To The Last Page

Horribly captivating Being kidnapped for a ransom can be a terrifying experience. You might think that's obvious, but you probably have no real idea of just how bad it can be. In An Untamed State , Mireille, a lawyer and daughter of a wealthy Haitian businessman, is kidnapped in Port au Prince by a group of armed men, wrenched away from her American husband and their young child, and held captive until a ransom of $1 million is paid. As you can imagine, the experience is deeply traumatic for Mireille, but no... you can't  really imagine just how traumatic. Roxane Gay can, but there's no way of making it easy for the reader. An Untamed State is a book of two parts. The first part deals with the kidnapping, the second part with the aftermath. Without getting into boring structural analysis, the manner in which the author divides perspective is relevant to how the book achieves its impact so powerfully. At the beginning it feels like the author is going straight for the kill,...

It would be Rude not to... Nexus looks like fairly basic superhero comic book material, but it doesn't take more than a glance at Steve Rude's stunning layouts to realise that this is a cut above the ordinary, and it doesn't take more than a few pages of issue one either to realise that there's great imagination in Mike Baron's literate and philosophical musings on ethics and the nature of (superhuman) power. Living on Ylum, a planet that lies outside the jurisdiction of the Web, Horatio Hellpop is compelled by terrible nightmares to take on the role of Nexus, a vigilante superhero who dispenses death sentences to some of the worst mass murders in the universe. There's also a considerable amount of humour in the situations and an imaginative science-fiction futuristic universe that offers so much potential. All of it is superbly visualised in an incredibly dynamic fascination by artist Steve Rude. Rude is not a stylist like Bill Sienkiewicz or Frank Miller who ...