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Comic Book Reviews Top Ten Graphic Novels of 2011

A round-up of the best comics of 2011

1. Holy Terror by Frank Miller

Living legend Frank Miller delivers a post-9/11 political carton exploded into a Batman-esque revenge fantasy! Some of Millers best art for years!

2. Criminal: Last of the Innocents by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

Forget ‘film noir’ and ‘pulp fiction’ Brubaker and Phillips have become the masters of comic book crime comics. Last of the Innocents is their best work to date.

3. Snow by Benjamin Rivers

A gentle, self published, detective tale set against the backdrop of a modern recession in a Canadian city.

4. Klondike by Zach Worton

Historically accurate,…

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Book Review The Third Antichrist

by Mario Reading

It’s impossible not to judge The Third Antichrist by its cover. The latest offering in Mario Reading’s The Antichrist Trilogy displays an inverted cross on it’s cover and has a notable RRP of £6.66. Many will be intimidated away from reading this interesting and imaginative tale.

Adam Sabir, guardian of the lost prophecies of Nostradamus, is attempting to protect the foetus he has identified as the second coming. He is tailed throughout by the notorious De Bale siblings – a group of adoptees convinced that they must prevent the devil from reigning by allowing the antichrist to wreak chaos on…

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Book Review Comfort & Joy

by India Knight

Have you ever wanted to create the perfect, fairytale Christmas for your family, but struggled because the modern family set-up is sometimes so complicated?

Wife and mother Clara Dunphy has the answers. In a desperate bid to please her flamboyant mother, her husband (and his mother) and ex-husband, her eccentric half-sisters, her children and various others, Clara hosts a riotous Christmas dinner every year.

We meet Clara Christmas shopping on Oxford Street on the 23^rd December 2009. After searching for the best – and therefore most expensive – presents she can find, Clara suddenly decides to get into the festive…

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Book Review The Rum Diary

by Hunter S Thomspon

The Rum Diary is re-released here as a film tie-in. Allegedly the result of Johnny Depp digging out a forgotten manuscript in his friend Thompson‘s archive, it is a novel that otherwise might never have been published. Depp told Thompson it should be published and Thompson subsequently decided that he needed the money. This presents an interesting tension upon opening the book. Should it have been published, or was it best left alone? Thankfully, Thompson does not disappoint.

The Rum Diary is written with that telltale gonzo style which readers will be familiar with. Here the voice is less relentless,…

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Book Review The Garden of Betrayal

by Lee Vance

Thrillers are everywhere, filling every book shop while authors hope they might become the next Dan Brown. And so arrives Lee Vance’s The Garden of Betrayal.

Seven years after the disappearance of his son, Kyle, Mark Wallace is working as an energy analyst for a large and successful hedge fund firm. Nothing has ever been heard about Kyle, until the police receive an anonymous tip about the night he disappeared. On the same day, Mark starts receiving information which could make his career. Is it just a coincidence?

On first opening the pages, it seemed like many thrillers that had…

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Feature Ben's Adventures in Winemaking

A Leeds-based lawyer and home winemaker releases a new book documenting some 33 different brews he's made

Homebrewing beer and wine are becoming increasingly popular hobbies these days. Once a common enough practice for those wanting to pinch the pennies and keep themselves steadily trollied, a new generation of makers are embracing homebrew as a way to craft drinks to suit their own palates and, yep, save a bob or two while they’re at it.

Ben Hardy, a columnist for Home Farmer magazine and lawyer who lives and works in Leeds, has taken home winemaking to quite an extreme. His recently released book, Ben’s Adventures in Winemaking, documents his attempts to make 33 different wines using a…

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Comic Book Reviews Snow, by Benjamin Rivers

The latest graphic novels and comic books reviewed

Shops closing down? Landlords upping rent to drive out existing tenants? Vibrant and lively areas of the city being needlessly gentrified? Sound familiar? Unfortunately this isn’t a problem that’s unique to Leeds. In Snow (£9.99, self-published by the author) graphic novelist Benjamin Rivers delivers a melancholy, mystery tale set against the backdrop of Toronto’s Queen Street West, an area previously buzzing with book shops, record stores and independent clothing boutiques. Slowly, one by one, these much loved businesses have closed down or moved out to make way for generic, bland corporations like Nike, Gap or Canadian chain store Roots.
…

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Book Review My Life: A Coach Trip Adventure

by Brendan Sheerin

There is a saying that everyone has a novel in them, and judging by the bookstore windows around Christmas the publishers firmly believe that every celeb, no matter how minor, has an autobiography in them. Which would explain why I’m holding a copy of Brendan from Coach Trip’s life story.

Don’t get me wrong though, this doesn’t mean it’s a bad book – in fact it’s very entertaining.Unlike other celeb biogs this clearly hasn’t been ghostwritten. You get pure undiluted Brendan and if you’ve seen Channel 4 Coach Trip you’ll know he’s warm, funny, charming and just a little bit…

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Book Review Dead Europe

by Christos Tsiolkas

Isaac is a photographer, Australian born of Greek immigrants, in his late-30s and thrust into a new and exciting adventure around what is mainly a post-Cold War Europe. Looking to discover his ancestry, he relives his mother’s anti-Semitic opinions and his father’s unrelenting anger and constant life lessons.

When visiting his mother’s ancestral village he learns that his family is cursed; a series of photographs taken on his journeys make him realise he may not be making the trip alone. The book has two very intense narratives running alongside each other and it leaves the reader to understand Isaac’s trip…

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Book Review The Killing Way

by Anthony Hays

Anthony Hays’ take on the Camelot mythos may indeed lead us into familiar territory, but it does so in a way that still seems original, and thereby manages to escape rehashing the same old story of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

When the King of all Britannia retires, elections loom for his replacement. But in the run-up to the election, Eleonore is found murdered, her heart cut out. And the blade nearby belongs to Merlin. Naturally Merlin is accused of Druidic sacrifice, and thus one-armed anti-hero Malgwyn is tasked by Arthur with finding out who the real…

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