Posts for 'Fantasy' Category

Violet and Simon, two small bunnies, are excited about Hanukkah. Simon is ready to light all the candles and then blow them right out!

But Mama and Papa explain how to celebrate Hanukkah by lighting one candle each night at sunset and placing the menorah in the window for all to see.

Grandma and Grandpa come over, too, and there are latkes and presents and a dreidel game.

Linda Glaser's simple, cozy story is just right for children first learning about this holiday. Daniel Howarth's charming paintings show a happy family passing on their tradition.

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LAPD Detective Harry Bosch is off the chain in the fastest, fiercest, and highest-stakes case of his life. Fortune Liquors is a small shop in a tough South L.A. neighborhood, a store Bosch has known for years. The murder of John Li, the store's owner, hits Bosch hard, and he promises Li's family that he'll find the killer.

The world Bosch steps into next is unknown territory. He brings in a detective from the Asian Gang Unit for help with translation--not just of languages but also of the cultural norms and expectations that guided Li's life. He uncovers a link to a Hong Kong triad, a lethal and far-reaching crime ring that follows many immigrants to their new lives in the U.S.

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Dark Noir is like Arthur C Clarke’s third law (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic) applied to crime fiction in that if you take a police procedural story and push it far enough into the future then it looks like something else (SF).

The main character is a police officer in a far future Pittsburgh that looks a bit like Judge Dredd and is fighting all sorts of criminal miscreants that are right out of a creature feature episode of X-Files or a HR Giger painting.

The structure of the book is really cool too. Each issue is broken down in to four individual tales. Some of the tales are part of a continuing storyline and others are standalones. Not only does this structure pack a lot of story into each issue but it also contributes to really fleshing out this far future east coast city.

The setting is particularly interesting because of it’s extrapolation of an east coast, dying, rust belt city. Though it evokes in the reader a SF feel it doesn’t take much for us to say that yeah, it COULD be Pittsburgh.

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Tyler and Lucinda have to spend summer vacation with their ancient uncle Gideon, a farmer. They think they're in for six weeks of cows, sheep, horses, and pigs. But when they arrive in deserted Standard Valley, California, they discover that Ordinary Farm is, well, no ordinary farm.

The bellowing in the barn comes not from a cow but from a dragon. The thundering herd in the valley? Unicorns. Uncle Gideon's sprawling farmhouse never looks the same twice. Plus, there's a flying monkey, a demon squirrel, and a barnload of unlikely farmhands with strange accents and even stranger powers.

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Gary Alan Fine's book, Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds, provides an enlightening overview of the state of gaming in the early eighties.

Fine, a sociologist, inhabits the gaming cultures he reviews, reporting on Dungeons & Dragons, Chivalry & Sorcery, and Empire of the Petal Throne as a player and game master.  He also interviews many of the leading lights of the industry at the time, including M.A.R. Barker, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax.

What's revealed by Fine's studies is that issues many gamers face today have remained largely unchanged over the course of thirty years. "Roll-" vs. "role-" playing figures prominently. Game masters who are unprepared or capricious, players who are petty and competitive, groups that exclude other groups…they're all here in vivid detail.

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I have stumbled upon the motorcycling adventure books I've read usually when they're referred to in motorcycling catalogs such as Aerostich's motorcycling catalog, or they're mentioned in a blog or website.

Such was the case with the works of Geoff Hill, an Irish travel writer for a couple of newspapers in Belfast, Ireland; he apparently has quite the following in the paper's clientele and is winner of several writing awards in Europe.

He's written two books, the first being "Way to Go" about two rides he did after hitting on the brilliant idea of writing his column while on the road, getting paid to do it and see the world.

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It’s tempting to look at recent D&D releases like the Monster Manual 2 and Player’s Handbook 2 as being full of B-list material that was rightfully axed from the originals.

This is definitely not the case. Here’s the deal. D&D has been around since the ’70s and there are tons of awesome rules, classes, monsters and so on.

When Wizards of the Coast released the game’s 4th Edition, obviously the designers had to make some choices. What to cut? A lot of D&D fans who cracked the 4E Player’s Handbook (review) complained about certain notable omissions: no bards, barbarians or druids, no half-orcs, and dude, no gnomes!

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Tucker Stone ruminates on the wonder that is G.I. Joe: “This is pretty solid comics–it’s aggressive, it’s far more cynical and hard boiled than I’d imagine a comic based off a toy empire to be, and as long as I’m not having to listen to him screech, Cobra Commander is a great heavy.” If that’s not enough Tucker Stone for you today, there’s also the second episode of this.

Also over at Comixology, Valerie D’Ozario debuts her new column, Comics-Op, which promises to talk about comic-book related news from a “semi-insider” perspective. Staying on the Comixology vibe, Kristy Valenti scrutinizes two anthologies about, ahem, doin’ it.

After staying silent for awhile, the Savage Critics site roars back to life, as Jog looks at the Eurocomic classic Perramus, while Graeme McMillan plays catch up on a few ongoing titles. Sean T. Collins reviews the latest issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle: “I think what Kupperman’s doing–with his long, digressive “stories,” with his riffs on old-fashioned comic-book covers, and so on–is using the stuff of comics itself as a locus of the comedy.”

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Note to writers, artists, cartoonists and other people who make stuff: No matter how negative, nasty, mean-spirited or just plain harsh a critic is in reviewing your work, posting a smart-ass reply in the comments section of their blog is never a good idea.

The Onion’s AV Club does their regular comics round-up, this time looking at Luba, Potter’s Field, the Unwritten and Optic Nerve, to name but a few. Speaking of round-ups, Matthew J. Brady looks a some recent manga offerings while Johanna Draper Carlson picks through last Wednesday’s titles.

The Mindless Ones review that new Wolverine movie, podcast-style. The KURUTTA blog takes an interesting look at Osamu Tezuka’s adaptation of Crime and Punishment.  Sarah Boslaugh reviews Emmanuel Guilbert’s The Photographer for PLAYBACK: stl.

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A modern “classic” that inspired some of the key elements in The Dark Knight… well, maybe I agree, maybe I don’t. You’ll have to read to see. There will be spoilers. It was competent and did the job, but didn’t really go above and beyond.

I’m sure that this was one book that read better monthly in singles where the whole “Who is Holiday?” mystery could keep up the interest. In trade-form, though, it all goes by so fast that it isn’t nearly as engrossing as it should be.

As well, the story is so sprawling as far as a cast goes, you never really get a chance to latch onto anyone. We’re supposed to feel for the Dents and I did — but just not as much as I feel I was supposed to.

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