ipacho's reviews
789 reviews

Dark, gruesome, gory, filled of rage and despair... This is one of the best Black Dog accesories ever. As some said, and it's real, not for the faint of heart or the easily sickened. This is to let the darkness have a stroll and then shut it down by force. Fantastic read, and another great antagonist book.

Being an interested in everything related to Catharism and after finally visiting this year the Languedoc-Rousillon region for the first time, this beautifully tragic novel deeply impacted me, taking me back to the stunningly beautiful southern France, and made me revive my steps and sunsets there.

Although there are some magical and mystical elements that could be stripped in favor of a stronger reality sense, they don't diminish the powerful story and the beauty of Jeanne, the protagonist. Through her is easy to picture the difficult life and times of Catharism, and of women in the middle ages. A highly recommended read.

This took me by surprise, because I love most of Morrison's work. I love his sense of the bizarre, mixed with a careful use of symbolism and how he manages to include in comics very powerful ideas from litearture and the arts. However, in this case, the results are outstandingly mediocre, his ideas are full of overused clichés, the characters are not interesting, and the main antagonist is a rip off of almost every world conqueror known. I was very dissapointed.

It's amazing that in 167 pages the only things that happened were fistfights. I know that explainatons were done in other volumes, but this felt rushed, underthought at the moment of beign written. Doomsday is a villain that pops up from nowhere and it's automatically more powerful than anything. No surprise that if that was the quality of stories of the time, almost nobody bought them.

What would a nordic saga really look, from the POV of real protagonists? This book is the answer. Ian McKinley delivers a world full of passion, of tangible adventure and danger, of characters lost and found through friendship and hardships. Fantastic realism is a new, more adult take on fantasy, that serves as a bridge for fantasy and historical fiction lovers.

My rating is more based on personal bias. I liked more Gallows Gem of Prallyn for the mediterranean quality of its setting, that for me is more appealing than the cold norse-like setting of Harbinger.

The last of the oWoD settings, and the less entwined with the metaplot, which makes for it the perfect canvas. I loved the setting built over Milton's Paradise Lost, mixed with biblical and gnostic material. It has the perfect amount of mistery built around it, and a great potential for drama building, while pleasing the most hardcore powergamer. A lot of powerful stories could be built from, and are hinted at, this book. A fantastic setting in every sense.

A nice compendium of the history and customs inside the 9 traditions, with very nice tales explaining the concepts of Paradox and Foci, for example. A comprehensive source of details to flesh out the WoD of mages.

A surprisingly good tale of one of the most famous mutants in the Marvel universe. I say "surprisingly" because most late "origin" tales either from Marvel or DC, are dissapointing. It succeeds as a period piece, isolated from the rest of the X-men world, and the plot twists come naturally and unexpected. Some mysteries kept unsaid, though, and those keep the tale in motion.

A true masterpiece of comics, fantasy taken to its most grim and gritty extreme. An absolute and must-have graphic novel.

It is always a pleasure to read Gibson in full cyberpunk mode, after a trilogy of techno-thrillers. And this one with a very innovative version of time-travel. As always, his heroes come from the very gutter (a Breaking Bad-type county and a I-fucked-my-career publicist with spoiled rich contacts) and the tech is marvelously described and oddly familiar. Flynne is a blast of a character, by her sheer innocence and up front attitude.

However, I was dissapointed by the rushed ending, the loosely tied plot threads, and a cadre of useless characters. Also, the first 90 pages are as dense as only Gibson could manage, and you can understand what happened after a very long while into the narrative. This said, it's a hell of fun and a nice return to my favorite sci-fi genre with his most well-known writer.