In 2011, Hal Jordan will have to have the ability to overcome great fear — because he’s going to be taking on Parallax.

PR from the film has been circulating around the Internet, but here’s a quote from the Coventry Telegraph:

In a universe as vast as it is mysterious, a small but powerful force has existed for centuries. Protectors of peace and justice, they are called the Green Lantern Corps. A brotherhood of warriors sworn to keep intergalactic order, each Green Lantern wears a ring that grants him superpowers. But when a new enemy called Parallax threatens to destroy the balance of power in the Universe, their fate and the fate of Earth lie in the hands of their newest recruit, the first human ever selected: Hal Jordan.

I’ll be honest, if this means we don’t have to see Legion in this movie (he was the villain of previous drafts of the script), I will be thanking my lucky stars.

In the comics, Parallax was originally a renegade Hal Jordan’s new identity, after he killed the entire Green Lantern Corps in an ill-fated attempt to rewrite history and restore his destroyed Coast City. When Geoff Johns took over the title, it was revealed that Parallax was in fact that entity of fear, and that the destruction of Hal’s home had left him vulnerable to possession from the cosmic parasite. In a lot of ways, however, this means the idea of conquering fear — one of the main high concepts of the current comics run — will be in the film, which will give the franchise legs.

The Telegraph has the rest of the synopsis, but we wanna know — what do you think, Rama readers?

Dong Xoai, Vietnam, 1965
Written & Illustrated by Joe Kubert
Lettering and Production by Pete Carlsson
Published by DC Comics

Happy Memorial Day, ‘Rama readers.

The Battle of Dong Xoai, waged during the United States’ early “advisory” days in Vietnam, marked one of the earliest major battles of the Vietnam war.  Joe Kubert’s latest graphic novel, Dong Xoai, Vietnam, 1965 does chronicle that battle, but it does far more than simply detail troop movements and casualties.

Kubert actually begins Dong Xoai following the A-313 as they are inserted into Vietnam, initially as advisors to the South Vietnamese at Bu Gia Map.  Working from first-hand accounts, many of which are reproduced in the book’s back matter, Kubert creates fictional characters, but inserts them into real events.  Doing so, he’s able to cut away the issue of trying to capture the voices and personas of the people involved, and he’s able to focus on the events that unfolded around them.

Flown into the country on an old, twin-prop cargo plane, the soldiers quickly found nothing as they expected.  Hardware and manpower didn’t exist in the expected numbers.  Many dedicated Vietnamese soldiers were undermined my less driven colleagues.  And when the troop is moved to Dong Xoai, the capital village of a province, a flashpoint along several major trade routes, everybody knows that armed conflict is only a matter of time – and reinforcements are not coming.

Kubert doesn’t use word balloons in Dong Xoai.  Rather, the entire story is told in narrative boxes, some in narrative voice, others attributed to characters and containing a person’s dialogue.  The effect distances the reader from the cast, making the book less about the individual persons and more about their shared experience.

Illustrated in uninked pencil, Kubert takes on the role of a battlefield reporter, delivering rough images, posed character profiles, sketches from the field, all done to enhance the book’s aura of authenticity.  The pencil art also allows for nuanced shadowing and detailed renderings, offering a softer humanity that only manages to support the power of Kubert’s usual artwork.

Joe Kubert’s narrative in Dong Xoai, Vietnam, 1965 is accompanied by supplemental text pages that present accounts of the experience of the A-313 by surviving members of the troop.  Readers can truly examine how closely Kubert skews to the facts of what this group of men experienced, while Kubert’s fictional cast maintains the story’s focus on what occurred.  It’s beautifully drawn, as you’d expect from Joe, and it’s a moving historical document.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World Official Trailer on Vimeo.

Oh baby, oh baby, YES. There are still about 3 months until the glories of this movie are officially unleashed upon the world, but director Edgar Wright has posted this all new trailer thanks to a facebook fan goal being reached. The official fanpage can be found here, so go become a fan after you revive yourself from the KO this trailer delivers.

Wait wait wait. What?

So, Community’s Donald Glover (who, btw, is extremely funny in stand-up. Highly recommend seeing him if you get the chance) launched a bit of a campaign last night, and well, it seems to be gaining some ground.

On his Twitter page (mildly NSFW language), Glover started things off with this retweet, referring to a post over at our friends io9:

RT wittyallusion : @io9 wrote a post about casting a non-white #Spiderman for the reboot. some1 suggested @MrDonaldGlover. I agree with this

He then began to ask people to make it happen, with a hashtag: #donald4spiderman

Then things got out of control.

On his tumblr blog (mildly NSFW language), Donald posted about his desire to play the webslinger, with a slightly ridiculous photoshopped image of himself. Then some fans made a facebook group, which at press time has over 1200 members. While that won’t exactly get him cast, it’s not bad for about 12 hours. His hashtag got to the point where it was trending #2 in Chicago and #3 in NYC- no small feat.

So what do you think? Could Glover’s goofy antics from one of the best sitcoms on TV translate into the superheroics of Peter Parker?

As a bald man, it offends me that they cast an actor with hair: According to Deadline, dreamy Scottish actor James McAvoy is going to play the young Professor Xavier in the in-development X-Men: First Class movie, which Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn is is set to direct. McAvoy is 31 years old, so if we assume Professor X is a generation older than his charges, that should give us some indication of just how young the youngsters attending the Xavier School For Gifted Youngsters are going to be.  Speaking of Marvel movies about super-teenagers, Deadline also reports (at the same link) that the Runaways film has a writer—No Heroics creator Drew Pearce. Given the fact that Runaways co-creator and original writer Brian K. Vaughan is also a screenwriter, I guess the big surprise is that someone other than BKV is doing the script.

But they just rebooted it!: Deadline also has news regarding Paramount’s plans to reboot the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film franchise, with Michael Bay’s production company Platinum Dunes  in charge. I gues that means we know one actress who won’t be playing April O’Neil—Ms. Megan Fox.

WB’s plans for DC’s B-List: The Hollywood Reporter rep0rted that Warner Bros’ CEO Barry Meyer announced that the next Batman and Superman movies will be released in 2012 (the former in July, the latter during the holiday season), and that Wonder Woman, Aquaman (it’ll never happen) and Flash are all getting closer to being greenlit. Entertainment Weely‘s Chris Nashawaty points out the major stumbling block facing a Flash movie–depicting super-speed on film in a way that doesn’t look ridiculous. That got me thinking about super-speed on film, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen The Flash’s powers look “right” to me on film, either in live-action (that TV show that wasn’t very good) or any of the animated versions of the character (he always seems to slow in those). The best super-speed sequence I’ve seen was that breif one in The Incredibles, but it was just a sequence, not a whole film.

“To a lot of people, a black man as a superhero is a hard thing to swallow, which is why I think a lot of characters had a hard time gaining traction”: That’s Randall Kenan, a University of North Carolina professor, talking about black superheroes, as quoted in this Durham News article covering his lecture “It’s Clobbering Time! Comic Books and Creating the Idea of Black Masculinity.” Not sure why he quoted an organge superhero in the title of a lecture about black superheroes, but, according to the article, Kenan raises at least one point I’ve never heard mentioned before—the strict Comics Code Authority rules of the ’50s made it all but impossible to “portray black folk as criminal” so “you rarely saw black criminals in comic books despite the images being fed by the popular media.”

The DC Bullets softball team ran their mark to an impressive 7-0 with a lopsided win over the Daily Beast on Thursday at Riverside Park.  Playing in a gloomy drizzle, complemented by occasional lightning bursts across the evening sky, the two softball squads bucked the elements and fit in their entire seven inning game.

Let’s pick things up in the third inning this time: After staking themselves to an early lead in the first inning (more on that later), Bullets and Daily Beast exchanged zeroes in the second.  LF Jay “Mickey Mantle” Kogan (4-5, 4 R, 3 RBI, double, homer) hammered a one-out double to the base of the right field wall, and the natural righty did it hitting left-handed which really just makes the rest of us feel bad that we can’t hit the ball as well from our good sides.  Adam Staffaroni (3-4, 3 R, 2 RBI), the third baseman, scored Jay with an opposite field single to right.  The Bagman, 2B Sal Cipriano (2-4, RBI, double), doubled down the left field line, and Staff trotted home on P Joel Press’s RBI groundout.  Pressman finished 1-2, with 1 R and 2 RBI.

In the top of the fourth, the Daily Beast – most of their players barely made it to the field by game time and didn’t have time to warm up – started to find their game legs, breaking through for a run against Joel and the Bullet defense.  The Bullets got back four, on singles by the left side of the infield, Mike Lorah (4-5, 4 R, 1 RBI, double) and Adam Schlagman (4-5, 4 R, 2 RBI, 2 doubles), an RBI double by outfielder Andrew Arnold (4-5, 4 R, 4 RBI, double, triple, homer), SCF Lauren Fries’ sac fly (part of a 3-4, 2 R, 2 RBI day for the Doc), and Jay Kogan’s – still hitting lefty – two-run bomb down the right field line.

The Daily Beast got a little swagger back with a four-run fifth, and maintained the momentum with a scoreless bottom half from the Bullets.  In the sixth, the Beast went down quietly, and the Bullets tacked on two more – with Schlagman and Arnold scoring once more each.  The Daily Beast scored once more in the top of the seventh, but the final batter lined sharply to Schlagman at short to end the game.

Final score: Bullets 25, Daily Beast 6.  That first inning I said I’d get back to?  Perhaps it was because the Daily Beast players arrived just barely in time and didn’t get to warm up.  Though to give the Bullets credit, the Beast played solid D and the Bullets just kept hitting “where they weren’t.”  In the first, the Bullets batted around.  Twice.  The eleventh and final hitter in the Bullet line-up made the second and third outs (to be fair, with more than eleven players, two Bullets alternated at-bats in the number eleven slot, so two different players made those outs).  Nine of the eleven spots in the order (including two other rotating spots) reached base safely twice during the inning.

Arnold and DH LP Vollano (2-3, 1 R, 2 RBI, homer) had back-to-back home runs, the second game in a row in which they’ve accomplished that feat.  RF Pat Brosseau (1-2, R, double), Lorah and Schlagman had consecutive doubles at one point, which was followed by Arnold’s triple.  There were simply too many hits to recount here.  In the end, the Bullets tallied seventeen runs on nineteen hits.  Ignoring the first frame, the Bullets squeaked by 8-6.

The victory pushes the Bullets to 7-0 overall, and 3-0 in the New York Media Softball League.  Their next game, a NYMSL tilt, is this coming Thursday at 5:30 against High Times magazine on Field #2 in Central Park’s North Meadow.

Game Notes:

If you read Andrew’s box score correctly, yes, he hit for the cycle.  He even hit for the cycle in reverse sequence, homering and tripling in the first, doubling (after a fielder’s choice in the second) in the fourth, and finally singling in the sixth.

Neil Hiremath complemented his 2-3, 1 R game with an outfield assist, with Schlagman relaying Neil’s throw to the plate to cut down what would’ve been the Daily Beast’s first run of the game.

LP left the game after the second inning with a bruised shoulder.  Softball remains a dangerous, dangerous activity.  The Bullets hope to have him back for Thursday’s game.

Find out more about Global Freezing here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or at ComicsByEgg.com.

Everyone knows Superman at a glance. The blue suit, the red boots and trunks, the big cape, the famous S-shield. Alter any of these elements and even non-comic book readers will quickly notice.

But when it comes to Superman’s birth place, the planet Krypton, this isn’t the case. In comics, TV and film, Kryptonians have been shown in a variety of ways for many different reasons, operating under sometimes drastically different philosophies. Some designs have worked. Some worked for the story but were limited in appeal. And some were simply lazy and uninspired. The world of Krypton is gone as we know it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t critique it!

So let’s jump into things, shall we? Let’s look at the world of Krypton and how its society’s fashion sense has altered over the years and how this has affected Kal-El, the man called Superman.

EARLY JOR-EL

The people of Krypton made their first appearance in 1939, not in the comic books but in the Superman newspaper comic strip. The only Kryptonians we saw were Superman’s parents Jor-El and Lara (originally called “Jor-L” and “Lora”) and there was no color in the strip, but we could still get some idea of their fashion sense.

Superman’s mother is wearing a simple gown which is no different than than what any pretty girl might wear on Earth. Jor is wearing a loose, comfortable-looking outfit. It could be a uniform, but this doesn’t seem too likely with the lack of decoration or symbols on it. The cut of the pants and the boots indicate these are general purpose work clothes. He seems ready to go on a nature hike as soon as he finishes in the lab.

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Just in time for Memorial Day: DC’s Source blog has announced a series of one-issue revivals of their classic war comics, including Weird War Tales by Darwyn Cooke.

There’s nothing about this story that isn’t incredibly sad: “Implants land woman superhero role”

This July 8, do your part to protect a world that hates and fears you: Marvel is declaring July 8 a special holiday, X-Men Day. This follows previous promotion of declaring a special Avengers Day. Are they going to keep this up? Because I’d love an excuse to put a Defenders tree up in my house and sing Defenders carols.

“None of the characters—not that I ever saw—ever actually articulated the idea that having less mutants wasn’t necessarily a bad thing”: Speaking of the X-people, Tim O’Neil has a well-observed post about how M-Day broke the X-Men franchise—or at least warped it so much that “Cyclops 2010 talks just like Magneto 1980, or Apocalypse 1995.” It’s a good read, and it should be noted that O’Neil agreed that reducing the number of mutants to more manageable levels and, to use Joe Quesada’s term, putting that genie back in that bottle was a good idea. It was the fact that almost every X-Men story since that dealt with trying to reverse M-Day sort of ruined the X-Men. Does having the genie back in the bottle really matter if you just sit around looking at the genie through the bottle and talking about it all the time?

No link for this one, but I’m sticking it here anyway: Writer Daryl Gregory and artist Scott Godlewski are joining Kurt Busiek for a new Boom series about Dracula and…business? It’s called Dracula: The Company of Monsters and, says Boom, it “tells the story of a powerful, predatory corporation that acquires a valuable asset…Dracula! They think they own him, but no one can own the Son of the Dragon.” Throw in a cover by Dan Brereton and yeah, okay, that sounds pretty interesting.

Is Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal terrible on purpose?: I haven’t read it yet, on account of not being terribly interested in reading about a character I like dealing with losing his arm and having his five-year-old daughter killed. But by all accounts, the miniseries by writer J.T. Krul and far more artists tha should be necessary to tell a four-issue miniseries, is just awful, awful stuff. Worse than you’d expect a comic book about a super-archer who loses his arm and his five-year-old daughter would be.

Now I’m wondering though, if it’s that bad, is it perhaps that bad on purpose? Did Krul and/or his editors decide at some point that there’s just no way to make lemonade out of the lemons they were handed, and so decided to try and make the comic so incredibly bad that people would have to read it, if only to see if it was really as bad as they heard? I don’t know, but if I may offer some anecdotal evidence, when I heard Brian Hibbs describe it as the worst comic he has ever read (and I’m assuming Hibbs has read a lot of Bluewater biographies and Countdown and Ultimates 3 and pretty much anything I might have considered one of the worst comic I had ever read), I kind of wanted to see the series for myself. (I think it was Hibbs’ mention of Roy Harper using a dead cat as a weapon to beat some folks to death that pushed me over the fence). 

In his comments section, a lot of folks express a similar desire to read it after hearing just how bad it is, and I see that The Comics Reporter, The Beat, and Journalista have all linked to Hibbs’ review, which will drive more eyeballs to it, which will perhaps convince more potential readers that the comic is so bad it has to be seen (and thus purchased and read) to be belived. Oh no, I just linked to it too! Is this all part of Krul and company’s plan? If so, that is genius.

Iconic or generic?: Esther Inglis-Arkell discusses that Green Arrow preview that was running in a bunch of DC books lately. You know, the one where he interrupts a rape by shooting  a dude’s nose off with an arrow. She notes the fact that the sort of scene  the preview typifies is a decades-old cliché, but that like all clichés, it’s a cliché for a reason—it works. She also says that the technical perfection of the sequence is obvious.The question of whether a comic book sequence like that is generic or iconic is actually a very interesting one, and I imagine the answer depends on which way one squits and what angle one looks at it. I wouldn’t say the sequence was technically perfect though; I had a really hard time reading it, in large part because of the zig-zagging left to right, now right to left, then left to right lay-out of a two-page spread, in which the right-to-left image is an extreme close-up. Also, there is a difference between this scene and, say, the 567 times Batman, Daredevil and other urban vigilante characters have performed it: It’s really, really brutal. Green Arrow shoots a dude’s nose off. Anyway, check out Inglis-Arkell’s piece; something for superhero fans to meditate on, I suppose.

A brief history of Wonder Woman’s panties: More variety than you might think!

The Executor
Written by Jon Evans
Illustrated by Andrea Mutti
Lettered by Clem Robbins
Published by DC/Vertigo

The Executor was my first exposure to Vertigo’s new crime line, and it’s not the introduction I’d have hoped for.

Here’s the gist of this book: Joe Ullen, a one-time professional hockey player, returns to his hometown when his high school girlfriend, who he’s not seen in fifteen years, is murdered and her will names him executor of her estate.

Joe’s quickly introduced, locked into an apparently unsatisfying relationship (which establishes something about where he is in his life, but is never touched on again), before immediately jetting off to Elora, Calif., to attend the late Miriam’s funeral.  Several characters are thrown at the reader, though none hits hard enough to have much presence.

Among The Executor’s flaws is Evans’ reliance on quite-literally lifeless characters.  A mystery revolving around the deaths of two local Native American kids during Ullen’s youth ties into the tragedy of Miriam’s murder, but neither character has any presence in the narrative.  Both appear in brief flashback, often single panels, without speaking, leaving them a hollow presence, a wispy ghost with no impact for the reader.  Miriam herself, despite slightly more page time, barely registers as a presence either.

The characters, from Ullen to Miriam, from the dissatisfied girlfriend to the tragic boys of Ullen’s youth, are more types than realized personalities. They’re terse and tough, tragic and emotionally disconnected.  Their dialogue is predictably distant, preventing any of the cast from connecting with readers or showing any indication of humanity.

Andrea Mutti, The Executor’s illustrator, delivers stiff, but most effective pages.  The character designs aren’t strong, but show enough range that readers can tell the cast apart.  The layouts are simple and clear, but the camera work shows little imagination and Mutti’s characters have little acting range.

In short, The Executor is a disappointment, wallowing in cliché, supporting by pedestrian artwork, full of characters who don’t deserve any reader sympathy, and more to the point don’t muster an ounce of reader interest.

Underground Toys has unleashed images from their upcoming action figure line based on the current Doctor Who series, starring Matt Smith as the manic eleventh Doctor, and Scottish beauty Karen Gillan as his headstrong companion Amy Pond.

The line of 5-inch figures will be available this summer, and will also include other characters from the first five episodes of the 2010 season. Underground Toys doesn’t have pictures of the product on their website yet, but you can find pictures where I did, at Toy News International.

If you like what you’ve read so far (c’mon, how can you not?) totally check out more super cute comics at:www.sosuperduper.com!

Just in from The Hollywood Reporter, it seems Cartoon Network let early word slip of a coming Green Lantern Animated Series on the network.

Not much was said about the show, other than it is a joint venture between Warner Bros and Turner Networks (CN’s owner). The show is based on the DC Comics character who has a live action movie coming in Spring 2011, and could be on the air soon after the movie, in Fall 2011.

At least that’s what it sounded like what Wolverine was saying in that game. Who knows. But before we dissect some of the more meaningless battle cries from video game lore, check out Marvel’s new screenshots for the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3 game. Be sure to check out Iron Man’s Proton Cannon, which makes its epic return in the sequel, which is due out for the XBox 360 and PS3 in the Spring of 2011.

There are no words to describe Patrick Boivin’s “Iron Baby” short. Except for “awesome.” And “baby.”

[Via Jon Favreau]

Uh-oh. Them’s fightin’ words.

So for those of you who saw the breaking news of Dynamite Entertainment acquiring the rights to Flash Gordon and Mandrake the Magician, the alleged prior owner of the sci-fi franchise says they’re loading for bear with another installment of their Flash Gordon tales.

“Like everyone else, I’ve heard about Dynamite’s plans to launch their own Flash Gordon series,” Ardden Entertainment’s co-publisher (and series writer) Brendan Deneen said in a press statement on Broken Frontier. “I look forward to some healthy competition.  I hope they’re ready, too.”

Part of me is a little confused by all this — isn’t the whole point of Dynamite buying the rights is that, well, nobody else CAN print a Flash Gordon comic? Either which way, Ardden had already written four six-issue arcs for their take on the series, and their upcoming Flash Gordon: Invasion of the Red Sword is scheduled for a Fall 2011 release.

Last week DC released the twenty-eighth issues of Art Baltazar and Franco’s Tiny Titans, and it was the usual mixture of super-cute art and gentle all-ages gags, sprinkled with in-jokes for the old-timers. The main difference between this issue and the previous twenty-seven was that it was completely devoted to the Super-Pets, most of whom have appeared in some form or another in previous issues, with the Tiny Titans in supporting roles.

The image above is the cover of the issue. But it’s not the image DC originally solicited, the image that is still up on dccomics.com because, for some reason, they never, ever update those online solicitations.

Here’s that image:

Notice anything different, aside from the lack of the added-in later logo and Super Pet identification? Anything different about the line-up?

That’s right! There’s a gray squirrel in overalls with a Green Lantern ring on the original cover, whom Tiny Titans readers will recognize as the artist’s version of Ch’p from his appearance in Tiny Titans #25, while the published cover features a different rodent-like Lantern, B’dg.

Having never heard of this B’dg fellow, I had to look him up on the Internet, and it turns out that he is a pre-existing GL (as many of you better-versed in Lantern lore probably already knew), created in 2005 as the inheritor of Ch’p's ring. Ch’p, it turns out, died in the comics a long while back.

Apparently at some point between Baltazar drawing the cover and DC publishing the comic, they swapped out Ch’p for the new squirrel.

Not a big deal, obviously, but sorta weird, since Ch’p previously appeared in the title

(and was a member of the Super Pets team that appeared in last year’s Super Friends #19). I guess DC decided they’d rather used the living squirrel GL instead of the dead one?

Seems odd though, given the continuity-free world of Tiny Titans, where no character who died in the DCU comics is dead, where there are multiple Wonder Girls and Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon are still Robin and Batgirl.

Plus, I think Baltazar’s Ch’p is much cuter than his B’dg, and isn’t that what’s really important?

The Hollywood Reporter has an article up with five alleged contenders for the role of Peter Parker in the upcoming Spider-Man reboot — but why sit there with names and not faces? Cheer up, Rama readers, we got your back!

Jamie Bell: The 24-year-old former Billy Elliot already has some genre cred to his name, having performed in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, as well as the upcoming Steven Spielberg Tin-Tin film.

Alden Ehrenreich: An up-and-comer, the 20-year-old is pals with Steven Spielberg and was in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro last year.

Frank Dillane: Frank is a 19-year-old British actor who played a young Tom Riddle in the latest Harry Potter films.

Andrew Garfield: Most recently, the 27-year-old has been seen in the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which was Heath Ledger’s last film.

Josh Hutcherson: My personal favorite of the bunch, the 17-year-old has worked on a host of kid-friendly films like Jon Favreau’s Zathura, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Bridge to Terabithia.

Of course, this could all be for nothing — as you’ll recall with Captain America, they had a host of potential players in the wings, only for Chris Evans to swoop in and snag the role later on. What say you, Rama readers? Which one do you want to see wear the webs?

[Images via IMDB and the Harry Potter wiki]

Find out more about Global Freezing here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or at ComicsByEgg.com.

By Julie Opipari

With the bad news that CMX is closing shop, I am left with the horrible sinking knowledge that there are many of their series that I will never have a chance to finish reading. Some were so close to being finished, too! Two Flowers for the Dragon, Orfina, I Hate You More Than Anyone. Instead of dwelling on the bad, though, I will think of only the good, and point out a few titles that have been published in their entirety. All of these are worth picking up before they go out of print.

The Recipe for Gertrude is the series that turned me on to Nari Kusakawa. The first volume didn’t do that much for me, but the character development and suspenseful plot kept me reading to the end. The first volume was quirky and kind of interesting, but nothing really special. The second volume, and each one after that, however, upped the ante to create a compelling story, full of danger, magic, and romance. I loved this series.

Kiichi and the Magic Books by Taka Amano is another magical title that is well worth a read. This is another series that did not grab me with the first volume. That’s why I have a two volume rule, and try to give every new release that I pick up at least 400 pages before I decide not to follow it any more. Kiichi is about a traveling librarian who journeys from village to village with his magic books. And a kid with a horn growing out of his forehead. Who is going to turn into a tree. Peopled with characters who come to life over the five book series, this is one of my favorite titles. Ever.

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