Aka Friday 14th September
Today the postman delivered:
‘The Nameless City: The Divided Earth’, the concluding part
in Faith Erin Hicks ‘The Nameless City’ Trilogy (with colours by Jordie
Bellaire) and the stakes are dramatically raised as armies are destroyed and
friends are in jeopardy, but friendship and trust win out. Faith Erin Hicks and Jordie Bellaire do a
great job on the art, there is a nigh-perfect mix of realistic & cartoony,
the faces are so expressive, and the colours just pop. The story matches the art,
Kai and Rat go on a rollercoaster of emotions and feelings – fear, worry,
confidence, despair, joy, sadness and happiness – with the perfect coda to the
story. I can’t say more without spoiling the story. 10/10.
Kelly Thompson (writer) and Jenn St-Onge (artist) have been
telling a great story and in ‘Nancy Drew’ #4, Nancy and friends dig further
into the mystery and into danger. All the main characters feel and act like
real people, with history, ups and downs and jokes, and when the issue ends
you’re worried about what is going happen to character X (no spoilers!). 9/10.
‘The Wicked and The Divine’ #39 throws a little more
backstory to the Pantheon and Ananke and a massive curve ball, which may switch
things more for (maybe) the first time. After a creeping sense of dread and foreboding,
in the recent issues, there’s a feeling that the “good guys” are going to win
and the 2bad guys” are going to get their comeuppance. 8/10.
Bryan Hill, Dexter Vines and N Steven Harris’s ‘Wildstorm Michael Cray’ #11 also has that feeling of crescendo - from there only be one
number left on the front cover countdown, to the deaths cutting down the cast, and
to meeting Michael’s “passenger” – that the waiter is just about to hand our
characters the bill. After several issues of John Constantine (I love that the
Wild Storm Universe John Constantine looks very similar to Grant Morrison), Diana
Prince and Christine Trelane plotting and using (or at least trying to) Michael
for their ends, it feels that all the options have been narrowed down to bloody
vengeance and death! (Wildstorm Michael Cray is a great counterpoint to the “main
series” The Wild Storm, where that series is about the world building, showing all
the main players and why their doing what they do, Wildstorm Michael Cray is the
opposite, by telling the story of Michael Cray, we’re getting the/an emotional
side to the Wildstorm Universe and how it feels to live in it). 8/10.
‘Cemetery Beach’ is by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard, the
team behind Trees, and is about “a sprawling and secret off-world colony
established a hundred years ago and filled with generations of lunatics”. At
breakneck speed, #1 introduces his to Michael Blackburn, who has been sent to investigate
this colony, as he breaks free from the colony authorities and finds a
potential ally and gives us a brief taster of what live is like in the colony. Because
this first issue is so action packed we don’t learn much about the history of the
colony, although we do learn about living in the colony, and it’s not clear if
we ever will or if the off-world colony is a McGuffin to fuel the story. 8/10.
…listened to more ‘The Thing Minute’ podcast episodes and UNKLESounds’
‘Edit Music For A Film’ mix, a two-cd DJ mix, which includes a mix of UNKLE
edits, trip-hop, songs from movies and snippets of dialogue from different
movies. A great mix...
…and I did the G2 crossword…
…which went a tad worse than yesterday’s crossword, as I
needed to cheat on six of the 24 clues, but I did learn that ‘Jasper’ is both a
boy’s name and a semi-precious quartz stone, that ‘Actinium’ is a ‘radioactive
element’, and that the ‘Cockatoo’ is a ‘crested parrot’.
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