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DC Finest: Batman: Red Skies. A collection of Batman's final pre-Crisis stories. Immediately after these issues, DC published Batman: Year One and things started changing. Doug Moench wrote most of the stories aside from a Secret Origins story by Roy Thomas, and the final issue, which was written by Harlan Ellison.

Although it's common to assert that Batman was relatively unaffected by the Crisis, this isn't quite accurate. Even in the mid-80s, Batman still had certain Adam West-isms that hadn't totally fallen away, such as his chummy deputized relationship with the police and a certain optimism in the stories. Jason Todd, who'd recently become the new Robin, was a much less edgy character than the reformed delinquent he became post-Crisis (i.e., the one that was so annoying the readers voted to have him beaten to death by the Joker). Jason here is pretty much just a nice kid who confounds the adults around him with his references to stuff like MTV, and he bonds with Harvey Bullock over their love of old movies. Just prior to the stories collected, Batman had been in a love triangle with Vicki Vale and Alfred's long-lost daughter, Julia. After breaking up with both of them, Vicki went through an odd subplot in which she took up bodybuilding and developed what paparazzi today often refer to as a "revenge body", which got quietly dropped post-Crisis, and Julia just sort of drifted along until she was made entirely nonexistent in the new continuity. Catwoman is also fully reformed by this time and is basically partnering regularly with Batman and that went out the window as well.

The overarching storyline in this volume is the fallout of Batman defeating Moench's major rogues gallery contribution, Black Mask, and his False Face Society. Nocturna, a sort of pre-Goth culture goth girl, takes over the society and causes all of the main characters to project images onto her in ways that somewhat evoke Jungian archetypes; e.g., Batman sees her as a lover, Robin sees her as mother, Catwoman sees her as a competing temptress, etc. Moench's stories often seem to revolve around the idea of love making people do strange and often self-destructive things. The stories are...okay. I've read worse Batman runs but I've also read better ones. Mostly there's just a bittersweet quality in retrospect because you know this is pretty much The End for the original Batman. That said, the biggest attraction in the volume is Batman 400, a massive anniversary issue that featured an introduction by Stephen King (not reprinted here), and as much high-profile artistic talent as they could find - John Byrne, George Perez, Bill Sienkiewicz, Brian Bolland, etc. The story involves Ra's al Ghul breaking every one of Batman's enemies out of Arkham, which got more or less recycled as the main idea behind the more well-known Knightfall crossover the following decade. If there's one thing modern comics publishers like, it's taking old ideas and simply bloating them up a lot while pretending they're new (I like Bane, though).

Tom Mandrake draws the stories in Batman while Gene Colan and Bob Smith do the ones in Detective Comics. Mandrake's work is decent, although I think he got better over the next decade, but Colan is clearly past his prime and his work doesn't have quite the same punch it did when he drew for Marvel in the 60s and 70s. Unfortunate since he seemed like a perfect choice to draw Batman.

Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer

Love for this book initially appeared, and quickly, in the fact that I could identify it as an act of non-betrayal. Since it was published ten years after the original trilogy, the common fear I have these days of similar releases being merely an opportunity to fleece sympathetic readers of earlier titles revealed itself as unfounded. Instead, this (as of now) conclusion to the Southern Reach series is the strongest part for me. VanderMeer returned to the material with not just the same competent voice as before, but takes us along on a spacious exploration from different angles, that also offers more insight on events and characters we are familiar with, as well as tying these together tighter, even more so compared to the already satisfying Acceptance, Book 3.

The main part of Absolution is about a veteran operative being sent by the parent agency of Southern Reach, Central, to investigate a biologist team expedition to the Forgotten Coast that went sideways twenty years before Area X. What comes to mind, if you aim to dredge up references, is that this is a prologue carrying genre underpinnings shared by The X-Files, the first season of True Detective, the tabletop roleplaying setting Delta Green, and the like. In all this, and I have mentioned it before in reviews for the trilogy, the author does his own unique thing. The inherent delicious weirdness of Area X, with its only sort-of Roadside Picnic/Stalker-transformed environment (but here: oh boy, the fauna, the flora!), body horror, psyops angst &c. is again permeating everything.

One of those books where I did not want it to end. The Southern Reach as a whole I do highly recommend; should the themes speak to you at all, treat yourself. Here are my reviews of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, if interested. Looking forward to read more by Jeff VanderMeer, a bigger discovery for me.

Daughter of the Empire

Nine years after reading The Riftwar Saga, I feared that I'll be at a loss, remembering so few specifics that I wondered what "mind-boggling" and "audaciously ambitious" scope and setting I was referring to in the quick review for A Darkness at Sethanon. However, Daughter of the Empire takes place entirely on Kelewan and stands completely on its own... And, with the exception of one moment from the end, it might as well take place in Feudal Japan, just with some strange animals... And even stranger natives, though the cho-ja are pretty much brushed aside after that one chapter. But the worldbuilding is actually decent, albeit with a narrow focus and mainly when it comes to traditions, rituals, ceremonies, and detailed descriptions. And I also appreciated the fact that the early part of the marriage, which would have otherwise been infuriating, was largely skipped over.
On that note, Bunto ends up little more than a caricature that's far too easy to manipulate, and Bruli is even worse. But things play too much into Mara's hands in general, and while she does expertly make use of any shred of an opportunity, I had the feeling that the authors were more interested in finding ways that would lead her to her goals instead of the ways in which she could carve her way there. And there's also the fact that, until the actually quite exciting part taking place towards the end, there are only a couple of other tense moments, the rest being mainly a matter of politics, of playing the Game of the Council from a distance... Which isn't necessarily bad in itself, but just not what I expected.

Rating: 3/5

Neat classic cover art.

Yep. Don Maitz
Full image: https://www.paravia.com/CollaborativeWorlds/projects.php?id=DaughterOfTheEmpire

Thanks, there are also a couple more cool ones on that site.

Personally I loved the whole trilogy, giving it 5 out of 5.

The complexity and different styles involved are second to none in my opinion.

Both authors worked really well together.

I'm not sure I've read any better Fantasy, though The Wheel Of Time series comes close ... and I've read a hell of a lot of Fantasy in my time.

But hey, each to their own .... stories like so many other things we do or don't like, are so subjective, which is why I rarely bother to review stuff anymore.

P.S. And an issue for Fantasy now in particular, is what has been crafted before and was unique and original, has now been done to death, and so much seems cliche etc etc these days. So I avoid Fantasy now to a high degree, except for a few authors who seem capable of rising above it all, like Adrian Tchaikovsky, who is just brilliant.

Well, I'm hard to please either way (only books I ever rated 5 stars), but maybe that's one thing, you read them when they were newer. And I was saying when I read the first cycle that it's probably what fantasy meant at the time. Now my terms for comparison are way up there, in epic scope, detailed worldbuilding, depth (of characters, topics tackled, wisdom, if I may use the term)...

It seems to me, that we now live in an era where everything is analyzed to death, and for me that spoils things. So I am one who tends to avoid reading reviews, or make sure I read them well before I read what I end up purchasing. I especially don't like other people's thoughts in my mind about what I am reading, because I find it tends to make you think in a specific way. I like to make up my mind without outside influences. It is also why I always prefer to read the book before seeing the movie or TV series, where you are at the mercy of other people's interpretations.

My primary concern when reading, is that I am entertained, and that nothing jars, and maybe I learn something. One of the most important things for me, is being able to suspend disbelief for the sake of the story, and to avoid things that take you out-of-that--zone, hopefully.

However, that's just me and my perspective, and I tend to go for the soul of the story, rather than the perfection of it, especially in this era where so much is so often formulaic.

Anyway, as I said before, each to their own.

Captain Britain Omnibus. At last done re-reading all the old Captain Britain comics. This volume is actually the original omnibus, which just collects the Alan Moore and Alan Davis run, then the Jamie Delano/Alan Davis run. Marvel later did a new omnibus that just crams every single thing into one huge book.

This is definitely the stuff to read if you must absolutely have one fraction of Captain Britain comics to experience. It was some Moore and Davis's earlier work in comics and they really hit the ground running with a lengthy saga that redefines Cap's origin and even his physical build and pits him against seemingly insurmountable enemies, namely the Fury and Mad Jim Jaspers. It's a hard-hitting story that was quite influential, for better or worse - many modern writers have tried to ape elements of it and other things Moore wrote but their takes mostly just devolve into characters being brutally slaughtered over and over. Not surprising that Moore has distanced himself from the comics industry and has even renounced a lot of his old work because he feels bad about how it affected Marvel and DC.

The only odd thing about Moore's run is that they set up a rematch between Cap and Arcade that never happens, possibly because Moore had to trim his plans and cut his run short to focus more on his work with DC on Swamp Thing and Watchmen. I think the Arcade story very belatedly happened when Marvel launched Excalibur in the late 80s...

The Jamie Delano issues aren't quite as dazzling but they're still quite good, allegedly because Davis was heavily editing Delano's scripts. They end up focusing on the fallout from the Jaspers storyline as mutated "warpie" children begin showing up all over Britain. There's more development on Cap's family, particularly his sister Betsy, although this sadly takes the form of Betsy suffering one trauma after another until finally the Slaymaster tears her eyes out. One of the last issues in the volume is a New Mutants annual in which Chris Claremont and Davis shifted her over to the X-Men, where she became Psylocke. And then years later she was brainwashed and physically transformed into an ethnically Japanese ninja, so the trauma wasn't quite over for her. But yes, good run of comics in this book.