Made of Library

As far as I can find there’s only one issue of this comic, which is disappointing because I would gladly have read more. There is also a short film and it’s been picked up by Netflix to make a TV series. I haven’t watched the short film yet as I wanted to review the comic on its own merits first. My comic reading history is webcomics and The Walking Dead, so I don’t ‘have a very broad basis for comparison, so I’m sure there’s a lot here that people more familiar with the genre could talk about that I’ve missed. The premise for this comic is a single mum and her superpowered kid, Dion. We only get about two pages of mum and kid action before we go to flashback and hear the story of how mum and dad met. It’s a shame because I liked the interaction between the mum and Dion. It was natural and fun and immediately showed us the dynamics of their relationship. The majority of the time is spent in flashback. We meet the dad, who is supposed to be charismatic and charming, but I ju...

Many years ago I used to read a lot of webcomics. It was part of my daily routine to check each one for updates and then read through the archive of any new ones I’d come across or old ones I just wanted to revisit. One of my regular comics was xkcd. I even read through the archive a couple of times after I realised I’d been missing out in the extra text you get when you hover the mouse over the image. Unfortunately, due to a number of technical issues, I lost all my comics bookmarks and links and was so disheartened about setting them all back up in the order I liked to bother doing it at all, and I stopped reading webcomics. This collection was published before I stopped reading xkcd so none of the comics were new to me, though there was some I’d forgotten. There was some added notes and marginalia that added extra interest beyond just the comics themselves. I think there is also some kind of secret code in there, which strikes me as something that would amuse Randall Munroe...

I like to come into a book not knowing too much about what it is. Let me know the genre and maybe and maybe an inkling of the subject matter, but mostly I prefer to start reading with as few preconceptions as possible. I avoid reviews, I avoid synopses, I try not to look at it’s Goodreads rating. I want to start with a clean slate. When I started reading Beloved I thought I was going to be reading a novel about a woman not long out of slavery and the struggles she faces. That is what Beloved is about, there’s no denying that. But it’s also about so much more than that. I thought I was going to be reading literary drama. It turned out to be more magical realism. Fortunately for me, magical realism is one of my favourite genres, so it was a win all around. I’d mentally prepared myself for reading about the brutality and horror of what was done to slaves in that time and place. It was there, but at no time was it gratuitous or intended for shock value. It was a necessary part...

This year I decided I needed to start reading more non-fiction. Where better to start than what is called the first true crime novel. In Cold Blood was written very soon after the events which the book covers. So soon after, that you have to wonder how much the rawness, the closeness of it, affected the writing of it. Researching and writing about a crime that was committed 20 years ago, is a much different thing to researching and writing about a crime that happened five years ago. The majority of our time in the book is spent with the murderers. And there’s never any question that they are the murderers, that’s not the approach taken here. We know that they killed this family, what unfolds is the how and, more chillingly, the why. We get quite a comprehensive history of both Dick and Perry, the two killers, but at no time does it feel like we’re being told this as an excuse for what they’ve done. It’s just laying out what is, it’s not trying to explain away their actio...