2021 books: 15-19

[the_siobhan]

I swear, graphic novels are the only thing that is going to get me over 20 titles this year.


    

Punderworld by Linda Sejic A story about Hades and Persephone. It's very silly and meet-cute and her art is amazing. There are lots of little one-off jokes on her patreon that have occasionally made it onto tumblr, which is what twigged me to Sejic's art in the first place. Alas, most of them did not make it into the comic book (Persephone being devastated while trying to pet Cerebus "I don't have enough hands!" is one that stands out in my mind.) But I'm still glad I picked it up and I hope she makes more.

    

The Sandman: The Doll's House by Neil Gaiman, Mike Dringenberg, , Malcolm Jones III, Chris Bachalo, Michael Zulli, Steve Parkhouse One of the things we dide to make space in the house is move our bookcases into storage. When we sorted out the books I came across some graphic novels and since there's a new Sandman show in the works I decided to re-read them. This is the second collection and takes place after Dream gets out of imprisonment. Four of his subjects are missing from The Dreaming, one of them the absolute horror show The Corinthian, which legit gave me fucking nightmares when I first encountered him. Which you know, was his entire point.

    

The Sandman: A Game of You by Neil Gaiman, Shawn McManus, Colleen Doran, Bryan Talbot, George Pratt, Stan Woch, Dick Giordano One of the side characters from a Doll's house is the centre of this story. She enters her own dreams to fight "The Cuckoo", an alien intelligence from another universe and a group of her friends from this world follow her into The Dreaming save her. I haven't read this one in years and I had genuinely forgotten the level of transphobia. Having a trans character at all was huge in 1993 when it came out but the amount of mis-gendering she has to deal with is horrific. I sincerely hope those scenes get a heavy re-write for the series, because holy fuck.

    

John Constantine, Hellblazer: Original Sins by Jamie Delano and John Ridgway This is a collection of the one-off comics, so there isn't a single over-arching stories. Some of them are hilarious, some of them really disturbing. Because it's all single episodes it feels weirdly disjointed, and it ends in a weird place - a cliff-hanger that I assume is resolved in the next issue. In the year 2021 some of the horror just seems so sweetly naive - investment bankers as actual demons is a cute take from the perspective of a timeline that has people like Jeff Bezos, the Walton family and the Koch brothers.

    

John Constantine, Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits by Garth Ennis and Will Simpson Constantine faces death - not from all the demons he regularly wrestles with, but from lung cancer from all the friggin' smoking he does. How mundane. Problem is, he knows he's going straight to Hell when he dies. So he has to trick his way out of it. This is apparently one of the most popular Constantine stories ever written and I totally get why. It's brilliant.

Comments

[greylock]

A lot has changed in *30* years.

I really should get around to reading The Sandman one of these decades.