Annie’s Nightstand

Saga Vol.One

Y: THE LAST MAN writer BRIAN K. VAUGHAN returns to comics with red-hot artist FIONA STAPLES for an all-new ONGOING SERIES! Star Wars-style action collides with Game of Thrones-esque drama in this original sci-fi/fantasy epic for mature readers, as new parents Marko and Alana risk everything to raise their child amidst a never-ending galactic war. The adventure begins in a spectacular DOUBLE-SIZED FIRST ISSUE, with forty-four pages of story with no ads. – Amazon
 

 

 

 

 

 

Fables: Cubs in Toyland

For years, Snow White and Bigby Wolf’s cubs have grown up knowing that one of them was destined for a much greater, more grave role amongst the Fables community. But no one knew how soon it would come.

When Snow and Bigby’s cub Therese receives a Christmas gift from an unknown admirer, this red plastic boat magically takes her on a journey to a desolate place known as Toyland. Will Therese be their savior? Or their destroyer? FABLES VOL. 18: CUBS IN TOYLAND is the latest epic from New York Times best-selling author Bill Willingham’s hit series FABLES, as the Bigby Wolf cubs learn that adventures in the land of misfit toys is much less fun than it sounds.

Also collected here are all the backup stories that feature Bufkin’s exploits in the land of Oz, beautifully painted by Shaw McManus (CINDERELLA: FROM FABLETOWN WITH LOVE). – Amazon

 

House of Mystery Vol. One

Jack of Fables writers Willingham and Sturges trade places on the masthead of a new, quite a bit creepier series that swirls around a big, elaborate house of many architectural styles with an interior far more expansive than the exterior implies. Perched on an intersection of realities, it’s a place you arrive at unexpectedly and leave only at the seeming whim of the house itself. Attempts to break out short-circuit you back into the place and its grounds. Everyone soon lands in the ground-floor saloon and is expected to tell a tale for admittance; since the length of anyone’s sojourn is indefinite, everyone obliges. So the main story—concerned with Fig Keele, who, fleeing in terror her imploding Austin, Texas, home, runs into the house—is regularly interrupted by drinkers’ yarns, all of the type of which nightmares are made. Luca Rossi draws the main story to look like a literally edgier Fables, and five stylistically disparate artists draw the inserted tales. A little loose, perhaps, but very intriguing. –Ray Olson from Booklist

 

 

 

 

Dan’s Nightstand

The Scar

In this stand-alone novel set in the same monster-haunted universe as last year’s much-praised Perdido Street Station, British author Mieville, one of the most talented new writers in the field, takes us on a gripping hunt to capture a magical sea-creature so large that it could snack on Moby Dick, and that’s just for starters. Armada, a floating city made up of the hulls of thousands of captured vessels, travels slowly across the world of Bas-Lag, sending out its pirate ships to prey on the unwary, gradually assembling the supplies and captive personnel it needs to create a stupendous work of dark magic. Bellis Coldwine, an embittered, lonely woman, exiled from the great city of New Crobuzon, is merely one of a host of people accidentally trapped in Armada’s far-flung net, but she soon finds herself playing a vital role in the byzantine plans of the city’s half-mad rulers. The author creates a marvelously detailed floating civilization filled with dark, eccentric characters worthy of Mervyn Peake or Charles Dickens, including the aptly named Coldwine, a translator who has devoted much of her life to dead languages; Uther Doul, the superhuman soldier/scholar who refuses to do anything more than follow orders; and Silas Fennec, the secret agent whose perverse magic has made him something more and less than human. Together they sail through treacherous, magic-ridden seas, on a quest for the Scar, a place where reality mutates and all things become possible. This is state-of-the-art dark fantasy and a likely candidate for any number of award nominations. – Publisher’s Weekly