Catnip for well-versed fans.
A collected anthology of out-of-print comics that expand a short-lived and beloved television franchise.
Despite only airing for one season, the sci-fi/Western mashup Firefly earned cult status and garnered myriad spinoffs including a movie and a number of comics. This legacy edition collects seven tales previously published by Dark Horse that are since out of print. For those unfamiliar with the series, Firefly (created by Joss Whedon of Buffy fame) follows spaceship captain Mal, a tough-on-the-outside-but-with-a-heart-of-gold captain, and his motley crew for hire as they navigate the fringes of a fractured universe under a broken authoritarian regime. Mal’s crew—including mechanic girl-next-door Kaylee, surgeon Simon and his troubled sister, River, and clergyman Shepherd—find themselves in gunfights against the domineering Alliance, fighting cannibals called Reavers, and in the midst of many near misses with spaceships and shootouts. True to its television roots, these comics are driven by the clever amalgamation of genres alongside cinematic scenes of big guns and even bigger explosions. The plotlines are easy enough to follow, but for those not already acquainted with the cast or the overall narrative arc, little exposition is provided. The crew of the Serenity is predominantly white, save for two dark-skinned characters, and all are hetero; expect stereotypical (for mainstream comics) character stylization: attractive, buxom women alongside macho men with chiseled pecs.
Catnip for well-versed fans. (Graphic science fiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68415-320-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2019
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer’s mixed-media masterpiece.
While Burton Raffel’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both “The Tale of Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale” on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these “standard narratives of pious exposition” hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it’s anyone’s guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles (“Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales,” etc.) directly underneath the new ones (“The Squires Tale,” etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we’re missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author’s other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, “He asked me about myself then—where I had come from, where I had been—but I quickly turned the conversation to another course.” There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel’s rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose.
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02122-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
A daringly placid novel about—here goes—a quiet, reflective serial killer. Leaving his first 13 victims behind in Oregon graves, Vann Siegert drives his pickup east, ending up in a small Massachusetts town where he rents a room with the Deans—postal worker Doug, his wife Jane, and their daughter Karen—takes a temporary job with the post office, drifts into an apathetic affair with his co-worker Ferrin, and resumes his affectless avocation, offering his bottle of Southern Comfort laced with poison to acquaintances, hitchhikers, stranded motorists, and the homeless. McCreary (Mount's Mistake, 1987) clearly knows that the success of Siegert's deadpan first-person narrative, with its ritual avoidance of suspense or even logical causality, depends on the storyteller's self-portrait, and though his principal revelatory devices—flashbacks showing Siegert's matter-of- fact abuse by his mother and his doubling with his dead brother Neil, moments of unfulfilled passion counterbalanced by understated homicides (Siegert is incapable of closeness to anyone but his victims and his dead), and, eventually, the arrest of Doug for Jane's murder after the police have picked up Siegert's own trail—press too schematically toward a rationale of Siegert's divided nature, the narrator-killer successfully resists his author's attempts to explain him away. Disturbingly effective in evoking the hypernormal killer. But don't expect the usual pleasures of the genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83414-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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