To The Last Page

The first book in Sylvain Repos's Yojimbot opens in a spectacular if unsurprising way. The imagery is at least familiar, the comic book opening with a silent and swift moving samurai standoff sequence straight out of a Kurosawa film or Kazuo Koike's Lone Wolf and Cub or closer perhaps in artwork style to Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo . The clue to where this differs and yet plays out unsurprisingly exactly as you might imagine is there in the title; the Yojimbo samurai warriors duelling here are robots. There's an anachronistic surrealism to the setting that initially makes you also think of this taking place in some Moebius reality, not least in its clear line art, colouration and movement language. Yojimbot however is not going to leave you in some abstract surreal world where clearly advanced technology exists, so there must be some reason for two robots facing off and using archaic swords. A "Eastworld" theme park perhaps? If so, there this amusement park ...

One science-fiction theme that is becoming more relevant in contemporary society is the paranoia thriller. One of the best exponents of this in the 1970s was the author Philip K Dick, most dramatically in his novel A Scanner Darkly , and that idea of being constantly watched and observed by powers and authorities was updated in the movie The Truman Show to reflect the growing interest in reality TV. Even since then, reality TV and the omnipresence of security cameras, phone cameras, the growth of the internet and the ability to observe and share almost every aspect of our lives has gone to new levels that would shock even PKD. Like all great science-fiction in this field (and indeed in reality TV), there is an uncomfortable place where a fun and entertainment sit alongside a rather troubling aspect to society and personal freedoms. The amusing and slightly disturbing twist that Omni-Visibilis places on this idea is that it extends the nature of The Truman Show to consider an even mo...

Lester Dent - creator of Doc Savage - has a little bit of a different spin on the hard boiled pulp crime genre. The characters are indeed all greedy, grasping, violent and double-crossing, but the difference here is the nature and scale of the operation being planned. This one involving a syndicate plotting the overthrow - or at least the continued embezzlement through impersonation - of the president of a South American nation. There is a small time crook involved. Walter Harsh is a grifter making a living taking photographs involving whatever kind of scam he can come up with, but when he cheats a photographic supplier out of a large amount of stock, his luck finally runs out. He finds himself pursued in a car chase that puts him in hospital, where his blood group is noticed and picked up by an investigator with a proposition for him. Not only is the blood group right but Harsh even looks like El Presidente. Except he doesn't have a scar, but that can be easily fixed. Lured by the...

Judith Vanistendael's The Two Lives of Penelope is ambitious in how it attempts to tackle serious issues not just through the medium of a comic, but in the simple relating of someone going about their everyday domestic business. This is a work where the unspoken - the things indeed that can't be spoken - is allowed to seep into everything else, where even the idea of keeping them separate is simply impossible. The two separate lives that Penelope leads are however dramatically contrasted in the opening pages of the graphic novel. Penelope is a surgeon who works tours of duty helping the war wounded in Syria. In the upper panels of each page we see the simultaneous daily activities of her husband and daughter at home in Belgium and in the lower panels, Penelope graphically struggling with the dead and wounded in Aleppo. Her husband is a poet wrapped in his own thoughts and words, her daughter 13 years old experiencing her first period while Penelope is dealing with a different ...

You don’t ever have to worry about whether you’ll find it difficult to get into a new Jo Spain thriller; she will have you gripped and intrigued from the start and The Perfect Lie is no exception. Right from the start we see Erin Kennedy’s life fall apart, shockingly and unexpectedly in a dramatic fashion. Erin is an Irish girl now living in America working for a publishing house and married to a police officer Danny in the Newport PD. Not only did she witness his suicide, which is horrific enough, and then find out that he was under investigation by his own force, but it seems that she is now also on trial for the murder of her husband. How can it have come to this? So you will definitely be hooked from the thrilling and shocking start, but still, a crime thriller set in the USA and within the American criminal justice system is quite a departure for Jo Spain. Or is it really entirely new ground? Certainly Spain’s previous work has all been very much related to Ireland, to the specif...

With the notable exception of Jon McGregor (whose latest book Lean Fall Stand was recently reviewed here), books dealing with the here and now, that see the potential in the everyday experiences of ordinary people and the daily challenges they face, are relatively uncommon. Most people want a bit of drama and escapism in their books, a good plot and a thrilling narrative. Rachel Trezise’s Easy Meat turns that all around, looking at the people who need that sense of escapism just to get through this point in their lives. With a setting in north Wales on the day of the Brexit referendum, it considers what happens when that need for escapism runs up against a political agenda that has little genuine care or consideration for people’s lives and livelihoods. Caleb works in an abattoir, partly through necessity and partly through choice, as his previous experience on a reality TV show has left him seeking anonymity and in some way perhaps, a hands-on dealing with a truer sense of reality. ...