Following up on the events of Chances Are…, This One Goes to 11 begins with a hurricane threatening Puerto Rico while Tom can do nothing but worry long distance about his girlfriend Lily. He’s taking his stress out on his co-workers and family in realistic portrayals of how people distract themselves from big issues with smaller disagreements, punctuated with asides on problems with the media. Such a tense situation, a matter of life and death, drives the realization of the […]

Sonovawitch!, the next book after Tales of Supernatural Law by Batton Lash, contains the lengthy title story about a man’s mother casting a spell that causes a colleague to fall in love with him. It also features a morality play about a doctor who’s legally enjoined from transitioning his patients and a mob vampire story told entirely through TV screens. A set of stories focus on Mavis the secretary, about her decision on how to respond to her boyfriend’s proposal […]

This series, formerly titled Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre, is easy to sum up: two lawyers represent a variety of monsters in cases ranging from the punny to the parodic. Background storylines, usually involving the cast’s love lives, provide continuity, while their ever-changing caseload deals with established horror conventions, including vampires, zombies, and curses. It’s quite amusing to see how such a factual, evidence-based profession interacts with the vagaries of the supernatural. This collection, first in the series, […]

Thieves & Kings is a classic fantasy adventure, with a young witch and a lost princess, a forgetful wizard and a boy thief, pirates and palace guards. Mark Oakley wonderfully creates the effect of another world. While I was reading the collections, anytime someone would interrupt, they’d ask if I’d been taking a nap, because surfacing from his kingdom was like returning from far away. The first volume begins with Rubel, the thief, coming back to Highborn after four years […]

To promote their release of the Middle Man trade paperback, Viper Comics has made the first issue downloadable for free. That’s a great idea. Nothing sells product as well as a free sample, assuming that the product is any good, and this one looks like a good one. The first issue is well-done, with an interesting character with a distinctive voice. Wendy’s a temp who wants to be an artist, and because she’s disinterested in her day job answering phones […]