Brian K. Vaughn is one of those comicbook writers whose name I cannot speak without emitting a dreamy sigh after it. This is similar to the way I said “Fonzie” when I was ten. I may have to start sighing after I say the name Fiona Staples too, because she’s responsible for the fantastically dreamy art that accompanies Saga Volume 1.

Oftentimes when you start reading a new comicbook series there seems to be a lot of WTFness as you get your feet under you trying to figure out the rules of this new world you’ve entered. There was absolutely no WTF-period in Saga at all. From page one you are grounded and from there the story is off like a shot.

The story opens with Alana giving birth to Marko’s daughter in the back of a garage while he assists her. Their “oh she has your wing buds” and “oh she has her father’s horns” is interrupted by some sort of ambush. Within moments of giving birth the couple is on the run. See, they’re from opposite sides of a galactic war and it seems the planet they are on doesn’t take kindly to fraternizing with the enemy.

As Alana and Marko search for a safe place we get to know bounty-hunter-like Freelancers and Prince Robot IV who seems human from the neck down but instead of a head he has a sort of tv-screen/monitor. We also get to know about Horrors and ghosts and a little bit about this endless war.

We learn that Alana’s will stop at nothing to protect her new family, even using violence. Marko’s a bit more of a softy and wants to stick to his word and be honorable. As the two head for the Rocketship Forest, they pick up a spooky babysitter for their daughter who appears as a pink ghost who is missing half her body.

It’s hard to explain but amazing to read. I can’t remember the last time I have been so instantly captivated by a new series. Perhaps it was Brian K. Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man, about what happens on Earth when all the men suddenly die.

While the story in Y: The Last Man is fantastic, the art in Saga is amazing. So amazing, in fact, that I’m totally coveting Alana’s bluish-greenish black hair style. It is awesome. Probably the best comicbook heroine hair since Ramona Flowers. And that’s saying a lot.

Saga Volume 1 is so good that I went in search of the next single issue (rather than wait for the next six or seven issues to be collected into a paperback), and was absolutely crushed to realize it hasn’t been released yet. Damn.

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After two, or maybe three false starts, I finally made it through Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues. Usually, I wouldn’t be so dogged in reading a book that didn’t seem to be working for me, but the combination of vinyl record on the cover & LeAnn’s review gave me the extra persistance I needed. I’m glad I stuck with it.

In Nazi-occupied Paris Sid Griffiths, Hieronymous Falk, and The Hot-Time Swingers are working on recording “Half-Blood Blues.” Hiero, aka the kid, is a trumpet-playing genius who was smuggled out of Germany by Chip and Sid, childhood BFFs from Baltimore. Hiero’s kind of a perfectionist and destroys take after take of their record. One night, Sid hides one of the records before Hiero can wreck it. That’s the same night Hiero is taken away by “the boots” while in search of a glass of milk. He’s never heard from again.

Fast forward to 1992 and ol’ Chip and Sid are about to embark on a trip to Germany to attend the premiere of a documentary about Hiero and “Half-Blood Blues.”

The story then zooms back and forth in time, where we learn about the events that lead up to Hiero’s capture and what happens when Chip reveals a devastating secret about Sid in the documentary.

Holy buckets is this a riveting, beautiful book. Plot wise this novel is totally aces, but the best part isn’t even the plot or the story about friendship, jealousy and redemption. The best part is the language.

Edugyan captures that hipster-jazz speak so wonderfully that my inner-monologue has been narrated by Sid Griffiths for the past week. All men are Jacks and all women are Janes and everyone who is a bit sassy is a Buck.

And while Sid’s voice is great, it’s the way she writes about music that makes this book such a winner and a joy to read. Edugyan writes so wonderfully that I could eat my own arm out of pure jealousy. It’s amazing and mesmerizing and so fantastic I want to fall into her sentences and stay there forever. I want to give this book to every chump who has ever tried to put music into words. She just nails it.

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On its surface The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg is the kind of the book I dismiss out of hand. Jewish suburban ennui? Been there. A fat character wrecking her family? Done that. Unhappy marriages and bratty teens. Got the t-shirt. Beautiful writing with a light plot? Don’t even get me started.

And yet to dimiss Attenberg’s sensitive and ridiculously readable The Middlesteins based on those surface descriptions would be a huge mistake.

I’m ashamed to admit I went into this one with a giant chip on my shoulder. A fat character who was eating herself to death and her concerned family who wanted to help her? Please. I fully expected to walk into the same kind of fat-people stereotypes that I found in Everybody Sees the Ants, and was shocked when I didn’t.

Attenberg showed that Edie Middlestein, despite her girth, was a real person filled with things to love and to hate. Fiercely intelligent, feared, well-loved, and fatally-flawed Edie finds love and comfort in the food she cannot stop eating. Her weight is taking a toll on her sixty-year-old body and after two surgeries on her legs, her family rushes in to intervene. Matters are not helped that as her health falls apart Edie’s husband, Richard, decides to leave her.

Their parents’ separation does nothing to soothe the ennui their children are feeling. Robin’s a hard-drinking history teacher in Chicago who is unsure of her relationship with the drinker who lives downstairs. Benny’s a suburban father whose twins, the product of a frat party hookup that turned into a long-time marriage, whose wife gets a little hysterical when his parents split. He copes by getting high in the backyard every night.

The story of the Middlesteins is told in turns by each family member, the neighbors, and potential love-interests, giving the reader a full view of the family from all angles. It is wonderful. Each character is painted with the slightest hint of author judgement. Attenberg presents each one with the same amount of care and detail. She writes about Edie’s bingeing and the effect it has on her family the same way she writes about Rachelle, Benny’s wife, and her obsession with feeding her family healthy meals mostly consisting of raw vegetables.

While this book is pretty light on plot, a lot of the ‘action’ centers around the twins’ upcoming bah mitzvah, when we finally get to that party it is well worth the wait. The lack of plot is not a slight in the least, I was surprised by how compulsively readable this one is. I never wanted to put it down. Each Middlestein voice was more compelling than the last. And just when you think things are either going to fall apart or fall together nicely in a new family configuration tragedy strikes and it breaks your heart right in two.

The Middlesteins is one of those books that grows on you long after you close the cover. The more I think about it the more my heart swells with love for it.

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As I recently confessed over in Book Riot’s Buy, Borrow, Bypass for most of my life I thought I had read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Turns out I read Watcher in the Woods, which is not at all A Wrinkle in Time. It’s like the Silver Eyes/Tiger Eyes episode all over again.

Now, thanks to A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel Hope Larson’s adaptation, I can say that I’ve sort of read the L’Engle classic.

I was a little leery going into this one after reading about Girl Detective’s struggles with it. However, once I realized that I had never actually read A Wrinkle in Time I was all in, and I really enjoyed it. If you’re like me and have managed to miss this in your childhood, the story revolves around weird, awkward, ill-tempered Meg Murry and her equally weird family.

It seems Meg’s scientist father has gone missing and for most of the people in her small town he’s presumed dead. This pisses Meg off makes her act out in ways that aren’t really constructive. Meg’s Mom, also a scientist, is holding down the homefront which not only includes Meg, but twin boys and spooky, extra-sensory baby of the family Charles Wallace.

After a dark and stormy night, Charles Wallace & Meg run into tall, redheaded Calvin and the three are spirited away by the strange women, Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which, who live nearby.

I’m not sure how much of this is spoiler-y so I’ll keep this part short. The kids are sent on a mission to fight the darkness. It is creepy and weird, and kind of awesome all at the same time. They land on this strange planet called Camazotz where everyone acts exactly the same. It’s conformity to the extreme and I loved every moment the trio were hanging out there.

A Wrinkle in Time is one of those books I’m glad I read as a graphic novel adaptation. Hope Larson’s art is lovely and because of her drawings I was able to see things at a glance that probably involves paragraphs of description in the original novel. I’m not the type of reader who does well with paragraphs of description. I tend to grow bored with it (See: The Night Circus). Reading about all the weird details of a new planet also bores me a bit, which is why I tend to shy away from most Sci-Fi & Fantasy. But when these kinds of things are presented in graphic form, I eat it up and beg for more.

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Glory Fleming is a seventeen-year-old piano prodigy living with her widower father in the Bronx. Frank is the hunky, artistic boy next door, a recent arrival from Argentina. When the two meet things start to go wonky in Glory’s world. Or at least the seem to.

Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony & Rodrigo Corral really puts the graphic in graphic novel. The story of two teens in love is told through newspaper clippings, instant message chats, postcards, and the other kind of ephemera that surrounds a life.

It is beautiful.

The book opens with a newspaper report of Glory missing from a mental institution for child prodigies. It seems she’s lost it and instead of creating her classical music/rock & roll mashups during her sold-out performances around the world she’s resorted to incessantly playing “Chopsticks.”

Once we know Glory’s missing, we fall back 18 months to see where things started to unravel. In scrapbooks and photo albums we learn about the death of Glory’s mother, how she was raised by a piano-teaching father who kept her on a strict schedule, how she fell for the cutie next door.

We learn through drawings and letters home from school that Frank excels at art but blows off most of his classes. By reading the duo’s chats we see that Glory’s dad isn’t too keen on this budding romance, and plans to whisk her away to Europe for a year. Slowly we see Glory unravel.

Visually, this book is stunning. The images are dreamy and grainy. There’s links to youtube videos and pictures of the letters home from Frank’s school & Glory’s institution. There are the postcards and chat transcripts and newspaper reviews and mix CDs. And this lovely collage is super engaging to look at. However, there aren’t a lot of words to read which, for a reader, left me a little frustrated at the end.

While I fully realize this is supposed to be some sort of statement about the slippery nature of reality and madness, blah blah blah it feels a little like a cop out. I don’t want to be too spoiler-y but the creators pull a switcharoo sort of ‘it’s all a dream’ kind of thing which feels like a ripoff. Perhaps, the young adults who are the target audience for this book will find the big reveal clever and satisfying. As an adult who has read many a big reveal in my time it felt like a let down. As I was watching the story unravel I kept thinking to myself “don’t do it, don’t do it, you are better than this!”

However, even with a sad trombone ending the beginning and middle is so inventive and fun, I’d still heartily recommend this one. It really is lovely to look at.

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