There was one Neil Gaiman story left on the shelf the last time: Signal To Noise. Probably out of print, it’s a tale of a dying movie director who’s trying to finish, in his head, a movie of the coming apocalypse at the end of the first century. Beautifully illustrated by Dave McKean, it’s a very poignant tale of how the things we love and give us purpose help us cling to life.
The Scene of the Crime: A Little Piece of Goodnight is a noir tale by Ed Brubaker, starring a detective called Jack Herriman who lives above a museum of photographs taken at crime scenes. The story follows the classic mold of cynic-attempting-to-do-good-and-getting-in-too-deeply, but the writing is alway engaging and the caracters feel real. It’s too bad that it seems like a first number in a series that was never continued.
I’m all for supporting small printing houses, so I took a shot on Serena Valentino’s Gloom Cookie. It doesn’t do it for me. Ted Naifeh’s drawing style is interesting and it’s refreshing to read someone attempting to write something different, but the goth-is-me bullshit got too tiring after a while. I guess I’m just not its target audience.
I’m a big Grendel fan, like I’ve mentioned before, but the stories in Matt Wagner’s Grendel: Black, White and Red vary too much in quality for me to be able to recommend it without qualifications. It’s great to have if you’re looking for a Grendel fix, but for a casual reader your money might be better spent someplace else. Wagner’s Doctor Mid-Nite is all too conventional as well, and the few times where he strays a bit from the norm don’t manage to make it rise to the quality of his Grendel: Batman.
For now, the only one left to mention is Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I probably don’t need to tell you that it’s on a completely different league from that piece of shit movie they put out, but detailing why I liked it will take longer than the paragraph I’m going for on these reviews. I’ll leave them for later.