I’ve now completed the first part of Simon R. Green’s Deathstalker series, with the fifth volume, Deathstalker Destiny, and I think I’ve finally got the series pegged. If Neil Gaiman’s Sandman books are “graphic novels”, then the Deathstalker books are “non-pictorial comic books”. Superheroes in Space, in fact, complete with origin stories, angst, and everything. There’s buckets of blood galore to disguise the fact that the mayhem isn’t particularly graphic, nearly instantaneous healing, folks both bad and good who can take more punishment than a company of marines and keep fighting, super villains, implausibly brief conclusions to long-running story arcs…it’s all here, in vivid four-color prose.

It’s a lot of fun, but good sense it doesn’t make.

There’s a follow-on series of three books, starting with Deathstalker Return; I’ll be getting to it soon enough.