I is for I read Comics!

I know, but we're all allowed a guilty pleasure! I mentioned the other day, I visited Forbidden Planet on my last visit to London, and while it always depresses me (I remember when it was 90% second-hand comics out of corrugated-card cartons, off bare floorboards round the corner, now, it's all shiny Kidult crap! But I managed to find three tomes this time - the last few visits I've left empty-handed!

 

I love these, I got the first volume of Legends of the Guard, as a Library sell-off a few years ago, so I was very pleased to find the second, on a yellow ticket (all three of these were in the 'bargain bin' shelves). To describe this is not easy, but if you imagine an illustrated Silmarillion, but written by mice, about an ancient mouse civilisation, you'd get the picture . . . s!

 

The original/core series (set as if in the present day of the mice) are written by David Petersen, but the various stories in Legends, are from the past of the mouse lands, and are told as tall-tales 'down the pub', with different artists invited to draw, 'ink' and/or letter the stories, which are just absolutely charming, and unlike a lot of my graphic-novel library, are as suitable for kid's as they are appealing to adult readers. If you haven't discovered the Mouse Guard yet, I recommend you do so!

 

This was a bit of fun, as it's a modern 'treatment' of the old movie, using all-new artwork based on the film, rather than the original cells or screen-shots, it was dirt cheap and took about 20 minutes to read from end to end, but the whole point of this kind of thing is the visuals, and they are sumptuous in this, capturing the original, perfectly. "Blue Meanies, Blue Meanies!"

 

I don't know if you are familiar with the concept of Six Degrees of Separation, but this has a close connection to the previous, in that the Den segment of the 1981 Canadian animated movie Heavy Metal, was directed by a Yellow Submarine veteran, Jack Stokes!

 

I first encountered Den in Heavy Metal, the magazine, not the movie, and it's best to say the visuals beat a very confusing series of story arcs, and it helps if you read each story as a stand alone with some similarities to that which has come before, Den being the late Corben's 'Star Wars', going back to his early years, but with less control on timelines or character development!

 

This is the third in a series of [relatively] new collections of all the Den'i'verse, and I'm now looking for the others!