To The Last Page

The third volume of the complete adventures of Corto Maltese - surely the greatest comic book creation ever in terms of its scope and the brilliance of Hugo Pratt's illustrations - neatly brings the adventurer from one side of the world to the other. Having learned in Peru that in Nonni e Fiabe  (at the end of Volume 2 of the collected Corto Maltese ) that there is a map in Venice detailing the location of the legendary city of El Dorado, the next story L'angelo della finestra d'oriente takes Corto to Venice while Europe is in the middle of war. The lust for gold however is not confined to El Dorado, but is chased by an Austrian army officer and it seems half of the nations of Europe in Sotto la bandiera dell'oro . Money doesn't just make the world go around, it keeps wars going. The white man's madness however extends further than Europe, this volume also taking in Corto's travel to Abyssinia where his guide and colleague Cush also finds that the lust for...

Many of the early stories collected in Volume 2 of the complete Corto Maltese have a feverish quality, taking place in the tropics, in the Amazon, in South American jungles, Caribbean islands and British Honduras. Corto's companion on most of these adventures is Professor Jeremiah Steiner, an academic with interest in the arcane, who has a habit of getting drunk and in trouble, as well as finding ways to open doorways to adventure, hidden treasure and mystical lands. The stories are relatively short, but they cover a lot of adventure, with native uprisings, pirates, witches, headhunters, voodoo rituals, slave traders, German steamships in the jungle and deadly female adversaries. The stories present a great variety of settings and action, and Pratt's black-and-white artwork and page layouts are of his very best, creating atmosphere and character in fluid brushstrokes, detailed where necessary, experimenting occasionally with darker, abstract blocks of ink. It's impossible n...

Los enamoramientos opens with the narrator describing in detail a couple she used to watch every morning at a cafe before she started work at the office of a nearby publishing house. (The later realisation that it is a female comes as a surprise when you are used to the observational voice of the author as Juan Deza in Tu rostro mañana ). María Dolz sees Luisa and Miguel Desvern (or Deverne) as the perfect couple, immaculately turned out, classic in their style and manner, but not ostentatious. It's a little daily ritual that amuses her to observe, but at the time of her " pequeño estímulo matutino " she was unaware of their names, any kind of acquaintance restricted to merely visual observation with a vague nod of acknowledgement, so it takes a while to associate the newspaper report of a man killed in a knife crime with the murder of Deverne. Unlike a typical novel that would explore the underlying motivations or even randomness of the murder (a carpark attendant with ...

A lot of people would be dismissive of pulp crime fiction, considering it sensationalised, but I'd contend that they are actually very important social documents of their time, breaking taboos about what was acceptable for publication in decent literature. As well as being very creative, adventurous and exciting story telling. I've seen that in previous Hard Case Crime books that republish classic noir from the past, from Max Allan Collins's Quarry whose lack of morals about killing come from his time spent in Vietnam to the counter culture of Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle . But not everyone needs to be an assassin for hire or a small time drug dealer turned to murder and Seed on the Wind has another unusual and daring angle that takes another look at changing attitudes in society. First published in 1930 before he became famous for his creation of Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout takes on an uncommon and very controversial subject in Seed on the Wind . A woman with a womb...

The start of this decade has been tough on Spanish literature with the premature deaths of at least two notable writers. The death of Javier Marías in 2022 was certainly noted in the UK, but not so much Almudena Grandes who died less than a year earlier of cancer at the age of 61. That's perhaps understandable as few of her works have been translated into English, but she was a major figure in Spain and particularly associated with her home city of Madrid. As writers, the two were very different in style and content, Marías certainly the more literary of the two, but Grandes had her own important part to play in the chronicling of lives in her works. No more so than in her final series of novels, Episodios de una guerra interminable (Episodes from an interminable war), works all centred on a painful subject kept under a veil of silence that few had tackled directly; the horrors of the Civil War and the lasting impact of the Franco years.  My experience of reading Almudena Grandes t...

The idea of illustrating Kafka or even turning  his work into a graphic or comic storytelling is not as strange as it might seem. I have a terrific edition of Robert Crumb's Kafka for Beginners and Peter Kuper's dark angular illustrations work also well in his adaptations of Kafka's stories. That goes for the most famous works that at least have a surreal and nightmarish quality, which along with terror of the authorities and the hell of faceless bureaucracy is practically a definition of Kafkasque as most people know it. The Japanese artist Nishioka Kyodai covers several of the most famous pieces but also ambitiously takes on some of Kafka's lesser known short works. The artist(s) finds a way, for example, to illustrate the definition of the imaginary creature 'Odradek' in The Concerns of a Patriarch (otherwise known as Cares of a Family Man ) as an angular and geometric abstraction, and there is a similar approach in he mixes that style with more traditional...

What do you look for in a horror book, or a horror movie even? Personally, scares don't count for much for me and I would prefer the situation to be at least half-way plausible and make a meaningful point about society and our attitude to death. So that kind of rules out zombies even if you want to hang a commentary on it about mindless consumerism. There are exceptions of course, and it's all the more impressive when you can be surprised by an unexpected new take on the genre. I got that with The Girl With All The Gifts and I've found that also with Simon Clark's Blood Crazy . While not exactly a zombie horror - there are no living dead here - Blood Crazy has a similar sense of a feeding frenzy being unleashed on society, and indeed the sides are drawn across pretty distinct generational dividing lines that does suggest there is a deeper commentary to be found here. But first of all comes the shock, and it comes fairly quickly. Staying a night at friend's house, ...