I get a little bit angry when people see Alice in Sunderland in our window display and laugh. It’s not supposed to be funny, and if people took a minute or two to have a proper look at it they’d see what an amazingly unique book it is. It hasn’t got a proper narrative but it’s a book that takes you on a journey. It’s a history lesson. It’s a literature lecture. It’s a geographical guide to North East England and Britain in general. It’s a guide to so many aspects of British culture and history it’s amazing that it’s only 300 full colour unputdownable pages. Bryan Talbot hooks you in with an appealing anecdote here which leads to a fascinating folk tale, then onto another interesting interlude and back again. At no point does this book become boring. In fact quite the opposite. It’s full of interesting facts you find yourself repeating out loud to anybody who’ll listen.
* * * * Koby lives in modern day Tel Aviv. Estranged from his father, he works as a taxi driver and generally just mooches through life. But when his dad’s new girlfriend, about Koby’s age, contacts him with a theory that his father may have been killed in a recent suicide bombing, Koby is forced to reassess his family relationships and the pair embark on a series of trips to find the truth about the missing man. As the mystery unfolds it appears things are not as they first appear. Not quite a detective adventure, not quite a romance, not overtly political, Exit Wounds is a unique book by Rutu Modan, one of Israel’s best-known cartoonists.
* * * * An extremely well researched comic book about Victorian killers, comparisons with From Hell are obvious but Rick Geary’s Treasuries of Victorian Murder have the one thing that Alan Moore’s opus lacks, a sense of humor. His latest volume, The Bloody Benders tells the almost forgotten true life tale of the serial killing family of 1870’s. The pithy prose and intricate illustrations breathe life into the long dead murderers of the Kansas plains. As with previous gems, such as Jack the Ripper, Murder of Abraham Lincoln and the Beast of Chicago, Geary expertly sets the scene with maps, drawings and historic points of interest and uses a very factual, matter of fact style to entertain with a humorous and bloody drama.
