This is the second Donald E. Westlake novel that Darwyn Cooke has adapted. The previous book was great, and this one is just as fun. Both follow Parker, who is essentially James Bond as a ruthless criminal. What could be better than that? Very little.

In The Hunter, Parker was left for dead after being betrayed and spent the book hunting down those responsible. Since then, he’s recieved a new face through surgery and has been anonymously enjoying the rich life. Unfortunately, someone blows his cover and squeals to the Outfit, a mob-like organization he crossed paths with in the last book. They decide to come after him and learn pretty quickly that you don’t try to shoot Evil James Bond.

Parker’s dropped the lone wolf act in this book and uses a small team to pull off multiple heists against the Outfit, costing them an awful lot of money. I love me some heist action, and that was one of my favourite things about this book. Cooke details a few of the hits, using a unique art style for each one.

This book is a lot meatier than the first, story-wise, but it’s also not quite as tightly plotted, which is maybe to be expected. He experiments a little more with the art this time around, always keeping a cool, retro-cartoony feel. I’m looking forward to the third installment of this four book series, which is due to come out next year.

This blog hasn’t been abandoned! I fell quite ill a month ago, even got to spend a couple of weeks in hopsital, and I wasn’t really reading or writing much during that period. I’m back home and settled now, and I’m feeling much better, so I’ll be catching up on the few books and comics I actually got through.

Before I was sick, I read the latest installment of The Walking Dead. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with this comic. The dialogue’s always been a bit stilted, and there were a few trades in the middle of the series of which I just wasn’t a fan, but this latest trade is up there as one of my favourites.

The series tends to go through fairly predictable arcs, and we’d just finished a calm, so the inevitable storm was on its way. This trade definitely delivered on that. It’s basically a gore fest, but it contains some great moments, including one of the more shocking panels of the series. I’m usually more of a fan of the calm, character driven trades, but I really enjoyed this one.

While the series does still keep my interest, it would be nice to stray from the repetitive cycle of finding a safe haven, thinking everything is getting better, and then running when it all goes to hell. This trade’s ending does make promise of some potentially interesting changes in attitude and character, so I’m a little more excited than usual to see what happens next.

Before Scott Pilgrim, Bryan Lee O’Malley wrote a stand-alone graphic novel about a girl who believes her soul’s been taken by a cat. It’s a coming-of-age story for Raleigh, a recent Vancouver high-school graduate on a road trip in California with three school peers she barely knows.

As far as coming-of-age stories are concerned, I tend to love the Spielberg-esque child to teen variation and despise the overly-angsty teen/twenty-something to adult variation. This definitely leans towards the latter, and there’s no denying that it has its fair share of angst, but it is a book about a teenager, so a certain amount of embarrassing navel-gazing and taking oneself way too seriously is expected and somewhat excusable.

I’m not particularly fond of moody teenagers, and I’d rather not read something that puts me in the head of one, but what saves this is the clever writing and humour. It’s a quiet, character-driven story, and O’Malley paces it quite well. The art and humour and very reminiscent of Scott Pilgrim but a lot mellower. The writing is genuinely funny in parts, whether the occassional one-off comment or entire scene (such as the search for the cat), and even the navel-gazing had a stream-of-consciousness feeling that I found interesting, like Kerouac as a straight-laced, slightly whiny, teenaged girl writing in her weblog.

It’s not for everyone, but I quite enjoyed it.

As a short, angry, hairy Canadian, I’ve always felt a special kinship with Wolverine. If there was ever a superhero I could relate to, it’s him. And if it wasn’t him, it might have to be Puck, and that would just be sad.

I’m the best there is in what I do. But what I do best isn’t very nice.

Wolverine had been part of the X-Men for six or seven years at this point, but this was the first solo title run for the character. It’s written by Chris Claremont, X-Men writer of the 70s to 90s, and the four Wolverine issues are illustrated by Sin City’s Frank Miller. Apparently up until this point, Wolverine was a very one-dimensional ball of anger with claws. Miller urged Claremont to give the character a little depth, and they teamed up in this to do just that.

In the story, Wolverine’s girl has been summoned back to her native Japan for an arranged marriage, and he travels back there to brood and call people bub and stab things. It’s actually a fun story, although it goes a little wonky when it transitions into the Uncanny X-Men issues. It’s a shame Frank Miller wasn’t writing this, instead of just illustrating, as you could see his influence on Claremont’s writing and how that basically got dropped once he was off the book. It’s a little heavy on the exposition, but not nearly as bad as many older comics.

The early Miller art was great and still holds up quite well. Worth reading if you’re a Wolverine fan.

When I ordered The Hunter, I didn’t realise this was originally a noir crime novel from 1962, although in retrospect the title probably should have been a clue. That book also has three film adaptations, including Payback starring a pre-meltdown Mel Gibson. All I knew was that this was on a lot of random people’s best of the year lists for 2009, so I figured I’d check it out.

The main character is Parker, a criminal in 1960′s New York City, who was betrayed and left for dead by his partner and wife during a job to hijack a shipment of illegal munition in Canada. He’s back and pissed, he wants the cash, and nothing’s going to stop him until he gets it.

It’s a very basic story, essentially just enough to lay the framework for some relentless ass kicking and to give you just enough compassion for the character to nearly excuse how unlikable and cruel he is. The art style is as simple as the story, black and white and grey, but Cooke manages to tell so much with every panel. His characters are incredibly expressive and the panel composition very fresh. You can tell he worked as a storyboard artist before this.

He’s planning to come out with four of these books, last I heard. The first two are out, and I found this one to be fun, so I’ve already ordered the second.

I’ve been hearing about Jonathon Hickman since I started getting back into comics. He’s was touted as a wonder child in the indie comic scene and has now been brought into Marvel. This is the first comic of his I’ve read, and I’m looking forward to picking through the rest.

Pax Romana begins 40 years in the future, when the Catholic church has lost most of its followers. The Vatican has finally embraced technology and have managed to unlock the secrets behind travelling back in time. They decide, in typical churchy fashion, that they know enough now to fix what they consider to be the problems of present day, and they send a team equipped with modern weaponry back in time to ancient Rome in an attempt to establish order and lasting dominance.

Right when you open this book you can tell you’re in for something different. The art style and the way he formats the page panels are really fun and interesting. Each page is a joy to look at, although I have to admit that the art did leave the characters feeling a bit stiff and lifeless at times. It took me a little while to get hooked while reading this, and the art is partly to blame for that. I wouldn’t want this style in every comic I read, but I did enjoy it during this.

I really enjoyed the story and the ideas in this. It’s a bit of a thought experiment in exactly what would happen if a modern army found themselves back in time, but since it’s so short you really just get a high level political view of that. It would have been interesting to have an ongoing series about them trying to just live their lives during all of this, like The Walking Dead but with zombies replaced with things like language barriers and lack of plumbing. Well, I’d find it interesting anyway…

Amazon has a ‘look inside‘ preview available.