Following up on the campaign book Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount (reviewed here), next Tuesday the second Dungeons & Dragons tie-in adventure with the D&D live-action series Critical Role is heading your way. Call of the Netherdeep is the first major adventure set in the world of Exandria, taking players–and five NPC rival adventurers–from the wastelands of Xhorhas to the oasis city of Ank’Harel, then on to the ultimate confrontation at Netherdeep, a twisted realm of gloom, corruption, and despair that harbors a terrible secret. Available for pre-order now here at Amazon, Call of the Netherdeep will remind players things are rarely what they seem in “the world’s greatest roleplaying game.”
One of the 21st century’s best comic book artists with a singular style brings her heroine back to the comics pages. Writer-artist Cynthia von Buhler is know for her sensationalism, both in story concepts, artwork, and marketing, merging real-world events and time travel tours to the past via her comic book work, as seen in her striking The Illuminati Ball. We first met her heroine Minky Woodcock in Minky Woodcock: The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini (reviewed here), as she recounted the 20 days leading up to the famed magician’s death on October 31, 1926. Her next Minky adventure is now available in single monthly issues, Minky Woodcock: The Girl Who Electrified Tesla. If you like the idea of a girl Friday coming into her own, then Minky Woodcock is for you.
It had a promising first and third season, twists and turns, clever story arcs, and a contender for the most faithful adaptation of a comic book series from the past decade. The creators of the fourth and final season of Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina gave 2020 a much-needed batch of two complete seasons, and we already gave the third season kudos in the 2020 Best of TV review here at borg. Kiernan Shipka proved to be one of TV’s best young actors, embodying a character that is next in line after Buffy Summers, Veronica Mars, and Liv Moore as young genre heroines who led series you can count on the first time and after re-watches. Already a contender for one of the best TV series of this century, and one of Netflix’s most creative efforts, how did the final season fare for our heroine Sabrina Spellman?
Just the image of a deep sea diver in a copper and brass helmet and lead boots conjures legends and lore of 19th century explorers, mysteries yet unsolved and shipwrecks and lost gold treasure. A four-issue comic book series from IDW Publishing titled Sea of Sorrows introduces readers to a crew of a salvage ship after the first World War. They are searching for a lost U-boat said to have gone down with enough gold to reward the crew several times over. It should be a simple errand, until a diver thinks he sees a woman swimming at the bottom of the sea.
You’ll find a lot familiar about the journey in the new sci-fi thriller Underwater, but it’s certain to keep you on the edge of your seat, trigger your claustrophobia, and get most of the beats of the survival thriller genre right. Most of that is thanks to Kristen Stewart, who stars as an engineer named Norah, working in an oil drilling facility seven miles down at the bottom of the ocean. Stewart makes our own recent tour of isolation seem pretty tame, as her world literally explodes due to some deep-sea fracking that causes an earthquake, breaking up the facility and severely minimizing the opportunities to leave for the surface. If that weren’t enough, the earthquake releases some kaiju-inspired beasties. It all allows Stewart to create a character as tough and heroic as Alien’s Ellen Ripley with a modern homage to the original sci-fi survivor.
We’re big fans of James Lovegrove here at borg. This time, I managed to beat C.J. to one of the books! Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows is the first volume in Lovegrove’s The Cthulhu Casebooks trilogy, an alternate history of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson’s adventures that sets the record straight about their real cases, those steeped in the paranormal and supernatural. As the series title suggests, the trilogy draws on the canon not just of Arthur Conan Doyle, but of Lovegrove’s “distant American ancestor,” H.P. Lovecraft. The result is a lively and somehow entirely natural mash-up. (See our previous review of the final volume, Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-Devils, here).
When you think of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, you probably think of the incredible scope of its collection. It houses some of the most famous and rare paintings, photographs, sculptures, and other artifacts from ancient times to the present day. Its collection can be parsed in so many ways to record the history of almost any subject. So it was a brilliant idea for The Met to open up its collection to focus on imagery for the holidays to illustrate a book about traditional Christmas stories. Christmas is Coming! Celebrate the Holiday with Art, Stories, Poems, Songs, and Recipes is an ideal single source book of traditional Christmas songs and stories, illustrated with attractive imagery from artists celebrating the holiday across the centuries. It also includes new poems commissioned for the book and holiday recipes created by the chefs from the restaurant at The Met. If you’ve ever tried to find that one book with stories to read by the fire, with songs to sing to pull out every year, this is for you.
Along with excerpts of The Christmas Story and The Three Wise Men from the Bible, are historic Christmas stories from Arthur Conan Doyle, the Brothers Grimm, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Leo Tolstoy, and Lucy Maud Montgomery, and poetry from William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, H.P. Lovecraft, E.E. Cummings, and Robert Louis Stevenson. It includes Clement Clarke Moore’s ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas and Francis Church’s timeless editorial Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus.
The artwork spans the entire collection of The Met, ranging from religious paintings depicting the Nativity from the 15th century and a winter landscape by Camille Pissarro to a collection of three dimensional holiday-related objects, illustrations of Santa Claus, and several images curated from a collection of vintage holiday cards donated to the museum. Christmas is Coming! includes sheet music for ten of the most familiar Christmas songs, and recipes hand-selected by chefs at The Met that include Shepherd’s Pie, Turkey Pot Pie, English Toffee, Cranberry-Thyme Shortbread, and more.
This month sees the bicentenary of acclaimed American author Herman Melville′s birthday, August 1, 1819. If you were an artist and asked to draw a defining interpretation of the author’s creations, what would you draw? Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, the Pequod, the whale, or some other inspiration from Moby-Dick, right? So the fascination for many of a new book of artwork interpreting and saluting the 19th century American author will be searching out how the 1851 classic novel Moby-Dick; or The Whale is interpreted, and what other creative ideas found their way to paper recalling his other, lesser-known works. This Wednesday comic book publisher A Wave Blue World/AWBW will be releasing such an assemblage, From Hell’s Heart, a full-color, hardcover volume featuring the works of 57 artists.
Most readers today will look at the title and first recall Ricardo Montalban uttering the title as the villain Khan in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, part of his many monologues pulled by screenwriter Nicholas Meyer from the likes of Melville and Shakespeare. But you might also recall from grade school days the short story of Bartleby, the Scrivener, a character study of the early poster boy for the modern office’s work-averse workforce. Artist Nacho Yunis provides a superb mock retro-style comic cover for his entry honoring that story, and Fernando Blanco’s contribution is perhaps the most evocative snippet in the book from the mind of Melville. The artists stepped up to create imagery more interesting than the Melville excerpts you were have likely to been force fed-in junior high American literature class. Surprisingly, most of the artists conjured images taking on the feel of H.P. Lovecraft in their haunting beauty, including the image of psychological horror on the cover by the artist known as Well-Bee.
Comic book readers will find renderings from some familiar artists in these pages, including Andrea Mutti, Maxim Simic, Ryan Sook, Denis Medri, and Brandon Graham. As expected, the bulk of the artwork is devoted to the great whale. Bjarne Hensen provides a strikingly colored street scene from Moby-Dick. Victoria Maderna and Federico Piatti contributed a fantasy image that begs for an entire reprint of the novel with their artwork peppered throughout. Steve Baker opted for fun, depicting the whale as a dog and kids playing Moby-Dick as they might play Cowboys and Indians. Cosimo Miorelli gets the mood in his image just right.
These days most movies translate just fine from the big screen to a home high definition television. Late December’s release from Warner Brothers, DC’s Aquaman, is a surprisingly good transfer, showcasing the film’s epic fantasy seascapes and truly unique otherworld sea creatures without the sound contrast and lighting issues that plague recent action film releases. Aquaman is available now on 4D, Blu-ray, DVD, and in digital formats, and it’s available both on Vudu and Amazon Prime. A single word to describe this rare, solid entry in the DC franchise? Epic. Throughout the film viewers will see concepts from the history of fantasy films absorbed into its plot, from the likes of Raiders of the Lost Ark to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, to Ray Harryhausen fantasy classics, King Solomon’s Mines and Tomb Raider, and even Harry Potter and Tolkien’s Middle-earth stories.
It all begins with the cast, and in particular the chemistry between the always cool and confident actor who looks born to play superheroes, Jason Momoa as Arthur Curry, and Amber Heard as a beautiful grown-up Ariel turned badass named Mera, who may be the best realized heroine from the comics in the DC universe. Aquaman director James Wan(Furious 7) does something rare for the superhero genre and forms his film around a romance between the two as they embark on a quest across the planet for the legendary trident of King Atlan, first king of the earliest water-breathers living under the sea. Wan makes that happen more successfully than other DC romances of the past, including even Clark Kent and Lois Lane. What is not lost on the small screen is the CGI-heavy undersea universe, but this time a film is CGI-heavy in a good, exciting way (Aquaman knocks the much lauded CGI film Avatar out of the water in every way). Atlanteans riding sea horses, sharks, whales, and turtles. Aquaman and Mera hiding out inside a whale, Pinocchio-style. The film hits its visual zenith with a giant Kraken-like beast with an appearance as awesome as seeing Godzilla for the first time. The visuals have all the imagination and colorful execution that makes for a rewatchable film, and the score has a pounding synth feel, with a mixed vibe of Daft Punk from Tron: Legacy and Queen from Flash Gordon.
The home release is accompanied by 15 behind-the-scenes features. The best has Dolph Lundgren explaining the connections between key characters and concepts in the comic books with the portrayal in the film, in Going Deep Into the World of Aquaman. You get a feel for how energetic and how fun Jason Momoa is in real life in Becoming Aquaman and A Match Made in Atlantis. Details of how the director expanded on the comics and where he mixed Kaiju and historical sea stories can be found in James Wan: World Builder. Heroines of Atlantis will leave viewers convinced future films in the series need more women characters, with only two to speak of in this film. Other features include Aqua Tech,Atlantis Warfare, Black Manta,Villainous Training, Kingdoms of the Seven Seas,Creating Undersea Creatures, three Scene Study Breakdowns (the Sicily battle, the early submarine attack, and the underwater trench climax), and a sneak preview of Shazam.
So many genre novels are quick reads, full of action and modern surprises. Once in a while you stumble upon the slow read–the book that is so smartly written, so exciting and enjoyable you never want it to end, and you force yourself to take it slow and enjoy the author’s use of language. With his latest book I’ve now added James Lovegrove to my shortlist of authors I will make sure to read as soon as his next work is released. His new novel is Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-Devils, book three of his trilogy, The Cthulhu Casebooks. In short, this work has it all–tie-ins, a mash-up, genre-bending, and immersive storytelling in a suspense-filled mystery adventure. It’s a big feat because the very subject matter and project has much to overcome. First, it is the third book in a series, not your usual place as a reader to begin. As it is a new release, I delved in anyway, and discovered Lovegrove crafted a complete end-to-end story requiring no prior knowledge of the first two books in the series. Second, it’s a tie-in and a mash-up of the most well-known historical characters in all of fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson twisted together with the macabre, dark world of H.P. Lovecraft.
I’ve reviewed several Watson and Holmes stories written in the past decade and the challenge is always the same–getting two voices just right, voices that are so familiar after reading original Doyle writings, and watching countless modern sequels and a host of television series and movie versions. One misstep and it’s easy to pull a reader out of the narrative, yet Lovegrove doesn’t skip a beat in this regard. Whether you’re drawn to the TV series with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, the classic Basil Rathbone film version, modern retellings, or just Doyle’s own marvelous words, you will feel this book is a believable sequel to the original stories and the voices are spot-on. Another barrier for Lovegrove to overcome is getting right that rich world of H.P. Lovecraft, whose works and words drip with a uniquely strange brilliance and eerie beauty. Again, Lovegrove fully captures the spirit of his creations and seaside environments, too, as if he’d conjured Lovecraft for this story. This strange mash-up of the logical, rational Holmes and Watson and the dark and fantastical Lovecraft probably shouldn’t work so well. These are opposites, right? But Lovegrove fuses them into one, evoking the 19th century wonder of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne science fiction and fantasy along the way. Not merely a fun romp for fans of either world, Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-Devils has all the realism and research of a scholarly work, sinking us into the world of England, the nautical life of coastal peoples at the turn of the 20th century.
The story begins a few years after the retirement of Holmes and Watson. In Doyle’s story “His Last Bow” we learned the character retired to a farm at Sussex Downs taking on beekeeping as a pastime. Only two original stories take place during Holmes’ retirement. This is where Lovegrove’s Watson catches up with Holmes: The date is 1910 and as England and the world moves toward war, Holmes and Watson learn the leaders of the famed Diogenes Club are all dead, found under strange circumstances. When three young women go missing in a nearby town, the detective duo takes on sleuthing out their disappearance as their final case, where they encounter local lore that speaks of monsters from the deep and a foretold legend of the return of a phantom from long ago. Locals believe that is why the women are missing, and Holmes knows it must all be connected. How much is real, how much is fantasy? Is it possible Holmes could discover both worlds might co-exist? Can Holmes ever escape the specter of his lifelong nemesis Moriarty? And what of his brother Mycroft?
