Jul 26, 2014: This review is based off of the first twelve issues. I’ll admit, when I started Curveball, expectations were a bit low. I never was one for books whose titles could be construed as comedic even though they aren’t supposed to be (I’m kinda superficial). However, I was pleasantly surprised by how good it is. It reminded me of Watchmen a little bit, but not enough for me to call it a Hunger Games/Battle Royale situation. Talking about the plot without giving any spoilers is going to be difficult, so I’ll [more . . .]

Jul 6, 2014: [I help edit this serial. This review is not 100% unbiased.]

Dark humor always walks a fine line between not funny seriousness and over the top crassness. World Domination in Retrospect does not walk that line so much as madly tap dance along it. But, despite the madness, it is a skilled tap dance. Any time it gets yanked down into melancholy or stumbles into the realm of poor taste for too long, it quickly pulls itself back along the aforementioned [more . . .]

Jul 4, 2014: Okay, so this story is a weird one (but I do tend to like and champion the weird).

Insightful Ape is essentially a travel narrative (combined with magical elements) that relates the story of a young ape who is attempting to rid himself of a dangerous demon who has taken possession of him. There are quite a few twists and turns in the plot—some of which can get a little confusing—but ultimately, the story kept me interested enough to want to [more . . .]

Jul 2, 2014: Holly(Woods) tells the story of a young ingénue (the title character) who has come to L.A. in the hopes of becoming a star. Holly experiences one lucky break after another, precipitating her rise to stardom, despite not having much training or experience in show business.

Though this plot line could easily become grating, clichéd, or ridiculous, the author avoids this potential problem by playing up Holly’s weaknesses, namely her naiveté which gets her into a number of scrapes—some of which aren’t [more . . .]

Jun 27, 2014: So here’s a slightly different take on super hero fiction: starting us out ALL the way back when mankind was just starting to move from nomadic tribes to gather in permanent settlements, and superhuman abilities were taken entirely to be the blessings of gods and spirits. As the author has stated his intention to move forward through different eras to tell different stories in his universe, this is quite the undertaking.

Only the first arc is finished at this point (or [more . . .]

Jun 27, 2014: It’s 14 chapters into the ‘prologue’ segment of the story so far (at the time of this review at least) and the story seems promising. The characters that we’ve interacted with for more than a couple lines of descriptive text all have unique personalities (I personally like the super villain’s dialogue so far, the cross between evil overlord and businessman approach has been done before but there’s a reason for that, and it’s well done in this story) and the interactions between those characters are pretty believable (important because interpersonal [more . . .]