Friends with boys – Faith Erin Hicks (via Scribd)

A sweet story about a girl who’s starting high school after years of homeschooling. She is terrified and lonely, and she doesn’t really have any friends other than her three older brothers. It’s a charming story about growing up, figuring out who you are. But weird also because there is a ghost following her around, something to do with an artefact at a local museum.

Faith Vol 1 (via Netgalley)

*I received a copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review*

She’s a superhero! She flies! She was one of the original members of the Harbinger team. She’s also sweet and funny and loves comic books! Faith (her superhero name is Zephyr) is now on her own, living in LA and working a regular office job as a content writer for a Buzzfeed-like site. The best thing about this plus-sized superheroine is that it’s not about her being big-sized, she doesn’t agonize about the way she looks. She’s just Faith. And that is awesome.

Fiction Squad – Paul Jenkins and Ramon Bachs

I guess it’s kind of like Jasper Fforde’s Nursery Crimes series but in comic book form. This one draws from so many childhood stories – from Alice in Wonderland, Snow White, Humpty Dumpty, Oz and more. The detective is Frankie Mack, apparently from an unfinished novella. Fun to see all these storybook characters collide.

Renee – Ludovic Debeurme (via Netgalley)

*I received a copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review*

Renee is the sequel to Lucille, a painful coming of age graphic novel about a girl with anorexia. This one is now more of Renee’s story and it is more uncomfortable and surreal than the first. Lucille has now moved back home with her mother and her boyfriend Arthur is in prison. Renee is a student who has an affair with a married jazz musician. It isn’t clear until much later how their worlds collide but it is a twisted merging of their stories. There is a bit of a nightmarish quality to this tale, one told in simple line drawings, panel-less, border-less.

 

Starve Vol 1 –  Brian Wood, Danijel Žeželj (Illustrations) (via Netgalley)

*I received a copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review*

So Gavin Cruikshank used to be a world famous chef but he went into self-imposed exile in Asia and in those years he was away, his cooking show exploded into Starve, a cooking competition, arena and all. But Chef Gavin is back in the game and back on the show.

I wasn’t a big fan of the illustration style, as the whole look was a bit too jaundiced for me. But the story turned out to be a bit more interesting than I expected, with not just the cooking show at stake, but also his relationship with his family, that is, his daughter and his pained ex-wife. But sigh it is an evil bitch of an angry ex-wife kind of story. That part was a bit much.

Lantern City –  Paul Jenkins, Matthew Daley, Carlos Magno (Illustrator) (via Scribd)

I love the look of this comic. An underground world where the lower class live, the elite live in soaring skyscrapers above. Sander Jorve’s brother-in-law Kendal, an activist, persuades Sander to infiltrate the Guard, who always wear these funky masks, and he is whisked into a different world, hoping to make a difference for his family. The steampunk world, especially its buildings, is fantastic. The story was ok enough. I wanted to know more about the wife of the guard captain whose identity he assumes, but they don’t really say too much about her.

The Gwaii – Sean Patrick O’Reilly, Grant Chastain (Editor), Pedro Delgado (Illustrator)

A charming story with sasquatches! Tanu, the young sasquatch in orange, is lost in the Canadian wilderness but with the help of his best friend (some kind of cat), he searches for his mother who has been taken by horrible humans. Meant for a younger audience, but may be a bit scary for younger kids (like my under-5s), as there are guns and talk about killing the mother.

Jim Henson’s The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow – Jim Henson, Jerry Juhl, Roger Langridge (via Scribd)

Apparently this was drawn from a forgotten script that Henson had written a long time ago, and he had even made puppets for it! It was so cute but a little bit forgettable. And sadly, music doesn’t translate well into pictures. I kinda felt this need for an actual soundtrack.

Memetic – James Tynion IV and Eryk Donovan (via Scribd)

Perhaps my favourite of the recent Scribd reads. Also here I should mention that Scribd’s new policy has taken effect and subscribers are restricted to just 3 ebook ‘credits’ a month. Some comics and books are still ‘free’ to read though, so I am still on the fence with this new Scribd. So much for being the Netflix of books! If Netflix said I could only watch 3 shows a month, I would so cancel it!

Anyway, back to Memetic. It is a social media comic! Sort of! That adorable sloth picture on the cover? It is spreading across the planet, via Facebook, Twitter, whatever you use. But there’s something rather weird about this meme – something evil, something destructive. It seriously was such a fun and a bit terrifying a read! Terrifying because, could this really happen one day??

(See more #weirdathon stuff at Outlandish Lit)