Inhaltsverzeichnis für January 2017 in SFX

RICHARD EDWARDS EDITOR RAVES Loving Westworld – I’m amazed a series based on a fun, but undeniably shallow, sci-fi movie has found so much depth. RANTS I’m not sure how long I’ll be sticking with The Walking Dead. The season seven premiere felt like it was teetering into torture porn territory. IAN BERRIMAN REVIEWS EDITOR RAVES Delighted that you can now download a few episodes of The Adventure Game – I want a DVD box set! Love the t itle sequence of Class. Very Tomorrow People! RANTS How could Ram attack the Shadow Kin leader? He’d have had to hop down a corridor with one leg chopped off, bleeding to death! RUSSELL LEWIN PRODUCTION EDITOR RAVES Almost us, The Greasy Strangler was extraordinary. Never seen anything like it before; probably…

How would you describe your Dirk Gently? I feel it’s got the essence and the spirit of the Dirk in the books. I feel Max has really captured that. But obviously I think I look very different to the Dirk that Douglas Adams created, who was more middle-aged, slightly portly. Did you review how other actors have played Dirk Gently? I listened to both seasons of the radio adaptation with Harry Enfield and I watched all the episodes Stephen Mangan had done and I really loved both of them. In fact, I was slightly going, “These are really good.” When it was announced that I’d got the job there were loads of people on Twitter saying, “What happened to Steven Mangan? Why can’t we have more shows with him because…

Favourite SF/fantasy film The first film that took me was Explorers. These kids end up constructing a spaceship to go into outer space and it’s kind of like a sci-fi Stand By Me. It explores that notion of if you have a weird idea that grown ups don’t believe, that doesn’t mean it’s not true. And sure enough you and your friends can get to outer space. Because you’re special [laughs]! Favourite SF/fantasy TV On and off I’ve loved a lot of Doctor Who. I was like, “Oh, here’s the weirdest thing most likely to get me beat up on the playground. So guys, let me tell you about a TARDIS…” Favourite SF/fantasy book After a lifetime of scotch and marijuana it’s interesting to try to dive into the card…

BETTERING RAM “My character’s cool. Ram’s a loving, caring young man who’s very driven, very passionate, and always wants to be the best at everything. I’m really just trying to find myself and become me again – trying to be the best again.” SUIT YOU, SIR “When I went for the recall, my agent sent me the wrong [script] sides. I’d prepared two scenes – I even went in with a suit, because we were preparing a prom. Patrick [Ness] was like, ‘Why are you wearing a suit?’ ‘I thought it would be good for the scene.’ ‘You’re not even doing that scene!’ It turns out I had five, six scenes to learn!” BROTHERS IN ARMS “The fans are so sweet. You can tell how religious and passionate they are…

new author Describe the world of The Bear And The Nightingale… The bulk takes place in a village in Muscovy – now Moscow and its surrounding region – in the 14th century. My heroine’s the daughter of a minor aristocrat and also the heir of a powerful and possibly magical lineage. She’s able to see the world in a way others don’t, which puts her at odds with her people – but might also be the only way she can save them. What’s the appeal of Russian fairytales? I love the vivid tropes and characters: the firebird, the immortal sorcerer Kaschei the Deathless, magic horses. These things have a half-familiar strangeness I find enchanting. Also, often it’s the female character who’s the magical one, the clever one, who saves the…

122 CAROLINE BLAKISTON In time for Rogue One, it’s Mon Mothma from Return Of The Jedi Despite a fleeting two minutes’ screen time, New Republic Chancellor Mon Mothma made an indelible impression in Return Of The Jedi, memorably closing her pre-Battle of Endor briefing by mournfully uttering the immortal line: “Many Bothans died to bring us this information.” A youthful incarnation of the character will return for Rogue One (played by Genevieve O’Reilly) but it was Caroline Blakiston who first brought the character to life 33 years ago. We spoke to the British actress about her most enduring role. Would you like to play Mon Mothma again? Of course. I’m part of Mon Mothma and Mon Mothma is part of me. What’s the strangest request you’ve had from a fan? To…

Based on the premise that even a wasp, armed only with its sting, can, in the right circumstances, cause the destruction of a moving vehicle and all its passengers, Wasp is at the same time a rollicking (and very funny) adventure story and a sly commentary on the nature of society: its fears; its instability; its lack of safety in numbers; and the role of the individual in a complicated, impersonal world Set during the galactic war between the Terran and the Sirian Empires, it tells of James Mowry, reluctant recruit to the Terran intelligence service. Mowry is known as a “wasp”: a solitary agent, in disguise as a Sirian and dropped on an enemy planet with orders to create as much mayhem and paranoia as possible. Terry Pratchett said…

What can you tell us about Jyn Erso? She’s really thrown into a situation that she’s not expecting. All of the Rebels have had some kind of struggle in their past, they haven’t had easy lives, and they all come together and are united in something they believe in. But she’s complicated, which is what I like about her. She’s resourceful when she has to be, but she has also had to stand up for herself. She’s determined, but there’s a humanity to her, which I hope comes through. She has real empathy and affection for the team around her. Gareth Edwards has talked about how he wanted to make the movie gritty and realistic. Was making Rogue One like making The Revenant? It was interesting hearing the stories about…

ORD MANTELL The bounty hunter that Han and the Rebels ran into on the planet of Ord Mantell changed his mind about paying off Jabba the Hutt, but what actually happened there? In the old Expanded Universe the bounty hunter was a cybernetically enhanced rogue named Skorr. We’d love to see what kicked off in the new continuity. MOS EISLEY CANTINA So many scoundrels in one place, and even though you only see most of them for mere seconds, it’s clear they all have stories to tell. A standalone set in Tatooine’s seedy underbelly could get under the skin of a wretched hive of scum and villainy – and even hang out in Jabba’s Palace. ROGUE TWO We know that “many Bothans died to bring us this information,” but little…

Close Encounters face to face with the biggest stars Rufus Sewell’s John Smith may not appear in Philip K Dick’s original The Man In The High Castle novel, but the ruthless SS Obergruppenführer made a big impression on the first season of Amazon’s TV adaptation. While Smith is, on one level, an utterly chilling villain and a thorn in the side of the resistance fighting to free the USA from Nazi rule, the Brit star says he doesn’t see the character as evil – just an ordinary guy adapting to his circumstances. “Until the Nazis dropped the nuclear warhead on Washington in 1945 Smith was a good soldier for the American side,” he tells SFX. “He never showed any predisposition towards torture. He’s not particularly racist. But he ended up…

Why did the production need a linguist? I was asked to comment on the script and work with the set crew. They brought me to the military tent set and said, “Imagine you’ve just been helicoptered here and you have a team of 50 military cryptographers. Your job is to decipher this language. What do you write on the whiteboard?” If aliens really did arrive, how would we even start deciphering their language? When looking at a language that hasn’t been studied or described, a field linguist looks for patterns. And there’s every chance it won’t be spoken? Right. Spoken language is constrained temporally – when you speak you can only produce so many things at a time. But the written language of the Heptapods uses circular logograms that aren’t…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 118 minutes | Also VOD Director Sang-ho Yeon Cast Yoo Gong, Soo-an Kim, Dong-seok Ma Sang-ho Yeon’s Korean horror does for zombie movies what Gareth Evans’s The Raid did for martial arts flicks, blending intensity, imagination and WTF-ery to rocket the genre to unexpected places. An outbreak of fleshchompers has reduced Seoul to chaos, and a bullet train speeds towards the titular city in hope of delivering its passengers to survival. But a strange little girl clambers aboard just as it pulls off, and the carriages soon fill up with ravenous hordes – just as the blurred landscapes outside the bloody windows are also clogged with gnashing fiends. Blending claustrophobic suspense with frenzied setpieces and vitriolic class satire (this would make an inspired double-bill with…

RELEASED OUT NOW! U | 92 minutes Cynics can sneer at another retro toy being crowbarred into a toon franchise, but Trolls isn’t made for them. DreamWorks’ latest is 90 minutes of pure happy. Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake voice two gnomes who set off to rescue their friends from a cooking pot, but the story’s really just an excuse for a lot of singing. Animated to look like the world is made out of Fuzzy-Felt and Play-doh, it’s as if someone gave a six-yearold a movie studio to play with.…

What impressed you about the screenplay? I really liked it because it’s a big theme to tackle: “What now?” It’s a very mid-life thing. Motivations change, priorities change. Does the Federation mean anything? Should we be fighting for it? It was a combination of that – the action I never really care about – and the humour, because Simon [Pegg] is funny and Doug [Jung] totally got it. It was always fun coming up with chances to make people smile. We had good energy on this one – the composite energy of true Trek fans and then people who are just fans of stories. You throw those people together and a new energy is created. We’re deep into the five-year mission now… What Simon and Doug did so intelligently is…

 RELEASED OUT NOW! 2016 | 15 | SVOD Creator Charlie Brooker Cast Mackenzie Davis, Alex Lawther, Bryce Davies Howard, Charles Babaloia  netflix Fans might have felt trepidation at Charlie Brooker’s tech-nightmares show leaving spiritual home Channel 4 behind for the wider horizons of Netflix. Thankfully the results are a triumph. Season three feels like a faithful continuation of what came before, but also, thanks to slicker production values and a more high-profile roster of talent, a significant progression. Satisfyingly, it sees Brooker exploring a greater variety of setting, format and tone. Sure, season three still has that darkly bitter Black Mirror tang, and an episode like “Shut Up & Dance” could slot seamlessly into any series. Others, however, feel like quite a departure. Retro romance “San Junipero” is genuinely heartwarming,…

EXTRAS  RELEASED OUT NOW! 2016 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD  Nothing good ever comes of neon green goo in the movies. Sure enough, when an Alpine ski resort owner fires up his goo-powered snow machine, he unleashes a zombie plague. Yes, this is a zom-com, but what it lacks in scares it makes up for in action, jokes and FX. The plot’s flimsy, but it packs more fun into 77 minutes than this subgenre’s seen in years. Extras Making Of; trailer.…

Bore Of The Worlds ETRAS RELEASED 14 November (Blu-ray/dvd) OUT NOW! (download) 2016 | 12 | 4K Blu-ray/Blu-ray 3D/ Blu-ray/DVD /download Director Roland Emmerich Cast Jeff Goldblum, Liam Hemsworth, Jessie T Usher, Maika Monroe Despite the message sent at the end of 1996’s Independence Day, Roland Emmerich never really intended to make a sequel. Still, here he is, with a whole new CGI toybox at his fingertips. But to paraphrase a Jeff Goldblum character from another ’90s outing, Resurgence proves that just because he could it doesn’t mean he should have. For while the sequel – set 20 years after the aliens last attacked – has one or two fun ideas (like a rebuilt, united Earth with retro-engineered alien tech) and the charisma firepower of Goldblum and the other ID4…

Grunt work EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1966 | PG | Blu-ray & DVD (dual format) Director Don Chaffey Cast Raquel Welch, John Richardson, Robert Brown BLU-RAY DEBUT Hammer’s prehistoric fantasy plays like a Creationist rally at the Playboy mansion. Dinosaurs walk the world alongside Raquel Welch’s glam, Max Factored cavewoman, that extinction event asteroid just a daft rumour from another, significantly less entertaining reality. The history’s absurd, of course, for all that a deep, meaningful voiceover assures us that “This is a story of long, long ago, when the world was just beginning”. The plot’s little more than photogenic neanderthals lobbing sticks at dinosaurs – the thin, dialogue-free story really drags – but it’s all about the visuals. The volcanic landscapes look grander than ever in this 4K restoration, while…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2016 | 15 | DVD Director Adrian Shergold Cast Ray Winstone, Michael Gambon, Luke Treadaway Casting Ray Winstone as HG Wells is a ripping wheeze that sadly sends out all the wrong signals about this otherwise rather po-faced Sky Arts adaptation of four of the author’s short stories. There’s some evidence that these four tales are supposed to be blackly comic – a sort of League Of Gentlemen’s Tales Of The Unexpected. The subject matter is certainly rum old toot: an artist whose painting comes to life to seduce him; an aged eccentric who body-swaps to stay alive; an etymologist haunted by a rival reincarnated as a moth; a baker who discovers the most magical mushrooms ever. But the stuffy, lifeless staging, stylised sets and one-mood…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 325 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Steinar Bragi Publisher Macmillan With their windswept deserts, Iceland’s volcanic hinterlands are a perfect setting for an unsettling horror story. Centring on four friends forced to shelter at a remote farmhouse after their jeep breaks down, The Ice Lands makes good use of its atmospheric natural surroundings. After being taken in by a mysterious couple, divisions between the quartet worsen as they discover that there’s no escape from the eerie, limbo-esque environment they’re apparently stuck in. Reminiscent of The Shining, The Ice Lands has also been compared to Twin Peaks, although it actually has more in common with less fantastical Nordic Noir authors like Stieg Larsson, as Steinar Bragi savagely critiques the corrupt practices that led to Iceland’s 2008 banking collapse. The…

RELEASED 15 NOVEMBER 448 pages | Hardback/ebook Author James Lovegrove Publisher Titan Books Setting the forensic logic of Arthur Conan Doyle against the gods and monsters of HP Lovecraft, The Shadwell Shadows launches a trilogy of uncanny adventures with one foot in The Strand Magazine and another in Weird Tales. Playfully blurring the lines between fact and fiction, James Lovegrove affects to have received the Cthulhu Casebook manuscripts from a distant relative of Lovecraft. Are they really the work of Dr John Watson, finally unburdening himself of the real secrets of his Baker Street years? Could they have been written by Lovecraft? Or is it all an elaborate hoax? The early chapters are rooted in the familiar Holmesian milieu of Hansom cabs and Limehouse opium dens, before events gradually move…

BULLET TIME A BOOK IN BULLET POINTS RELEASED OUT NOW! 320 pages | Hardback Authors George Mann, Justin Richards Publisher BBC Books • This one’s ambitious – a book charting the total history of the Doctor Who universe, from the Big Bang to the end of time. That’s 53 years of TV and untold billions of years of fictional reality. Whew. • The trot through the Doctor’s adventures is brisk to the point of remorselessness but it’s fun seeing how the authors tie all the strands of chronology together. • There are some wonderful, impressionistic illustrations – some concept art for the revived series, some new paintings of old series monsters. We particularly love a painting of the Cyber-King stomping through Victorian London. • The book fudges the UNIT dating…

RELEASED 10 NOVEMBER 704 pages | Hardback/ebook Author James Islington Publisher Orbit In many respects The Shadow Of What Was Lost is a traditional coming-of-age, saving-the-world epic fantasy, in the vein of Tad Williams and Raymond E Feist (and yes, Robert Jordan). But it also has the flavour of something new, mostly due to its intriguing use of various magical abilities, including time travel. Previously self-published, the book has gone through a quick edit with Orbit and come out looking shinier. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its faults, however. The book hops around from major event to major event, feeling a little rushed, and yet still runs to just over 700 pages. The characters are a familiar but loveable bunch: Davian with his prodigious latent magic; Wirr with…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 224 pages | Paperback/ebook Editor Jim Al-Khalili Publisher Profile Books This collection’s full title continues Is There Anyone Out There? and (spoilers!) the answer is a hesitant “no”. Intelligent extraterrestrials are unlikely to exist, or they’ll be so different from us that we’ll struggle to recognise them. There are 19 essays here, but if you’re hoping for sensational UFO stories there’s just one Roswell- and Area 51-filled chapter by Dallas Campbell to keep you entertained. Otherwise brace yourself for SETI statistics, the Fermi paradox, cellular chemistry and Mars’ hostile environment. Two chapters are of particular interest to SF fans. Ian Stewart recounts the best examples of aliens in literature: it’s a solid introduction to mainstays like Clarke and Heinlein, although fresher references are rare, limited to Stephen…

SCI-FACT! We’ll see more of Aly Michalka in season three of iZombie; she’s been promoted to series regular. Woo! Liv Moore’s life as a secret zombie certainly hasn’t been boring, and according to executive producer Rob Thomas, there’s plenty more for her to struggle with in iZombie’s third season. With zombiemaking energy drink company Max Rager a thing of the past, Liv (Rose McIver) will find herself facing a brand new Big Bad. “In their place is a new organisation that we met in the season two finale: Fillmore Graves,” Thomas reveals. “It’s a Blackwater-like military contractor, except they are all zombies. They are essentially preparing for the day when humans discover that zombies are walking among them. They want Liv to be part of the organisation. So in season…

An often overlooked gem of late ’70s sci-fi cinema is Nicholas Meyer’s adaptation of Time After Time, Karl Alexander’s novel, which had HG Wells using his time machine to travel to then-modern day San Francisco to capture an escaped Jack the Ripper. Luckily Kevin Williamson, one of TV’s most successful executive producers (Scream, The Vampire Diaries) never forgot that movie… “When I saw Nicholas Meyer’s movie, it had a meta sensibility which became my sensibility,” Williamson tellsRed Alert. “[The film] was in Warner Bros’s library so I toyed with turning it into a remake. Then I thought with a TV series, you could go further. Time After Time really only dealt with [the book] The Time Machine, and just one aspect of that novel. But what happened with Doctor Moreau,…

THE REDDER SHOES SUSPIRIA Chloë Grace Moretz is enrolling in the remake of Dario Argento’s acclaimed 1977 giallo (that’s a bit like gelato, but with more slashy murder stuff and less choice of flavours). The original movie was a slice of atmospheric arthouse horror, telling of a young American ballet dancer who travels to a European dance academy, only to discover a sinister, witchy secret at the heart of the school… A Bigger Splash’s Luca Guadagnino is set to direct the remake, reuniting with that film’s stars Dakota Johnson – as the ballerina – and Tilda Swinton alongside Mia Goth from Nymphomaniac Vol 2. There’s also a role for Jessica Harper, who played Johnson’s part in the original. Guadagnino says the redo will explore “the concept of motherhood and… the…

BLAST FROM THE PAST So Ouija 2 is okay. Or rather, should we say, Ouija -1, given this is a prequel set in the ’60s about a mother and two girls who hold fake séances in the name of bringing “comfort” to the bereaved. But when they pick up Hasbro’s game, “Ouija”, things get a bit ghostly. Retro settings for horror films seem to be all the rage. You don’t need to worry about mobile phones, CCTV cameras or any modern technology. But actually it’s more than that. We live in an age of cynicism. Of social media, “meh” and “LOLs”, where everyone has seen everything before, and no one is scared by anything that isn’t a loud noise and a crash zoom. Taking us back to a time when…

Dallas Cowboys – is known locally as the Death Star on account of its giant, grey retracting roof. Seattle-spawned alt.rock band The Presidents Of The United States Of America released the song “Death Star” in 2000. Contains the stirring couplet, “Death Star, massive and maniacal/Death Star, teeny weeny vulnerable hole.” Industrial Light And Magic christened their San Francisco render farm the Death Star. It’s a ginormous, high-powered supercomputer but cannot, as yet, take out rival FX houses. German digital hardcore band Atari Teenage Riot included the ditty “Death Star” on their 1997 album “Burn, Berlin, Burn!” We like to imagine Grand Moff Tarkin tapping his jackboots to the soulful confession “I only destroy to demonstrate my powers.” Kevin Smith’s slacker-championing comedy Clerks (1994) sees two Generation Xers debating whether the…

As far back as SFX can remember, we always wanted to be a Corellian smuggler. Or a bounty hunter. Maybe even an X-Wing pilot. But is the adventure and excitement we crave a realistic target – or the foolish ramblings of a boy who grew up far away from the bright centre of the universe (in the Midlands)? We’re about to find out... SFX has landed at the Munich incarnation of the Star Wars Identities exhibition before its contents are loaded onto a transport, given an X-Wing escort and redeployed at London’s O2 this month. There have been Star Wars exhibitions before, of course, but in addition to the usual props, costumes and concept art (more on those later), Identities wants to talk about what makes us all tick –…

We see Ben screwing over his coworker Chad in the pilot. Does that make him harder to root for? He has every intention of fixing that. There are ways around helping Chad and his family. I have to look at Ben as the Road Runner. He’s sprinting at such a speed, and his mind works at such a pace, that if he were to look down over that cliff, he would fall. He is doing these horrible things, but there’s a lot further he could go. The stakes will get a lot higher than in the pilot. Julian is the bogeyman of the Spiga Corporation. How scared should Ben be of him? He’s sort of terrifying. There’s a consistent cat-and-mouse game between the two of us. Julian is naturally suspicious…

JONATHAN STRANGE One of a pair of feuding mages in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, this equally sorcerous Strange was a young pretender to the crown of English magic. DR CARLO STRANGE Marvel’s original Doctor Strange – appearing only two months before the master of the mystic arts – was a minor league Iron Man villain with electromental powers. HUGO STRANGE One of Batman’s most chilling, insidious opponents, Hugo Strange is a shrink with a serious Dark Knight obsession and a sideline in creating monstrous superhumans. JOHN STRANGE Strange, the BBC’s brief early noughties foray into Saturday night demonology, saw a disgraced priest fighting to clear his name while battling occult forces. ADAM STRANGE DC’s definitive Silver Age space hero and the champion of planet Rann, he’s a…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 99 minutes Director Mike Flanagan Cast Elizabeth Reaser, Annalise Basso, Lulu Wilson, Henry Thomas, Lin Shaye, Doug Jones If Hasbro is hoping the Ouija franchise will help sell more of its famous “talking boards”, it might be disappointed. Despite some striking product shots, this Ouija prequel really doesn’t make playing with that iconic planchette look appealing... Set in Los Angeles in 1967, the film follows the widowed Madame Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) and her two daughters as they attempt to make a living by tricking bereaved customers into thinking they can communicate with the other side. Then they add a Ouija board to the act and things get weird. If you didn’t see the first Ouija movie, it’s not a problem; while this is technically a…

RELEASED 25 NOV EMBER 15 | 156 minutes | Also VOD Director Hong-jin Na Cast Do Won Kwak, Jung-min Hwang, Jun Kunimura If you’d happily never watch a Catholic exorcism ritual again, here’s some good news: this Korean possession horror provides a little variety by drawing on a different cultural tradition. After a string of brutal family murders by village folk who’ve suddenly gone violently insane, suspicion falls upon a newcomer – a Japanese man. Could he be laying curses? When the daughter of nebbish cop Jong-Goo (Do Won Kwak) starts doing her best Linda Blair impression, he decides to set due process aside… The comically ineffectual Jong-Goo makes for an unusual protagonist, displaying flashes of protective fury once his family comes under threat, but always remaining a bit pathetic.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 82 minutes | Also VOD The age of techno-fear looms large in Let’s Be Evil. It follows chaperone Jenny as she looks after gifted kids in a pitch-black learning facility, only visible through Augmented Reality glasses. This unreliable reality is well-suited for horror – especially when the kids begin to take control. Yet Let’s Be Evil’s drive is a single, flat note. No mystery to unravel, no plot developments, just people looking scared until the twist – which really isn’t worth waiting for.…

EXTRAS  RELEASED OUT NOW! 1957-1977 | PG | DVD Directors Ooh, loads of people This box set features nine films, mostly dating from the late ’50s. It’s impossible to go into detail on every one, but they do have shared qualities. Expect giant insects or lizards, preposterous science, copious grainy stock footage, fag-smoking middle-aged heroes and pointy-sweatered heroines, old-fashioned attitudes to African “natives”, and vintage sexism so blatant it prompts guffaws. In the case of the four British entries, also expect the bathetic juxtaposition of high weirdness with, say, grumbling punters in spit-and-sawdust pubs. With scripts and production values never Oscar-worthy, the highlights are the most out-there entries. Best of the bunch: the campy Womaneater, in which a scientist seeking a life-restoring serum puts women into a trance with some…

EXTRAS  RELEASED 14 NOV EMBER 2015 | 12 | DVD/VOD  They also served: the Imperial grunts and faceless Rebels who populated the background of that galaxy far, far away. This doc tracks down the extras and bit-part players of Star Wars – along with Dave Prowse, who feels slightly too famous for the premise. Complete with tales of petty rivalries and spiritual salvation in the afterlife of conventions, it’s a melancholy, amusing, ultimately uplifting look at fame on a microbiotic level. Extras Commentary; extended interviews; featurette; trailer.…

 RELEASED OUT NOW! 2016 | 15 | VOD  There’s an obvious way to sum up the plot of The Rezort: it’s Jurassic Park with zombies. Ten years after the outbreak of a virus, a shadowy corporation is running an undead safari… Then there’s a security breach, and the guests become zombie chow. It’s better than it sounds. While the action sequences are generic, the characters are well drawn, and there’s righteous anger sloshing about amid the entrails. Indeed, the political satire might even bite harder than the zoms.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1983 | 18 | Blu-ray/DVD (dual format) Director John Carpenter Cast Keith Gordon, John Stockwell, Alexandra Paul, Harry Dean Stanton BLU-RAY DEBUT Christine could’ve been a campy mess. The plot’s pretty daft: nerdy Arnie (Keith Gordon) buys a clapped-out old banger and, in restoring it, finds himself becoming cooler, meaner, and more able to stand up to bullies – especially because his car is sentient and can run them over for him. Another director might’ve let you laugh at Christine revving her engine and winking her headlights. Not John Carpenter. He approaches Stephen King’s story with deadly seriousness. Arnie’s transformation is striking and scary, and though there’s not much on-screen violence, the threat is crystal clear: this is a story about boys coming of age. The…

Holy Lazarus! ETRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2016 | PG | Blu-ray/DVD/download Director Rick Morales Cast Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar, Jeff Bergman The Batman TV show has enjoyed a renaissance in the past few years, from its own, pop-coloured comic book title to a box set of the original episodes, finally sprung from years of rights hell. Now comes this new animated movie, reuniting the voices of original stars Adam West, Burt Ward and Julie Newmar. Ward still sounds as though he could slip into the tights; there’s more of a disconnect with West’s voice. He’s clearly older but his comic gift is intact and he effortlessly recaptures the deadpan sincerity of the Caped Crusader, straight man to the universe. It’s all here: alliterationcrazed dialogue, demented death traps, Catwoman’s…

House Of Pain RELEASED OUT NOW! 2016 | SVOD Director Hervé Hadmar Cast Veerle Baetens, François Deblock, Geraldine Chaplin, Lila-Rose Gilberti SHUDDER New horror-themed subscription service Shudder’s most eye-catching launch title is this UK premiere of a three-part French miniseries. After Lisa (Veerle Baetens) inherits an old house from a mysterious benefactor, she finds a hidden passage leading to The House, a bewilderingly labyrinthine structure with no apparent means of escape… A classy, atmospheric series, it eschews jump scares and gore in favour of enigma, eerie imagery, and a strong sense of the uncanny. The House operates as a metaphor for dealing with grief, with the emotionally withdrawn Lisa forced to confront feelings about her dead sister. There’s also a star-cross’d romance, as she bonds with Julien (François Deblock), a…

Lovers of bad taste horror will be delighted by the release of THE HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS FEAST (out now, dual-format Blu-ray & DVD). This Amazonexclusive box set collects 14 films by the cult director who basically invented the gore film. Only a handful of them – like 1967 vampire tale A Taste Of Blood, or 1968 sex-robot tale How To Make A Doll – really exist in SFX territory, mind; psychos, rednecks and delinquents are more common themes – as is violence to the female form… Beginning with a multi-episode failed trip to France to try to convince Bonnie Prince Charlie not to fund the Jacobite rebellion and ending with the Battle of Culloden, OUTLANDER SEASON TWO (out now, Blu-ray/DVD) continues to be the most gruesome and harrowing historical romance…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Wray Delaney Publisher HQ, HarperCollins “Picaresque” is the term for a type of story that focuses on a single character’s journey from innocence to experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that this genre’s heyday was in the libertine 18th century, it has a reputation for being a bit on the raunchy side. Any doubts as to which side of the innocence/experience fence An Almond… might fall are washed away by an early, knowing reference to Moll Flanders. Wray Delaney goes all out for her beautifully-realised Georgian setting, and decorates it, gleefully, with great swathes of bedroom action for plucky protagonist Tully Truegood, a magician’s apprentice/courtesan who can see ghosts. The result is a slightly unholy cross between Pretty Woman and the more subversive delights…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 416 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Alex White Publisher Solaris Basic social interaction is governed by unspoken rules and body language cues that most of us take for granted, because we don’t remember learning how they work. But for Loxley, who may be on the autistic spectrum (the word’s never used in the book), tone of voice and facial expression are parts of a foreign language that she’s spent years learning how to decipher, and that she has to work at every single day. Life would be complicated enough, frankly, if she hadn’t also inherited the family knack of seeing – and being seen by – the ghosts of people who have died violent deaths. Alex White handles his non-neurotypical protagonist with sensitivity rather than sensationalism; Loxley is…

SCI-FI TV ROUND UP War Of The Worlds is coming to the small screen courtesy of Teen Wolf showrunners Jeff Davis and Andrew Cochran. BrainDead, Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s alien parasite comedy, won’t be getting a second season. The Expanse, the show based on James SA Corey’s books, is now streaming in full on UK Netflix. The Walking Dead will live to shuffle another day – season eight has been confirmed. Ben Barnes will play Jigsaw in the Punisher Netflix series. Doctor Who director Euros Lyn will helm episode one of the Let The Right One In TV series. Cameron Cuffe has been cast as Superman’s grandpa in Syfy’s Krypton series. What We Do in The Shadows is getting its own six-episode series called Paranormal Event Response Unit. “Think Mulder &…

War-torn landscapes, gifted youngsters, centuries-long power struggles… Those tropes will be familiar to many fantasy fans, but they’re given a gritty dust-down in James Islington’s debut novel, The Shadow Of What Was Lost. Following student Davian, the first book in The Licanius Trilogy sees him heading off on a dangerous journey. “It’s not long before he finds out there are dark, violent forces actively pursuing him and his friends,” Islington tells Red Alert. “So yes – there’s plenty of magic, blood and fighting throughout!” Hailing from Australia, the author spent his twenties running a tech start-up before he returned to his teenhood passion for writing. He started scribbling The Shadow Of What Was Lost on his 30th birthday and, five years later, it’s finally hitting shelves, with Islington aiming to…

out 24 Mar 2017 Meet Jason (Dacre Montgomery), here eyeing the smashed windscreen of a car we’re led to believe he played a nice game of piñata with. The Losers’ Club visit a restricted area and discover what looks like a downed spaceship containing multi-coloured asteroid crystals. Jason tests out his new powers by leaping over a ravine. Then suggests the others try, too, which Billy (RJ Cyler) isn’t too happy about. Cue what looks like one heck of a catfight as Rita whisks Kimberly out of bed and starts slamming her around like a rag doll. Now he has to matriculate with “all these weirdos and criminals” (his pa’s words), having landed in a Losers’ Club for juvenile delinquents. “Something happened up there, okay!” Jason has his Peter Parker…

Back in 1990, Mark Frost was responsible for co-creating one of TV’s weirdest and most wonderful programmes. Along with David Lynch, his Twin Peaks not only redefined the episodic format of television, but earned a cult following so ardent, it’s no surprise the show’s making a comeback in 2017, over two decades after it was unceremoniously cancelled by a network that didn’t understand what it had. Now, just ahead of the show’s longawaited third season – coming to Sky Atlantic in 2017 – Frost has written a new book, The Secret History Of Twin Peaks. He’s taking it on tour, and on the Bath leg he’ll be interviewed by SFX, at a special event with Topping & Company Booksellers in the city’s Christ Church: Mark Frost Uncovers The Secret History…

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ruby Rose and Mackenzie Davis are all up for roles in Deadpool 2. Director Tim Miller has exited the film though. Doctor Who and Mr Men are getting a book mash-up, with four new volumes out next spring. Gollancz is set to release a neverbefore-seen David Gemmell novel,Rhyming Rings. Barbarella is returning to comics in 2017 with a new series from Dynamite Entertainment. “I saw the trailer for Rogue One a while ago and I was like, ‘I want to do that,’” says Joss Whedon. Give this man a lightsaber now! Donald Glover has been confirmed to play Lando Calrissian in the untitled 2018 Han Solo Star Wars Story. JRR Tolkien’s Beren And Lúthien is being published in 2017, 100 years after he wrote it. AMC has…

RED DWARF XI Rob Perry, Facebook Episode one felt clunky and more concerned with the sci-fi elements than character comedy, like a series seven episode. But after episode two things settled into a series three/four vibe and it had me roaring with laughter. Kirsty Leanne, Facebook It’s not quite at its height, but still very funny, and superior to the bad old days of series seven and eight. Seb Jowett, Facebook More laughs per show than most sitcoms manage per series. Christopher Dowson, Facebook It can never be what it was – a show about the last human trying not to go mad in deep space. It lacks the humanity and creativity. Now it’s just another sci-fi comedy. SFX Er, just another sci-fi comedy? Which one are you thinking of?…

As it faces the future, Chinese society is witnessing rapid development and change, with risk and hope coexisting, and opportunities and challenges. Such an environment is fertile soil for the development of science fiction, and has contributed to the genre’s meteoric growth in this country. Like a mirror, science fiction reflects China’s development. In the science fiction of the 20th century, China played a peripheral role in the future. Back then, there were no Chinese superheroes. Even in the Chinese reader’s mind, the future of the world and the fate of humankind depended on the superpowers – the United States and the USSR – rather than China. But as China’s modernisation gains pace, Chinese readers have started to believe that their country can play – will play – a leading…

The Reality Bomb Doctor Who, “Journey’s End” For epic scale it’s hard to beat Davros’s suicidal scheme to use a planet-sized Dalek spacestation plus 26 stolen planets (and one stolen moon!) to transmit an electromagnetic cancelling wave capable of wiping out the entire universe (and disintegrating Gita off EastEnders). The Halo Array Halo videogames This network of seven ring-shaped artificial worlds, each 10,000 km across and separated by thousands of light years, is capable of wiping out all sentient life in the Milky Way via the superluminal conveyance of a burst of cross-phased super-massive neutrinos. Try saying that after a couple of gins. Warworld The DC universe In a textbook case of nominative determinism, alien race the Warzoons created this artificial satellite bristling with laser-cannons and nuclear missiles, operated mentally…

I’ve spent the last two and a half years with Darth Vader in my head. In fact, I realised about halfway through writing Star Wars: Darth Vader that, unless I’m forgetting someone, I’ve written more actual-in-canon Darth Vader dialogue than any other individual in history. I’m not sure if that makes me qualified to say why he’s such an enduring icon of a villain. I actually suspect that it may make me the person least qualified to argue that. You ask anyone who writes truly bad people how do they write truly bad people, you’re almost certain to get an identical answer: I don’t write truly bad people. No one thinks they’re a villain. Everyone’s a hero of their own story. Due to the aforementioned two and a half years…

There are some amazing artefacts on display in Star Wars Identities, but how much Star Wars stuff do you have that fans haven’t seen yet? There’s things that we’d love to be able to tour around the world, but they’re just too fragile to do so. We rely on a smaller subset of artefacts – often props and models – that are more durable or more iconic. Then we have to balance out the needs of the casual museum goer who will be more flexible about what they see, and the dedicated Star Wars fans. So we’re always trying to add in a few items that maybe are not seen very often. With Identities we have a few things that have never been on the road before. Some of the…

People are really hungering for intelligent sci-fi,” says Dan Levine, producer of first contact tale Arrival. “We’ve had Interstellar, Gravity, The Martian. It seems every year there is that one film that really pushes the boundaries. And as huge fans of sci-fi we’re just thrilled to be in that conversation.” Conversation? It’s an illuminating choice of word. Arrival is all about conversation: language, communication, meaning. And that’s a rare thing, given first dates between mankind and extra-terrestrials rarely end well on the big screen. While other alien encounter movies revel in death ray diplomacy and tactical nuclear trash talk, leaping to DEFCON 1 at the speed of a Roland Emmerich adrenaline surge, Arrival asks “Why can’t we just put our action sequences aside and listen to one another?” It’s an…

The term Ken Liu applies to his own fiction is “silkpunk”. It’s a way, he says, to describe a take on epic fantasy that “has a new aesthetic”, one “based on both technology and magic” and rooted in “the classic antiquity of East Asia”, the deep history of countries such as China, Japan and South Korea. “The technology grammar is based on traditional East Asian engineering practice,” he tells SFX during a whistle stop tour of the UK, “which is very flexible, very organic and based on bio-mimicry, so you’ve got these airships that pulsate, like jellyfish, and you’ve got soaring battle kites, like eagles, and you’ve got these underwater boats that flex and swim like whales.” It’s an aesthetic Liu brings to bear in his new novel, The Wall…

THE STORY BEHIND THE SF AND FANTASY OF YESTERYEAR 1986 The Fly’s journey to the screen began in the early 1980s, after screenwriter Charles Edward “Chuck” Pogue had returned from England, where he had just written two Sherlock Holmes films, starring Ian Richardson. Pogue hooked up with a young producer named Stuart Cornfeld, today co-producer and business partner of Ben Stiller. They pitched Twentieth Century Fox a remake of The Fly, a 1958 B-movie starring David Hedison (later to play Felix Leiter in Live And Let Die and Licence Kill) and horror icon Vincent Price. Beginning with the mysterious death of a scientist in a hydraulic press and his wife’s confession of murder, the film uses flashbacks to tell the tale of a terrible science accident that transforms its hero…

RELEASED 24 NOVEMBER 12A | 106 minutes Director Makoto Shinkai Cast Ryûnosuke Kamiki, Mone Kamishiraishi, Masami Nagasawa, Etsuko Ichihara At the time of writing, this animated movie is the ninth highest-grossing film in Japanese history, a success that has earned its director, Makoto Shinkai, comparisons to Hayao Miyazaki. Flattering, obviously; yet Your Name is not a Studio Ghibli film. It’s more grounded, more Young Adult, more risqué and funny. It follows Taki and Mitsuha, two teenage strangers divided by distance (Taki in Tokyo, Mitsuha in a small rural town), but brought together when they start waking up in each other’s bodies. This, as you can imagine, is an education about the opposite sex, with Taki taking full advantage of his new-found breasts — an initially off-putting gag that gets funnier…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 99 minutes | Also VOD Director Steven Shainberg Cast Noomi Rapace, Michael Chiklis, Kerry Bishé, Lesley Manville Rupture marks the directorial return of Steven Shainberg, last seen 10 years ago with terrible Diane Arbus biopic Fur, but best known for his bold 2002 spank-’em-up Secretary. As you’d expect from an idiosyncratic indie auteur, it’s one weird-ass film — a sci-fi hostage horror fuelled by off-kilter mood and mystery. The victim is Renee (Noomi Rapace), an everyday mother kidnapped by a strange band of scientists. Terrified, she’s taken to an underground bunker, where they attempt to terrify her even further – playing on her greatest fear, spiders. It’s here that Rupture is at its best – when building a sense of creepiness and confusion. Who are…

RELEASED 21 November (Blu-ray/DVD ) 14 November (download) 2016 | 12 | 4K Blu-ray/Blu-ray 3D/ Blu-ray/DVD /download/VOD Director Justin Lin Cast Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg We’re now well over seven years into Paramount’s mission to reboot the Star Trek movie franchise, and it’s pretty clear the Enterprise crew are no longer flying at maximum warp. The energy, fun and sense of adventure that made JJ Abrams’s first movie such a refreshing antidote to run-of-the-mill blockbusters now feel like a distant memory – Star Trek Beyond seems rather happier recycling old tropes than boldly going where no one’s gone before. That’s not to say it’s a bad movie – there certainly isn’t anything in Beyond as infuriating as the Wrath Of Khan cover version that…

EXTRAS  RELEASED OUT NOW! 2016 | 18 | Blu-ray/DVD/download/VOD Director Nicolas Winding Refn Cast Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee  If The Neon Demon were projected onto the walls of the Tate Modern it would make a beautiful piece of motion art. As a film with an apparent narrative it’s less successful. Possibly after digesting Dennis Pennis’s bon mot, “In any other job if you walk around like a drugcrazed zombie you get the sack, but in the fashion industry you get a multi-million-dollar cosmetic contract,” 16-year-old Jesse (Elle Fanning) moves to Los Angeles, and runs into bitchy models, egotistical designers and a strange lesbian stylist, who may actually be the biggest threat. Is it horror? Is it sci-fi? Kind of, because Refn creates another world here, strikingly…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1989 | 18 | Blu-ray/DVD Director Michele Soavi Cast Hugh Quarshie, Tomas Arana, Feodor Chaliapin Jr Helmed by Dario Argento’s regular assistant director, this batsarse Italian horror’s main accomplishment is to locate its pneumatic drill suicide and goat demon-humping in Budapest’s Matthias Church, a stunning example of 14th century gothic. True, the most outlandish sequences were shot on a soundstage reproduction, but you still wonder how the hell they got away with it. The plot, such as it is, sees an infection of evil released after someone uncorks the mass grave of witches on which the building was built. Cue some eye-poppingly sacrilegious sequences – like an orgiastic tableau of writhing corpses rising from the church’s floor. Shame the work-of-manyhands script is such a mess. The…

EXTRAS  RELEASED OUT NOW! 1951 | PG | DVD  There’s plenty to scoff at in this B-movie, in which an alien resembling a bloke in a papier mâché Victor Meldrew mask visits Orkney – chief among them the dire accents. But there are points of interest too: threatened by a scientist to gain his secrets, the visitor seems more sinned against than sinning. And director Edgar G Ulmer conjures a gloomy gothic atmosphere on fog-shrouded sets recycled from 1948’s Joan Of Arc.  Extras Trailer.…

A Lad Insane EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1976 | 18 | Blu-ray/DVD Director Nicolas Roeg Cast David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark, Buck Henry Nicolas Roeg’s cult classic casts an outsider’s eye on ’70s America. His viewpoint character is a literal alien, Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie, in his first screen role). Newton has arrived on Earth in the hope of finding a source of water for his barren home planet. Instead, he finds – and quickly succumbs to – a surfeit of booze, sex and TV, before the military take an interest… Both funny ha ha and funny peculiar, Roeg’s film is a disorientating experience, its plot minimal and at times opaque. It’s unquestionably dominated by Bowie, with the director coaxing an astonishing performance from his star. Glassy-eyed and…

Ant Rap ETRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1954 | PG | Blu-ray & DVD (dual format) Director Gordon Douglas Cast James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon BLU-RAY DEBUT Halfway through this atomic age monster movie there’s a short real-life nature film about ants and how they operate. It’s fascinating, arguably more so than the main feature surrounding it, and it also rather shows up the movie’s ant puppetry. Harsh perhaps, because Them! is a solid sci-fi suspenser. But, crikey, there are more meetings in it than a lawyers’ annual jamboree – talk is cheap, and giant ants are expensive, presumably. It’s a good 27 minutes before we see outsized mandibles, after the initial investigations into a ransacked store and a battered corpse found in the desert. When it turns out that…

Inglorious Bastards EXTRAS RELEASED 14 NOV EMBER 2016 | 18 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Showrunners David Benioff, DB Weiss Cast Emilia Clarke, Lena Headey, Kit Harington, Peter Dinklage, Maisie Williams “I have had more shit thrown at me than any other actor on this show,” says Kit Harington in one of the behind-the-scenes documentaries on this set. He’s referring to actual shit (as in mud, blood and god only knows what else), but he could be speaking psychologically as well, given the crap the back-from-the-dead Jon Snow goes through this year. This is most notable in 2016’s finest hour of telly, “Battle Of The Bastards”, which combines the fight at the start of Gladiator with every battle from The Lord Of The Rings, to stunning effect. Elsewhere there’s a satisfying sense that…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 112 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Pablo Hidalgo Publisher Harper Design The Star Wars galaxy is so vast and complex that its “history” can feel like a living, breathing thing. This in-universe book – subtitled A History Of Persuasive Art In The Galaxy – recounts decades of turmoil in the Republic, Trade Federation, Empire, Rebellion, New Republic and First Order as if they actually happened. It’s tied together by art that skilfully riffs on various styles of propaganda from 20th century Earth – posters with slogans like “Loose Lips Bring Down Starships” and “Remember Alderaan: Never Forget”. The designs are almost uniformly brilliant, showing an ingenious knack for twisting the medium to mesh seamlessly with the iconography of a galaxy far, far away. The words are slightly less…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 416 pages | Hardback Author Jonathan Rigby Publisher Signum Books Following 2000’s English Gothic and 2007’s American Gothic, horror maven Jonathan Rigby’s latest surveys European horror cinema – and a strange, wild landscape it is, thanks to less restraint when it comes to sex and violence, and a disregard for logical plotting. Rigby lavishes special attention on 113 titles, but also discusses general trends and other minor films. All the expected milestones are covered, with names like Bava, Argento, Franco and Fulci looming large, but he also shines a light on obscurities. An erudite man, he’s fond of using paintings or poems as reference points. He has a mellifluous prose style and a sophisticated vocabulary, replete with terms like “susurration” and “stertorous”. If there’s a weakness it’s…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 448 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Jacquelyn Benson Publisher Headline Classic adventure stories by the likes of H Rider Haggard and Edgar Wallace are problematic to say the least; nowadays the thrill of the tale tends to be spoiled by attitudes towards most people who are not white and/or male. The Smoke Hunter feels like an attempt to deliver those old-fashioned thrills in a more inclusive fashion. A lot of this 1890s-set story feels very familiar. As suffragette rebel Eleanora Mallory heads into the Honduran jungle with rugged American Adam Bates, following a mysterious map, things feel rather Romancing The Stone. And Bates, who conceals a top-notch university education and expertise in Mayan history under that buff exterior, has more than a whiff of Indiana Jones about him.…

Pick of the paperbacks this month: Tricia Sullivan’s OCCUPY ME ( , 10 November, Gollancz). It centres on Pearl, an angel with wings that exist in another dimension, who wakes up in a tip with no memory of how she got there, finds work with a secretive organisation, and is pulled into a conspiracy involving big oil, time travel, and a mysterious briefcase. We said: “Sullivan has a talent for describing things in unusual ways, and the characters are a great strength. But the story is confusing, confused and oftentimes garbled.” Set six years before The Force Awakens, the events of STAR WARS: BLOODLINE ( , 1 December, Arrow) are integral to the new mythology. Centring on Leia, Claudia Gray’s tie-in reveals plenty about how a foundering New Republic spawned…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 176 pages | Hardback Author Ian Nathan Publisher Aurum Does being a fan of something make you less critical of it, or more? It’s a pertinent question where this book is concerned. A lavishly presented survey of Tim Burton’s CV, it features hundreds of colour photographs, and feels very much designed as a gift for the Burton fan in your life. Some of the images are oddly chosen – what value does the poster for Superman: The Movie add? – but mostly, it looks splendid. Given a limited wordcount (more than half the book is pictures), Ian Nathan crams in a lot as he rattles through Burton’s career. However, the tone is often too gushing, too eager to laud Burton’s genius. Maybe some fans want this –…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 405 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Kim Newman Publisher Titan Books In many way, Angels Of Music is classic Kim Newman: a melange of fictional characters, and a story composed of a series of shorter stories building up to a climax. Because of the way it ranges through time, it’s probably most akin to 2000’s Seven Stars in that respect. It’s set in Paris, with Erik, the opera ghost, running his own agency, a sort of Edwardian/Victorian Charlie’s Angels. There are always three Angels, and over time they are replaced – and so in each story, a different trio of Angels takes the lead. It gives Newman a chance to weave fictional characters, both forgotten and still-recognised, into his narrative. The time frame is one that Newman seems to…

As ever, there’s a broad field of other books out. It’d be remiss not to flag EUROPE IN WINTER (out now, Solaris), third in Dave Hutchinson’s Awardsnomination-hoovering Fractured Europe Sequence, or Ken Liu’s THE WALL OF STORMS (out now, Head Of Zeus), book two of his Dandelion Dynasty series. Sadly we were unable to bring you reviews of Mark Frost’s THE SECRET HISTORY OF TWIN PEAKS (out now, Macmillan) or Rogue One tie-in STAR WARS: CATALYST (17 November, Century) due to stern embargoes – but we will next issue! Readers with superhero-mad nippers should check out IRON MAN: THE GAUNTLET (out now, Egmont) by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer, first in a new Marvel Fiction range suitable for ages eight and up. Turning to non-fiction, you’ll need sturdy shelving and…

Mad Bats RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher DC Comics Writer Scott Snyder Artist John Romita Jr ISSUES 1-3 Thanks to the brilliant Rebirth, there are a lot of Batman books on shelves right now – so many it can be tough to choose which one to buy. The main Batman book? Justice League? Detective Comics? Maybe one of the spin-offs. Batman Beyond? Batman ’66? Gotham Academy? Actually, what about the villains? Deathstroke? Harley Quinn? Catwoman? You get the point. To buy them all, you’d need to take a second mortgage out on Wayne Manor. Thank DC, then, for putting out All-Star Batman, which fulfils the promise of its title by putting writer Scott Snyder and artist John Romita Jr together, allowing them to make full use of the enormous Gotham City sandbox.…