Antony Johnston

Best volume of the orbital detective series so far with multiple storylines and sub-plots intertwining over the course of a single chaotic space station festival day. A mixture of Hill Street Blues and the great Judge Dredd storyline The Graveyard Shift and Ed McBain innnn spaaaace, this has two murders, a serial killer, terrorism, a hospital massacre and more, all filling the pages without ever feeling crowded, a remarkable feat of comics writing that wraps up as an extremely satisfying read.

Although Alan Moore's principal fame is as a writer of comic books, he wrote Light of Thy Countenance as a straight prose piece, and I can't help but wonder if it wouldn't be more effective that way. It's not that I have any objections to the general pacing and structure of the adaptation by Antony Johnston, and the fully-painted illustrations by Felipe Massafera are all wonderful in their way. But the words of Moore's "story" are so powerful and still so challenging to digest, I'm afraid show more that the other elements of this comic book repackaging might distract from the text more than amplify it.

I put "story" in scare quotes, because the narrative element is rather slight, even though much of the text is built around a chronology. The genre here is actually that of an oracle: the thoughts of a god reduced to human language. And the god is the transcendent self-consciousness of Television, regarding with sublime contempt the human psyches that it exploits and impoverishes. "I am the silence of the will," it declares. "I am the last voice you will ever hear."

Even Cronenberg's film Videodrome couldn't make TV as creepy as this Light does. There's nothing supernatural or counterfactual in Moore's treatment. It's just a brutal confrontation with the global and individual consequences of the mass psychological experiment cum global cult called commercial television. All that makes it fiction is giving the phenomenon an honest single voice. show less

Like the author (in his Acknowledgements) I remember enjoying the Choose Your Own Adventure books in the 1980s so when I heard about this grown-up version I had to give it a go.

You are the detective investigating the murder of a man found on the lawn of a wellness retreat. Who killed him, how and why? That is what you must try and work out by reading the first chapter and choosing from two (or sometimes more) options as to where to go or who to interview next.

It makes for a fun and show more interesting read with a cast of largely unlikeable characters who may or may not have been up to no good. The storyline itself is more simplistic than many crime novels; it's not about having a convoluted plot but it is about the novelty of trying to solve the crime yourself.

Did I solve it? Err…..well that would be telling (read that as no) but I did at least do fairly well with my clues and according to the points system at the back of the book I've made it to the heady ranks of Detective Inspector!

There were a few things I would do differently if I read it again. First of all, when I put it down for a while I would write down the number of the last section I read, mainly because I would have liked to have refreshed my memory but also so that I could pick up the thread of my journey through the book if needed. There are some coded messages and I wish that I had at least written down where they were as later on I had to try and find them again (bad detective). Oh, and don't start trying to decode them when you're laying in bed at night!

I enjoyed this quirky and entertaining novel and would read another one if more are in the pipeline. Maybe I'll make DCI next time.

For associated reading, I recommend The Boy in the Book by Nathan Penlington. show less

Following Stormbreaker, the first in the Alex Rider series, this continues the story of the 14-year-old schoolboy now living a double life. Like a teenage James Bond, he is sent to infiltrate an exclusive school in the French Alps for MI6, the UK's Secret Intelligence Service. The owner of the school has taken control of the boys by cloning them and intends to take over the world. Will Alex be able to get out before Dr Grief clones him too? The Bond-style gizmos provided by Smithers are the show more most fun. I loved this action-packed spy story from Horowitz (famous for Foyle's War tv series) and Antony Johnston, enhanced by the vivid art of Kanako and Yuzuru, two Japanese sisters who collaborate on every illustration. Terrific read! show less