Blurb for the back cover:
“Superheroes? Check.
Orphans? Check.
Girl that looks like a violin? Er, check.”

So The Umbrella Academy appears to be your typical superhero comic on the outside. A group of seven kids are adopted by some rich guy in order to “save the world”. Naturally, these kids were born in mysterious circumstances and have super human powers. The book opens with a prologue with six of the kids saving the Eiffel Tower and the seventh watching as she seemingly has no super power. The story jumps forward twenty years and we discover that the group has broken up and gone their separate ways only to be reunited at the funeral of their adoptive father. Yanya, the seemingly unspecial seventh child, gets pulled in to a diabolical scheme that just might prove how special she really is, but at the same time, destroy the world in the process.

I haven’t read many superhero related comics but what drew me to this one was the fantastic art style (drawn by Gabriel Ba) used in the book. It’s colorful and morbid with a nice attention to detail in the bigger panels. Plus, the girl on the cover looks like a violin.

Story wise I didn’t find it to be anything that special. There is a bad guy and there are superheroes. The superheroes stop the bad guy and the heroes stand around and are like “It’s a good thing our adoptive father’s death conveniently brought us all together again so that we could overcome our differences and team up to stop the apocalypse. Also I could really use a sandwich right about now!”. There is a very dry humor that is used to tell the story. It wont make you laugh out loud (or LOL, as kids nowadays are calling it) but it will make you grin.

I would recommend this graphic novel. The story may not be special, but the artwork and humor make it stand out compared to all the other graphic novels I have read (which is only a few, so really who knows what I am say…)

Other blog reviews:
read/RANT!
Bao’s Blog

Blurb for the back cover:
“A fantastically enjoyable book”

Tales of the City, the first book in a current seven book series, centers around the inhabitants of 28 Barbary Lane in San Fransisco in the 1970′s. We enter the drama already in progress as we follow Mary Ann Singleton as she bids farewell to Ohio and extends her vacation permanently. Anna Madrigal is the landlady of 28 Barbary Land and acts as mother figure to the tenants often offering them advice and comfort in the form of marijuana. The other tenants include: Michael, the novel’s token gay man; Mona, Michael’s roommate and sorta-lesbian; Brian, former lawyer, current womanizer; and Norman, the mysterious stranger who lives on the roof and starts a relationship with Mary Ann. There are so many more characters in this book but to try and list them all here would be ridiculous.

Speaking of the characters, I would like to address one of the problems I had with this book. It seemed to me that all the characters knew everyone else and never ventured out of their social circle. If one character knew Jon, then so did everyone else and at least two people were sleeping with him. In the city of San Fransisco I would imagine that people knew other people that their friends did not know. That is not the case here. However, to try and include even more people in this novel would just make it harder to keep up with what everyone was doing. Instead I grew to view the characters not as people but as archetypes (the gay man, the cheating husband, girl who moves from small town to big city). Maybe this isn’t exactly what Joseph Campbell had in mind back in the day, but it works.

The way Tales of the City is written may at first seem a little odd. Each chapter is only three pages long and tend to focus only on one or two characters. This probably goes back to the fact that originally the text was originally serialized in the San Fransisco Chronicle. Maybe each chapter was published once a day. I don’t see the short chapters as a bad thing. This made it incredible easy to pick up and put back down if I needed.

Tales of the City is a fantastically enjoyable book that I quickly read and just as quickly purchased the second book in the series, More Tales of the City. My goal this summer is to read all seven books.

James Frey.

I’m just saying. I don’t -hate- people that often. But it seems that in between stroking his own ego and being obnoxiously cocky that he got away with lying in a “memoir”, he has managed to secure a four book deal with Harper.

And now, for some links:
daydalus blog – Why I hate James Frey
Flavorwire – James Frey Is Addicted to Controversy
Bookpublishing – Because what’s funnier than deriding James Frey?
words for my enjoyment – Today’s Imaginary Conversation With James Frey
Gawker – James Frey Answers Your Gawker Intern Questions (with sass I might add)