Graphic novel

Reading the Heartstopper series by Alice Oseman, now with a fourth very much welcome volume, is like falling into an affirming beautiful world in which anything is possible. It’s not perfect by any measure and Oseman goes to great lengths to be frank and honest about the challenges of love, Continue Reading

There is a real art to balancing a completely bonkers premise with some pithy, salient observations about the brokenness and weirdness of humanity which somehow still manages to hang onto something approaching hope, and Undiscovered Country, now back with a second off-the-wall Alice in Wonderland-meets-Mad Max narrative instalment, manages with Continue Reading

One of the tests of how well a story is told, particularly one told over multiple, decade-long instalments, is how easily you can leap into a later episode and still not only know what’s going on but what the characters mean to each other and how this world, so well Continue Reading

If Sea of Stars issues one through five proved anything, it’s that space is as far from boring as you can get. Admittedly at the start of one of the most imaginative graphic novels series you’ll ever come across, Kadyn, the nine-year-old son of long-haul space trucker Gil, thinks it’s Continue Reading

Stepping in a science fiction tale ripe with promise only to find it is all that you expect it to be and expansively so much more is one of life’s great pleasures. Well, on the assumption that you like science fiction aka sci-fi, of course. If you do, then you Continue Reading

If you read enough space operatic science fiction, it becomes clear that the far and even near reaches of the galaxy are an endlessly exciting place of intrigue, mystery and anti-humdrum. But what if that’s not entirely the case and that being out amongst the stars is all bit been-there-done-that, Continue Reading

The prospect of finding out the truth about something is powerfully and motivatingly intoxicating. Operating as we so often do in a veil of lies and half-truths, much of it motivated by necessary social lubrication or the unwillingness of certain groups in society to gaze upon the authentic face of Continue Reading

We’ve all had bad days at work, right? Sent an email with highly confidential comments meant for one person and one person only to Reply All. Or we’ve accidentally deleted a document we spent all day on and no amount of IT wizardry can summon it back from the Microsoft Continue Reading

Diving into a fully-realised fantasy world is one of life’s great inestimable pleasures. No matter where you are or what you are doing, escaping into a world such as the one exquisitely and immersively well-realised as the one in Gert and the Sacred Stones by the Italian team writer Marco Continue Reading

Among the current, quite understandable, surfeit of apocalyptic and dystopian literature – a product of both a long-term decline in peoples’ faith in many things including governing bodies and the state of the world, and the seemingly never ending COVID pandemic – there is a very welcome trend that posits Continue Reading