Tomm Coker

You're reading a book that relegates you, the reader, assuming the reader isn't a member of the 1%, to abject ignorance and slavery as a lot of very unpleasant people control the world through a dark religion of high finance that requires bloody sacrifices every now and then, That being the case, it better be good, and it is. It's a chilly and bleak horror thriller with amazing art. Turning the grubby everyday quotidian mundanity of people getting to be hyper-rich into an intricate show more conspiracy of sectretive masters of magic and murder requires weaving history into patterns and menaingful events and getting your chracters out in front of the parade of twists and turns and ups and downs, and Hickman does this with skill and imagination. Whether constantly dismissing peiple like us as insects is a misantropic metaphor or just a side effect of inventing characters sometimes in control in a way that makes the idiotic state of things make a kind of sense is an exercise for the reader to decide. show less

Todos saúdam o deus do dinheiro! As várias escolas ancestrais ligadas à magia controlam secretamente toda a sociedade através das instituições financeiras mais poderosas do mundo. Um mundo secreto onde vampiros oligarcas russos, Papas das trevas, aristocratas americanos encantados e assassinos do Fundo Monetário Internacional trabalham juntos para nos manter no nosso devido lugar.
Agora um dos líderes desse seleto grupo foi brutalmente assassinado e o investigador de polícia show more Theodore Dumas começa a desvendar os segredos por trás dessa conspiração que atravessa os séculos! Jonathan Hickman e Tomm Coker criaram uma série noir com toques de "Lovecraft" sobre o poder do dinheiro sujo... e exatamente qual tipo de pessoa você pode comprar com ele. Leia se tiver coragem. show less

Jonathon Hickman continues his weird tale of global finance barons in thrall to the god Mammon, and the grisly murders committed in the course of their internecine rivalry.

In this instalment, Detective Dumas seeks the help of an academic to help his inquiries. The two go inside the Fed building and encounter a deep, dark secret. Meanwhile Ria Rothschild and her familiar are proceeding to enact a bloody retribution for the murder of her brother.

The artwork is still suitably creepy and Hickman show more manages to keep his story on the right side of ridiculous. I did find his chronology confusing at times; the narrative is not quite sequential, and the reader should pay attention to the date/time stamps on the top of the page. I also started to get uncomfortable with his use of the Rothschild name, and how he characterises them. I think it's the only real name in the finance industry that he appropriates, and he gives the impression that he's aligning with some of the anti-Semitic stuff that was hurled at the Rothschilds in the past. It's not necessary and the story would not have suffered at all if he'd invented another name for those characters.

I'm not expecting another instalment for a year or so, but I will be looking out for it. It will be interesting to see if I can pick up this convoluted tale after a long break. show less

I'm hardly a fan of baseball, but this intensive info dump of trivia kept me engaged despite being text heavy and not particularly well formatted. Seriously, a graphic novel of this page count would normally take me about an hour to read, but this one took closer to three with its truckload of names and statistics. The book mostly takes a timeline approach throwing out the highlights of each year from page to page, with frequent side bars to highlight particular anecdotes and mini-bio pages show more for some of the major players. Alas, the side bars sometime blended into the narrative panels and the bios sometimes seemed randomly or poorly placed. I assume there are better histories with actual photographs out there, but I'm sure there is a small intersection in the Venn diagram of baseball and comic book fans who'll get a kick out of this. show less