Books

Graphic Stories

The Halo Graphic Novel
Lee Hammock, Jay Faerber, Brett Lewis and Tsutomo Nihei
Marvel Enterprises, Inc.; July 2006

Marvel and Bungie team up to create The Halo Graphic Novel based on the best-selling video game. The graphic novel brings the Halo universe to life for the first time in the sequential art medium in a 128-page, full colour, high quality, jacketed, hardcover graphic novel. Stories include: "Last Voyage of the Infinite Succor" by Simon Bisley and Lee Hammock. When communications from a Covenant agricultural support ship are mysteriously terminated, an Elite Commander and his squad of Special Forces are sent to investigate. In "Armor Testing" by Ed Lee and Jay Faerber, the only way to test Spartan armor, is to send a Spartan. The question is what's really being tested? In Tsutomo Nihei's "Breaking Quarantine," the untold tale of Sergeant Johnson's escape from the clutches of the Flood menace is revealed! Finally, Moebius and Brett Lewis' "Second Sunrise Over New Mombasa" tells of the subtler, more dangerous fights taking place on the streets of New Mombasa and in the hearts and minds of men.

Lost Girls
Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
Top Shelf Productions; September 2006

Almost 10 years before his The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen took many of the figures of Victorian popular fiction on a remarkable romp, Alan Moore, in collaboration with underground artist Melinda Gebbie, began Lost Girls, with a similar, although less fantastical, conceit: that the three women whose adventures in girlhood may have inspired respectively, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Wendy and the Wizard of Oz, meet in a Swiss hotel shortly before the first World War. Wendy, Dorothy and Alice, three very different women-one jaded and old; one trapped in a frigid adulthood; the last a spunky but innocent young American good-time girl provide each other with the liberation they need, while also providing very different versions of the stories we associate with them. We go with the girls, in memory, to the incidents that became the Rabbit Hole, Oz and Neverland. As a formal exercise in pure comics, Lost Girls is as good as anything Moore has written. Gebbie's people, drawn for the most part in gentle crayons, have human bodies. Lost Girls is a bittersweet, beautiful, exhaustive, problematic, occasionally exhausting work.

Killing Floor
Lee Child
Penguin Group (USA); April 2006

From its chilling opening page, you know all is not well in Margrave, Georgia. The sleepy, forgotten town hasn't seen a crime in decades, but within the span of three days it witnesses events that leave everyone stunned. An unidentified man is found beaten and shot to death on a lonely country road. The police chief and his wife are butchered on a quiet Sunday morning. Then a bank executive disappears from his home, leaving his keys on the table and his wife frozen with fear. The easiest suspect is Jack Reacher an outsider, a man just passing through. But Reacher is not just any drifter. He is a tough ex-military policeman, trained to think fast and act faster. He has lived with and hunted the worst: the hard men of the American military gone bad. When authorities learn the first victim was someone from Reacher's past, and he cannot convince them of his innocence, his patient self-defense becomes a raging crusade of revenge. With two cops who believe in him a thoughtful black detective and a woman named Roscoe he closes in on a ruthless conspiracy hiding behind Margrave's rural charm. But closing in on him is a team of killers so careful and efficient they are almost invisible. Step by step, the two teams circle waiting to see which will be the first to walk onto the killing floor.

Compiled by SANYAT SATTAR

Copyright (R) thedailystar.net 2006