Only the End of the World Again

Written by: Neil Gaiman, P Craig Russell, Troy Nixey, Matthew Hollingsworth, and Sean Konot

First line: It was a bad day.

Why you should read this book: Sometimes I get the sense that Gaiman keeps a fishbowl of speculative fiction tropes behind his desk and his brainstorming method is to just pull a handful of themes out and call it a comic book. In this case, he pulled out "Cthulhu mythos" and "werewolf" and ran with it, and Troy Nixey's sweet freaky imaginative artwork carries the reader over any chasms between the two. Our hapless protagonist wakes up feeling awful (we know he's the werewolf because he throws up a dog's paw and three child-sized fingers on page two) and trapped in a Lovecraftian landscape (we know it's a Lovecraftian landscape because his landlady leaves him a note about Elder Gods on page four and is cooking three different kinds of eldritch horror in the kitchen on page five) where everyone he meets casually mentions methods for killing werewolves and raising Deep Ones from the ocean, but for a Cthulhu/werewolf mashup, it has a fairly optimistic ending.

Why you shouldn't read this book: I just didn't feel like there was enough at stake: the story is so short that we don't have a lot of opportunities to get to know or care about any of the characters before the events that might lead to their collective demise.