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I should have realised that having the Dora Milaje work with Spiderman was an obvious choice - “you are the one Anansi blessed.” Anyway, Nnedi Okorafor, reaslised it, which is how we got the three-volume run of Wakanda Forever, featuring Good ole Spidey, The Avengers and the X-Men with our glorious heroes, the Dora Milaje of the secret country of Wakanda.

Nakia, a Dora Milaje who has lost her loyalty, is living in the US as the villain Malice, but now she has stumbled onto something important - a talking drum stolen from Wakanda - and she is capable of dong real harm with it, so the other Dora Milaje have sent a team out to retrieve them both - from Spidey’s home territiory. No way he’s not getting involved. To say nothing of Ororme, Storm Goddess, and a few more of the Avengers.

It’s an exciting, self-contained story that makes good use of the Dora Milaje mystery, and the powers of Spidey, Ororme, Captain America, Rogue and a few other familiar faces, including that of the Black Panther himself.
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Black Panther: Long Live the King, written by Nnedi Okorafor and drawn by various artists, is a self-contained story featuring T’Challa, King of Wakanda battling threats to his kingdom. Though his primary problem is a strange force, manifesting as a huge monster, which causes earthquakes and drains vibranium of its power, he must first face a reborn White Gorilla cult, led by a resurrected M’Baku, and a bitter friend from his youth who has designed a trap for him.

Okorafor completes her run with an alternate universe story about Ngozi, the young Nigerian woman who protects Wakanda as both Venom and Black Panther. Fun adventures to accompany Ta-Nehisi Coates’ powerful look at governance, power and responsibility in The Black Panther.
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Haven is the third volume of collected issues of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s brilliant, beautiful, and disturbing graphic narrative, Monstress. Maika Halfwolf and her companions, Kippa the Arcanic fox-child and Ren the cat, are for the moment safe in Pontus, an independent city-state where refugees from all over the Known World have gathered. Pontus is protected by a magical shield, an artifact created by Maika’s ancestor, the Shaman Empress. But the shield was deactivated after the war, and it needs one strong in the Shaman Empress’ blood to reactivate it. The rulers of Pontus offer Maika a deal - permanent sanctuary if she will activate the shield for them. Maika continues to struggle against the blood and power cravings of the creature, Zinn, the Monstrum summoned - and beloved and loving in return - by her ancestor, that dwells within her.

As usual, Takeda’s art is breath-takingly beautiful, intricate, and evocative. Liu’s story continues to give us more clues into Maika’s past, the line of the Shaman Empress, and the mysterious mask, a fragment of which is in Maika’s keeping.. We also discover more about the Cumeae, and how deeply they are controlled by the Monstrum, siblings of Zinn, and their desire to bring about another war.

The complexity of the story and the worldbuilding behind it continues to wrap me up and carry me away to a fully realised other world with each installment I read. Also profoundly important to this story is the deep intention of the authors to make this a story that recognises the ones who are too often forgotten - the refugees, the damaged, the wounded, the victims of all the political games and the conflicts between the powerful who seek only more power, while the people who suffer in their battles want only to live in peace and happiness. And then, there’s the unavoidable fact that every person of importance in this story is a woman. Where so many other texts make women invisible, or limit the women who matter to the story to a rare handful, Liu and Takeda make virtually every plot point in this story turn on the actions of a woman. This in itself would make Monstress a very special text, but when there is so much more on top of this... I admit I’ve not exactly been an rabid consumer of graphic narratives, but this is easily one of the best I have seen.
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The Coldest City, a graphic novel by Anthony Johnston, is a complex spy thriller set in Berlin on the verge of the fall of East Germany and the Berlin Wall. It was the inspiration for the recent film Atomic Blonde, which I watched and enjoyed, so I thought I might enjoy the comic as well.

The narrative is in the form of a verbal debriefing of an agent, just returned from a mission in return. All we learn of the present is that an agent named Perceval has died. As the agent being debriefed begins to make her report, it’s easy for the mind to slip between the two framing narratives, to forget this is not a narrative of ongoing events, but of an agent who was involved in those events being debriefed. One can lose sight of the fact that we have an unreliable narrator.

The set-up as given in the agent’s report. which those who have seen the film will recognise, involves a missing list that purports to contain the names of every secret agent in Berlin. It was to be delivered to a British agent by an ‘asset’ codenamed Spyglass, but instead the British agent, James Gascoigne (Ber-2) is dead, his presumed assassin, a Russian agent named Bahktin, is in the wind, and the list is missing. The higher-ups don’t fully trust the lead British Agent in Berlin, David Perceval (Ber-1), so they are sending in someone who’s never worked in Berlin and has no previous connections with Ber-1 or Ber-2 - Lorraine Broughton, who is going in under cover as a lawyer, Gladys Lloyd, arranging for the repatriation of Gascoigne’s body. Her real mission is to find the list.

The visual style of the novel is stark, drawn in black and white, the characters mostly line drawings never fully fleshed out in detail, faces often drawn without any features, or partly or fully blacked in, shadowy figures echoing the unreality of the characters themselves, who are never what they seem and never display everything abut themselves. And in many panels, there are characters in the corners, watching the other characters, sometimes taking up whole panels themselves as they all observe each other. It’s a graphic illustration of a world where nothing can be taken for what it seems to be, and suspicion and surveillance are unspoken, eternal presences.

It is, of course, a complicated story, of agents and double agents and moles and plots, all unfolding against the imminent collapse of the Wall and the inevitable changes in the world of spycraft in Berlin, which will no longer be a place where multiple nations intersect, and people and information move back and forth.

Quite engrossing, a spy story in the classic style, worthy of Len Deighton or John LeCarré.
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The first volume of the comics featuring Black Bolt, Black Bolt Volume 1: Hard Time, written by Saladin Ahmed and illustrated by Christian Ward, is up for a Hugo award, so naturally I read it. And, although the quality of both the writing and the illustrations are solid, I bounced right off it.

Perhaps it’s just that, way back when I was a comics reader, in my youth, I was always more into the DC comics than I was their rival, Marvel. And there are some stylistic differences, though I’m not sure I can pinpoint them. But I just found no point of connection with Black Bolt, and that made reading the comic a rather intellectual exercise, rather than one of identification and enjoyment.

I did not find the story particularly compelling, which is odd, because usually, one way to get me emotionally invested in a character is yo have them treated unjustly, which one assumes is the background to the opening set-up. Black Bolt, King of the Inhumans (whom I gather are some sort of mutant or possibly a human/alien hybid), wakes up in a prison, with his power, which is to destroy with the sound of his voice, gone. He escapes, his initial confinement, only to find himself in a large prison with other not particularly human inhabitants, who want to fight him. So he fights some people, and then he allies with them, and they go on to fight more creatures, go after the jailer, and despite some success, end up imprisoned again. Then they escape again, and go after their jailer again. In between, there’s a lot of dying and being reborn, and some dark brooding on his former life, which apparently involved getting imprisoned on a variety of other occasions. If anything, I found myself more engaged with one of his enemy-turned-allies, Crusher Creel, also known as the Absorbing Man, because we get a coherent backstory on him, and it is the sort of ‘young boy with horrible family life gets no breaks’ story that does create some empathy.

It looks as though it’s going to be a redemption story. It’s pretty clear that Black Bolt, intentionally or not, has done a lot of unpleasant things, and has a lot to seek redemption for, and the whole prison experience of this first volume has been about underlining that for him, but... in the end, I just don’t care quite enough to find out more. Others who are more into this line of the Marvel universe may differ.
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Bitch Planet Volume 2: President Bitch (containing issues 6 through 10 of the comic series written by Kelly Sue DeConnick) continues to tell a brilliantly dystopic and uncomfortably violent story. As with the first volume, I can’t quite say I like or enjoy reading it, it’s too raw and too close to reality, in spirit if not in fact. It’s hard to read about women in prison for being insufficiently docile, and not hear the chants of ‘Lock her up’ heard at Trump rallies, or think of women of colour from Joanne Little to Sandra Bland and on and on, imprisoned, abused, raped, killed, in jails and prisons, or thousands of migrant women detained for the ‘crime’ of seeking refuge in the richest country in the world. Feminist dystopias are hard things to read if you happen to be a woman in this time.

But, on with the story. Volume One established the scene and set up a situation where former athlete Kamau agrees to lead a team of women inmates in the Metaton tournament that is a huge part of the authoritarian, patriarchal culture in which a place like Bitch Planet can exist. Volume 2 begins with a flashback telling the story of Bitch Planet inmate Meiko Maki, who was murdered during a Metaton practice session at the conclusion of Volume 1. In the present, multiple plot threads are advancing. Meiko’s father, Makoto Maki, an engineer, has been assigned the task of building a Metaton stadium on the Bitch Planet. He agrees, hoping to see his daughter - not knowing she is dead. Kamau has convinced a guard to get a map of the prison for her, and convinced that her sister is being held in a special cell. We, however, have seen that her sister Morowa, a trans woman, is being held in the general population in a special section with other trans women. Whitney, the official who offered Kamau the leadership of the Metaton tram, has been stripped of her position and imprisoned fir Meiko’s murder - and is now Kamau’s cellmate.

When Makoto is allowed a ‘virtual interview’ with Meiko, he realises something is very wrong, and uses his authority to get access to the prison controls, shut down the power and open all the cell doors. Kamau takes the opportunity to look for her sister, but instead, discovers that the mysterious unnamed prisoner in the special cell is an older black woman named Eleanor Doane, whom Kamau addresses as Madame President. The volume ends as revolution, both in the prison and on Earth begins.

There is a very raw, very real feeling to this narrative. It’s powerful, it is saying things that need to be said. It’s profoundly intersectional, and one of the things about it that is so very right is the way that it shows us that while sexism causes damage and injury to all women, it’s the multiply marginalised, black women, trans women, women who cannot conform to male-created standards of beauty, who suffer most. It acknowledges the reality that women of colour have always been more likely to be seen as transgressive and non-compliant, and be punished for it by the justice system, which has always operated for the benefit of the multiply privileged - those who are white, wealthy, heterosexual, cisgender and predominantly men.

I can hardly bear to read it, but I’m going to keep on doing so anyway. If you are interested, I urge you to read the individual comics, not the trade compilations, because of the excellent articles by feminist, anti-racist and trans activists and scholars. Bitch Planet is more than just a powerful feminist narrative, it’s an experience.
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I read Bitch Planet Volume 1: Extraordinary Machine (which collects issues 1 - 5 of the original graphic series), created by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro, because Bitch Planet Volume 2 was nominated for a Hugo, and I figured I needed to start from the beginning to get the full impact. Reading Bitch Planet was a very odd experience. As a graphic narrative, it’s really, really good, and it’s also intensely painful. It’s a very dystopic graphic narrative, one that is extremely well-written and drawn, with excellent characters and a very powerful story. It’s also a story that I didn’t really want to engage with, largely because I’ve read too many novels in which the society is blatantly patriarchal and authoritarian (in Bitch Planet, the leaders are called Fathers) and women are reduced to the role of things, commodities, objects to be used for the pleasure, satisfaction or comfort of men, and those who don’t comply, or aren’t pleasing, satisfying, comforting enough, are punished, discarded, or erased.

And that’s the state of things in the universe of Bitch Planet. Women who don’t please men, who are non-compliant, inconvenient, or in some way unsuitable, are seized and sent to a prison planet known officially as the Auxiliary Compliance Outpost - also known as Bitch Planet, because all women who don’t serve men are bitches, right?

There are of course two ways to present this scenario. There are people, mostly men, who would consider this a utopia, a paradise. It’s very clear that the creators of this comic are presenting this as a nightmare, but one with roots in reality - rather like Atwood’s intentions in The Handmaid’s Tale, a classic dystopic nightmare of this particular genre. The creators are also trying to do some educating along with the storytelling, for each issue of the comic contains real world, here-and-now essays about sexism and feminism (unfortunately, these essays are not included in the trade volumes, which is a pity). There’s also some very powerful reflections on the whole American carceral state here that the reader can easily unpack, plus the parodies of the old-style ads younused to find in comic books and pulp magazines are perfect, and perfectly deconstruct the ways that consumerism enforces compliance. It’s an admirable project, just... not one I really wanted to see yet again, when the real thing is happening in the daily newspapers.

So. The narrative is centred on the Bitch Planet prison system, and in particular on Kamau Kogu, a black professional athlete with a strong will and a distinctly revolutionary attitude. She’s being framed for the murder of another inmate in order to pressure her into participating in a brutal sports event known as Megatron that is compulsory viewing for all citizens (bread and circuses, anyone?) - and a money-making scheme to help fund the prison system. Another key character is Penny Rolle, a black woman of considerable size sent to Bitch Planet for, among other things, “... repeated citations for aesthetic offenses, capillary disfigurement and wanton obesity.”

Meiko, another inmate, convinces Kamua to go along with the prison administration and put together a team - with her advice - in order to gain access to a gathering of the fathers in a location that she has intimate knowledge of, because she designed it. Kamua agrees, but as we learn later, she does so in part because she hopes that the process of assembling this team will help her locate her sister, also incarcerated on Bitch Planet.

Meanwhile, in scenes set on earth, we gain a glimpse into the way this society works and the position of the sport Megatron in the culture. We also see, in the background of panels depicting news shows, hints of some kind of women’s movement gathering around the slogan “Eleanor Lives.”

This is not an easy story to read. In today’s world, where perceived non-compliance can get you killed in the blink of an eye if you are racially marginalised person, where refugees, men and women, are imprisoned and separated from their children fir the ‘crime’ of running from a home that’s become a deathtrap - largely because of imperialistic interference and exploitation by ‘developed’ countries - and where the rights if marginalised peoples are being eroded daily, this hits far too close to home.
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Emil Ferris’ graphic novel, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, is an incredibly complex narrative experience, both visually and thematically. The novel is presented as the personal journal of a 10-year-old girl, Karen Reyes, living with her mother, who is dying of cancer, and her older brother Deeze, in Chicago in the 1960s. Written and drawn in multiple styles, her journal is a portrait of a talented and intelligent, but ostracised and outcast young artist who is fascinated by the strange and monstrous, both in art and in life, and who portrays herself as a monster, a werewolf, in a world of otherwise human-appearing people. Her journal tells her life in graphic imagery, scenes from her everyday life interspersed with images of cover illustrations from horror comics and copies of classical art which her brother introduces her to on visits to the museum.

In between telling her own stories about her life and the lives she sees around her, Karen’s journal follows her investigation into the death of her neighbour Anka, a troubled Holocaust survivor, and one of her womanising brother’s many lovers.

In the midst of Karen’s drawings of imaginary and real life monsters, is an extended section illustrating a taped interview Anka gave to a young man not long before her death, a tape that Anka’s husband, jazz musician Sam Silverberg, plays for Karen. It is the story of Anka’s early life in Berlin. She recounts growing up in a brothel, the daughter of a sadistic prostitute who pits out cigarettes on Anka’s flesh. As a child, Anka is sold to a man who runs a child sex ring; she escapes by making herself indispensable to one particular pedophile who is willing to be her protector - until she grows too old to arouse him, when he gives her enough money to establish herself and find a job. But Anka is Jewish, and the Hitler years have begun, and it seems as though most of Germany has turned into monsters. Thanks to the patronage of her pedophile protector, Anka is saved from the camps, and manages to save a few young girls, but only through promising to set up a child sex ring herself and prostitute the girls to her protector’s circle of friends. In a world of monsters, only monstrous deeds can avert even more monstrous ones.

There is a sequence, sandwiched between two horrors, in which Karen, saved from threatened rape by a gang of school bullies by another outcast, a gay black man named Franklin, takes him to the art museum, and we see the paintings through his eyes - the ways in which the dresses, hairstyles and accessories in the portraits of women talk to him about their personality and power. But after this, they emerge into the reality of the news that Martin Luther King has been shot, and the racist responses from whites, and the rejection of Franklin as a brother by the black men around him because of his sexuality. Karen depicts Franklin as a version of Frankenstein’s monster. And slowly, we understand that one of the reasons Karen depicts herself as a monster is because of her own awareness of being a girl who likes other girls, a sexual outcast herself.

In many ways, this is a meditation on what we mean when we say something is monstrous - is it an external quality of appearance, is it a set of circumstances, or is it the mentality that enables violence and cruelty? Is a werewolf monstrous in the same way as a painting by Hieronymous Bosch, or a murderer, or a government that tramples on the rights of its citizens, abuses and kills the most vulnerable of those it should serve and protect? What is truly monstrous, the outsider, or the society that demonises and oppresses her?

At one point, Karen talks about the ‘good monsters’ and the ‘bad monsters,’ writing in her journal that “... a good monster sometimes gives somebody a fright because they’re weird looking and fangy... a fact that’s beyond their control... but bad monsters are all about control... they want the whole world to be scared so the bad monsters can call the shots.”

Reading My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a powerful and thought-provoking experience, an exploration of the light and the dark, the best and worst of human nature, the twinning of creativity and monstrosity. It is sometimes inspiring, often harrowing, and ends with so much still unresolved - The wait fir Volume 2 is going to be a difficult one.
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Black Panther: Avengers of the New World, Book One is the beginning of a new narrative arc in the Black Panther comic written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The rebellion is ended in Wakanda. A new constitution, a new, more representational form of government is being forged. But T’Challa and his people face a new crisis - the disappearance of the Orishas, the gods of Wakanda, who have until the recent rebellion been an active force in Wakandan life. But now prayers and entreaties go unheard, and not even the Black Panther can commune with his patron orisha, Bast, as he has in the past.

But there are other threats. Strange, violent reptilian beings have begun appearing, entering Wakanda through portals that Wakandan science cannot control, and Wakanda’s shamans cannot close without facing their own deaths. All that is known is that these Simbi are ancient enemies from Wakanda’s far-distant past. And the Simbi are not alone. Other creatures appear, giant ape-like creatures called Vanyan, the spider-men known as the Anansi, and other dooms from the past.

Guided by the spirits of former Black Panthers, T’Challa seeks out a potential ally, the ancient sorcerer Zawavari, who appears to know something about what is going on. He manages to close a gate, killing a troop of invading Vanyan, but falls into a coma - first uttering the chilling words that the gods are dead, and predicting that the Originators will return. With Zawavari unable - temporarily, they hope - to help, Shuri persuades T’Challa to seek the help of his former wife Oromo, the warrior goddess known as Storm.

As the crisis worsens, news is brought to T’Challa of a new religious cult - in the name of the “twice-risen” god Sefako - sweeping the land, filling in the gap left by the disappearance of the orishas.

And there are other enemies circling Wakanda as well - Zeke Stane, Doctor Faustus, Fenris, and the rebel Zenzi are planning to take advantage of Wakanada’s unrest. The first dign of their involvement comes when T’Challa learns that Fenris has kidnapped T’Challa’s old friend Asira and given her to Wakanda’s enemies, the Azanians. Aneka and Ayo of the Dora Milaje are sent to rescue her, but are taken prisoner by Doctor Faustus and Klaw.

It’s an action-filled, tense beginning to the next Black Panther adventure. I find the missing orisha plotline more engaging at the moment, but that’s probably because I lack context for all these villains and their history with the Black Panther. I’m certainly enjoying the fact that in Black Panther, we have a hero surrounded by women without whom he would be quite lost. And I find the idea of Wakanda, an uncolonised African nation, ever resisting, very powerful.
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I do not often read picture books for children. Largely because it’s been a very long time since I had very young children in my life on the sort of basis where I selected and read picture books to them, and a much, much longer time since I was reding picture books for myself. So I don’t know much about picture books these days and what’s done and not done in them. I think the last picture book I remember reading for my own interest was Where the Wild Things Are, because there was a time when everyone was talking about it. My own tastes in picture books were influenced by Madeleine, and Babar, and Peter Rabbit.

But when I heard the story of how A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo came to be written, I had to read it.

Because gay bunnies are delightful, and messages of accepting and valuing difference are important, and there’s a decent civics lesson in there too.

I don’t know what children will think about it, but I was crying at the end, it made me so very happy.

Just in case you don’t know the story, it goes something like this. US Vice President Mike Pence has a bunny named Marlon Bundo. And his daughter has written a book about Marlon Bundo, called Marlon Bundo’s Day in the Life of the Vice President. Now there’s nothing wrong with the book itself, as far as I know. What has annoyed some people is that the Pences are promoting it through, among other places, the notoriously queerphobic Focus on the Family organisation. And as far as I’m concerned, once you politicise your book by linking it to a known hate group, you make it fair game for satire.

But because satirist John Oliver has class, he decided not to troll the book directly. Instead, he arranged for the creation and publication of a legitimate children’s book, written by Jill Twiss and illustrated by E. G. Keller, that’s a message of inclusion and acceptance. In this book, Marlon Bundo, the Vice President’s bunny, is lonely, until he meets a floppy-eared bunny named Wesley, and they enjoy hopping around the garden together so much, they decide to get married and hop together for the rest of their lives. But when they tell their friends about how happy they are together, along comes the Stink Bug, who seems to be in charge, and he tells them all that boy bunnies can not marry boy bunnies. And that being different is wrong. The animals decide to reject this message, and hold a vote to remove the Stink Bug from power. And Marlon Bundo and Wesley get married and hop together forever more.

It’s important to note that there are no cheap shots at Pence here. The Stink Bug is a homophobic autocrat, but in the story, Marlon Bundo talks about his family, his Mom, his Grandma and Grampa, who is Mike Pence. The book says nothing about the Pence family beyond that. Mike Pence is not identified as the Stink Bug (although there may be some ways in which the drawing is a caricature of the VP). The Stink Bug is symbolic of anyone who tries to marginalise and oppress those who are different.

And the illustrations are lovely. There’s a few particularly charming images of Marlon and Wesley doing hoppy bunny things together, and later warming themselves in front of a fireplace, gazing into each other’s eyes. Both text and pictures do a marvelous job of portraying love in a way that is absolutely accurate, and appropriate for children.

And the proceeds from the book are being donated to the Trevor Project, a suicide hotline for young LGBTQ people, and the AIDS charity AIDS United. So you really can’t go wrong with this book. And if you have small kids, they might like it. If they do, let me know.
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The second volume of Majorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s graphic narrative, Monstress: The Blood, continues with the orphaned refugee Maika Halfwolf’s search to uncover the secrets of her long-dead mother. Maika, with her Arcanic companions, the foxchild Kippa and the feline nekomancer, Master Ren, have persuaded an old comrades of her mother’s to take her on a voyage that follows her mother’s journey to a dangerous and mysterious island known as the Isle of Bones. Meanwhile, the various great powers are searching for her, because they suspect she has the weapon her mother used to end the last great war between them - though they have no idea of what that weapon might be. And others are trying to stop her from reaching her intended destination.

The story remains complex and interesting, with Maika as a most unusual protagonist. Her position as a survivor of multiple abuses, including being made the host of a vast and violent intelligence that drives her to seek blood, makes her a walking contradiction, victim and predator. The multiple quests - her seeking to understand her mother’s actions and the thing inside her, while the great powers of her world seek her, fir the thing she carries, offer further conflicts.

The artwork continues to be breathtaking in its complexity, beauty and impact. When I read the first volume, I had not done a lot of reading of graphic novels. I’m still not a big fan of them, but some, like this one, have definitely captured my imagination. This is compelling storytelling, in a visually stunning form.

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Black Panther Book III continues the story of civil war in Wakanda, and the struggles of the heads of the various factions to discover what it means to be a leader, what is needed to govern justly and fairly with compassion for all.

Events are moving quickly. The Dora Milaje rebels, former members of the all-woman guard of the King, have defeated an expedition sent against the lands they have taken over and announce their secession from Wakanda. At the same time, they hesitate to join forces with a second army of rebels, led by the ambitious Tetu, who seeks to overthrow the ancient kingship and replace it with a new government. Tetu’s army has been assaulting women, and he brushes aside the requests of the Dora Milaje that he control his followers and respect women’s autonomy. Tetu himself has been criticised by his former mentor Changamire, who sees that Tetu has begun to be corrupted by the power he has gained through the rebellion.

Meanwhile, T’Challa’s sister Shuri has returned from her inner travels with new wisdom and stands beside T’Challa as tensions increase.

The battle for the future of Wakanda is beginning, and it is time for the king to emerge, and change, to become not one man above the people, but one part of a nation.

In the midst of this large story about the essence of governance (I’m suddenly reminded of how Shakespeare’s history plays also have a lot to say about learning to be a king in the midst of civil war), there are small touches that delight me. A reference by one of the leaders of the dora milaje rebels to “the parable of Zami” - that a free house is not built with a slave-driver’s tools, paraphrasing the words of Audre Lorde.

All in all, it’s a fitting conclusion to the first story arc of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ turn at the helm of the Black Panther story.

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I have a confession to make. As much as I adore Octavia Butler’s work, I have never read Kindred. I don’t think I could. It’s a thing I have, that goes along with being deeply emotionally drawn into the lives of the protagonists of the books I read, and the films I watch. I have a hard time handling any kind of slave narrative, or any narrative where people are unjustly accused an punished, especially if it is a true story, or a historically accurate fiction. (I had a hard time with parts of Les Miserables, too, but the fact that I read it in my struggling French as part of a course enabled me yo distance myself enough.)

But I’ve always wanted to read it, and so when Damien Duffy and John Jennings released their graphic novel adaptation of Kindred, I decided this was one way to come as close as I could without freaking out too much while reading it. I find the visual format just distancing enough.

I’m still overwhelmed by the narrative. Not just the realities of live in a society based on slavery, but the way that the characters from the modern era, Dana and Kevin, have to struggle against the mindset of what being a member of the slave class, and the owner class, can do. And the exploration of how relationships are twisted and distorted by the fact of slavery - not just those that cross racial lines, but those between black slaves, and white slave owners. The sexual exploitation. The destruction of families, the denial of kinships, white slave owners selling their own black lovers, siblings and children. The forced and stolen labour. The dehumanisation. The brutal punishments. All the things that one knows about, but can hardly bear to think about.

I’m still overwhelmed by the impossible situation that Dana is placed in. To have to facilitate rape in order to ensure one’s own existence, to act as the guardian angel toward a man who consistently commits or orders acts of violence against the humans he holds a power if life and death over, because he must survive to father the child you are descended from. But Butler has that habit, of putting her characters into situations that you don’t think they can bear, ad yet they do.

I’ve read enough about Kindred over the years to know that Duffy has done a fine job of incorporating the story and the themes that Butler addressed in her novel. And I’m grateful for the style the illustrator has chosen - just realistic enough, but not too realistic, another slight act of distancing that makes the subject matter easier to bear.

I will be seeing some parts of this in my mind fir some time to come, I think. And it’s good that I have finally had some experience of the novel, albeit at this distance. Maybe someday I will be able to read the novel for myself.

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Just a few pages into the second volume of collected Black Panther comics, I start mentally screaming at the page, “No, T’Challa, please don’t go there.” If it is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ intention to show us a man trying to figure out how to govern a troubled, even a broken nation, then T’Challa seems to be trying all the wrong things. I’m fascinated by the exploration of what it is to be a leader, of what are the key issues in governance and in building (or rebuilding) a nation, but I am finding it very hard to like this protagonist.

He doesn’t understand his people, he doesn’t listen to them, he doesn’t allow himself, as any good leader should, to be taught what must be done by the needs and hopes of his people, rather than by his own goals. It’s his job to take the best of what his people imagine and figure out out how to make it happen. But T’Challa is as broken as his country, and he is getting everything so wrong.

Not that the leaders of the rebellion are doing much better. I see them getting drawn away from good intentions, of losing their idealism. Power does corrupt, and one important part of figuring out how to lead, is how to put that natural process in check.

So, Volume II of A Nation under Our Feet leaves me very concerned about the future of Wakanda. But then, with a title like that, it’s almost a warning that governance will be an issue through to the end. That there is a road to a better understanding is clear, never so much as in one vignette, a part of the story of T’Challa’s sister Shuri. In a dreamquest if sorts, she experiences a fight practice between her mother and herself. The image of the Queen tells the story of how the early forerunners to the Wakandan nation resisted the first white imperialist interlopers. At the ends, she says “The point is power, and in that practice, either you are a nation or you are nothing.” T’Challa has forgotten, if he ever knew, that to lead, he must be the nation, and thus, in his struggles to lead alone, he has so far achieved nothing.

But I’m keeping faith with Coates, because I believe he has a longer view here, and intends to give us, in the end, a superhero/king who is flawed and human, but still represents a force for good, for his own people and for the world. He will be the nation, because he has let the nation become him.

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I finally got around to reading the second volume of Tom King’s graphic novel The Vision, subtitled Little Better than a Beast, which continues the story of Avenger Vision, a synthetic being, and his equally synthetic family, trying to live as human beings.

It’s a tragedy. Partly because they are trying to be what they cannot be, partly because society cannot let them be what they are, partly because of the problem at the core of the superhero story, the one about having so much power snd attracting evil and dealing with that in the middle of a world full of ordinary people. Some superheroes deal with it by having secret identities - that’s the DC universe way, for the most part, and it kind of works most of the time.

But Marvel heroes don’t always do that, and Vision is so very different that he couldn’t do it anyway. So this story about a superhero trying to have a normal family life becomes a meditation on fame, power and difference. It’s also a frightening look at how a chain of poor decisions can lead to horrifying results. Lies, denials, betrayals, spreading out like ripples, reinforcing each other and evoking terrible consequences.

One of the characters becomes obsessed with quoting Shakespeare, and there is something very Shakespearean about this story. Figures larger than life, fatal flaws, and cathartic consequences. Hidden guilt coming to the surface. And destruction. And renewal, and the seeds of more to come.


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Voting for the Hugos means reading graphic novels, something I'm trying to do more of, but.... So many, many books, so very little time.

I continue to enjoy the Ms. Marvel series by G. Willow Wilson. In Vol. 5, Super Famous, the adventure plot has sone things to say about gentrification and the effects of urban redevelopment on communities, but it's the interpersonal material that's pure gold. As usual, the best parts are about Kamala trying to negotiate her day-to-day life while balancing that with being a suoerhero and member of the Avengers. Naturally, this goes terribly wrong as she tries to do what she thinks is expected from her on all sides, but everything ends well with Kamala learning some important lessons about priorities and staying sane and level-headed in the midst of chaos.

I had never really been aware of a superhero named Vision before reading the Hugo-nominated The Vision, Volume 1: Little Worse Than A Man, written by Tom King, and illustrated by Gabriel Hernandez Walta. The IMDB says he was in the recent Avengers films, but I guess my attention slid right over him in favour of the superheroes I did know.

In any case, this is an excellently written and deeply frightening graphic story - I want to know how it ends, but I'm not sure I want to read any more of it. Vision, apparently, is an artificial life form created with the use of the brainwaves of a real human being. At one point he had a human wife and children, but they died, so he has made himself a synthetic family to replace them, and moved them into a nice middle-class suburban neighbourhood. And just as sure as if this were a Steven King novel about death and hubris, things go horribly, horribly wrong. Small mistakes and misunderstandings, misjudgements, errors and then attempts to cover up the errors to make everything seem perfect on the surface, it all piles up.

The story is told in a very objective, almost mechanical fashion, almost in the style of a casebook or police report, a contrast to the increasingly violent and horror-filled events of the narrative. Not going to forget this soon.

Unfortunately, I was not nearly as enthused by Volume 1 of Brian K. Vaughan's Paper Girls. It's the story of four young teens - all girls who have early morning paper routes in the same typical American town in the '80s - who get caught up in something called The Ablution involving horribly disfigured teens from the future battling armoured warriors riding mutated pterodactyls and the disappearance of most of the people in their town. When one of the girls is shot by accident, the future teens offer help, and the girls team up with them temporarily and reluctantly. Various twists and turns later - all of which happen very suddenly and serve only to further confuse the reader (or at least, this reader) - the paper girls find themselves thrown forward in time, only to meet with the future self of one of them on a dark and lonely road. End Volume 1.

Alas, despite my confusion, I am not tempted to find out what's going on. The somewhat frantic pace, and the deliberate 'let's confuse everyone' tone of the work, left me cold, and not even the prospect of a story about four girls was enough to warm me up.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates' re-imagining of the black comic hero the Black Panther, is thoughtful, exciting, deeply political.

Vol 1 of Black Panther, titled A Nation Under Our Feet, delivers us into a country in great turmoil. Previous writers - as I learn from various summaries on the Internet - have left the series a legacy of contradictions and tragedies. The country of Wakanda, a technologically advanced African society largely hidden from the rest of the world, ruled by a long line of absolute monarchs with mystical powers able to become the Black Panther. An orphaned king who left his people to be a superhero to the outside world, bringing the destructive wrath of evil supervillains down on the country he left in the hands of others.

Coates begins with a Wakanda in chaos. Unrest, rebellion, revolution threaten. The king, T'Challa, is here no wise and benevolent king, but a confused and conflicted man, not understanding why his people are at war with each other, and with him. The first novel casts T'Challa as, in fact, the 'bad guy' by default, because of his lack of comprehension, his lack of connection to his people. The various rebels seem on the side of good - especially the two renegade warriors Ayo and Aneka. Formerly members of the king's elite, all-female bodyguard (shades of the Dahomey warrior-wives of the king), they have become vigilantes fighting against a brutal leader in northern Wakanda whose regime is one of enslavement and rape of women. It is in this subplot that we most clearly see that T'Challa - and his advisors and military leaders and others of the royal faction - are completely out of touch with the situation of the people, and trapped in an out-moded mythos in which the king's word is unquestioned law, and tradition outweighs true justice. If T'Challa is to learn to become both leader and hero, he has a long way to go.

The artwork, by Brian Stelfreeze, is strong and powerful, with appropriate touches of a softer and more mystical style when the subject matter demands it.

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I read Ms. Marvel Vol. 1, written by G. Willow Wilson, two years ago when it was nominated for a Hugo in the Best Graphic Story category. I enjoyed it, and read Vol. 2, and then sort of stopped.

The thing with Ms. Marvel and me is that I find the action parts of the stories kind of boring. What
I enjoy is the inbetween things, the glimpses of her homelife, the depiction of her internal struggles over heritage, culture and religion vs. living in a secular American city, over being a teenager with parents and an older brother and school to deal with vs. being a superhero and trying to fight evil. I enjoy watching her grow up - she is only 16 - and learn the lessons all people must learn, only writ large because her powers have made her larger than life in certain ways.

So I skimmed the comics, paying more attention to her relationships and internal growth than I do to the other stuff. And now it's time to catch up, because Vol. 5 has been nominated for a Hugo, which meant going back to read Vol. 3 and Vol. 4. In these volumes, the personal lessons have been integrated a bit more solidly into the plot, so I enjoyed reading these stories a bit more than the earlier ones.

In Vol. 3, Kamala meets Kamran, the son of old friends of her parents, and at first he seems perfect - they have so much in common, and he too turns out to be an Inhuman. The early warning signs are subtle, but then, abusers are often charming and hide their true natures well. By the time Kamala understands what he really is, he has used his powers to abduct her, imprison her, and try to force her to become a follower of an Inhuman called Lineage. He succeeds for a while in making Kamala feel guilty and at fault for what he's done to her, but when she realises just how much he is on the wrong side, she pulls herself together and kicks butt.

Ms. Marvel Vol. 4 is a bit of a change of pace, almost a sideline to something that is going on in the larger Marvel universe - the Incursion, we learn from Captain Marvel, aka Carol Danvers, and the end of the world, and other huge stuff - but for Ms. Marvel, it's about smaller, more personal things. Meeting and briefly working with her hero Carol Danvers. Saving her brother Aamir from Kamran, who wants to turn him into an inhuman to reinstate himself in Lineage's good graces. Coming out to her mother as Ms. Marvel. Mending bridges with old friends, and classmates. And confronting the emotional bonds between her and Bruno. I enjoyed this the most of all the Ms. Marvel stories so far, precisely because it's about these things, and the superhero action arc is going on somewhere else, with other superheroes taking point.

And now I'm caught up with Ms. Marvel and ready to read Vol. 5 for the Hugos.

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I keep meaning to read more graphic novels, but somehow it's mostly during the Hugo season that I actually do, and that's because of the Best Graphic Story category. I've enjoyed several of the specific volumes I've read for the Hugos, but somehow I rarely follow up on the multi-part stories.

Monstress Volume 1: The Awakening, written by Marjorie Liu and illustrated by Sana Takeda, is another of those graphic novels that was enjoyable while reading - though also deeply disturbing - but I'm not at all certain I'll be continuing to read it (unless more volumes are nominated for Hugos in future years). Not because it isn't a good story, because it is. But after lots if attempts, I've come to understand that I shy away from reading graphic novels because it is physically difficult fir me, and few stories are compelling enough to override that.

Some of those who read these reviews know that I have severe multiple chemical sensitivities and am bedbound due to multiple disabilities. What this means is that I can't read anything printed on paper - it's too toxic for me, especially paper with lots of ink, like graphic novels. So everything I read must be electronic. But because I spend all my tine lying in bed, everything I read, I read on an iPad. Any other device is too heavy. And I have arthritis and poor eyesight. There's no reader out there that allows me to read graphic novels without a lot of pinching and swiping around each page to get all the important dialogue and visual detail. And by the time I've read a few pages, my fingers and my eyes hurt. So.... I tend to shy away from graphic novels. Nonetheless, I will do my best to read those nominated and not let my circumstances bias me against the medium. So.... On with my thoughts on Monstress.

Visually, Monstress is a stunning piece of work - intricately drawn, dense but never 'busy,' a feast for the eyes. Takeda blends artistic traditions to create marvellous images, though she is at her best with inanimate subjects - architectural designs and atmospheric backgrounds, clothing, machines, furniture, and so on. Her living characters seem curiously unfinished, rather like dolls.

The narrative is complex and disturbing, set in a post-war, almost post-apocalyptic world where two enemy civilisations, still opposed but not actively at war, appear to be recovering from a cataclysmic event. On one side, the human federation in which considerable power lies with the all-female sorcerer-scientist order of the Cumaea; on the other, the non-human Arcanes, rumoured to have access to powers or beings known as the monstrum.

The story focuses on Maika, an Arcanic, a former slave of the Federation, living with other escapees and dispossessed arcanics in a sort of demilitarised zone between the two nations. She possesses powers she cannot use at will or control, though they appear when she is in great distress. She is connected in some way to the catastrophic event that ended open warfare between humans and arcanics. And she is seeking the truth about her mother and herself, a truth that she believes can only be found among the Cumaea.

At the beginning of the story, Maika has allowed herself to be captured and enslaved by humans. She and several other Arcanics, all children, have been claimed by the Cumaea as slaves, but from almost the beginning it is clear that the Cumaea - like other humans - see the Arcanes as animals and so fit subjects both for torture by those who seek pleasure in the children's pain, and scientific experimentation by those who seek to know more about the Arcanes and their power.

The story is hard to read, even harder to look at. Takeda's brilliant artwork is often used to portray scenes of humiliation, torture, vivisection, and violence. In an afterword to the first issue, Liu talks about the genesis of the story in her grandparents' memories of war and xenophobic hatred and violence - based on timing, I'm guessing her grandparents would have been survivors of the invasion of China by Imperial Japan, or both. Malka is a refugee, an orphan, an escaped slave, an amputee, a victim of war and violence and racial hatred, and she carries within her the power to wreak vengeance, or to simply spread violence indiscriminately as survivors of trauma often do. She has the capacity to be a monster, and it stems from her suffering and pain. It's one hell of a story, relevant in all times of violence and war, about what these all too common pursuits of humanity can do to our souls.
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Reading the Hugo-nominated graphic stories for the year reminded me that I had enjoyed several of those I'd read last year, and so I decided to check out Vol. 2 of Ms. Marvel to see if I was still as interested in the story and character as I had been last year.

The answer is yes and no. I'm still quite interested in the character of Kamala Khan and how she manages to combine being a superhero with being a teenaged Muslim schoolgirl still living at home. The parts of the comic devoted to dealing with that and with the life lessons she learns in being a superhero are still quite worth reading and in my opinion make up the best parts of the narrative. The actual comic book adventure criminal-fighting stuff is less interesting to me.

For now I suspect I'll skim the plot stuff and devote most of my attention to the character bits, and see where that gets me.

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