Comic aka how I spent winter break

True to most holidays, I got a whole bunch of graphic novels for Christmas and spent the last couple weeks getting through them. Here are my mini-reviews:


I've reviewed the Fables series before. It's one of my absolute favorites. Fairest is the newest spin off of the original Fables series. This first volume focused Sleeping Beauty, finally woken up by Ali Baba after the events in the previous Fables novels. It follows their misadventures with the Snow Queen, one of the main adversaries in Fables. At the end there's a short issue that introduced a new twist to Beauty and the Beast's story line. It was great.



I've also been reading Buffy season 9 (after reading season 8) and its spin off, Angel and Faith, which focused on Angel and Faith's adventures in London after the events of season 8. I always liked their friendship on Angel so it's nice to see that in more detail. In this novel, Daddy Issues,  Drusilla shows up in these issues, which was pretty awesome. And Faith's father was introduced, rounding out her background a bit better. Angel is still on his quest to bring back Giles, leading to him meeting Rupert's youthful great-aunts. The issues moved the plot along nicely and made me excited to read the second issue of Buffy's story line.



Geoff likes to pick me out random comics that I never would have heard of, like The Manhattan Projects. My maternal grandfather was actually one of the engineers hired to work on the Manhattan Project during WWII. He knew he was working on some sort of weapon but didn't know the details. Anyway, we had just gone to the NY Historical Society's exhibit on WWII in NYC. This was a really cool story. It's an alternate history of WWII and the Manhattan Project. Here, it's called the Manhattan Projects. Building weapons is only one part of it. The scientists are also involved in communicating with aliens, space travel, artificial intelligence and lots of other weird things. Weird like a dead FDR's brain being transferred into a computer. The story is definitely strange but a really cool alternate history. I loved it and will definitely read the next volume.



I also previously reviewed Star Wars Legacy, a series of 11 graphic novels about one of Luke Skywalker's descendants named Cade Skywalker. I still find the timeline suspect (see my previous entry) but that's ok. I picked up the series at the fourth book, Alliance. It's a pretty good series. Cade is the last remaining Skywalker but he's hardly the Jedi his ancestor was. He is one of the last survivors of a Sith attack of the Jedis on Ossus. He ended up being evacuated from an escaping ship and drifted in space until he was picked up by a group of pirates. Since he was a young teenager during this time, he grew up denying his Jedi powers. However, clearly the force isn't done with him yet. He gets pulled into the brewing war between the Sith who controls the empire and the remnants of both the Jedi and the Galactic Alliance as well as the deposed emperor, Roan Fel (a descendant of Jagged Fel, who married Jaina Solo [Han and Leia's daughter] during Luke's lifetime.) Ok I could go on and on about this series, but I'll make it brief. Cade keeps trying to reject his legacy but is continuously pulled back into the fighting until things get so bad (the poor little Mon Calamari are basically exterminated) that he ends up trying to take out the Sith on his own to get rid of the evil emperor and restore peace to the galaxy (although if you've followed any Star Wars books you know that never ever happens). Anyway, the battle scenes are sometimes confusing to follow in comic form but the characters were interesting and it's always fun to drop in on the Star Wars universe and see what's happening. Just a word of warning - if you read this series, book 6 is actually Vector volume 2 and you should also read Vector volume 1 before 2. Vector is a cool cross over series where one character goes between four different Star Wars story lines, including Darth Vader not long after his transformation, a young Luke and Leia before Return of the Jedi and finally Cade. It's definitely worth reading.

I still have a few other comics to go from Geoff and my Christmas gifts but now I'm back to regular books for a bit. Stay tuned for more.