Reviewing the Mail: Week of April 27, 2024

One book this week: I was ordering some other things from that hegemonic Internet retailer, happened to check my wishlist, and realized the finale of this series was actually published. So now I have it on hand:

Ralph Azham: The Dying Flame is the fourth book of the series - at least as published in English. In the original French, this is a series of twelve album-length bande desinées published in the decade after 2010. The American publisher, Super Genius - which I think is the adult, or maybe Eurocomics, arm of the Papercutz kids-book juggernaut - combined those into three-book omnibuses. The first three are Black Are the Stars, The Land of the Blue Demons, and You Can't Stop a River.

See my posts on the earlier books for more details, but, briefly, this is a secondary-world fantasy series, with a lot of the same tone, concerns, and style as the Dungeon books Trondheim writes with Joann Sfar. Ralph himself was the "Chosen One" - which turned out to be both not really a good thing, and not as singular as it sounded. As usual with Trondheim, it's gotten a lot more complicated over the course of the nine books before this volume - but a real ending is promised here, and I'm interested to see how he wraps it up.