1989 (collected 1992) / Ecomic / 75 pages / UK
****
Gaiman & McKean's gloomy artist triptych lurches forward to the end of life for a thoughtful exploration of personal apocalypse. I vaguely remember reading this before, when I was too young and invincible for it to make an impression. Maybe I'll read it again before the end.
1997 (collected 1998) / Ecomics / 128 pages / USA
**
These increasingly daft cases of carnivorous dust mites, mischievous gremlins and confused ghosts were the last to be collected by Titan Books in the UK. They could've got another volume or two out of John Rozum's X-Files before the series was cancelled, but I guess we'd seen enough.
2000 / Ebook / 95 pages / USA
**
A balanced defence of the film for absolute psychos. In fairness, the historical parallels and murderous context you couldn't make up are begging for analysis. Once that's done, he pointlessly recaps the film to make the book thicker, as happens with most of these.
2014 / Ebook / 168 pages / USA
**
A book about an unpronounceable album of untitled songs sung in a nonsense language risks being somewhat pretentious. This writer avoids the elite music snobbery route by taking a bold and boring linguistics approach, only getting around to the music in an abstract fashion towards the end. Useful for coursework, not that language students are going to find it categorised in their section.
2015 / Ebook / 120 pages / Australia
***
Dario Argento's overwhelming sensory kaleidoscope isn't big on substance. This short book extracts what it can, though seems to spend most of its time on digressions.
