To The Last Page

Ted McKeever’s 1990 5-part full-colour series for Epic really tested the boundaries of the writer/artist’s ideas and artwork, but also pushed the extremes that Marvel’s daring creator-independent imprint was used to publishing. The idea behind Plastic Forks is as bizarre as you could imagine and McKeever’s artwork really goes for it in a dynamic way. Two scientists are working on a way to make human reproduction self-contained, with both males and females capable of reproducing independently without any contact between the sexes. So far the experiment has only been tried out on monkeys, but after a dangerous incident in his laboratory, Dr Henry Apt recovers in hospital to find his sexual organs replaced with a mechanical construct. Escaping from the institution holding him, Apt takes off across the desert pursued by secret agents, finding assistance from an eccentric former soldier, Angel, building his own weaponry and escape vehicle in preparation for the coming apocalypse. But what ...

Perhaps Ted McKeever’s most wild and entertaining work, the creation of Eddy Current, an escaped lunatic from an asylum who believes he has superhero powers, gives the writer/artist free reign to indulge in the wildest of adventures and push his scratchy drawings to expressionistic lengths.   Eddy’s not insane and doesn’t know why he is in an asylum, but inspired by the adventures of his comic book hero the Amazing Broccoli, Eddy purchases a Dynamic Fusion power suit from one of the ads in the comic book, hoping to realise his true potential. If only batteries had been supplied, Eddy wouldn’t have had to plug himself into the mains, but when the activation of his suit brings the power down in the asylum, Eddy realises he has 12 hours to explore the city of Chad and perhaps find his old girlfriend. Instead he runs into a couple of violent backstreet criminals, is worshipped as the second coming by an unusual nun and, naturally in a Ted McKeever storyline, stumbles upon a fiendi...

Ted McKeever’s first graphic novel from 1986 looks a little primitive at the start, but very quickly develops into the scratchy, smeary, bold and angular style that we have become accustomed to seeing in his work. Even character types are familiar from Eddy Current and Metropol , as a group of oddball types in Union City band together to try and face down a dangerous menace to the city, and perhaps civilisation as a whole. Here in Transit , it’s City Commissioner Boss Traun who has designs not so much on controlling the city as using it for his own obscure and ultimately destructive aims. He attempts to gain this power and establish a new order through Reverend Grisn, who is standing as a candidate for mayor of Union City. The only means of stopping this threat could be through the unlikely form of Spud, an underground graffiti artist who has unwittingly witnessed the darker side of Grisn, along with a blind beggar and an ex-wrestler who give him shelter when he goes into hiding. Ther...

Maybe you need to have read the previous book in the Jake and Juoma series ( Bait ), since there’s a sense of something missing here in terms of characterisation and the relationships between characters, but the writing - short, sharp and full of cliché - is such that I can’t imagine that there was ever much depth in the first place. Other than the exotic setting of Kenya, this is a really run-of-the-mill thriller, full of contrived, improbable situations and ridiculous one-dimensional characters. There certainly wasn't enough here to encourage me to make it to the end.

The notion of Sarah Waters writing an old-fashioned ghost story is a strange one, but there's a lot more to The Little Stranger than at first appears, and while it may disappoint fans of the writer's earlier work, it turns out to be the logical next step for the writer of Fingersmith and The Night Watch .  Moving progressively towards more a more modern period, The Little Stranger 's post-war period is significant, with traditional notions of class being upturned, most notably in the narrator Dr Faraday who, born the son of a housemaid at the estate of the Ayers family known as the Hundreds, succeeds in becoming a doctor and somewhat accidentally ends up being the personal physician for the Ayers family and witness to their decline.  That decline into madness is caused by a spirit that appears to torment the household, but it could just as easily be the sense of personal guilt, gossip, prejudice and betrayal that have driven previous Waters' characters to the madhouse...

Presumably not by chance, Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel follows similar themes to Issui Ogawa’s The Lord of the Sands of Time , also published among the first wave of Japanese sci-fi novels under Viz’s new Haikasoru fiction imprint, but in reality the two books are very different in approach. Again the theme is one of using time-travel in order to combat the overwhelming invasion force that threatens to wipe out the entire planet, but in the case of All You Need Is Kill , the time-travel is on a smaller, more personal scale, but the outcome could equally be of global importance. Here, one fresh Japanese recruit in the United Defence Force, Keiji Kiriya, is caught-up in a Groundhog Day style loop, seemingly doomed to fight and repeatedly die in a major battle with the Mimics that, like a computer game, is continually reset until he can build up the necessary fighting experience and find a way - if there is a way - to overcome the merciless onslaught of the strange mechanical amphibian crea...

With effortless wit, Holt introduces the reader to another world where the underlying mechanics and physics of how the world works is closer to that of myth and fairytale, and only marginally more unreliable than the real world we know. For Chris Popham, a travelling salesman and amiable loser seeking to impress customers into buying a wider range of magical products than the inexplicably popular DW6 dried water (“just add…”), there’s always the risk of a malfunctioning product like the instant car-park space trapping him in another dimension. Not to mention the trouble with Demons. All fine and dandy when they’re held in objects like a SatNav kept secure by protective charms, but Chris has been encountering a lot of rather more dangerous ones while out on his rounds, and wonders if it has anything to do with his friendship with Jill, a high-ranking official at Demon Control in the Department of Metaphysics, the new work placement student tagging along with him, or the entity in his Sa...