Illustrated by Sean Phillips
This series is a classic Hollywood murder mystery. Charlie wakes up after a raging party, and he finds the star of his movie dead in her living room. He quickly erases all trace of himself and flees back home. Later, he finds out the studio staged her after he left to make it look like a suicide, and the lie eats away at Charlie. He tells his friend Gil, who also can't stand what the studio is doing. Gil and Charlie have a tenuous relationship - it was originally Gil's idea to have Charlie report Gil as a Commie during the Red Scare, and now Gil feeds Charlie ideas and dialogue for scripts so they can split the money. Ever since WW2, Charlie can’t write like he used to, but his name is still respected in Hollywood. The studio recasts the leading lady role, but Charlie is still unsettled by the whole affair, and he stumbles upon a few clues that drag him into the mystery even more.
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Illustrated by Kousuke Kurose (Illustrator), character design by Noboru Kannatuki
In this dark fantasy with RPG elements, Goblins often leave their nests in the mountains and raid villages, stealing food, livestock, and kidnapping women. Adventuring parties undertake quests to exterminate the nests, but often go in unprepared and under-leveled. If there happen to be female adventurers who are under-leveled, the goblins will kidnap them as well. The goblins have their way with these female prisoners. On one such adventure party, the Priestess' party is torn to shreds. Just before she is taken by the goblins, a brave knight, known as The Goblin Slayer, saves her and helps eradicate the nest. Priestess decides to continue adventuring with Goblin Slayer and helping him in his mission to destroy all goblins everywhere. Goblin Slayer's village was ravaged by raiding goblins, and he has a vendetta against the entire race.
Caiman and Nikaido live in The Hole, a place where sorcerers go to practice magic on unsuspecting humans. Caiman has his head transformed into that of a lizard, and now he and Nikaido are trying to track down the sorcerer who did it. If they can kill him, the spell will be reversed, and Caiman will go back to normal. Nikaido also runs an eatery called The Hungry Bug, and Caiman works for a doctor’s office specializing in helping the victims of sorcerers. In this way, both gather leads on sorcerers working around The Hole so they can track them down. En, the head of the sorcerers, is also looking for the sorcerer who changed Caiman, but he still had to do something to stop Caiman and Nikaido from killing sorcerers. He sends in a team of “fixers, the ones who usually cleans up messes, to deal with Caiman and Nikaido.
Vol 1: Opening Fire, illustrated by Leandro Fernández, colored by Daniela Miwa, lettered by Jodi Wynne
Andy and her team of super soldiers are nearly immortal. Some have been alive for centuries, others, millennia. They don’t know why they haven’t died yet, despite repeated attempts to kill them, most of the time in fairly violent way. They often discover their immortality by coming back to life after being killed on the battlefield. When they start dreaming about a new girl, they have to find her or they’ll just keep dreaming about her. Andy recruits Nile Freeman, a U.S. Marine, after she returns to life from having her throat slit. After their latest job goes south and their secret gets exposed, they must go on the run and figure out how to put things back to normal. The team begins to fracture, and it’s team leader Andy’s job to figure it all out and keep the team together.
Illustrated by DaNi
Octavia (Vee) and Eldora (El) are high school seniors in the town of Shudder-to-Think, Pennsylvania. Their coal-mining town is plagued with sinkholes full of fire that filled the coal mines ages ago, and the holes and soot claim many lives throughout the town. Nevertheless, people can't seem to leave Shudder-to-Think, guilty of leaving their dead behind in shoddily marked graves empty of inhabitants, swallowed by even more sinkholes. Aside from the soul-sink that is the town, something else strange is going on that seems to affect townspeople intermittently - they forget whole swaths of time, hours, days, or more, and can't account for their whereabouts nor their actions. Vee and El enlist the the help of the local witch, who knows more about all of these strange phenomenon that she lets on. The truth is horrifying, and each victim of the forgetting disorder is faced with a pivotal choice - to keep forgetting, or to face the horrible truth of the nature of their town.
MNGR João da Silva is assigned to the Homestead mining colony on Titan after their previous MNGR becomes suddenly ill, and the station returns another unprofitable quarter. What he finds is a station on the brink of exploding, with tensions high between the Terran management and their Titan workers. The Titans were genetically modified long ago to be stronger and larger than Terrans, able to withstand the harsh conditions on Titan. João decides that what the workers need are trackers so that he can analyze immense amounts of data to figure out where the inefficiencies lie. The Union workers, through their liaison Titan Phoebe Mackintosh, disagree with João’s assessment whole-heartedly, and instead assert that the station needs upgraded machinery. Phoebe and João try to work together to save Homestead, while others decide a violent coup will fix the problems of the mining colony, and finally bring liberation to all Titan.
Vol 5: Imperial Phase: Part 1, illustrated by Jamie McKelvie and Kevin Wada, colored by Matt Wilson
The Pantheon has to deal with the repercussions of Persephone’s actions from the previous volume, and a disagreement on how to proceed has them in factions. Some favor taking their enemy head on, some favor researching their options more, while others believe a path of anarchy is the best. This volume is prefaced with an interesting edition of "Pantheon Monthly," a magazine that presents as one written in-universe, and that gives insights to how the remaining pantheon members feel about what’s happening. This also serves as a recap of sorts for some of the major incidents of previous volumes.
Illustrated by Ian Bertram, colored by Matt Hollingsworth
Little Bird's village comes under attack from the American Empire, but her mom has a great plan: squirrel her away until the violence is over, then set her on freeing a great warrior named Axe. Axe will save the people, and save the North, aka Canada, the last bastion of resistance against the Empire. Little Bird's family lineage is not what she was originally led to believe, and the Bishop who's coming after her now has more secrets than all of them combined.
Vol 4: Rising Action, illustrated by Jamie McKelvie, colored by Matthew Wilson
There is no way to summarize this volume without spoiling the ones that come before, so I'm not going to try. I will instead just provide my review. This volume provided a lot of clarity to some action in previous volumes, but the underlying motivation of our "bad guy" is still unknown. Every new chapter gets us closer, gives some small tidbit, but there's still a big mystery to solve. The art is back to normal, without guest artists and colorist, so that was a major improvement from Volume 3.
Vol 3: Commercial Suicide, illustrated by Jamie McKelvie, Tula Lotay, Kate Brown, Stephanie Hans, Leila del Duca, Brandon Graham
We are reaching the point where reviews will need to be super vague because of spoilers to previous volumes and future volumes. This volume provides some serious flashbacks into how some of the other pantheon was awoken by Ananke. To this point, we know nothing of Tara, but we see her awakening. We also see the beginnings of The Morrigan and the love of her life, Baphomet. Amaterasu makes another appearance, as we haven't seen her since volume one. There are some insights into some of the mysterious happenings from the first two volumes. Not all is revealed, and the reader is left with more questions by the end, but more to continue wanting to read the series. |
About MeI've been reading manga and comicbooks for years. Now, I write reviews and other helpful things for School Librarians, teachers, parents, and students. Search this siteRatings, Audience, and Subject Tags
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