Ascent by Jed Murcurio and Wesley Robins

Yefgenii Yeremin is orphaned by the Second World War, one of the few children to survive Stalingrad. He grows up with a world of kicks and punches in the casual brutality of an orphanage. There is a way out, but it is slight, only one child from all the orphanages in the area will get the opportunity of going to the academy to learn to fly. He makes it and becomes an ace flying MIGs against the Americans in Korea, but his achievements can never be recognised as officially the Soviets are not there. Exiled to Antarctica he and his wife live a lonely and harsh life, then as the Space Race takes off Russia are in need of an expert expendable pilot to try and land on the moon before the Americans do.

Robin's stark blocky drawings with their muted colours illustrate this bleak sad tale beautifully, echoing the blunt brutality of the life of a brilliant man whose achievements can never be recognised. Not quite as brilliant as Nick Abadzis' Laika but another timely example of recovery of hidden and lost histories, a work that makes you think about our perception of the recent past. The names of great Americans such as Aldrin burn in our consciousness but there must have been equally brilliant Soviets who, apart from Gagarian, remain unnamed and lost so our histories must be incomplete.

The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean by David Almond

Billy Dean is born in the town of Blinkbonny, just outside Alnwick, the day the bombs explode razing his town and plunging his country into war. He grows up knowing only the walls of the tiny flat where he and his mother live, and the face of his father who is an occasional visitor, preaching hellfire and teaching his son Bible stories. At the age of 13 his mother takes him out into the post apocalyptic landscape of rubble for the first time and he becomes a phenomenon, can speak to the dead and heal the living. As his father returns and the truth of his birth and the reasons he was shut away come to light the narrative comes to a climax involving redemption and the holy island of Lindisfarne.

Almond has written almost the entire book in Dean's own demotic, a sentence structure that is coherent and complex but often childlike, and words written phoenetically much as a 7 year old child would write. This makes it perhaps a little harder to read but also compelling and with a sense of authenticity as a boy who was shut away from the world for 13 years, knowing nothing of rivers, bombs, hills, wind or rain struggles to narrate his own history

Annexed by Sharon Dogar

Dogar imagines life within the hidden flat that housed Anne Frank and her family from the point of view from the boy she fell in love with, Peter van Pels. Dogan works with the fact that a diary is a subjective piece of writing, and that Anne Frank was a young teenager, and constructs a narrative that is very interesting but without the compelling power of Frank's own diary Kitty. When we read Frank's diary we read the actual words of a very ordinary young girl destined to die in the Bergen-Belsen death camp, to be survived only by her father and her words which would ring out as an appeal against race hatred and mass killings throughout the years since. I think Dogar's book is best when she is imagining Peter's experiences in Auschwitz and the final death march to Mauthausen, and the title is clever too as the Nazi's systematically annexed Europe 'cleansing' it of 'undesirables' as they went.

The Blue Book by AL Kennedy

After reading Oatley's book Such Stuff as Dreams on the psychology of fiction I understand that for a piece of fiction to be taken into the mind of a reader and become a simulation within their own mind they have to touch their reader. There are a few writers who do this for me to the extent of shaking my understanding and opening me up to new understandings, the poetry of TS Eliot, Blake and McCaig, and the writings of David Almond, Phlip Pulman and AL Kennedy are among them.

Kennedy crafts her prose with the heart catching precision of a poet, never a word wasted and many challenging. The Blue Book is packed with phrases such as 'kind hotel' is a fresh pairing that sparks memories of good times had in hotels, a posh hotel in Salzburg where room service was exemplary, we watched an epic thunderstorm and decided to have a child, of pools and understanding staff.

Elizabeth Barber, also know as Beth, is boarding a ship for a cross Atlantic cruise to New York with her completely adequate boyfriend Derek. Her friend paid for the trip but couldn't make it. Whilst waiting interminably to check in for boarding Elizabeth is asked to take part in a simple numbers trick with a street magician, and later he corners them on board, takes his meal with them and verbally assaults Elizabeth. But all is not as it seems and the book and the story are masterful sleights of hand.

The Blue Book is a puzzle box, extremely clever, revealing and deeply moving, it speaks both overtly and in its form of the nature of reading, of charlatan trickery and the probabilities that fake mediums use, whilst never losing contact with the painful history Elizabeth is trying so hard to run from and the difficulties of loving for real. The close reading the puzzle asks of the reader is rewarding and enlightening, teaching as it entertains. It is full of gut level punches and revelation.

The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman


I'm not a fan of horror films, this was selected for me by one of my current comic pushers at my library and I'm glad he did.

Rick Grimes wakes up in hospital having been in a coma, only to find himself the survivor of a horrific plague that has turned people into cannabilistic zombies.  Grimes makes his way to Atlanta in search of his wife and son and just escapes being eaten alive.

Rather than being splatter gore zombie fare Kirkman looks at what it means to be a survivor, how it feels to be left alive and what survival does to people's character.  Excellent execution (excuse the pun) and writing.

Autonomy by Daniel Blythe

Set in the near future, Hyperville is the mother and father of all shopping malls, an experience so vast with restaurants, bars, casinos, cinemas and theme parks that its hotels hold the shoppers who come to stay for a week or more to get the entire experience.  But something terrible is lurking under the very lowest level of the complex and the Doctor once again fights the Nestene Consciousness, a contest we have seen many times before as the consciouness takes over plastic and taps into our fear of shop dummies.  Good fun and thought provoking about the seeming human love for shopping malls, which are my personal idea of hell.

Lost Souls by Joseph Lidster (BBC RADIO 4 FULL CAST DRAMA)

To celebrate the switching on of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland Lidster comes up with an aching Torchwood paen that honours the recent deaths of Toshiko and Owen whilst imagining the worst that could happen when the LHC comes online.  Martha, now working for UNIT, has been called in by a friend to investigate disappearances among the workforce at CERN in Geneva, then her friend disappears and unwilling to bring the entirety of UNIT into a delicate scenario she calls Jack.  There are voices in the air, saying that they are the dead, that they want to come back.

The recording isn't particularly long but it is very good, it's a dramatisation rather than a reading of an audiobook so it's packed with sound effects and hearing Ianto, Jack and Gwen speak of their grief and connecting it with the madness that the irrecoverable loss of a loved one can drive you to is seamless.

Forever Autumn by Mark Morris, read by Will Thorp (AUDIO)

In the New England small town of Blackwood Falls the Doctor and Martha emerge out of an eerie mist, a strange book has been dug up from among the roots of an creepy black skeletal tree and a slumbering menace has awakened.  Think Sleepy Hollow with aliens:  the Hervokan.  They are an ancient race whose science of gestures, psychic connection, ability to bring to life inanimate objects and take over minds looks to human eyes like black magic.  With their giantlike spindly figures and jack o lantern style heads these monsters have been the inspiration of much of the celebrated horrors of Hallowe'en.  The Doctor and Martha must fight to save themselves and the townspeople of Blackwood Falls.  A nice length story, two cds read by Will Thorp, who Dr Who addicts will recognise as Tony Zed from The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit story arc.

Glow by Amy Kathleen Ryan

Waverley is sixteen, the eldest of the daughters born in space to the crew of the starship Empyrean, a mission of last hope travelling from the poisoned Earth in search of a new world to colonise. Kieran, the eldest boy, has just asked her to marry him and she is considering his fumbling proposal and the presence within the fog of the nebula through which they are passing of their sister ship, the New Horizon.  The ship launched a year before the Empyrean, she should be much further ahead and and their captains are in closeted heated discussion.  There seems no cause for disagreement, both ships contain vast domes of crops and livestock providing them with all the food, oxygen and water they need.  But the Empyrean does have something the New Horizon does not, the children.  As Waverley finds herself prisoner on the sister ship and Kieran one of the boys left without any adults on the Empyrean both struggle for survival and their characters emerge along the way.  This is a good read, but I felt the plotting was a little heavy handed at times, the theme of religious and xenophobic intolerance could have been handled with more subtlety.

Such Stuff As Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction by Keith Oatley

I don't think my brain has worked this hard for over a decade since I left university, but like riding a bike it's amazing how much comes back to you. Oatley has written a tantalising book about the relationship of readers to all kinds of fictions, not just books but also movies and television.  Moving beyond reader-response theory Oatley theorises that when we read we create a simulation in our minds of the fictional world, a dream which we enter into and interact with, and draws on science to show that reading about an action such as kicking activates the same area in our brain as doing that action for ourselves.  He speaks of the social aspect of writing, in particular function, both in terms of speaking to others about what we are reading and with regard to how fiction can help us negotiate the social world for ourselves by presenting us with a myriad of scenarios the total of which could not be contained in a single lifetime.  As a voracious reader I loved this book but was left wanting more, what are the regions of the brain that have been implicated in reading, what can neuroscience tell us?

Akira Volume 2, by Katsuhiro Otomo

Tetsuo's powers and his instability are on the rise.  He becomes obsessed with Akira, the mightu force that destroyed Tokyo 38 years earlier.  Trying to stop him are the clandestine government forces that hold him, headed by the Colonel, and the underground resistance, and Kaneda and the street gangs of Neo-Tokyo.  As the novel Akira rises, a young boy, seemingly innocuous.

Akira Volume 1 by Katsuhiro Otomo

Kaneda is a disaffected rebellious teenage boy growing up in dystopian 2030 Neo-Tokyo, a city built around a crater of destruction from the massive detonation that exploded in the heart of Tokyo at 2.17pm on December the 6th 1992.  He leads his gang of anarchic motorcyling teenage delinquents breaking into the zone of destruction and his friend Tetsuo is badly wounded as they crash trying to avoid a mysterious wrinkled faced child who disappears.  Tetsuo is taken away by mysterious forces and return to their school for out of control teens strangely changed.  A wild adventure of gang warfare, underground resistance, a beautiful girl and awesome psychic powers begins, a 360 page long but absorbing fabulous ride.

Y: The Last Man : One Small Step (Book 3) by Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra

After a plague which wipes out every creature carrying an X chromosome except for one man, Yorick Brown (alas) and his monkey Ampersand, the pair are travelling across post apocalyptic America with mysterious government agent 355 and bioengineer Dr Mann in search of the doctor's experimental files and a possible cure for the plague.  Israeli soldiers, a Russian agent and the return to earth of three astronauts, two male, from the International Space Station make for a great dystopia, can't wait to read the next.  Brilliantly written by Vaughan and drawn by Guerra.

The Brain Book by Rita Carter

Visually this is a stunning book, coffee table size with beautiful glossy double page spreads of diagrams, photographs and scans. The text on each page is learned and accessible and this would be a good book for kids, the information bites are fairly small.  But despite its beauty I feel there is something lacking.  Many of the photographs of people are of the kind you find on clipart sites illustrating an emotion and don't really serve any purpose, they feel very pat.  The structure of the book is such that you can dip in and out of any spread, so there is no linear narrative, even the history of knowlege on the first pages jumps around and is difficult to follow.  A little too slick.

Blankets by Craig Thompson


This is Thompson's autobiography and at over 580 pages it is a doorstep of a graphic novel, but utterly compelling, expressively drawn in lovely monochrome.
Craig and his younger brother Phil sleep together in a single bed, suffering the everyday traumas of growing up as an outsider, strict Christian fundamentalist parenting and sexual abuse at the hands of a babysitter.  As he negotiates high school with its social hierarchies and casual brutalites he falls in love at Christian summer camp with fellow outsider Raina.  She has her own burdens, a brother with Downs, a sister who is mentally retarded and an utterly selfish older sister who leaves the care of her own baby to her sister and mother.  Thompson chronicles the tender wonder that was his experience of first love, wonder battling with his fundamentalist inspired terror of the sins of lust, of his vision of Raina as a beautiful angel set in contrast to his own self loathing.  Blankets took me achingly back to my own adolescent years, it is stunning in its honesty and expression.

The title refers to a number of evocative concrete images, of a quilt created as a message of love, I know as a quilter the act of creation for a person means that there is an alchemy of thoughts about the person the quilt is destined for in every stitch.  Blankets also refers to the thin inadequate blanket Thompson and his brother shivered under together as boys, that could in their wild lovely imaginations become a pirate ship but could also lead them to fight, to Phil being punished by being traumatically shut in the house's tiny dark spider infested cubby hole and to Thompson carrying a burden of guilt at being unable to protect his brother. Blankets refers to the snows that cover the land during his time with Raina, to memories of creating snow angels, of watching snow fall in the dark and of the coming of the end of love with the thaw.

Cannot recommend enough

The Quitter by Harvey Pekar, art by Dean Haspel

Pekar is one of the giants of American comic writing and in this book expressively drawn in monochrome by Dean Haspel you can see why.  This is Pekar's autobiography of his younger years and he is relentlessly brutal and honest about his own shortcomings, in particular his inability to keep going with any task when faced with being less than perfect and not receiving adultation.  It is a tendency all of us have and dealing with failure is an essential part of character growth and Pekar is mercilessly candid about the ways this shortcoming has crippled his emotional and professional life.  One of those rare comics which is not action driven, not much happens but you come away feeling that you have encountered a mind of rare clarity and a story that you can truly learn from.  I only wish he'd completed the story.

The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels by Danny Fingeroth

This is a really well written and constructed guide to graphic novels.  It is divided into eight clear sections, starting with what constitutes a graphic novel and the history of the genre with a 40 page graphic novel about writing comics as interlude before moving on to Fingeroth's selection of 60 best graphic novels, the writers, artist and publishers and finishing with a good informative section on Managa, a section on film adapations and resources.  The layout is really attractive, with blue boxes in the margins providing information along the lines of 'if you like this, you might like...'.  It is good but not great, and it isn't completely up to date, being published in 2008 it misses some of the major movements of the last four years, such as the rise of steampunk, and there are some puzzling omissions as to major writers and artists.  However, a good starting point which has given me plenty of new information.

Torchwood: Golden Age by James Goss (AUDIO PLAY)

This is a lot of money for a 45 minute radio play, but it is a great Torchwood story with the voices of Eve Myles (Gwen), John Barrowman (Captain Jack) and Gareth David-Lloyd (Ianto).  Full of energy and sound effects.

The Torchwood team are in Dehli, battling an energy wave that suddenly makes an entire district of people disappear.  They trace the source to the former Torchwood India, now an expatriate club which Jack closed down at the turn of the century.  Inside they are fired upon by Jack's former companion the Duchess, mysteriously alive, well and preserved in her mid twenties.  The tension mounts as they battle to find the source of the energy wave and prevent themselves and the people of Dehli from being erased from existence.

Pandora's Handbag: Adventures in the Book World by Elizabeth Young

Young wrote two kinds of articles, reviews and social commentary.  In the former category are the reviews collected here of Hunter S Thompson, Herbert Huncke, William Burroughs, Brett Easton Ellis, Alice Munro, Greil Marcus, Alice Hoffman, Dennis Cooper, TC Boyle, David Callard, Poppy Z Brite, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Terry Prachett, Christopher Wood, Iain Sinclair, Jonathan Meades, Will Self, Michael Bracewell and Robert Harris.  Her reviews are incisive and learned both in literary and cultural terms, for instance in her writing on the Celtic renaissance of the 90s which included Warner and Welsh she sees clearly the anti establishment ethos of writers disenchanted with the misrepresentation of Scotland as all about tartan, shortbread and beautiful landscape searching for a way to speak of their world of desperately low expectations, drugs, of isolation from society and of their own culture.


Her other articles take these themes on in a more direct fashion, challenging and lambasting the current 'war on drugs' government and society attitude to illegal drugs that replaced the 'British system' of prescribing to addicts and has resulted in massive gang warfare, illegal trafficking, and death and maiming from the adulterated drugs themselves and supposed solutions such as methadone.  She speaks from within the affected society and the urgency of her calls for change are informed by this.

But Young is also funny and witty, this is a good collection that made me think.   And I have found two other people that are sure they are a gay man trapped in a woman's body, I thought I was just nuts...

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, adapted by Nancy Butler and Sonny Liew


Austen is both a challenge and an opportunity when it comes to translating into graphic novel form.  Her books deal with complex social hierarchies and subtleties, but Nancy Butler and Sonny Liew do an excellent job of adapting Sense and Sensiblity.  The pictoral element of graphic fiction can make light work of portraying paragraphs and pages of the novel and Liew elegantly makes the most of the format to communicate feelings and motivations.

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are sisters left impoverished and bereft of their family home by the death of their father and inheritance of the house by their elder half brother.  Elinor is sense, calm and determed, deep thinking, self sacrificing and loving, Marianne is sensibility, impulsive, passionate, headstrong and hasty.  Both have lessons to learn in life and Austen's novel is well handled by Butler.

Zita the Space Girl by Ben Hatke

Zita is playing with her friend Joseph when they find a fallen meteorite, wedged within is a red button.  Zita cannot resist and is appalled when on pressing the button Joseph is yanked through a gateway out of their reality by mechanical tentacles.  After a moment of reflection she presses the button and jumps after him into a world of strange creatures 3 days away from being hit by an annihilating asteroid.  In search of Joseph she meets strange creatures and makes friends such as the space traveller Piper who lulls enemies to sleep playing his pipe, One the Heavily Armoured Mobile Battle Orb, ostracised because he isn't a team player and Pizzicato the enormous mouse who hates his name.  Bewitchingly cute, Hatke's drawings and story create a world that enchanted both me and my 7 year old daughter.

Trouble Maker by Janet and Alex Evanovich, drawn by Joelle Jones

Sam Hooker, NASCAR driver and his mechanic and spotter Alex 'Barney' Barnaby along Hooker's massive St Bernard Beans are on the trail of their friend Rosa, kidnapped by Miama underworld  figure Armando 'Nitro' Dupont.  Cue a high octane ride through the world of Miami voodoo and alligator ridden swamps, complete with explosions, rpgs and snakes.  Super handsome Hooker and gorgeous blonde Barney are excellently drawn by Joelle Jones, full of expression and colour.

The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, adapted by Ian Edginton, illustrated by INJ Culbard

Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story The Valley of Fear is translated into a graphic novel excellently by Ian Edginton and the artwork of INJ Culbard.  Culbard's style is stark, graphic and dark, echoing the ligne claire style of strong lines and clear colours Herge used for Tintin.  The Valley of Fear is a twisting tale of secrets and terror, claustrophobically contained within the moat bound country house of Birlstone Manor and the mysterious murder of the rich country gentleman John Douglas, a tangle of threads leading back to secret societies and goldrush America.  A good adaptation.