COMIC REVIEWS: Joyride Vol 1

Joyride

In the near future, humankind has finally found life in the universe! And we are TERRIFIED. In response, the government creates a dome called SafeSky to protect us from extraterrestrial life and have used this fear as an excuse to create a fascist, controlled society. As you do. Or as humans do, anyway. Shock Doctrine engage! Power up the giant gun on the moon!

Characters/Plot 8/10

The characters of Joyride are relatable namely because they are familiar types without being stereotypes. Namely, in another title, Dewydd would probably be the lead, haplessly following his manic pixie dreamgirl Uma into the great beyond. Instead, within the first volume, all three leads have Goals, Motivation, and Background that make their actions reasonable, if not always wise or expected.

For some it might be hard to relate to Uma’s enthusiastic (to the point of irrationality) embrace of flinging herself into space, intent on never coming back. But when you find out what’s happened to her, it all makes sense. Dewydd is in fact following Uma because he loves her (this is barely a spoiler), but this is complicated by the fact that her character isn’t there to teach him anything, and she has romantic inclinations of her own.

Catrin starts as your standard security guard getting swept up in the hero’s madcap adventures, but turns out to be a whole lot more. She’s also Uma’s enemies to friends to potential love, and it’s done in a slow way that I wholeheartedly approve of.

I have to admit that I’m strongly in favor of slow burns over insta-love, no matter the genre, but especially for LGB characters, everything tends to happen at once, because the writers often lose interest after sweeps to knock one of them off. Boo. In Joyride vol 1, we’re still eeking toward friendship.

The side characters are also worth paying attention to, especially the robot/ship’s pilot/Uma’s text buddy and the alien wanderer they pick up at their first stop who is constantly nonplussed or horrified by the antics of the humans he’s fallen in with.

If I had a criticism to make, it’s that the emotional resolution of the final chapter comes pretty quickly. But I’m willing to excuse it since the story is otherwise well-paced and Uma tends to be mercurial in nature. It feels believable that she would shift her feelings very quickly from one state to another.

Art 7/10

I grade comic art on a few specific criteria: Can I tell what’s happening? (Clear lines, distinguishable action, etc.) Are the characters identifiable with recognizable facial expressions? And are there moments to elevate the sequential drawing to art?

Joyride gets high points on clarity of action and emotive characters. The designs for the aliens are neat, too, and it was interesting without being too cutesy, gross, or ridiculous. The panels are well laid out and the artist does an excellent job of directing they eye through the course of action, even when there are floating panels or smaller panels layered on top of a larger scene.

The comic misses out on higher Art points, but that isn’t an aim of this volume, and there are some very well composed scenes of our teens looking up at a huge field of stars and the entire Protex scene with Uma and Catrin has a lot of meaning pressed into a few pages.

Also, space dance party.

Two women and a robot dance

Narrative Themes:

Important themes:

Bio-fam Loyalty vs Found Family

Security vs Freedom

Human Expectations vs Alternative Alien Logics

I won’t go into details on these at the end of this volume because it would involve spoilers and I need to see the full arcs to accurately judge. What I will say at this moment is that the fact that these themes are present is a plus for the title. You could easily just have a group of teens run off and have adventures with no deeper connection for any of the characters. I appreciate what’s started here, particularly the dystopian elements, as dystopia literature has been a research interest of mine and I’ve taught dystopia lit. Love it.

You can’t do dystopian Earth without making the human connections and addressing the issues of violence and conflicted loyalties and values, but the story doesn’t get too bogged down in philosophizing either.

TL;DR

Overall, I’m going with a definite recommendation. I picked this volume up as a free review copy for Netgalley, simply based on the LGBT label, but if I’m honest, I would be interested in the story regardless based on the dystopian and sci fi content.

The fact that other reviews keep going on about SPACE GIRLFRIENDS doesn’t hurt. I’ve already secured the second volume, and I’ll be preordering the third.

Movie Reviews: Atomic Blonde, Deflated Luftballon

I wasn’t sure how to start this review. So I’m just going to say, I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed.

I genuinely like Charlize Theron. I’m not a superfan to the point that I watch everything she comes out with, or treat her as my “exception” the way my straight friends do. But she is a bonus for any movie. Unfortunately, like another highly anticipated action movie that Charlize stars in, Aeon Flux, this film both falls short and doesn’t really do justice to the source material.

Atomic Blonde doesn’t fail because of its titular character, though. Problems like this tend to stem from writing, direction, and editing. Since the movie has been out for some time at the writing of this review, I’m just going to tag SPOILERS here, so I can break down the movie on a macro level.

Vamp Reviews: Fledgling

Pictured: Fledgling by a bottle of Poison Girl, with dark purple flowers.
My love for Octavia Butler is deep and all consuming. I’m closing in on reading her entire oeuvre as soon as I nail down the Patternmaster series. She has stories about gene trading aliens, pregnant men, the destruction of America under a demagogic leader, among other thought experiments. She does with sci fi what should be done with sci fi: Explore social phenomenon and test the boundaries of human social expectations.


Fledgling (2005) is no different in this regard. It isn’t my favorite book of hers by any means (that award goes to Parable of the Talents), but it’s just so darn interesting that I’ve returned to it many times. The story follows a young vampire named Shori, who wakes in agonizing pain, nearly burned to death, and blinded, in a cave. As she heals and makes her way out into the world, she has to solve the murder of her family and try to navigate a society she has no memory of in order to get justice or her people.


Fledgling was supposed to be Butler’s “fun” vampire novel, and t was the book she wrote just before she died. (Too soon!) In spite of that, the novel continues to explore the concept of power in hierarchical societies, as well as biological interdependence through a completely original imagining of how vampires and their humans may interact. While some of this novel’s prose isn’t as polished as Butler’s other novels, the conceptual development is more than worth the read.

Sapphic Game Reviews: Blossoms Bloom Best

Pictured: Three women standing in a huge galley. Erica the Captain, Kotoha the otaku engineer, and Sara the only person reacting to this situation normally.

Title: Blossoms Bloom BrightestPlatform: Steam
Cost: Free!
Medium/Genre: Visual Novel/Sci Fi

Blossoms Bloom Brightest is a visual novel about three sapphics in space. They wake up from stasis, with two of the characters, the perky engineer Kotoha (basically an otaku who reminds me of a high school friend of mine) and the justifiably suspicious Sara (who is much more interesting imo, but comes with some serious baggage), as your potential love interests. You guide the actions of the captain, Erica, who mysteriously won’t tell her tiny crew what their mission is or why they’ve been chosen for it.

This is a cute, entertaining little game that takes about an hour to complete for one storyline. Thus, it’s pretty short, although considering the price, you could do worse. The concept behind the plotline is pretty standard sci fi and worth exploration. What the game lacks mostly is development; of plot, of characters, of romantic relationships, you get what you pay for. However, if you enjoy the game, Reine Works and Dharker Studios will be releasing a rebooted version with new artwork, another love interest, and longer gameplay sometime in Summer 2017 under the title Galaxy Angels.

Vamp Reviews: Blood Trail

Pictured Above: My cat with Blood Trail.

Blood Trail was my least favorite installment of the Vicki Nelson series. I'm not sure if that's because the precepts of the series work less well with this plot or because I have such high expectations for werewolf stories.

Yep! In this book, Vicki and Henry go out to London, Ontario to solve the murder of some werewolves. Henry Fitzroy happens to be a friend of the family!

Vamp Reviews: Dracula

This isn't exactly a review, but I'm tagging it under that anyway for easy finding purposes. Imagine a world in which Bram Stoker had an editor.

I appreciate that novels written for serialization tend to run longer. (Though not all parts were serialized.)  This is the common problem WIP fanficcers face, right? And it’s why a lot off high schools let out pained wails at having to read another Dickens novel. But at the same time, I’ve read Dickens and women’s epistolary fiction, which can be just as obsessed with minutia. 

I don’t quibble with the epistolary/found document form, and I might even argue that some of our common forms make the effort to do something quite like what epistolary does, without much effort of pretense. So many found footage movies, especially in horror. Lots of rotating POVs in novels. Some mad love of the first person in YA dystopia and romance. And of course, I have to give him props for the attempt to make this folklore concept “scientific.” That’s what contributes to a lot of the length. Stoker is consolidating a lot of lore in one place to bring the old horror to the contemporary world. Van Helsing is trying to explain this complicated supernatural phenomenon and convince the characters, and thereby the audience, to buy into what’s happening. It’s drawing a line between his work and the penny dreadfuls. 

This is also why you have an American, a Texan no less, hanging around with his bowie knife. It’s why Mina talks about what the New Woman would think, and speculates that someday, she will be asking the men to marry her. Lucy is delighted by slang. The present day xenophobia is as ubiquitous in the novel as the body horror of an undead monster sucking your bodily fluids.

Regardless, this book experiences some serious middle-of-the-plot sag.  There are moments when his characters literally repeat something they just said. Van Helsing has looong speeches about practically everything. He gives Dr. Seward the randomest speech about “King Laughter,” aka grief makes you react in irrational ways, that is SO LONG. There was no reason for that to be there. Sometimes, some things, you have to summarize. 

I look at literature with a critical modern eye as a writer, but also as someone who has taught literature. I love Austen more than my students can appreciate, but I can also say that sometimes even the canon authors need to kill their damn darlings. And if that means tightening up the middle of Dracula to get back to the action and not lose the tensions rising around Mina’s vulnerability, so be it. 

Any canonized authors, or just wildly popular authors, who you wish you could give writing advice?

Vamp Reviews: Blood Price

These days, you can’t seem to throw a stone without hitting a brooding vampire… or at least a brooding vampire SERIES. Anne Rice, the Sookie Stackhouse novels, Twilight, and the Vampire Diaries… everyone had a deep Teutonic brow and even deeper angst.

But this isn’t the only feature to vampire fiction. Bram Stoker isn’t even the originator of the genre, if we’re being really honest. Now that I’ve been rereading some of my favorite (as well as less than favorite classics) of the vampire genre, I thought perhaps it would do me good to put the word out about the world of vampires outside of your run of the mill brooding beau.

Mostly, I started this because I decided to reread the Vicki Nelson series by Tanya Huff. Huff is an amazing author regardless of the genre, but most of what I associate with her has its place in high fantasy. However, Huff contributed substantially to the urban fantasy build during the 90s, before Sookie and Dresden, before Buffy and Angel. People wanting to look into the urban fantasy genre could do worse than 

The Vicki Nelson series is set, for the most part, in Ontario. Our heroes? The half-blind ex-cop Vicky Nelson, and the bastard (vampire) son of Henry VIII, versus an entitled computer geek and a Demon Lord.

Why not.