Ursula

We Called Them Giants is a graphic novel with text by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans, and lettering by Clayton Cowles.

Lori is a foster kid. She knows that sooner or later, everyone who says they care about her is going to disappear. When her adoptive parents vanish, along with almost every other person on the planet, she has the cold comfort of validation.

There are a few people left, including Annette, a friend from school with relentless Girl Guide spirit, and the Dogs, a group of stragglers who instantly form a postapocalyptic-style gang. There are also giants. Stephanie Hans renders them in flames of red or green, something beautiful and intense beside the grayed-out cartoonishness of the other characters.

The question, of course, is whether Lori is right. Can she trust anyone else? I can report that the answer is sometimes yes but sometimes also no, and that tension is where the story really shines. If "Can people ever be OK to each other?" is a question you've been turning over in your own mind, this might be a good fable for a dark November.

(I read this as a Netgalley ARC. The US release was November 12.)

aelfgyfu asked for a post about gaming. I'm assuming that, like any right-minded individual, she means tabletop RPGs. At the moment I don't have a game going (glasseye's campaign seems to have succumbed to the dual pressures of school and players who insist on gallivanting round the world). I keep meaning to run a couple of sessions of GURPS Goblins, but this involves either doing a bunch of arithmetic so my players can make characters without ripping my single set of books apart or feeling their heads explode, or else figuring out how to port the entire setting to a less arithmetically demanding system without losing the basic idea of a character built entirely from disadvantages.

cattifer and I have talked a little bit about doing a D&D-themed webcomic. I've been thinking a little bit about how one might set up a literal dwarven point of view, with humans disconcerting and monolithic.