Grovel

While Batman’s universe is crammed full of heroes with special powers, Batman’s popularity must be at least partially accounted for by his normality. This isn’t a man who’s been sent from another planet, bitten by a radioactive spider or bombarded with gamma rays. Batman is just an ordinary guy. Albeit an ordinary guy who just [...]

The third instalment of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen brings us into the 1950s. After winning the Second World War, the British government was usurped by a new party called Ingsoc, bringing a socialist dictator (Orwell’s Big Brother) into power. The remnants of Mina Harker’s League (last seen fighting Verne’s [...]

The second volume in Alcante’s Pandora’s Box series is about Sloth. Updating the spirit behind various Greek myths and incorporating the misuse of modern technology, this particular volume provides a behind-the-scenes insight into the fall of an Olympic sprinter.
Paris Troy holds a plethora of records, medals and championships, but sees his grip on them slipping [...]

Jaime Hernandez’s side of the Love and Rockets anthology may have started in a world of futuristic fantasy, but this is the volume where he finds his feet and hits a groove. The most fantastical elements of this book remain relatively grounded, at least in the sense that they could be real: Maggie’s aunt is [...]

The Apollo 11 mission, which saw Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon, is drenched in conspiracy theories. Ranging from questions of Hollywood fakery to whether previous missions had landed before it, the suspicions of devoted conspiracy theorist know few bounds.
This concept of something fishy going on is hurled into the near future [...]

Hollywood is always looking for ready-made properties ripe for converting into movies, and graphic novels must be a tempting source. Movies like Watchmen and the various superhero franchises are embarrassingly obvious but savvier movie moguls are looking beyond the ’superhero for grown-ups’ cliché and discovering works that take science fiction beyond the flying men in [...]

Just before transforming Batman, Frank Miller cut his writing teeth on Daredevil, practicing an attitude to superhero comics he would later carry to near perfection in The Dark Knight Returns. Daredevil is similar to the more famous Batman in many ways – his superpowers are more restrained than many of the more way-out costumed heroes, [...]

John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865, believing him to be a tyrant. Booth is a dramatisation of the days running up to the murder, which charts Booth’s thoughts, actions, motives, and arguments with those around him, as he travels towards his date with destiny.
Written by the historian C. C. Colbert (a pseudonym of [...]

From the creator of American Born Chinese and The Eternal Smile comes a story of sibling rivalry. There can be little to hit a child as hard as the arrival of a little brother or sister, but Thaddeus takes the arrival of his sister particularly hard. As she turns from baby to toddler, Thaddeus’s worst [...]

More good news for younger readers – the superheroine dinner lady is back in Jarret J. Krosoczka’s third Lunch Lady book. With her food-based gadgets and ninja antics, this book should be ideal for its 7- to 10-year-old target market.
A best selling author of children’s stories is due to visit Lunch Lady’s school, but before [...]

Political cartoons are a near-perfect mix of journalistic opinion and artistic impression. But whether you appreciate and agree with a cartoon or cartoonist tends to come down to whether your political allegiances are aligned or not. However, there’s one strand of political cartoon where the message tends to hit so far home it’s difficult for [...]

With the hardback hitting UK shelves in February, the paperback in March and the movie (already causing a tempest of negative publicity for all the right reasons) in April, you need to be quick if you’re going to catch up with Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s comic before it hits the silver screen.
We’ve all [...]

UPDATE: The Complete Case Files 14 out now
If you’re British, over 30 and have the slightest interest in comics, you can barely have avoided Judge Dredd. The lawman of the future dominated the British comics scene for (what feels like) a lifetime, and is still being published in British weekly sci-fi anthology comic 2000AD.
The Complete [...]

Want your superhero tales with a little added mystery? The Dark, written by Chris Lynch and illustrated by Rick Lundeen is a science fiction thriller with a mysterious added element – you can enjoy the book as it is, or delve deeper to try and unravel some of the extra puzzles its creators have hidden [...]