Dave's Capsules for October 2024

Items of Note (Strongly Recommended or otherwise worthy): Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc vol 4, Kaiju No. 8 vol 11, Nothing Special vol 2: Concerning Wings

In this installment: Dreadnought (Nemesis Book 1), City of Strange Gods (Signalverse Book 10), Stop! Project 2025, Kaiju No.8 vol 11, Dinosaur Sanctuary vol 5, Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. vol 4, I'm In Love With The Villainess vol 7, Shock City, Amoeba Adventures: the Warmth of the Sun, Nothing Special vol 2: Concerning Wings

Not a lot this month, but high quality. Kinda a complement to last month, where I got a lot of stuff but found fault with much of it.

"Other Media" Capsules:

Things that are comics-related but not necessarily comics (i.e. comics-based movies like Iron Man or Hulk), or that aren't going to be available via comic shops (like comic pack-ins with DVDs) will go in this section when I have any to mention. They may not be as timely as comic reviews, especially if I decide to review novels that take me a week or two (or ten) to get around to.

You will believe a woman can.

Dreadnought (Nemesis Book 1): Diversion Press - The debut novel from April Daniels, published in 2016 but I only found out about it recently. The premise is "What if a superhero world's Superman analogue was powered by something that was passed onto a new host when the current one dies, it got passed to a deeply closeted transfemme high school student, and rebuilt her into as female as the power could manage?" Daniels, being trans herself, writes from experience up to a point. One presumes she does not secretly have superhuman powers. Danny, the new holder of Dreadnought's powers, lives in a world that has had superheroes and villains since WWII, which you might think would be less alienating than a world where she's the only superhero, but not so much. Yes, it's bad to have no support network and have to figure everything out yourself, but it's far worse for a support system to exist and you can't TRUST it. In fact, one of the major deuteroantagonists of the series if a teammate of the previous Dreadnought, a TERF witch who Daniels says on social media she's pretty sure wasn't based on Rowlings, if only due to the timing. Even seemingly decent teammates who are doing their best to be accepting are still at best uncomfortable around Danny, due to the whole "our long-time friend and teammate just died" thing that would be awkward even if Danny wasn't trans and a minor. Not to mention, being able to shrug off tank shells doesn't mean you automatically gain the ability to stand up to an emotionally abusive father. So...dreams come true, but there's definitely some monkey's paw in the mix. The sequel, Sovereign, came out in 2017 and is currently sitting in my TBR queue, but due to personal issues the third book is still in development. (Her social media is still active and the most recent update about the progress of the book was a few weeks back.) Recommended. $6.99 in the Kindle Store, I picked it up when it was on sale for $1.99. No hardcopy available, but there is an audiobook for $1.99.

Also, a very special beagle.

City of Strange Gods (Signalverse Book 10): Self-published - I reviewed the first book in this series, Miracle Girl and Jack, several years ago. While I haven't been reviewing all the books since (or any, I'd have to go digging), I figured this one merited a "where are things now?" catch-up review given that it's a bit Event blowout featuring or at least mentioning every main character from the previous nine books. (A few are only mentioned to point out that they were not in town and therefore couldn't help with the current crisis.) It builds up into an Origin Of Powers story, with author Blake Michael Nelson establishing why there's magic in the world and suggesting how that might have indirectly led to other sorts of powers as magic worked its way into the fabric of reality...even as someone is doing something Bad to the source of magic. Anyway, it's very ambitious, and Nelson does mostly manage to keep the characters all in the air and distinct (although Sneak and Skeeter can be a little similar at times). There's a whole mantlepiece full of Chekov's Guns, but better to be obvious than to pull plot devices out of absolutely nowhere. Probably not a good starting place for the Signalverse, but it does show he can manage a wider world. If you've read any Signalverse books but haven't read this one, it's worth picking up. $3.99 in the Kindle Store, $14.99 trade paperback.

Agatha All Along is not quite done, but I'm liking it so far.

Digital Content:

Unless I find a really compelling reason to do so (such as a lack of regular comics), I won't be turning this into a webcomic review column. Rather, stuff in this section will generally be full books available for reading online or for download, usually for pay. I will also occasionally include things I read on Library Pass (check to see if your public library gives access to it), although the interface can be laggy and freeze sometimes.

STOP! Project 2025: StopProject2025Comic.org - This is a free informational comic put together by dozens of comics professionals as a piece of political advocacy. Some of the names attached to it that are relatively well known in the profession are Matt Fraction, Gene Ha, Zander Cannon, Cully Hamner, Rick Veitch, Denys Cowan, Jay Hosler, Steve Lieber, Jim Ottaviani, Jeff Parker, Greg Rucka, and Chris Ryall, plus a couple dozen more who are willingly painting large targets on themselves in case the election goes the GOP's way. The actual Project 2025 document is dauntingly long, and comics have a long history of being used to present a lot of information memorably in a condensed form. As one might expect from an anthology, the quality and tone vary pretty wildly (everyone's against P2025, but some are more on the dark humor side while others lean into the horror of it). I really do not recommend reading it all in one sitting unless you have a very high tolerance for inhumanity, though. Nor do I expect many (or any) people reading my reviews to be undecided at this point, but some of you might benefit from knowing more about what might be happening starting in a year or so (even if Dems win the White House and both houses of Congress, a lot of this stuff is going to get implemented at the state level in too many places). Free, other than the damage to your sense of calm.

Manga Collections:

With manga collections coming to dominate my reading habits, I decided to formally split them off from Trades (informally they'd already been split for a while).

Kaiju No 8 vol 11: Viz/Shonen Jump - This is where the Big Damn Battle turns around, thanks to a comnination of motivational flashback scenes and Kafka reaching a sort of personal enlightenment and getting past the uncertainty and self-doubt that has been plaguing him since his identity as Kaiju No. 8 got revealed. This is one of those books that would be pretty weak as an introduction to the title, because it's so heavily about paying off all kinds of personal arcs. The sheer number of important characters is still a little difficult to follow at times, but as Payoff volumes go, it's very well done. The battle is not over yet, but this volume is chock full of Turning Points. Recommended in isolation, strongly recommended as part of a binge read. $11.99/$15.99Cn/#8.99UK rated Teen.

Dinosaur Sanctuary vol 5: Seven Seas Entertainment - The "prickly ankylosaur keeper" arc wraps up in this volume, with the rest being split fairly evenly on the ceratopsian specialist and the standoffish veterinary doctor, with the usual protagonist newbie taking more of a back seat to those two (much as she was more of an audience to the therapod specialist's backstory). Itaru kinoshita does seem intent on making this a full ensemble book, both humans and dinosaurs as characters, and moving away from the newbie's coming of age story. Recommended. $13.99/$17.99Cn rated Teen 13+.

A younger, more adorable Dr. K.

Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. vol 4: Viz Signature - Saving the expo last volume has given MMGI a much higher profile, and the CEO feels the time is right to start licensing their "middleware" (management in the field software) to other companies. Bur first, time for new brooms, and a new supporting character who's a prodigy at broom design. Like, she's in grade school and already recognized as the best in the field. That MMGI can get appointments with Dr. Ginji on short notice is further evidence that MMGI is way more than what it appears. The second half of the volume has a magical girl from the company whose techs helped out at the expo coming to learn the MMGI Aesthetic (and steal as many secrets as she can, but joke's on her, I think they WANT the secrets "stolen"). She also provides a bit of exposition for newbie Kana and the reader, of a Kaii Disaster 15 years ago. In the first draft of this review I went into a bit of spoilery detail speculating on how this ties into the fact that there doesn't seem to be a Big Bad behind the Kaii like in other magical girl stories, but I'm going to narrow it down to this: the Big Bad of this setting is capitalism, and the kaii are a metaphor for anthropogenic climate change. I could be wrong, but it's plausible, eh? Anyway even if this is just what it looks like on the surface and there is no deeper metaphor intended, it continues to be a really good take on the premise of magical girls as a business model. Strongly recommended. $14.99/$19.99Cn/#10.99UK rated Teen.

I'm In Love With The Villainess vol 7: Seven Seas Entertainment - If Dinosaur Sanctuary is rather lacking in yuri (girls loving girls) for Seven Seas, this book more than covers that base. There is a nun on the cover, which in this book is a sign of danger. She's actually a cardinal, and her name is Lilly because this is not going to be an even remotely subtle volume. (For those who don't know, yuri literally means "lily.") She's also the first important character in the game who Rei does not know the name of in advance, because she was so deeply background that none of the official material said anything about her save that she was the fiancee of one of the princes (so, yeah, the game encourages some cheating if you decide to pursue that prince, which I suppose may be normal for dating sims with heavy worldbuilding...not really my genre). While Lilly and her relationship with her fiancee do make for some major plot points to bookend this volume, the middle half (roughly) is actually a flashback to Rei's real life high school days, and the first real information we've gotten about her other than "office lady who lives alone and is obsessed with the game." So, a break in the magic and aristocracy yuri story for a regular high school yuri, the story of Rei's first love and her awakening to her sexuality. This parallels how a lot of characters in the main story are developing as people, instead of being one-note villains or background cyphers. It's possible that whatever force put Rei in the world is letting her unconscious desires shape the unformed aspects, and as I noted in a previous volume's review, the plot is starting to come off the rails in a big way. And while Rei thinks of herself as a Grown Woman Who Knows Now What Love Is, some of the less than mature behavior in the flashback reflects Rei's own behavior in earlier volumes...she's growing up all over again, or perhaps growing up for real for the first time. Basically, if you can get past some of the "this would be unforgivably creepy with a male protagonist" stuff in earlier volumes, it does seem to be getting past that awkward adolescence. Mostly. Recommended with a lot of caveats. $12.99/$16.99Cn rated Teen 13+ (some mild nudity of the sort you could get away with on broadcast prime time TV)

Expected next month: Cat + Gamer vol 6 was pre-ordered and technically shipped before the end of the month (shipped on the 28th), but did not arrive before November. Asadora vol 8 is the only book I'm definitely getting otherwise in November, although there's a couple I've made notes to check out if they make it to the shelf. So, I'll probably go ahead and order a few more volumes of Heterogenia Linguistico.

Other Trades:

Trade paperbacks, collections, graphic novels, whatever. If it's bigger than a "floppy" but not Manga, it goes here.

Shock City: Viking/Penguin/Random House - This is a sequel to Aaron Alexovich's motion comic interactive app thing "It's Not Scary," expanding on the rather Zim-like world of that story (but instead of aliens, mad scientists and the undead). The Inciting Incident is that after years of being victims of the blast radius effects of Mad Science, the entire population of Shock City has the opportunity to move out and into a new SAFE community. Sure, it seems sinister and corporately bland, but at this point the residents will take corporate blandness over zombies riding flying sharks. Sunny, the carefree protagonist of the previous story, and her best (only) friend Milo face being parted. Milo is kinda okay with this, because Sunny acts like death is a minor inconvenience (for her, it kinda is) and Milo is not quite so sanguine about the lethal stuff she regularly exposes him to. Sunny decides that if she can fix all the problems with Shock City in one night, no one will need to leave! Hijinks ensue, naturally, although she does prove quite adept at fixing a lot of the problems. A positive attitude and parents who can reassemble your scattered body parts can solve almost as many problems as they cause! Recommended. $13.99/$18.99Cn

Amoeba Adventures: The Warmth of the Sun: Protoplasm Press - This collects the first six post-20-year-gap (real life, only a few months in-story apparently) issues of Amoeba Adventures. I'd read the first one (#28) online, but never got around to the rest...I guess I just prefer hardcopy for stuff formatted and paced to be traditional comics. Max Ink is not involved in this, it's 100% Nik Dirga's work, and his art hasn't changed a lot in twenty to thirty years. It still has the feel of indie mini-comics, for both good and ill, but it fits the story. There's really no big arc here, just personal lives as people get on with their lives after they've ceased to be a superhero team. A lot of it is Nik goofing around with ideas for his own amusement, and there's tonal whiplash on the regular, but that's kinda the way slice of life works...the funny guy in your group will have a bad streak where their humor isn't enough. Couples do hide stupid things from each other despite being still very much in love. People drift in and out of our lives. It's just that in this case a lot of the people are humanoid insects or dinosaurs or mallards or mushrooms. Humans may be the most common kind of people, but they don't even make up a majority in most scenes. And since a lot of the scenes are just everyday life rather than superhero life, that's telling. Amoeba Adventures is an oddity in comics, a series that not only continued from high school doodles through middle age, but kept it all in continuity. Bone had a similar artistic arc (as shown in the Thorn collection I reviewed a while back), but that story restarted several times as Smith improved his craft. Dirga just does a Yes And to every little bit of his old work. It may get recontextualized later on (some of the stuff he did with Raoul the Boy Cockroach decades ago was...not great...and he recognized that and found a way to explain it such that it happened but not how it seemed, for instance), and a few details might get shifted around (some very early characters got moved to the Future because they were kinda written out while he was still in high school, if I'm reading the notes right). But if you're interested in process, and a peek into the 90s indie comic scene, both the previously reviewed Best Of Amoeba Adventures collection and this book are good reads. Or you could just read the stuff all on amoebaadventures.com I guess. (I like having nicely bound copies to complement my plastic bag full of minicomics. I should probably move them to a nicer plastic bag at some point.) Recommended for a fairly narrow audience. $12.99 on Amazon.

Nothing Special vol 2: Concerning Wings: Webtoon/Ten Speed Press - This volume is about the same size as volume 1, but the chapters started to get a bit out of hand at this point, and only about half of Declan's focus chapter is covered in this volume, with the second half coming out next year. (Chapter 3 is still being worked on, it was interrupted a bit by Katie Cook's health issues.) As with any Webtoons book, there needs to be some reformatting done to turn an Infinite Canvas book into regular pages, but Cook goes significantly beyond what's necessary, adding all sorts of new content in the oversized margins that result from the aspect change issues. And she went and redrew a LOT of backgrounds to make them more noodly with details. Thus, even if you've read the whole thing online, it's worth picking this up for more than "I want a copy for the shelf" reasons. Anyway, on to the story. The first chapter was all about Callie's origins and heritage, although the others of the trio got some hints dropped about their stories. This volume starts the exploration of Declan's fairy heritage and introduces some of the magical economy elements that will become extremely important in Lasser's story, not that Declan is untouched by the issue of the One Percenters of Magic. Oh, and the volume title is at least a double-meaning reference, since the story concerns Declan's (broken) wings, a big part of the Reveal at the end concerns the nature of his wings, and his wings spend the volume being very Concerning. Like, catching fire and stuff. Strongly Recommended. $22.99/$30.99Cn rated all-ages.

Expected next month: Star Trek Lower Decks: Warp Your Way (came out in late October, but not on the shelf locally, so it'll arrive in the mail in November)

Floppies:

No, I don't have any particular disdain for the monthlies, but they are floppy, yes? (And not all of them come out monthly, or on a regular schedule in general, so I can't just call this section "Monthlies" or even "Periodicals" as that implies a regular period.)

Yep, this was a no-floppies month, didn't quite hit enough to make it worth paying shipping.

Expected next month: Gatchaman #4, Gatchaman Galactor #2 and 3 (of 4), My Adventures With Superman #5, Ultraman x Avengers #2, Fantastic Four #26, Venom War Fantastic Four, Moon Knight Fist of Khonshu #1, Vampirella #672.

Dvandom, aka Dave Van Domelen, is an Associate Professor of Physical Science at Amarillo College, maintainer of one of the two longest-running Transformers fansites in existence (neither he nor Ben Yee is entirely sure who was first), has submitted his petition for tenure, is an occasional science advisor in fiction, and part of the development team for the upcoming City of Titans MMO.

"It's really just a dream, to have a user...who uses the product as intended." - Dr. Ginji, Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. vol 4