Book Review: Trudeau and Doonesbury

For more than 50 years, Doonesbury has helped drive the national conversation. The first comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize, Garry Trudeau’s sprawling narrative featuring a host of beloved characters has reflected America back to itself, capturing the highlights and lowlights of American politics and culture with wit and penetrating insight. And as Doonesbury’s characters aged alongside their creator, Trudeau became one of the preeminent chroniclers of the Baby Boom generation.

Biographer Joshua Kendall tells the story of the cartoonist and what drove him to put pen to paper. He traces Trudeau’s boyhood in the Adirondack Mountains, his teenage angst in prep school, and his formative years at Yale, where he began drawing his iconic strip. And he shows the changing world it reflected; Doonesbury began appearing in papers nationwide in 1970, and big events, from Watergate to the the war in Vietnam, fueled its popularity and its significance.

Book Review: X-Men - Elsewhen (vol 1 of 3)

In Volume 1 of X-Men: Elsewhen, the Dark Phoenix Saga is over and Phoenix is alive?!

Diverging from the epic finale of the original storyline from 1984, X-Men: Elsewhen presents a universe where Jean Grey’s powers and intellect have been greatly reduced, and from there, everything you thought you know about the X-Men is forever changed.

John Byrne’s monumental return to the X-Men heads in entirely new and surprising directions, as the X-Men head back to the Savage Land, face their climactic adventure with the Sentinels, and contend with special guest–stars such as the Avengers and the Fantastic Four along the way. Byrne wrote and penciled every page, and inked multiple chapters of this three volume series.

Book Review: Marvels - The Novelization

This is the Marvel Universe, where the ordinary and fantastic interact daily. This is the world of Marvels—one of the most important and bestselling stories in Marvel Comics history, which Stan Lee described in his introduction to the first collected edition as “innovative, brilliantly conceived, and skillfully executed." Over 30 years later, Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’ groundbreaking comic book series Marvels gets a long-awaited novelization by Steve Darnall, author of Uncle Sam and Ross’s writing partner on the original proposal.

Marvels was a landmark series when it was first published—peeling back the curtain on Marvel’s history. It’s a story told from the perspective of an everyman character—news photographer Phil Sheldon—who chronicles a world full of costumed superhumans, providing an on-the-ground view of events in the Marvel Universe as they unfold. Darnall’s prose perfectly captures the magic of Busiek and Ross’ original story, offering insights and background previously untold in the comic book.

Book Review: A Game of Luck

The puzzling murder of a beloved teacher leaves Detroit homicide detective Sam Roma searching for answers. To her chagrin, not only does Sam have a murder to solve, she's been assigned a new homicide investigator, Tom Green, who comes with his own set of problems and challenges. As Tom makes a series of rookie mistakes, Sam wonders if she's up to mentoring a partner with personal struggles—one who she suspects is involved in departmental politics.

To top it off, Sam's personal guilt over her own history intersects with the conflicts faced by the middle school students close to the murder. She needs to navigate complicated relationships and face memoires that have haunted her for years while keeping her family's secret safe.

Book Review: The Fiction Blueprint

You have a story in your head. Maybe it’s been there for months. Years. You’ve read craft books. Watched videos. Joined writing communities. But the story stays stuck—because you don’t have a clear path from idea to finished book.

Ian Stevens walked that path nine times. Along the way, he kept notes—what worked, what didn’t, what got him unstuck when everything felt broken. Those notes became a course: The Fiction Blueprint. It covers everything from first idea to published book. 13 modules, templates, and the exact process he used.

Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced — start where you are. Go deeper when ready.

Book Review: Dirty 20

Tommy Fugue never cared for the family business. But when his fathe Big Al, aka King of the Denver Streets, assigns him the “summer job” of laundering money online, Tommy figures he can list some fake projects on FunFunder, pledge them with zombie accounts, and clean a dirty $20,000 in time for college in the fall. Unfortunately for Tommy, he’s more creative than he thought. Just as he’s about to give his father’s capos a progress report, he sees that a roleplaying game he mocked up using his mom’s old artwork has been funded to the tune of $650,000 and counting.

The only thing scarier than an angry Big Al is a Big Al that smells cash and family bonding time. Voluntold by their mercurial boss to assist, various criminals and killers help playtest and produce Tommy’s 1,000 Blades of Tergivers RPG in the hopes they can truly turn a dirty twenty into legit millions. But when Tommy realizes that being game master might help him uncover what these criminals know about his mother’s disappearance, it’s Game On.

Book Review: Next Level

In video games creativity isn't just seen – it's played – from exploring endless landscapes, to diving into character details, to immersing ourselves in unpredictable narratives. Yet these elements are often the result of procedural generation – the creative use of algorithms to design game content. Procedural generation is the secret behind some of the biggest hits in video game history, from genre-defying titles in the 1980s, to the most famous blockbusters of today.

Next Level demystifies the collection of algorithms and procedural techniques that are often as mysterious as the things they create. Written by game designer and creative AI researcher Mike Cook, it takes us on a tour of generative systems past and present, exploring how they work, the artistic uses they have in some of our favourite games and how procedural generation didn't just change how we design games, but how we think about creativity.