Webcomic Wedneday

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they decide that YES! They want to read comics and webcomics in particular!

The trouble some people find is that the established online strips often have years of backstory to wade through before they can get up to date with what is happening in the strip now and discuss it with their friends.  If you are one of those people who has a thing called a ‘life’ and is not able to stay up all night to read comics but still want to experience the joy that wecomics bring then may I suggest a BRAND NEW webcomic!

I may?

Oh goody!  Here goes!  Introducing

 

by Sonia Leong - one of the few true manga megastars of the United Kingdom! 

 

So what is it about?

Simone has moved into a shared house for the first time, with a pal from her university days. The reality is far from the grown-up, yet girly lifestyle she was imagining, as her housemates turn out to be Fujoshi – the ultimate female otakus! This Yonkoma (4-panel) strip is published online every Tuesday and Friday from May 2011.

It launched yesterday so you can read the first strip now and get ready for the second page tomorrow!  How cool is that? (Very)

So you can click on the banner or follow this link: Fujo Fujo to start reading.

American Weather by Charles McLeod

Meet Jim Haskin. He’s forty years old. He’s worth around thirty-five million. He runs his own San Francisco ad firm, American Weather. AmWe’s image is green and forward-looking: if your product is upcycled or hydro or vegan, they’ll make you an ad. Behind the scenes, though, Jim supports the old captains of American industry; bleach, beer, guns.

But all is not well: Jim’s wife, Denise, is in a coma induced by a drug Jim helped promote. A live-in nurse and former Salvadorian gang member helps him care for her. And Jim’s only child, Connor, has been sent to a boarding school three thousand miles away after assaulting another student.

Orphaned at 14, Jim and his three closest friends grew up at Mr Hand’s Home for Well-Behaved Boys. All have profited from the American Dream. In 2008, on the brink of the Presidential election, the quartet finds themselves short on cash and look to Jim for a solution. The scheme he devises brings together a Death Row inmate, pay-per-view television, and most of America's major corporations. Everything is set for it to be his greatest achievement yet.

Jim Haskin – what a man! When I first met him in American Weather I was not too sure what to think – I hated him, then admired him, pitied him and by the end was so confused that I had to read the book again and ended up mixed up between loathing and admiration!

American Weather is a book I have read, not once or twice but three times – in a row! This is something that has not happened to me for well over a decade!

Jim's amoral journey is countered by the letters from his son Connor, who is kept far from trouble at boarding school.  We never meet Connor and only hear his voice through the letters he writes to his father.  As much as I love Jim's single-minded push for all that is unclean in the world, it is his son's journey told through letters that provides a glimmer of light.

This book is full of gems, my favourite four pages started on chapter two with Jim introducing who he is and what he does - it is six pages of perfection, at least he is honest about treating the public with the contempt only an advertising genius can muster!

I will just say that you have to pay attention whilst reading this book if you do you will be rewarded with a brilliant read - a pure, vicious satire on the American way of life. I enjoyed it more with each, subsequent reading, this book has it all, hypocrisy, amorality, a vicious sense of humour and a true anti-hero who is so fascinating and funny that I could not help but cheer him on. 

Go on buy a copy and read it - it will make you feel guilty for loving it and you know what?  There is nothing wrong with that!

 

Mondays are Murder: The Long Weekend by Savita Kalhan

Sam knows that he and his friend Lloyd made a colossal mistake when they accepted the ride home.

They have ended up in a dark mansion in the middle of nowhere with man who means to harm them. But Sam doesn't know how to get them out.

They were trapped, then separated.

Now they are alone.

Will either of them get out alive?

I may have to speak to my lawyer!  Savita Kalhan has TRAUMATISED me!  She lured me in with the offer of a free (signed) copy on twitter and fool that I am I took her up on it .  

 When it arrived I looked at it and thought oooh! Pretty and creepy!  So very creepy-looking!

The Long Weekend is a fairly short book – 180 pages in length - oh good I thought!  Quick and easy - I need a book like that!

Then I made the mistake of reading it! 

It is quite possibly one of the most gripping abduction, escape and chase novels for young people that I have ever read!  The prose is very tight, there is not an inch of wasted text!

Sam is an amazing hero, he is a smart kid but he is just 11 years of age – same age as my nephew and sounds like him a bit as well! 

He realises that he is no Alex Rider as he engages in a terror filled game of cat and mouse in and around the house where he and his friend are trapped. There are no heroics, just a desperate struggle to stay hidden to remain alive.

I loved The Long Weekend it left me breathless – there were several sections where I discovered that I was holding my breath waiting for something terrible to happen. The building sense of dread compelled me to keep reading and as the book neared its end I realised that I had no idea what was going to happen, I had a sick sense of horror in my stomach as the page count diminished and I can honestly say that I was kept guessing until the very end.

It has probably been said before that this story is every parent or guardian's worst nightmare!

I still feel twitchy even now, I have put the book on my shelf where it is safely away from me!  I fear that I may have nightmares about the worst that humanity has to offer and a little boy who wants to go home.

Five stars for a riveting story!

The fact that I finished The Long Weekend at the end of another long weekend is fitting and totally unintentional.

Many thanks to Savita for the book - it has a special place on my bookshelf of awesome YA books.

International Towel Day

Read the Hitchhiker's Guide books again! Today if nowhen else! Do this in memory of the hoopiest frood of them all! 

"A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough."

Douglas Adams

Sci-Friday

Sci-Friday on Books...and stuff is here to celebrate all manner of science fictiony goodness - and fantasy too!  They go hand in hand Sci-Fi and Fantasy.

Now Sci-Friday was supposed to launch (into space fnar!) last week but with problems on Blogger this did not happen.

Now this is not as big a problem as I thought because - the British Library is launching it's Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it today - how is that for serendipity?  Maybe the distant space gods have chosen me as their prophet to spread the gospel (probably not).

Now I love Science Fiction (and Fantasy) it is genre fiction that made me the voracious reader I am today!  So Sci-Friday will be my space to celebrate the books and authors I loved as a child and the authors that I respect as creators of the weird and fantastic today - yes I still love the authors that write for me even if they have no idea who I am but I say respect because a grown man professing love for a wide range of people across the world would be weird and geeky - which actually does describe me (sort of).

So authors of the weird and fantastic I love you all!  Thank you for writing the works you do, this is just to let you know that I will be tracking you down one by one to say a big thank you and maybe... just maybe give you all a BIG HUG!

I will be going to Out of this World on Saturday.

Thor's Day

Today is Thorsday - now I am cursed on thorsday I was supposed to have a revieof a Thor graphic novel butw  noooooooooooo!  Work and stuff got in the way - so next week Thorsday will launch and I will try and keep it as oriented on Aesir and Vikings as possible!

I would tell the Thor joke but it is not actually that funny

You know yhe one that ends:

I am Thor I am Thor!  

You are thor? I'm tho thor...

Thorsday will be here same time next week!

I promise!

Webcomic Wednesday

Welcome the the first in a series of reviews and articles about webcomics!  I thought I would use Wednesdays for this feature as it is the middle of the week and usually at this time people could use something humourous (sometimes) to read.  Also it rhymes.

Apparently (according to wikipedia anyway) webcomics have been around since 1985.  I was bitten by the webcomic bug some five years ago and am still finding some interesting titles.

To begin I would like to introduce you to one of my favourite series of the moment:

I have been a fan of Weregeek since it began in 2006 and have featured it in two of my newsletters over at TeenLibrarian as I have found it to be a brilliant tool for educating people on LARPS, collectible card games, Dungeons & Dragons, Shadowrun and other obsessive tendencies of geek kind.

It is also a fantastic (free) read!  The overarching story concerns Mark.

Mark was once just an ordinary guy with an office job and a blonde girlfriend. Except that every once in a while he had a strange urge to hang in front of a tabletop RPG store and stare at its wares pointlessly... Then one day, after a run in with the local vampire coven and The Hunters, he discovered a mind-blowing truth: there is a secret society out there, The Masquerade... OF GEEKS! And he is one of them, "a human by day and a geek by night"...

The story also follows his friends, and colleagues in their real lives as well as in the fantasy worlds they enter through their role-playing games.  It also pokes fun at pop culture...

 Weregeek was created and is written, drawn and edited by Alina Pete and Layne Myhre.

Give it a read, if you are a geek you will enjoy the in-jokes and positive portrayal of geek culture.  If you are not a geek - read it and you may discover that actually you are a geek after all!

So if you just want to enjoy a good laugh with a few soap opera, fantasy, horror, gaming and mystery tropes thrown in then Weregeek is for you! 

Just remember to start at the beginning

For those of you that do not enjoy reading off the computer, Weregeek is also available in print form from the Weregeek Store