, whatever), except for one human, Yorick, and his monkey, Ampersand. Yorick has no idea why he's still alive, but he's more worried about finding his girlfriend slash possible fiancée than pretty much anything else.

Of course, there are other players in this new world — at the beginning of the comic we are introduced to a woman with an amulet that too many people want to get their hands on, an Israeli army officer who gets a quick promotion after all the dying, a scientist with a cloned fetus that dies during birth (the fetus, not the scientist), a secret agent known only as 355, a group of "Amazons" who cut off their breasts and fight with bows and arrows and generally want to kill men and also women who don't follow their path, and a majority Democratic government under siege by the wives of the Republican congressmen who died.

There is a lot of stuff going on here, and I am intrigued to see how it plays out in the future, but I'm not terribly thrilled with the characters or the storyline thus far, probably because everything is in big-time Exposition Mode. I think I'll give the next volume a chance and see what happens.

Recommendation: Good for fans of apocalyptic and other generally problem-ridden universes, and those with an eye for pop-culture references.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Rhinoa's Ramblings

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.