Comic book mash-ups, spaceships, and nerds make up this week’s Book Review Friday!
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The Amalgam Age of Comics by John Byrne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m a bit of a comic fan, and while I’ve always liked the idea of the characters from the DC side of things, for the most part their stories have just never grabbed me. I’m very much a Marvel zombie. I think that colors my opinion of this collection a bit, because I think the Amalgamations that work well and seem like they could have made great ongoing books were characters that leaned much more heavily on their Marvel counterpart than their DC counterpart. The best example in this collection is DarkClaw: It’s essentially Wolverine and Jubilee as seen through a lens of Batman and Robin. Overall it was interesting to see how the characters and concepts were combined and I think an ongoing anthology book could have been successful.
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I think anyone who has read more than a handful of comics has had the thought “what if I combined [hero x] with [hero y]?” and quite a few of us have played that hero in a Supers RPG. I myself am guilty of that. Mac Magma (The Pyroclastic Powerhouse!) was essentially “What if I combined The Thing and Jonny Storm?
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Full Frontal Nerdity 1: Big Book of Epic Fail by Full Frontal Nerdity
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’ve been a big fan of Aaron Williams ever since the first time I read a Nodwick comic in the back of a Dragon Magazine. He’s always found the humor in roleplaying settings and with Full Frontal Nerdity he proves that there is ample humor to be had in the act of Roleplaying itself. In my opinion the FFN guys seem more like the roleplayers I know than the KoDT characters do.
If you like gamer humor I would recommend picking this up.
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It’s hard to put into words why I find FFN so funny. I think it’s the fact that almost every time I read one of the strips I can either say “yup, I know that person” or “that seems like something I would do.”
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And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It’s… alright. It’ not good (what fan fiction is?)* but it’s not bad either. It reunites the cast and gives the series a much more satasfying ending that Douglas Adams’ did, so there’s that. It manages a crappy Cthulhu joke but makes up for it by making Thor an important character, so again there’s that. I will admit that I could be being very unfair to the book, but while reading most of the book I kept thinking “This is alright, but Adams could have done something really funny with this.”
*Yes, this is fan fiction. Just because it was commissioned fan fiction doesn’t make it any more legitimate.
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That last book about fantasy space rolls us right into…
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Beyond the Moons by David Zeb Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It’s the story we all know and can relate to: a simple country farmboy goes off to war and comes home to tend the family farm when all of a sudden a spaceship crashes in the field, the boy gets befriended by a hippo-headed military man, and he gets stuck with a powerful artifact that dangerous forces want to take for themselves. I think we’ve all been there.
The pacing was a touch slow in parts, and I have to assume that the only reason the novel series started in the Dragonlance series was because the series HAD to visit all of the big three TSR settings, as the rest of the series dealt with hardly anything else from Dragonlance.
Anyway, this is the first in a series of SpellJammer novels and I think that it was pretty good. People who are fans of the setting or are fans of light heated silliness and adventure should find something enjoyable, but anyone who doesn’t like the less serious elements of the SpellJammer setting may not find it to their liking.
View all my reviews
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I’m a huge fan of SpellJammer and finding these in a local used bookshop was awesome. I’ll be posting the rest of the reviews in the future.
