Lucas Blogs About Books

  Woohoo! Nearly a year of using this same image! The Intro Okay, so we're now twelve months (and ten entries) into my planned one year project to blog my reading of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales . Turns out that planning to read a lengthy work of medieval literature while also reading other books and blogging about them is maybe more time-consuming than I anticipated. Whatever, it's not like this month will see me tackling one of the longest tales in the book. Oh wait. The Recap Okay, so you may recall that last month , we got far enough into the seventh fragment to reach the point where Harry Bailly interrupts Geoffrey Chaucer's mock epic Tale of Sir Thopas to insist that surely the poet must know a better story. Well, turns out that the only other tale Chaucer can think of is— The Tail of Melibee Melibeus is a wealthy man with a wife named Prudence who has born him a daughter named Sophie. One day while Melibeus is out, three of his foes break into his hous...

Who says you can't judge a book by its cover? So, what's this book's dea—wait, is it really called Dracula, motherf**ker! ? It is called Dracula, motherf**cker! . See, this is why titles shouldn't end with punctuation marks. Whatevs. The deal with Dracula, motherf**ker!  is that it's a comic book written by Alex de Campi and drawn by Erica Henderson, who you may recognize as the original artist from The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl  and the co-creator of Assassin Nation . I'm not familiar with de Campi's work; but in addition to writing comics she's also a music video director. In any case, Dracula, motherf**ker!  (yes, I am always going to type out the full title every time I mention it), is not — as you might expect from the title and cover — a 70's exploitation style sequel to Bram Stoker's novel (in fact, it can't even be in continuity with the novel). Instead it's an exploration of the characters of Dracula's wives — who receive shor...

Oooh, the cherry trees are in bloom.   So, what's this book's deal? The deal with The Golden Age, Book 1  is that it's a comic book by Roxanne Moreil and Cyril Pedrosa (translated from French by Montana Kane). It's got sort of a historical fiction vibe with a few fantasy elements. It follows Princess Tilda who is about ascend the throne when her mother and the regent stage a coup to install her kid brother instead. With the help of Lord Tankred and her childhood friend Bertil, Tilda is able to make her escape but is wounded by an arrow while being chased through the woods. She and her companions are able to briefly take refuge in a commune of women hidden away in the forest. These women try to live in accordance with the egalitarian ideals of a rare book detailing a fabled— Golden age? No points for guessing. Anyway, these women also have another visitor, Frida, who is translating the book and smuggling the translation out to fuel a peasant uprising. After a disturbance...

Oh no! The inOpportune cOntent rePlacement proceSs ? You haven't had to deploy that since November . Yeah, once again real life has interfered with my blogging. There'll be a real post next Monday.

Is that Bill Cipher? So, what's this book's deal? It's the second volume of Andrew MacLean's sword and sorcery comic, Head Lopper. This particular volume is entitled Head Lopper & The Crimson Tower . It picks up more or less where Volume 1 left off: Norgal, the eponymous decapitator, and Agatha, the blue witch's head, have joined Zhaania and her apprentice Xho in a quest to discover what happened to Zhaania's mother when she entered the Crimson Tower. If you can master the Tower's challenges you may find yourself its new master. This is also kind of a big deal to the Fonga, a dimminutive, roughly humanoid species who share an island home with the Crimson Tower and are preparing their champion, Harpo, to claim the Throne of the Master. However, Harpo's younger brother, Twerpal, isn't convinced that the supposedly enchanted sling-bow is going to be enough to protect his brother from the tower's dangers. Meanwhile, Ulrich, the current Master ha...