November 6, 2024 10:19 pm

SAFER PLACES (review) —“Comfort with a stranger”

Creator: Kit Anderson Avery Hill Press, 2024 FOR ONE SMALL MOMENT we help an other live: in memory, in experience, in action, in desperate times when no one else cares. This is the primary theme in SAFER PLACES by creator Kit Anderson, a collection of twenty-one strips in two hundred pages. Stellar work most all, sometimes arresting, as in the title page for the story “Country Lane” where moonlight beams a shadow through a rail fence; and later in the same story, a small black panel in the night with the edge of a shadowed figure, a glimmering path ahead, and gold scribbled highlights, with the words, “So you move on.” Another theme. The artwork is mostly sharp duo-tones, sometimes splashed in color, attractive in its diversions into something different, like the black panels walking through the night, or a symbolic draped window alone in the middle of a page,

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The Panharmonion Chronicles (review) —“Don’t mess with a missionary man”

Writer: Henry Chebaane Artist: Stephen Baskerville Supanova Media 2023 BINGE AN HOUR or three through the recently released 200-page graphic novel THE PANHARMONION CHRONICLES, and you won’t notice the time passed. Artwork by Stephen Baskerville engages with slick, highly colored scenery that sets fully rendered figures and faces in fully rendered backgrounds with pleasing perspectives, like a tv drama, always attentive to the direction of light and shadows. Under the glare of the brightly inked art, writer Henry Chebaane enters with a rhythm of drumbeats: time‑and‑place stamp, sound effects of a crashing window, flames, screeching tires, terrified voices; then silence, until snatches of dialogue gradually pipe in the play. Opening art indicates two perspectives, one in the present, and another reflected in a duo-tone style of an earlier era, the steampunk period, say 1870 to 1910, when discoveries of chemicals and processes, matter and energy brought hosts of inventions and

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Aliens v Avengers #1 (review)

Writer: Jonathan Hickman Artist: Esad Ribić Marvel Comics / 20th Century Studios, December 2024 How appropriate that we publish a review on a sci-fi /

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The Coffee Table (review)

Kieran Alexander – writer Christopher Wood – artist Independently published, 2023 When we write a review for this website, we think about the best way

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1949 (review)

Creator: Dustin Weaver ( @dustinweaver12 ) Image Comics, June 2024 We were delighted to have stumbled across this title in a book shop, and dismayed

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Absolute Batman #1 (review)

Writer: Scott Snyder Artist: Nick Dragotta DC Comics, October 2024 A hulking Batman, akin more to a ridiculous professional wrestler than the traditional gymnast’s physique,

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Nemesis: Rogues Gallery #1 (review)

Writer: Mark Millar Artist: Valerio Giangiordano Dark Horse Comics, July 2024 Nemesis: Rogues’ Gallery picks up where Mr Millar’s title Big Game ends. The world’s

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Deer Editor volume 1 (review)

Writer: Ryan K Lindsay Art: Sami Kivela Mad Cave Studios, May 2024 A large deer is an investigative journalist in a large semi-rural town, dealing with

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