It has everything -- action, drama, humor, a love story, kick-ass heroines, crazy wonderful world-building, high stakes aLove. This. Series. So. Much.
It has everything -- action, drama, humor, a love story, kick-ass heroines, crazy wonderful world-building, high stakes adventure, well-developed characters with distinct voices and motivations. I'm bedazzled and bewitched by its charms and wit and powerful themes. This is intelligent and emotional storytelling at its finest....more
First there was Scully and Mulder (the truth is out there).
Then came Sam and Dean Winchester (saving people, hunting things, the fMy fangirl timeline:
First there was Scully and Mulder (the truth is out there).
Then came Sam and Dean Winchester (saving people, hunting things, the family business).
Recently there's been Elizabeth and Philip (Married Russian spies not to be confused with Royals)
Now keeping company with all of these is Alana and Marko. Star-crossed lovers from the warring planets of Wreath and Landfall. Horns and wings aside, their love is universal and instantly recognizable. All they want is peace, to be left alone to raise their precious daughter. But their enemies are many and threats lurk around every corner, from the seemingly innocent ballet teacher to Alana's Open Circuit coworker with her infinite supply of drugs. Then there are the mercenaries, Robot insurgents, and interplanetary revolutionaries who want to make the denizens of Wreath and Landfall pay for unleashing such a brutal and unceasing bloody war upon them all.
So much love for this series it's turned me into bonafide fangirl stupid.
Can this series get any better or more exciting, Other Barry? I'm here to tell you it cannot. Up against it, this series makes cyborgs as interesting Can this series get any better or more exciting, Other Barry? I'm here to tell you it cannot. Up against it, this series makes cyborgs as interesting as watching paint dry. Cyborgs -- watching paint dry -- even the ones with removable vaginas of the lighting up variety. Just the tip, Archer. You want to lose that thing or what?
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All Archer joking aside (and yes, that was totally for you Mara), Saga is a tremendous graphic novel series that continues to blow my hair back, my skirt up and my socks off. Don't even ask me where I left my vagina, but I'm sure it's gotta be around here somewhere.
This third volume of the Saga saga (see what I did there?) continues to up the ante on the crazy and the thrills. What I love about this series the most is that even though every other page contains something I've never seen before anywhere else, it all feels so very sane, and beautiful and universal. This is a space opera dealing with an age old bitter protracted bloody war between two different races. But our heroes Marko and Alana, born to fight each other, raised to hate and want to kill the other, have fallen in love. They have given birth to a mixed race daughter -- Hazel -- our intrepid sometimes narrator, a living symbol of all that is innocent and good.
Marko and Alana (and Hazel) act as our sympathetic entry point into this story and the wacked out landscapes and sundry denizens we encounter along the way. Their plight might not be relatable, but the love they share for each other and their family certainly is.
The Will may be an assassin extraordinaire with plenty of blood on his hands, but he also has a conscience and a desire to be a good man, kept in line by his lie-detector cat creature (who is even more awesome than the exotic ocelot). I heart Lying Cat, okay? Okay.
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There's so much to love packed into this story -- the action, the heart, the energy and passion and tongue-in-cheek humor. Always with the humor. Whether it's captured in the text or in the artwork, dynamic sensational duo Vaughan and Staples find the humor existing everywhere in their tale, in the absurd, the poignant, the raunchy and the ironic. It's addictive and cathartic and all I want is more. Just MORE. Of all of it. ...more
I freaking LOVE this series!! Believe the hype -- it's epically awesome. A heady mad mix of adventure, space opera, humour and a love story. You will I freaking LOVE this series!! Believe the hype -- it's epically awesome. A heady mad mix of adventure, space opera, humour and a love story. You will be shown things you have never seen before to defy your imagination. The characterization is phenomenal -- I love these creatures who have wings and horns and TV faces and giant lie detector cats. This has instantly become a favorite. Cannot wait to read more.
I picked up this book with the initial impression that I was in for an urban fanta *Available today!*
3.5 stars
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
I picked up this book with the initial impression that I was in for an urban fantasy piece in which Hell (and angels and demons) would play a role, but that some of the story would inevitably take place in a concrete, corrupted human city. But no. This is full on, 24/7 Hell, all the time Hell, everything Hell. There is no reprieve. And very little hope. The hope is so miniscule you need a very expensive microscope to see it.
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So yeah. Hell. In as much technicolor, cinematic horrorscape that you probably can't handle. Seriously, it's brutal. Claustrophobic and suffocating. Unsworth's painstaking, meticulous world-building of this feared and unknown domain is impressive to say the least. He spares no detail and isn't shy about unleashing buckets of effluvia, viscera, despair and derangement. This isn't your paranormal fantasy version of Hell where the Demons are sexy anti-heroes brooding about looking for bodices to rip open. Noooooo. These are deformed, mutated, merciless beasts seeking out any hole of any body to violate, and throw in some torture on the side for good measure.
Unsworth creates a Hell populated by innumerable species of Demons of varying size, hierarchy, power and cruelty. In this devilish brew, forsaken humans doomed to suffer Hell's torment, must co-exist. They are Demon slaves. Mere chattel. With meaningless jobs and tasks to perform in the ever present threat of Demon violence.
Thomas Fool is one of those humans, and one of Hell's Information Men. Normally, Fool's job consists of looking the other way -- of NOT investigating Hell's crimes. But when a human corpse shows up with its soul entirely gone, Fool is pushed into an investigation he is not ready for. He must learn his Detective's trade fast before whatever is consuming human souls turns its appetites on all of Hell itself.
This is a book extremely dense with description, and understandably so because the author has cut himself out a big job to build Hell and its fiery inhabitants from scratch missing no detail, no matter how small. There is A LOT of narrative exposition to move the story and action along too. Dialogue is minimally used. And that means the book can read heavy and slow in parts. You have to be patient with it and soak up the landscape. Let it unfurl in your mind and agree to stay with it until the tale is done.
Now that the book is done, and I've laid it aside, I find flashes of it continuing to haunt me -- certain scenes appear to be burned onto my retinas. I can't unsee them. This is a dark book, but for those seeking a dark fantasy set in the darkest and most fearful place, then you might want to give this one a go.
A free copy was provided by NetGalley in exchange for this review.
Here marks the concluding final volume of the original Dark Tower adaptation by Marvel comics and to say it's left me feeling underwhelmed is quite th Here marks the concluding final volume of the original Dark Tower adaptation by Marvel comics and to say it's left me feeling underwhelmed is quite the understatement. It turns out to be a confusing mish-mash of stories that barely connect to what's come before. The first two chapters are spent on Sheemie and the Breakers and strive to explain the birth of the Tower, its crucial importance and the forces who wish to see it destroyed. This is major Dark Tower sacred canon that took King decades to build and make believers of us all. To see it watered down in the final volume like this doesn't sit well with me and strikes me as rushed and lazy.
Then we're offered another adventure of young Roland and his original ka-tet which is followed up by a re-telling of the legend of Arthur Eld and his defeat of Lord Perth (a kind of lame David and Goliath type deal that I can't remember well enough from the books to know whether any liberties were taken with the source material or not).
As much as I was stupid excited for this graphic novel adaptation, I was slow to warm up to the series; in fact I skipped over Volumes 3, 4, and 5 and didn't pick up the series again until Volume 6 The Gunslinger: The Journey Begins. That's mostly because those first five volumes draw almost exclusively upon material from Book 4 of King's series -- Wizard and Glass. I'm much more a fan of long, tall and ugly Roland, than young Roland and his original ka-tet comprised of Cuthbert, Alain and Jamie. So while the series did get better for me as it went along -- especially The Battle of Tull and The Way Station -- there were way more lows than highs. Way more places where they got it wrong than right.
However, despite my lack of fangirling at this point, I'm deliriously excited by this news; the Dark Tower adaptation is continuing this fall with The Drawing of The Three: The Prisoner. Now we're talking!! Eddie Dean! New York! And hopefully some lobstrocities and astin. Oh yeah! The Drawing of the Three is one of my all-time favorite books and I have to hope that adapting from this juncture in the narrative will result in a much more successful experiment than what we've seen up to now. Only the best is yet to come in a world that has moved on. ...more
Bees are exceptional creatures. Their hive characterized by drama and high stakes, intelligence and a sophisticated organization that is a marvel to s Bees are exceptional creatures. Their hive characterized by drama and high stakes, intelligence and a sophisticated organization that is a marvel to study and behold. For all its beauty and the tantalizing production of golden, luxurious honey, the bee life comes at a high price -- an existence propped up by slavery and the hive mind. There shall be only one Queen and no original thought. Accept. Obey. Serve. It's Orwell's 1984 in the flesh, Thought police and Big Brother included. Deformity means death and is ruthlessly stamped out in a strive for purity that rivals Hitler's attempts at Eugenics in the creation of a genetically homogenous Aryan Master race.
I was excited to read this book. I needed no convincing that bees could be the stars of their own literary masterpiece in much the same way rabbits became legend in Watership Down. Growing up one of my favorite movies was The Secret of NIMH, a movie I love to this day. I bring it up now because it did what The Bees does not, and that made all the difference for me in my level of involvement and enjoyment of this novel.
NIMH (based on this classic children's book) is an animal fantasy that anthropomorphizes rats and mice to tell a harrowing adventure tale. For me as a child, and even now as an adult, the movie strikes a perfect balance between "humanizing" the animals enough so that the drama soars, yet still allowing their animal natures and the laws of the natural world around them to shine through.
While The Bees is a beautifully written book, with scenes that are quite lovely in their composition, I felt the author lacked conviction and an overall commitment to just what kind of story she was telling. At times, the bees are very humanized. At other times, they feel alien and unknowable. This back and forth and hesitation ultimately prevented me from ever truly bonding with any of the characters. I was emotionally shut out of the story even when my reader brain was fascinated by some of the details contained therein. For that reason, the story dragged in many places.
If you have a personal curiosity of bees, the detailed portrait the author offers here of hive life may indeed appeal to you. She has done her research, and there is definitely poetry contained in some of the pages of this book and in scenes that deal with the harsh realities of the natural world and the strict laws of bee existence.
This is a book you read with your brain, not your heart. ...more
Well, you wonder why I always dress in black, Why you never see bright colors on my back, And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone. Well, t
Well, you wonder why I always dress in black, Why you never see bright colors on my back, And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone. Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on. "The Man In Black", Johnny Cash
Marvel's ambitious undertaking to adapt King's magnum opus has been hit or miss for me. The first five volumes (essentially a re-telling of Book IV - Wizard and Glass) did not work for me, most likely because Wizard and Glass is my least favorite of the series. While I eventually grew to appreciate the story for what it is, young Roland will never beat out long, tall and ugly Roland. So I actually skipped over Volumes 3-5 and didn't pick up the graphic novel series again until Volume 6 The Journey Begins.
I was so relieved and super-psyched to resume the story as it's finally reached The Gunslinger. Roland’s young battles are behind him, all has been lost, and he is now on the road to the Dark Tower as a solitary traveler, embittered, battle-weary, with no tears left to shed. This is the Roland I adore. This is who I want to read about and see captured in the panels of graphic novel.
In the previous volume, Roland finally meets up with Jake, and I loved how the Way Station encounter is handled. This volume focuses on the slow mutants attack and ends with Roland's palaver with the Man in Black himself.
I did not hate this volume by any stretch, but the series is now venturing into sacred territory and I didn't cotton to several of the storyline alterations. Not to mention, most of the art was just...not good. Inconsistent shall we say. I didn't like how in some panels Jake and Roland are very chiseled and there while in other panels they're barely there at all, kind of just shadowy impressions, blurry lines and all.
While I wanted to love the prolonged and "extra" interactions between Jake and Roland, something seemed not quite right about how they were speaking to each other. I can't put my finger on it really. But my gut just wouldn't leave it alone. And the climatic "go then, there are other worlds than these" scene fell flat for me. I didn't feel the punch or the emotionality I should have.
The last section capturing Roland's fireside conversation with The Man In Black is well executed. It strays little, if at all, from the original source material, a lot of the text lifted right from King's novel. Still, there are gaps even in this pivotal scene that I wish weren't there.
It's probably a mistake to read these graphic novels and judge them against King's books. Different format and all that, but I can't help it. And while I'm desperate for more Dark Tower, I'm probably much better off to just go and read the novels again rather than trying to find solace and satisfaction in the colored panels of a comic. A re-read is definitely on the table, but I will stick it out with the graphic novels too. When and where they've worked, I've been extremely pleased. ...more
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