Today’s stack: a grab bag of comics! Sometimes I can’t create a category that fits everything nicely, but here are some of the books I read over the past few weeks that didn’t necessarily match my Halloween-themed lists!
Sir Kelton is brawny and fearless, ready to charge into danger at a moment’s notice … but he’s not very bright. His squire, on the other hand, is bookish and observant, and Sir Kelton doesn’t even know his name (so we never find out, either). When they arrive in Bridgetown, the townspeople tell them that they’re under a terrible curse that began when a dragon knocked down their namesake bridge. Crops have failed, a boat sprang a leak, a kid’s dog died. Without the bridge, travelers aren’t passing through, and trade has failed. As expected, Sir Kelton promises to slay the dragon and rides away. (“For Eldergard! And victory!”)
In the meantime, Squire stays behind and starts to investigate. He collects stories about the dragon and wonders why things don’t all add up. He digs into tales of Elden Augerhand, the wizard who founded Bridgetown 200 years ago, and he takes a lot of notes. Mostly, he tries not to jump to conclusions like everyone else does.
It’s a fun story that’s kind of a detective story disguised as a swords-and-sorcery fantasy. There are elves and goblins, magic spells and tall towers—but really it’s about getting to the bottom of a mystery when the whole town already thinks it has the answer. This one was from a couple years ago, and I’ve got the second book in my reading queue.
I mentioned another volume of Archives of the Unexplained a few weeks ago—that one was about haunted houses. This one is about UFOs. The framing story features TJ, a boy who is attending the funeral of his great-uncle, whom he doesn’t even remember meeting. As he’s poking around the house during the wake, he finds a hidden basement room covered in tinfoil and filled with classified documents.
The files are about Area 51, UFO sightings, and various other stories about aliens from outer space. There’s also information about experimental aircraft including the development of the SR-71 Blackbird. As TJ pores over the documents, two strange men in black, claiming to be the uncle’s former colleagues, arrive at the house and start to poke around.
The fictional framing story is entertaining—the two men are very obviously aliens and everyone but TJ is oblivious—but the information TJ is reading is real. That is, it reports the sightings and theories and unexplained phenomena, without ever actually explicitly claiming that anything is proof of alien activity. It is, instead, a quick overview of UFO and alien stories, mostly in America.
This comic book is a spin-off from the Nico Bravo series (which I covered back in 2020). It’s a big mash-up of various mythologies, and Eowulf shows up in that series, a kid warrior descended from the legendary Beowulf. (The family tree included Ceowulf and Deowulf before Eowulf.) She’s had some amazing adventures, but now she’s back on this side of the dimensional portal, living in New Jersey, where her life is a lot less exciting.
She plays D&D with her friends and pretends that all the weird things around the house are just props from movies that her dad works on. Lately she’s befriended Amadeus Hornburg—despite her parents’ warning. He’s the son of their nemesis, and they assume that he’s just as bad, or using their friendship as an excuse to spy on them. When the supervillain shows up in New Jersey, their fears are confirmed.
But Eowulf thinks there’s more to it, and she and her friends (and Amadeus) work together to figure things out. There’s a good bit of silliness in the comics, but there are also some nice messages about friendship and about trust—both between Eowulf and her friends, and between Eowulf and her parents. It turns out there are things they’ve never shared with her, and this incident gives them a good reason to really talk through some of their history. Book 2 is expected in February (but I’ve got an advance copy, so I’ll check it out soon).
Page and Turner (ha, ha) are twins who love the New York Public Library, and they spend a lot of time there while their parents are off traveling. Page snuck their dad’s rare copy of Dracula to see if the librarian can help them appraise it … but then it goes missing! Eventually they meet the Night Librarian, who reveals that book characters can escape their books and wreak havoc in ours. The twins team up with the librarians—along with a colorful cast of characters from other stories—to capture various villains and troublemakers before things get out of hand. This one is a fun romp through a lot of different books, so it’s a good one for readers who like stories about stories.
This one’s for adult readers—it’s a sci-fi horror comic about a team of “astronauts” who are traveling to parallel universes. Our world is dying—a strange “quantum mutation” has destroyed 90% of the planet, and scientists hope that they can send somebody to a world where a solution was found. Douglas Spitzer is one of the candidates chosen to go, and the only one who survives the journey, inserted into a world he doesn’t quite understand. Then he discovers that his wife Maddie, who died to the mutation in his own reality, is alive in this one, raising all sorts of conflicts.
I’ve got an ever-growing stack of books about AI and I’ve started to dip into them. A short nonfiction book about the history of artificial intelligence, a middle-grade novel about an AI teacher introduced to the classroom, a generative art book done without AI. I’ll be making my way through these, though at the rate these have piled up, I’ll probably need multiple columns to share them all!
Disclosure: I received review copies of the books in today’s column. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers.
Source: geekdad.com