Ham Helsing: Vampire Hunter by Rich Moyer. Crown Books for Young Readers, 2021. 9780593308912. 240pp. Vampire hunting has been an obsession of the Helsing family for generations, but it didn’t end well for any of them. Now Chad Helsing has arrived in Mud Canyon to help out with its vampire problem. Two rats offer to lead him to the vampire in exchange for its treasure. After setting out together, they’re chased by a werewolf. Instead of something horrific it’s got a tennis ball in its mouth; it’s friendly and it wants to play fetch. Meanwhile, in a nearby castle, an overwrought, rapping hen is trying to get the vampire it serves to worry about Chad, but the vampire is more excited about his new TV. This friendly, somewhat goofy “horror” adventure has large spiders and an actual villain later, but Moyer’s jokes and kid-friendly drawings keep it light. This is one of those books that makes me wish my now-adult daughter still let me read to her at bedtime.

Eight-Lane Runaways by Henry McCausland. Fantagraphics, 2020. 9781683963110. 96pp. Taller than your average graphic novel. Eight people run on a track that winds through the woods (and other places). Soon after they start, a runner from another group steals the running stick from Mykol and Bruce goes to get it back (which is weird because he may have planned on betraying his teammates). Natalie is running to earn her last badge. Oplo is looking for his cats. Freddo (with the head scarf) can’t talk because he’s a frog. Bobby says he isn’t wearing a mask, though it looks like he is. Blaise is working on the train while running the race. And Khoklakola’s coat talks to her. These characters stories and conversations weave back and forth as they run together on and off and sometimes in search of the track. I’m sure folks will call the narrative experimental, and it probably is because it feels unstructured and magical and unlike anything I recall reading. It holds together really well, though; the art is fun, the layouts delightful, and it made me laugh several times. This is a beautiful book that continued to defy my expectations and that left me with a pleasant feeling. I’m buying a copy for myself as soon as I take it back to the library.

Don Vega by Pierre Alary. Translation: Matt Madden. Europe Comics, 2020. http://www.europecomics.com/album/don-vega/ for digital purchasing options. A Zorro tale set in late 1840s California, drawn by Pierre Alary, whose art I fell in love with while trying my best to read his Belladone series in French. No one draws swashbuckling sword fights like Alary, and his colors are just as amazing. This Zorry story has a suitably villainous villain, a town full of ordinary folks who are suffering, and of course a masked avenger whose true identity likely won’t stay hidden for long. This graphic novel is only available digitally in English, but it’s worth the price. And it’s complete in one volume, so you won’t be left waiting for the next book. Worth noting: Alary also illustrated the adaptation of “The Queen of the Black Coast) in The Cimmerian Volume 1, which was recently published in English by Ablaze.

Moms by Yeong-Shin Ma. Translated by Janet Hong. Drawn & Quarterly, 2020. 9781770464001. 372pp. This graphic novel, focused on the lives of women in their fifties living in Seoul, South Korea, starts with a street fight between two women over a man. (It’s not explained until about halfway through the book, when the story catches up to it.) At the center of the book is Soyeon. She’s in a relationship with a man who’s cheating on her (for economic reasons) with a woman who keeps promising to open a flower shop for him. Soyeon’s life went downhill after she became pregnant and then married. Her husband cheated on her and gambled, and she worked for years to pay off the debt he racked up, but they eventually got a divorce anyway. Now she works as a cleaning woman at an office building and hopes her boyfriend will stop by at night. She loves him, but if he ever made her happy those times are behind them. (Her friends are in similar circumstances — they’re not in great shape economically and their relationships with men are unsatisfying. But they go out and have fun together once in a while, and they can mostly trust each other.) I’ve never read a Korean comic like this. The ajumas swear and party and have fairly mundane lives. They want more but there’s not a great way to get it, so they keep plugging along. It feels very real (especially the abuse the cleaning ladies suffer at the hands of their supervisor and the people who hire them). The whole story is readable, and not just because of the fistfights two of the women have. In a note at the back of the book Ma explains that his mom is the main character. He gave her a notebook and a pen and asked her to write about her friends and her love life, and she did. This is the result. Ma says it makes him look at raucous, cackling older folks differently. (It makes me think about the busses I used to see in the 1990s, on Korean highway. They were filled with older adults dancing and partying while we all sat in heavy traffic. After reading this book I feel like I have more insight into those folks’ lives. But I’m still not sure it’s wise for anyone to drink soju on a moving bus.)

Sentient by Jeff Lemire (writer) and Gabriel Walta (art). TKO Studios, 2019. 9781732748590. Contains Sentient #1 – #6. Onboard the USS Montgomery. Mission Day 742. Earth has about ten years of habitability left. The crew and their families on the USS Montgomery are about to enter the black zone; communication with the Earth or its off-world colony won’t be possible for about a year. Soon after they do, all of the adults on board are dead. Val, the ship’s AI, has to teach the kids to do everything necessary to keep the ship working. At a refueling station, one goes against Val’s advice and investigates a faint SOS signal, which turns this into an even more harrowing story of the kids having to save their ship, themselves, and eventually even Val itself. The cover really drew me in — the spaceship is colored with a subtle mix of purples and greens. Walta’s interior art looks like it was drawn on brown paper, in a way that makes the texture of the colors pop, and the lighter colors seem to glow.

Oh My Gods! written by Stephanie Cooke and Inshah Fitzpatrick, Art by Juliana Moon, Color by Whitney Cogar. Etch (houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 2021. 9780358299523. 208pp. Karen leaves New Jersey to go stay with her dad, Zed, for a while in Mt. Olympus, Greece. There’s a crowd to greet her at the airport, and then a chariot pulled by a winged horsed takes them from the airport to his house. (Karen doesn’t think the horse’s wings are real.) Her dad is a bit cagey about what he does for a living but it’s clear he’s the dean of students at her junior high, and, from other clues, that he’s a whole lot more than that. Hermes gives Karen a tour of her new school on her first day. Despite the centaur in the cafeteria Karen doesn’t seem to have a clue as to what’s going on or where she actually is. (I’m sure any reasonable kid would know by that point. But Karen’s naiveté is on the charming side, and works with the art to create a light tone throughout the book.) The plot, other than waiting for Karen to realize who her dad is mythologically and to find out what that means for her, involves someone turning students into stone. Suspicion falls on Karen since she’s new, but it’s pretty obvious which mythological being is the real culprit (and that she and Karen will likely end up being friends in the end).

A Gift For A Ghost: A Graphic Novel by Borja González. English translation by Lee Douglas. Abrams ComicArts, 2020. In 1856, Teresa meets a person in a skeleton costume in the woods, and makes the mistake of telling her little sister about it. Teresa’s sisters don’t get her, and her mother is not impressed with the poem she’s writing for her debut, “The Ghost Rider,” about a “fire velocipede hero.” (Her mother tells her everyone will be happier if she lowers “the dose of vampires, crypts, and dementia” in her work.) Teresa is someone you’ll root for; she’s not only misunderstood, she also has a foul mouth and performs Lovecraftian shadow puppet shows. One of her stories seems to be about a ghost in our time buying ice cream. In 2016 Laura, Gloria, and Christina are talking about starting a high school punk band, The Black Holes, even though Laura and Gloria don’t really know how to play any instruments. It won’t stop them because Christina has the best basement / rehearsal space ever. There are butterflies everywhere. Halloween and horror movies are involved. Laura writes incomprehensible lyrics about science and worms and weird things, and it’s secret how she comes up with them (though it comes out at the end). I worry that last sentence won’t make much sense but trust me, this is a beautifully mysterious, somewhat circular graphic novel by (which I believe was originally published in Spanish). It’s so great when I started skimming through it to write this review, I had to read it again. I’ll be on the lookout for more of González’s books; his art reminds me of work by Ruppert and Mulot (Barrel of Monkeys, The Grande Odalisque), mostly because González doesn’t draw faces either, and, in the shading of the pages that take place at night, of some of my favorite Hellboy pages drawn by Mike Mignola.

A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan Book 2) by Arkady Martine. Tor, 2021. 9781250186461. 496pp. This is a sequel to Martine’s A Memory Called Empire. That one is about an ambassador from a space station trying to help her people maintain their independence from the Teixcalaan Empire, which is her personal obsession. The story starts quietly, with a failed attempt to integrate the memories of her predecessor into the ambassador’s mind, and ends with a bang. Great book. (minor spoiler) This sequel starts with that ambassador, Mahit Dzmare, back on her home station. Things are pretty bad there, so when she’s offered an out she leaves to help Teixcalaan establish contact with an alien species they may already be at war with. The aliens are technologically advanced and seem both brutal and unknowable. That’s part of the story, a strange tale of a violent and mysterious first contact. It’s woven in with a romance that continues to develop from the first book, a relationship that is trying and maybe failing to establish itself across a cultural divide. And off to the side, far away but also involved, is the story of a very young boy who will one day be the Emperor of Teixcalaan as he tries to learn who his allies are, what he values, and how to exercise the power and influence he already possesses. There are heart stopping moments and amazing writing in this book (which makes sense as poetry is at the heart of the Teixcalaan Empire), but don’t skip the first in the series. Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds. Orbit, 2018. 9780316555678. 432pp. This is a sequel to The Prefect, which it looks like was republished last year as Aurora Rising. (I like the new cover design but prefer the original cover.) This is another “police” procedural starring Prefect Tom Dreyfus and other familiar characters, set in a high-tech period of human habitation in the Glitter Band, a civilization of about 10,000 habitats around a planet called Yellowstone. (Other books by Reynolds take place in the same setting, but in wildly different time periods.) The central mystery in this book is why an increasing number of citizens are suddenly, inexplicably dying. It clearly has something to do with their neural implants, which are cooking their brains. As investigations continue into what links the victims (including interviewing backups of those who have already died), a man urging habitats to secede from the Glitter Band’s democracy seems to be gaining traction. He’s also made the mistake of irritating Dreyfus, and could be involved in whatever is killing people. #bookreview #sciencefiction #mystery