Northlanders 17 is one of my favorite one-shot comics of all time. It’s actually the one that got me all into Northlanders in the first place.

It has no plot – simply a description of two Vikings in the middle of an honor fight to the death. The detailed narration that comes along with it is a perfect snapshot of the Viking culture that is at the heart elsewhere in Brian Wood’s stories. It is simple and perfect and Vasilis Lolos’ artwork is absolutely mesmerizing in its subtlety.

Anyone who thinks comics can’t be high art needs to take a look at this. (You can see much of it here if you don’t believe me.)

18-19 tells the story of a trio of women who must step up and defend themselves against some horrible Christians and 20 brings back our favorite Sven of Orkney, now hidden up in the Faroe Islands, letting his legend grow so strong some knuckleheads dare to try and kill him for glory.

Issue 21 begins an 8-issue arc. More on that as it completes.

I am just as surprised as you are to learn that Fringe comics are good.

I would say that this 6 issue arc is actually more fun than many of the episodes.

It is, at heart, a prequel, with a young Walter Bishop meeting and working with a young William Bell. (As this was all done before the casting coup, the Comics’ Bell looks nothing like Leonard Nimoy – nor is he the appropriate age, but that’s okay.)

You get to watch Bish & Belly do all sorts of wacky stuff in their Harvard lab – like go back in time to fight Hitler!!!

Each issue also comes with a smaller, tag story that is just a little bit of “Pattern” spookiness.

Issue 6 is the only one set “now” and its last panel is Agent Dunham knocking on Bishop’s hospital door. Fun stuff.

Lots here depends on your point of view.

For an X-Men comic, this is a miraculous work. For Holocaust fiction (even Holocaust fiction in comic form) it is a trifle.

I was a little nervous that we’d somehow see young Magnus bending crematorium doors open with his mind, but Greg Pak is smarter than that. We see very little mutant power in the young German Jew condemned to Sonderkommando work in Auschwitz. I just hope the eventual 20th Century Fox film has the good sense to keep it that way (doubtful.)

The third arc of Brian Wood’s Northlanders takes the action to Ireland, where a one man resistance force causes agita for the invasion force. Some 11th Century CSI work is either awesome or far-fetched, depending on your point of view.

While I still really dig these amoral Viking stories, I prefer the artwork in the earlier comics to what is collected here. It looks too Dick Tracy for my taste. Still worth your time, though. Right now, other than Trek comics, these are the only current comics I currently care about.

One of the more famous collections of “psychedelic” science fiction. From a man, of course, who never touched psychedelics.

The titular story is fantastic, a few others are interesting. And others still are completely forgettable. Harlan Ellison is terse, sometimes, to his own detriment. These are short short stories – oftentimes just enough to get some kooky idea across and then move on.

I see a book like this in a store it is a virtual impossibility that I’m not going to buy it.

It is a position paper, basically, arguing that a) most Jews are liberal and that b) they shouldn’t be.

The a) part is interesting reading – dating back to the Biblical era on through the Inquisition and Reformation and Pogroms and Herzl and Roosevelt and Alger Hiss and Kissinger up through the Bushes. Interesting reading.

What fails – ultimately fails – is Podhoretz’s rallying cry. He goes absolutely “all in” that anyone who doesn’t defend Israel 100% of the time is an anti-Semite. Seriously. It is amazing that publishing house of record ever let such insanity see the light of day.

Podhoretz’s maniacal litmus test renders all of his arguing moot, until he becomes a laughing stock.

He says Nixon is the greatest friend Jews ever had ever, and doesn’t even bother to refute the Billy Graham tapes. He just ignores them as if they don’t exist. Reagan was forced to go to Bitburg against his will and W. is a Truman-esque genius.

Whatever.

I liked reading this book for its first 2/3rds but the remainder is the ramblings of a madman.

I’m all for investigating other points of view, but this did nothing to turn me into the GOP voter its author hoped it would.

Two-issue arc concerning the Viking invasion of a monastery in Northern England – told from the point of view of a young, treasonous boy who “summons up” the Northlanders to vanquish his family. Bloody and alarmingly free-of-ethics (like most of the previous Northlanders stories) this comic makes some of the best toilet reading around.

This is the second 700 page novel by Reynolds I’ve read this year. I’ve got a third ready to go.

Set somewhat as a “sidequel” to the happenings in the “Revelation Space” arc, this is a slightly more conventional tale, but not without Reynolds’ style of truly mind-expanding ideas.

A detective story, of sorts, set in a post-human society where The Melding Plague has thrown all nanotech into such chaos that the buildings themselves begin growing out of control. Also: a religion that is truly infectious.

The best sections deal with a flotilla of generation ships that slowly begin to form into their own warring nations. It is a fascinating piece of anthropology and a solid example of what hard SF can do that no other genre can.

Vikings. Adventuring in Constantinople, conquering the Orkneys, battling the Saxons. Three times awesome.

Brian Wood’s writing is good-not-great, but the setting and art are a solid A+. This is a great collection of an 8-issue arc featuring more beheadings than you can shake a blood-soaked blade at. Highly recommended.

Ignore the good reviews, Steve Niles’ City of Dust (soon to be a motion picture) is a pretty lame-ass comic.

The premise – that a Utopian society that has outlawed religion has also done away with “all storytelling,” so a savior has reconstructed robot versions of classic monsters to rekindle our imagination – is asinine.

The art is cool, though.