If you asked who I thought the best living fantasy authors are today, I’d have a tough time deciding between George Martin and Neil Gaiman. I’d go with Martin when I’m in the mood for a medieval soap opera, equal parts a history of the War of the Roses, a Martin Scorsese film, and a phone book filled with typos. He writes entertaining material, but sometimes feels a little like reading soft-core porn. Neil Gaiman also displays human sexuality in his work, but at least when I read his books, I have the luxury of not feeling creepy for reading a 15-year-old’s lesbian love scene written by a man in his sixties who looks like Santa in a sailor hat. But if Martin draws from history, Gaiman draws from mythology, giving his works a distinctively more magical feeling to them.

Just ho’ ho’ ho’-ing. Sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what kind of package you want him to give you.

Such is the case with Stardust, written to resemble an English/Celtic faerie romance. While modern fairy tales usually revolve around pixie dust and happy thoughts, benevolent, wish-granting godmothers and violent, blood-thirsty giants, traditional faerie myths are much more compact, giving the fae folk both magical skills and an overwhelming desire to skewer your spleen like a cheese cube on a toothpick.  These folk live in faerie (the same way nuns live in nunneries and fish live in fisheries), on the other side of a wall guarded by the Night’s Watch a detail of humans from the village named–in the tradition of the English to boil both their language and their food down to a simple, flavorless, unappealing mass–Wall. In a lengthy prologue, Gaiman explains that faerie is far too dangerous for mortals, so humans are forcibly kept safe on their own side of the wall and discouraged from crossing over to pick fruit or to have faerie anchor babies, the latter of which sounds like an excellent idea to Dunstan Thorne, who crosses the wall at the one time every nine years when it’s permitted to do so, not because it becomes less dangerous, but because there’s money to be made.

Dunstan attends the famous 9-year Wall Market in faerie, and encounters a beautiful young woman selling baubles, chained to her post, a slave who isn’t paid and can’t leave until the moon loses her daughter in the same week when two Mondays come together, which are terms enforced by a centuries-old woman standing guard at the door–pretty much like the standard deal for modern Wal-Mart employees, except without the blue vest. The two of them steal off into an X-rated area of faerie, and months later a basket filled with an anchor baby is left on Dunstan’s doorstop. The majority of the book follows the faerie baby on his quest to discover that teenage love is a beautiful, magical thing akin to getting one’s fingernails ripped out with pliers while jabbing a pencil in one’s eye whilst one is entirely engulfed in flames. Young Tristan offers to cross into faerie to retrieve a falling star as a testament to his love for a girl who clearly would much rather be dating the captain of the football team. Fortunately for Tristan, the fallen star happens to be a beautiful girl. However, as far as anthropomorphic gas balls go, she’s pretty popular, and since faerie is a dangerous place, they find themselves pursued by enough conflict to fill out a 200-page novel filled with elaborate illustrations on every page.

Because of its style, Stardust would be an excellent gateway drug for the fanciful, imaginative adolescent or teenager to make the transition to the hard stuff–Medieval romances written in Middle-English. It has a nice blend of traditional and more modern faerie stories that would appeal to plenty of fantasy readers, and although it does bound into acknowledgement that mammals often enjoy fornication, the material is not so extreme that it would harm any but the most fragile and delicate of readers, the kind who would probably cry outrage at having to read about sextants and sackbuts.

I read a lot of science-fiction and fantasy, but sometimes I wonder if all those epic battles, thrilling worlds and imaginative scenarios might just be a little too exciting. Dangerously thought-provoking. So sometimes, to alleviate all the strain that comes from wonder, creativity and awe, I have to dive right into your plain, old-fashioned recreational reading like a lengthy government document. I tell you, there’s nothing like a tedious analysis of our nation’s security capabilities to make me feel relaxed, settle my blood pressure, and make my brain activity flatline, putting me into that near coma-like trance that tells me there’s no longer any danger of any of those deadly, vicarious thrills that so commonly lay up readers in hospital beds, where they have naught to do but read, thus creating an inescapable cycle. Fortunately, for the time-efficient reader who may not have the time to read through 592 pages of tedious analysis, or for those of us who just want to spice up our recommendations for improved national resistance to terror with a few colorful pictures, I can recommend The 9/11 Report: The Graphic…uh…novel?

So not technically a graphic novel, this adaptation of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks’ epic dissertation on the September 11th terrorist attacks challenges everything we’ve ever thought about our ability to use the phrase “epic dissertation.” Produced by Marvel Comics veterans Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon, the book distills information into a 129-page summary that makes it easier to swallow, much in the same way that a can of WD-40 makes it easier to swallow a big chunk of asphalt. It makes a sort of sense, though, that this story would find its way into a comic book, what with the popular culture immortalizing the fire fighters and police officers as godlike super-heroes who can evacuate tall buildings before they’re a simple mound, and the cartoonishly evil scheming on the part of bin Laden and his goons that set up a rather accurate comparison to super-villains (except, well…successful). However, the fact that Jacobson is noted for creating the character Richie Rich, prominent child of wealth hoarders who has a kind, heart of gold, makes me wonder if there wasn’t anyone with a stronger grasp of realism to explain the problems faced by America. You know, like Stephen Colbert.

I joke, but the adaptation is rather artfully done, opening with an timeline of the horrifically unsettling events occurring on all four planes before slipping into the horrifically boring events of the analysis that followed. Not exactly having characters to follow, we learn a lot about individual terrorists, although they mention names as though they were tired of Microsoft Word judging their ability to spell, and so identities are virtually indistinguishable–you know, the way most Americans view anyone from non-English-speaking countries. I went in expecting something ridiculously propaganda-laden, but except for a single panel that depicts George W. Bush as a tall, powerful man with broad shoulders, a pointed jaw, and a sharp, military crew cut, I didn’t feel like any political bias seeped into their interpretation, and I have to say I enjoyed the drawing of Bill Clinton that looked like Phillip Seymour Hoffman, but not as much as Karl Rove’s depiction as the love child of Peter Pettigrew and the fat kid from the Goonies…drawn as though he appeared in a Ren and Stimpy cartoon.

Obviously written as a way to introduce–I imagine–high school students to either political science and non-fiction reading, the book has some flaws. As most parts lack plot or even at times any sequence of events, most of the drawings end up being random, unnamed, middle-aged white men, with about 10% of them turning out to look like Bill O’Reilly, standing around staring smugly out of the page as though they’re waiting for the reader to trigger an elaborate prank they set up. Also, while they do a good job of distilling the information into smaller paragraphs and explanations, they often took out text verbatim, without realizing that a subtle depiction of Han Solo in a terrorist lineup doesn’t make the language easier to understand, so the report still comes off as drier than Ann Coulter’s vagina on a Saharan sand dune next to a drawing of a mirage. Still, I’d much rather read 129 pages–which I managed to do in less than a day–than 592, and I think there’s some important stuff in here for both high school students and adults. For example, did you know that the commission recommended America adopt a foreign policy based on empathy, where we pump funding into foreign education and try to assuage some of the things that pissed off terrorists in the first place? Spoiler alert: we didn’t do that.

But really, more government documents need to be written using comic sans.