thevampiremars's reviews
200 reviews

“An exotic blend of complex trauma, psychotic ramblings and spicy gay high aesthetic make you a hit at the dinner party while remaining just pathetic enough to be non-threatening”

CONTENT WARNINGS:

panic, paranoia, delusions, suicidality, drug use, white supremacy

Wish it were longer.

CONTENT WARNINGS: hypochondria, paranoia, guilt, colonialism/imperialism, dictatorship 

Dagger Dagger is not a cohesive anthology. The cover promises “dark fantasy and sci-fi” and editor Al Gofa coins the term “blood-fi” to describe these works. “Blood-fi” to me invokes those manga where characters explode with more blood than could possibly be contained within a human body, and enemies are viscerally torn apart (something like Berserk or Fist of the North Star). By comparison, the comics in this anthology really seem to be holding back; in fact, there are many comics which barely feature blood, or don’t at all. They do all touch on grisly subject matter like slavery and warfare, but these are major themes throughout science fiction and fantasy literature, so I don’t think this book is especially “dark.”

The individual comics are fine, largely mediocre. I did like the art of The Monastery by Goran Gligović, Angelic Missile by Linnea Sterte, and Yesaul by Artyom Trakhanov and Artem Dumov. I’ve been a fan of Sterte’s work for a while but I’ll make sure to check out those other artists as well.

I think that’s ultimately the main goal of this anthology – to highlight some comic creators and give them exposure. The book literally ends with the Evil Wizard following all the featured creators on social media and being inspired to create their own comics. If that’s what Dagger Dagger was aiming for, it did succeed.

CONTENT WARNINGS: war, violence, execution, slavery, injury, fire 

 “...and I, beneath... would find stillness in the hot viscera.”

CONTENT WARNINGS:

death, murder, mentions of terminal illness and suicide, mental illness (dissociation, dereality, hallucinations, nightmares, paranoia), blood and gore, toxic relationships, constant lies/manipulation, sexism

The writing is sardonic and meandering – that’ll take some getting used to. And there’s a lot that’s making me kind of uncomfortable, from cringey one-note characters to objectionable politics. Maybe this improves as the book goes on, but I’m just not in the mood right now.

I might come back to it eventually. We’ll see.

Love the artwork. I can see the French and Japanese stylistic influences – a little bit of bande dessinée, a little bit of manga... And Locatelli-Kournwsky’s knack for shape and silhouette is uplifted by de Santiago’s vibrant colours.

The fight scenes are slightly hard to follow, but that moment where

Troezen yeets a makeshift weapon and it flies out of the confines of the panel, seemingly towards the reader...

that was very cool.

There are some interesting concepts, like

magical girls being coopted by the state; the image of Naoko in her leotard and tights being deployed from a military aircraft

– ugh! So good.

It’s really promising! This volume is only the introduction, laying the groundwork for (hopefully many) future instalments. I’m hungry for more.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

invasion, injury (amputation, blood), trauma, alcoholism

 

Fruity

“Plums. Well. I did it. I – oh, sweet nectarines, I don’t entirely know what it is I’ve done – but I have most thoroughly and irrevocably done it nonetheless.”

Farcical, for better or for worse. Hijinks, lots of secrets and misunderstandings, everyone gasping and gaping and stammering in disbelief. Fun if you’re into that.

The main focus is Henry fumbling through life and figuring herself out –

her gender, her crush on Septimus, and her place in the world.

This coming-of-age narrative, along with the preoccupation with eloquence and grace (Henry struggles to find the words to express herself; she’s very aware of how clumsily she speaks so she overcompensates in her writing with verbosity, a very self-conscious performance of intelligence and charisma, modelled after the competent characters she looks up to) made me think she was maybe fourteen? I was surprised to find out she’s twenty-one. The quirky “figs!” exclamations and the “my wretched self” angst feel more befitting of a teenager than a full grown adult. It’s just a bit odd.

The other character I was drawn to was Pip Property, the eccentric and vaguely sinister cravat designer.

Except their villainous role was disappointingly undercut by the reveal that they’re simply “under coercion” (in their own words), and dampened by a humanising moment before then where we see them chilling in their home and even learn their deadname. It does feel like Reeve struggled with the whole queer-coded villain thing, toying with the idea of this enigmatic and transgressive figure stalking our protagonists, but also not wanting to demonise them and cast their queerness as evidence of evil. I say go all in and commit to writing a genderfucky pervert. Seriously, just do it. If the rest of the story is going to boil down to relationship drama with a veneer of quirky macabre, you may as well lean in and write a suitably flamboyant villain.

I dunno. I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s not for me, but there were aspects I enjoyed.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

sexism, transphobia, allusions to racism and antisemitism, anxiety and panic attacks, self-loathing, some drunken incestuous flirting, outing, blackmail, kidnap, gun violence, nonconsensual cutting of hair, injury, death, a severed head

 

My greatest criticism of Babel is how didactic it is. You can get away with a few exposition dumps in academic settings, but the overexplaining is something else. An example: Ramy and Robin have very different personalities, partially informed by their different experiences of racism. Robin can (sometimes) pass as white, so his MO is to keep his head down and try to blend in for his own safety. Ramy doesn’t have that option so he instead adopts extravagant personas, pretending to be an Indian prince if it means white people will be more courteous to him. The reader should be able to recognise these different approaches and infer the reasoning without being prompted, but Kuang opts to make it explicit through dialogue as Ramy explains all this to Robin. Okay, fine. But then that’s immediately followed by another paragraph explaining the exact same thing again, this time through narration. It felt a little patronising to have it spelled out in such a way.

On the topic of telling instead of showing, I saw another review which said the main characters didn’t have much chemistry and we only know they’re friends who would die for each other because we’re told as much, not because we’re actually shown it and made to believe it. I don’t disagree, but I think it makes sense that these four traumatised and alienated bookworms would form weirdly intense clingy-yet-detached relationships with one another. Not speaking from experience at all, haha...

Likewise, the pacing is odd in a way that does make sense. The first half was slow and lecturey and kind of felt like a chore to read, and it was difficult to track the passage of time because the narrative would hover on a particular day or week or term then jump forward a few months seemingly at random. It threw me off at first, but it was effective in conveying the feeling of university passing in a blur, of it existing as a liminal period before adulthood.

After that there was a lot of action and fraught emotion, then the last few chapters trudged towards tragedy.

One aspect I thought was really cool was the way the narrative would get kind of unmoored from chronology when emotion was heightened; we’d be told how a character looks back on this event rather than being walked through how they experienced it in the moment.

I thought that was particularly effective in the Lovell murder scene, where we’re told the outcome before the scene can reach that point. We have the argument preceding the attack, but before the attack itself is described we have this interjection: “He would try desperately to justify what he’d done as self-defence, but such justification would rely on details he could hardly remember, details he wasn’t sure whether he’d made up to convince himself he had not really murdered his father in cold blood. // Over and over again he would ask himself who had moved first, and this would torture him for the rest of his days, for he truly did not know. // This he knew:” How great is that?

The scene that had me hooked –

when Robin confronted and ultimately killed Lovell

– didn’t happen until around the 60% mark; everything up until that point felt like backstory setting up the actual story. Which is fine when you do eventually get that payoff, but while reading it I got bored and impatient. I think Babel might be better suited to people who read quicker than I do.

All in all, it does (mostly) come together. There’s an inventive and interesting magic system with a lot of thought put into its implementation and implications. Kuang is obviously building on real world history and sociology but that’s not a bad thing. The book is maybe a little on the nose with some of its messaging but it’s a good read once it gets going.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

imperialism/colonialism, classism, misogyny, racism, child abuse (verbal and physical), a brief scene involving sexual harassment, emotional manipulation, drug use and addiction, anxiety/panic, suicide, death, some gore, torture, police brutality, gun violence, impending war, terrorism, slavery, white fragility

 

“Something’s screwy...”

Alec Robbins, as the author/artist, gets to decide what everyone else thinks, feels, and does. Existing as a character within the fiction means he can not only conjure and control the other characters, but he can also control the relationships they have with him.

I think fans often overstate the commentary on intellectual property – it’s gestured at, but I don’t think the blurb is quite accurate when it describes the comic as giving “a middle finger to corporate IP.” I mean, sure, it makes you think; how can a character be owned the same way a logo is owned without being reduced to a lifeless and unchanging image, an icon? But Mr Boop doesn’t really go down that philosophical route, at least not primarily. Alec being sued is more threatening to him than it is to Betty, because he realises he can’t control her any more and he starts to spiral. I suppose you could interpret this as some commentary on fan entitlement but I think that would be too literal, taking the pop culture imagery at face value. It’s not about copyright, it’s about controlling relationships. At least, that’s how I read it.

“You’re living in a fantasy world, Alec.”

When Alec meets the ostensibly real Liz, he turns her into what he wants.

I also want to note how his solution to almost every problem is sex. It’s comedic, yes, but it’s also quite revealing. If all you have is a hammer, everyone gets nailed – that’s the level Alec is operating on. It’s like he simply cannot imagine a different mode. All he cares about, all he wants, is sex with Betty Boop.

But is this all imaginary? To what extent do the non-Alec characters in this comic have agency (within the fiction)? To what extent are they people? Maybe this is just a comic about a guy writing a comic. Layers!

Surprisingly complex postmodern comedy/tragedy/horror depending on how you want to look at it.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

sexual content, abuse, obsessiveness, depression, suicidality, death threats, gun violence, dereality