(read at Pindari cabin, Yeranda Cottages, Dungog, 2-9 January 2024) Charlie and Nick are in love. Really and wonderfully, deeply and assuredly in love, and free from does-he, doesn’t-he vibes of earlier volumes of Heartstopper where the attraction was clear but the certainty of connection was not, the two guys Continue Reading
Graphic novel
Comic book review: Asterix and the White Iris by Fabcaro (writer) and Didier Conrad (illustrator)
(courtesy Hachette Australia) If you don’t have a magic potion to revive your spirits and strength every so often, or at least when a semi-threatening Roman legion is nearby, it can be easy to flag a little and to not be quite as peppy as you once were. That was Continue Reading
Graphic novel review: Peculiar Woods (Vol. 1) – The Ancient Underwater City by Andrés J. Colmenares
(courtesy Simon & Schuster) Losing your sense of place in the world can be a hugely debilitating experience. Thais applies regardless of whether the replacement for your status quo is good or bad since any change, even if you can adapt quickly to it, leaves you feeling unmoored and uncertain Continue Reading
Graphic novel: Beetle & the Hollowbones by Aliza Layne
(courtesy Simon & Schuster) Coming into your own is, in theory, a wonderful thing to have happen. You know yourself, you get yourself and you live the kind of life that’s authentic and matters to you; that’s in theory, of course, which is a wonderful place to live where everything Continue Reading
Graphic novel: Good Luck by Matthew Erman and Stefano Simeone
(courtesy Simon & Schuster) Great big expansive sci-fi stories are always a huge delight to lose yourself in. While the really good ones ask some fairly intense questions about who we are and why we do what do (and why maybe we should rethink that because reasons), they also have Continue Reading
#Halloween graphic novel review: Voyaging Vol. 1 – The Plague Star by George R R Martin (story) and art and adaptation by Raya Golden
(courtesy Penguin Random House) If really good sci-fi is all about to taking a great big, long, hard look at the dark soul of humanity, and the best of it is, then Voyaging Vol. 1 – The Plague Star by George R R Martin with art and adaptation by Raya Continue Reading
Graphic novel review: I Hate Fairyland – Volume 5: Gert’s Inferno
(courtesy Image Comics) Welcome back MUFFIN FLUFFERS! That’s the aggressively return encouragement we’re given on the back cover blurb and if you were afraid that you can’t go back to back to something as sublimely and manically perfect as I Hate Fairyland‘s first series of stories, then think again because Continue Reading
Graphic novel review: The Last West by Evan Young & Lou Iovino (writers) and Novo Malgapo (illustrator)
(courtesy Alterna Comics (c) Evan Young & Lou Iovino) Alternate histories are a flourishing genre and a really creative way to already established events that we now take for granted but which substantially changed the way our world is and how it works. The Last West by Evan Young & Continue Reading
Graphic novel review: Astronaut Down by James Patrick and Rubine
(courtesy AFTERSHOCK) Staring down the existential barrel of oblivion as we currently are, thanks to an epidemic, climate change, AI, encroaching fascism and a thousand other malodorous life-ending ailments, we have become well used to storytelling that inhabits a future apocalyptic/dystopian storytelling landscape. Usually these stories operate as a weird Continue Reading
Graphic novel review: Vern – Custodian of the Universe by Tyrell Waiters
(courtesy Penguin Random House) There is something deliciously liberating, no doubt for the creator every bit as much as the reader, of a premise being seized by the lapels with alacrity and enthusiasm and taken to some narratively imaginative and epic but emotionally intimate places. It’s rare that two play Continue Reading