Category: Reviews

The modern day monster genre suffers from a dearth of creativity that leaves most stories feeling like a scene from “The Monster Squad”.  Vampires?  Garlic.  Werewolf?  Silver.  Blue haired land whale?  Crime statistics and logic.  Or they feature protagonists who feel flatly perfect and impregnable.  Or they take place...

Bridging the gap between review and shill, it’s time to talk about StoryHack, an action and adventure short story periodical produced by Bryce Beattie.  He had the urge to produce a regular collection of short works that runs the gamut of genres, and that is a much bolder move...

Mainstream comics are so much worse than I thought.  All dazzle, no razzle. I’m a sucker for ten cent comics, particularly when they are bundled in plain brown wrappers and sold in ten packs to clear shelf space down at the local friendly comic and game and community based...

Yesterday I told you about Alterna Comic’s Zero Jumper.  In the interests of showing Peter Simeti, the big hearted entrepreneur behind Alterna, an open and honest appraisal of the comic, I waited until today to discuss the broader cultural issues that surround this particular company.  Mr. Simeti is a...

Patrick Mulholland and Peter Simeti bring this four issue sci-fi adventure to us by way of the usual $1.50 newsprint titles, which I love, smudged fingerprints and all, or via  trade paperback. I’ve read it, and it’s okay.  I’m really not the target audience. The story is suitably epic,...

Here’s a fun little number. My youngest wasn’t sure about this, but she’s learning how to read and we’ve been enjoying a little Lego Batman on the Xbox 360 lately (so retro!), so it seemed right up her alley. Also, it was free. Li’l Gotham is a promotional comic...

 The cover story for Cirsova 8 brings us a near future, superhero tale dressed up in tech-noir trappings.  The two heroes of the piece, Haywire and Scramble, are hired guns ready to engage in a little corporate espionage or black-op counter-terrorism if the price is right.  The name of...

When the Isolate and Swarm crowd decided to take a swing at the good guys over at Alterna Comics, I (along with a few thousand other comic book fans) advanced my purchase schedule to send a financial signal to Peter Simeti that he has a lot of people in...

If you want to catch the eye of a Catholic, you could do a lot worse than the opening to Jennifer Povey’s Only A Coward: “Only a coward chooses death over a difficult life,” Selien spoke those words as the knife hacked through the braid of her hair.” As...

Uitvlugt has become mainstay in the pages of Cirsova, with offerings going all the way back to The Hour of the Rat in the inaugural issue. This time around he takes the reader on a journey to one small corner of the Dreamlands, a strange village whose inhabitants serve...