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Body Work and Night Witch

3/5. *trumpets* The first graphic novels to appear on this here reading blog! These are the first two completed interstitial graphic stories set between the Rivers of London books, as read to me alternately by [personal profile] axiom_of_stripe and [personal profile] gnomad. They were pretty easy to read out loud, for the curious, given that they are dialogue-heavy and drawn in what was described to me as photorealistic style. So the panels are what they are showing, and not a lot else. Good for trying to be mainstream, I guess, though I do wish from an artistic point of view they'd made other choices, like giving the Nightingale point-of-view sections a different style.

Things that please me: Nightingale wanders around having one-sided conversations with the dog, bless; Molly is a scary motherfucker; we get more insight into the way Nightingale thinks through problems (for better or worse, lol, use your phone, child); we get roughly equal quantities of Peter nudity with lady nudity.

So I liked these, but I continue to be vaguely annoyed that they are included by reference in the books now. IDK, something about that bugs me, and I can't figure out whether I'm being ridiculous about it. I think it's that I kinda feel about different kinds of media the way some people feel about the food on their plate: they are different things and they should not touch!

Something we didn't know going in – the single issue comics have extra material included, like interviews and historical background, that were inexplicably left out of the printed trade paperbacks.
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The Hanging Tree

4/5. Book six, delayed but worth the wait. First because it's good, second because it might actually have gotten me into these books as a fandom. It's been coming, but I wasn't quite there before.

Anyway, about the book. It's thematically expanding on familiar ground in that its concerned with faces, real and metaphorical. Spoilers ).

This is not as much a Tyburn book as the title might leave one to hope, but she is there. I continue to really enjoy what she and Peter are textually and subtextually arguing about. On the surface it's purely political. Underneath…it reads to me like an argument on the different modes of being black and being a force for change in a white institution. Because there are different modes of doing that, and I don't think either of them actively dislike the ways the other has chosen. They're just orthogonal and, sometimes, at cross-purposes.

Anyway, predictions. I've said it before and I still think that we're heading towards something semi-apocalyptic, at least on a local level. If the Folly is still physically standing at the end of this, I will be shocked. Also, Peter, thank you for finally stopping to follow the same chain of speculative logic that [personal profile] gnomad and I did after, like, book four.

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