Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

I recently went back and re-read the entire iZombie comic book series for the first time since the TV adaptation launched. If you only know the TV show, it’s very different, though they both share a similar quirky not-quite-horror, not-quite-comedy tone.

The show took the basic premise: a woman in the Pacific Northwest becomes a zombie, but can continue living as a human as long as she eats brains frequently enough. She picks up flashes of memories from the brains she eats, sometimes with a compulsion to resolve unfinished business.

The comic deals with supernatural rather than biochemical zombies, with werewolves (well, a were-terrier anyway), ghosts, vampires and more. It starts off in the mystery/monster genre just a bit darker than Scooby Doo/Buffy level, with a dash of secret agent intrigue, slowly building to a Lovecraftian cosmic horror cataclysm with a side of Michael Moorcock’s eternal champion (whose expy, here, is a minor character at best).

Here, Gwen gets her brains working at an eco-friendly cemetery (no embalming!). Her best friends are a ghost who died in the 1960s and a were-terrier. She barely remembers her family, who think she’s still dead, as her pre-zombie life keeps fading.

It’s full of off-the-wall concepts that they just run with. There’s a group of vampires who run a paintball outfit, draining customers out in the woods just enough to leave them woozy instead of leaving a trail of bodies. (Naturally, the story is called “uVampire.”) An artificial construct who’s building her own Frankenstein-brand monster for nefarious purposes. A secret international order of monster-hunters, and an even more secret group of monsters working as government agents (under the alias of the Dead Presidents). A diner proprietor rumored to have been either a hit woman or the original model for a popular doll line. And a several-millenia-old former mummy with a mysterious agenda involving Gwen.

Early on, Roberson establishes a remarkably simple cosmology to tie all the monsters together: the idea that every living being has both an “oversoul” and “undersoul” (roughly corresponding to intellect and emotions, or conscious and subconscious, or superego and id).

• Dead body where the oversoul sticks around: Vampire. Still intelligent, wants blood to make up for the missing undersoul.
• Only the undersoul? Now you’ve got a zombie, who wants brains.
• Disembodied oversoul? Ghost.
• Disembodied undersoul? Poltergeist.
• Human possessed by an animal’s undersoul? Werewolf etc.

I’d forgotten how much I liked Mike and Laura Allred’s art here. Their clean style makes for a great contrast with the monsters and occasional gore, and helps keep it on the lighter side of the genre. And seeing it again reminded me I should look up some of their other work!

The 28-issue series is available as a 4-volume paperback set or a massive 1-volume omnibus, as well as digitally.

This story looks at a different corner of the Hainish universe than usual. Too far for instant communication. Centuries of time dilation instead of decades. Completely cut off from anyone you might have known back home. What kind of person would willingly go so far beyond the known worlds that they could never even talk to anyone back home?

Much as Larry Niven suggests only someone who doesn’t need social interaction can be a solo ramjet pilot, Le Guin suggests only someone who can’t deal with society would be willing to take what’s effectively a one-way trip.

A crew made up of people with varying neuroses and phobias finds a planet full of plant life, but with no sign that animals ever evolved there. The center of it all is one crewmember who’s an empath, able to feel others’ emotions, but who doesn’t get along with anyone.

It’s an interesting psychological exploration of the crew, the relationship between empathy and fear, how they deal with each other and the planet, how they break down individually and as a group, how that changes from the confines of the ship to life on a forest planet, and how the planet reacts to them. And it’s an interesting take on large-scale plant (and planet) sentience, predating works like Bios (or Avatar) by decades and contemporary with the development of the Gaia hypotheis.

Wait, Autism?

But it’s hard to read it today because the empath’s abilities hinge on him having been “cured” of “autism,” and he’s also a complete a–hole when he’s around other people.

On the plus side, it’s probably the oldest thing I’ve read that posits autism can be a form of hyper empathy, with people withdrawing into themselves because they’re overwhelmed. In this case, he’s always been science-fiction-level empathic, but he no longer withdraws into himself as a defense against overstimulation.

On the minus side, his being so hostile aligns with an actual stereotype of autistic people that still causes prejudice against them (and gives some genuinely awful people a disingenuous excuse: “oh, I’m not really racist/sexist/whatever, I just have Asperger’s!”) And the term is consistently used in the old, extremely-withdrawn sense. Language changes, and the meaning has broadened since 1970, which is why we talk about an autism spectrum these days.

Reading in 2025, though, with RFK Jr. putting conspiracy theories about “autism” front and center in government health policy? It’s hard to ignore that this old sense of the word is what he’s pretending is on the rise (even though there isn’t) so he can blame vaccines, or Tylenol, or whatever supports his goals this week. Instead of accepting that there’s just a wider variety of human neurology than we used to be willing to admit, and that we’re getting better at recognizing it.

So it’s kind of like reading the “wicked as a woman’s magic” parts of early Earthsea, only without follow-up works to reconsider it.

Collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Buffalo Gals, and The Found and the Lost.

I use Windows, macOS, Linux and Android on a regular basis, and these are the web browsers I like better than Chrome, Edge and Safari. (I don’t have any iOS devices, so I can’t really speak to how well these run on there.)

Recommended

Vivaldi

I’ve been quite happy with Vivaldi for the past few years. It’s the spiritual successor to the original Opera browser, built on Chromium, and they’ve committed to not cluttering up your experience with “AI” (though you can clutter it up with power-user features if you want). Vivaldi runs on Windows, macOS and Linux (on both x86_64 and ARM) as well as Android and iOS. The Android version is noticeably faster than Firefox.

Orion

Orion Browser has been quite nice as well. It’s more advanced than Safari, and can run extensions made for Safari, Chrome or Firefox, but tries to keep a simpler, less cluttered design. Currently it’s only on macOS (and maybe iOS, I forget), but they’re working on a Linux version.

I should add that I don’t have a problem with Safari, I just usually want a bit more than it can provide, like the ability to sync with my non-Apple devices.

Firefox Variants: Waterfox and Zen

Mozilla…seems to be flailing about these days, chasing ad revenue and investor-friendly buzzwords. While I still like Firefox overall, I haven’t been happy with the direction it’s been going.

Waterfox has been solid: it’s basically Firefox minus Mozilla, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as Android. The macOS version is universal, the Windows version is x86_64-native but runs well under emulation on ARM systems, and the Linux version is x86_64-only. The Android version is slower than Vivaldi, but it can run extensions.

I also like Zen Browser, which is trying to build “a calmer internet” experience. Zen is sort of like rebuilding Arc using Firefox instead of Chromium, and runs on all major desktop platforms.

Special Use Cases

Privacy

LibreWolf (desktop) and IronFox (Android) both use Firefox as a base and make a bunch of trade-offs to make it harder for sites to track you. Tor Browser is the gold standard, and bounces your traffic around the world to hide where you’re connecting from…but that also slows things down a lot.

Slow hardware

Falkon has a decent balance between capability and leanness. It mainly on Linux, but if you’re running on old or low spec hardware, Linux is going to run a lot better on it than Windows anyway. And then there’s the extremely minimalist Dillo, which doesn’t support JavaScript but is blazing fast at loading and displaying web pages.

Avoid

Edge tries very, very hard to lock you into Microsoft’s services as thoroughly as possible.

Chrome tries very, very hard to lock you into Google’s services as thoroughly as possible.

Brave has experimented with some interesting tech, but it’s wrapped up in the crypto/venture capital/exploitation side of Silicon Valley.

Opera seems to just be chasing buzzwords these days. I much prefer Vivaldi, which picked up where the old Opera left off.

Dia feels like a chatbot with a web browser bolted on, rather than the reverse. I haven’t tried OpenAI’s Atlas, but from what I’ve read, they dispensed with the web part as much as they could.

More

I’ve tried and reviewed a lot of web browsers over the past year, if you’re curious about what didn’t make my best / worst list here.

I like birds, but I’m not really a birder (checks page 135). Oh. Um. Yeah. Never mind.

*ahem*

It’s a delightful collection of comedic “definitions” of various terms one might encounter while watching birds or interacting with people who do. For instance “American Robin” refers to a machine that transforms worms into loud songs at 4AM right outside your window. Or identifying owls by their calls (the ones that sound like owls aren’t owls at all, they’re mourning doves.) It’s filled with the same style of humor and illustration that Rosemary Mosco brings to her occasional comic strip Bird and Moon, and worth keeping out after you’re done so you can always flip to a random page for a laugh.

The best piece of live-action Marvel I’ve seen in years, and the best Marvel TV since the first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones.

The twists and turns, betrayals and tragedies grow organically through a (rightfully) mistrustful group that’s been forced to work together, first by Agatha’s bullying, then by necessity. The multiple variations on “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” tie it all together, and it’s a gut punch when you finally learn where the song came from. And where the road came from, for that matter.

Agatha All Along is as effective as Poker Face and The Sixth Sense at showing you an accurate but incomplete view of what’s going on, letting you fill in or gloss over the gaps, and then flashing back later with more context that completely changes your understanding of what it meant. Especially in the episodes that focus on Patti LuPone’s character, who experiences her life out of sequence Billy Pilgrim-style, and on the teen who (for magical reasons) cannot be named, when you find out who he is and what was going on outside the illusions in the first episode. Lorna Wu’s 1970s rock version of the song is another great example: what she was trying to do with it, what happens with that goal, and the final twist of why it hadn’t worked.

The whole cast is solid, and Kathryn Hahn especially is fascinating to watch, giving Agatha a huge range. There are times when you feel sorry for her, there are times when you like her, and there are times when you want her to just die and go to hell already and give everyone else a break. I’d been apprehensive before picking up the first episode, since while I really liked her as “Agnes” in WandaVision, once she revealed herself she kind of turned into a one-note cackling Wicked Witch of the West(view). That’s shattered right from the start.

The series stands mostly on its own. You don’t need to have watched any other Marvel shows or films, and while it helps to have seen WandaVision, they recap the important parts. The season is a complete story, too, though there’s an epilogue that sets up a possible direction for a second season (which probably isn’t happening) with the surviving characters.