The wind rendered most of the short speeches inaudible despite amplification. Many of the speakers weren’t used to holding a microphone, and their words were lost. Hana’s older brother, who looked his neater, healthier twin, told a few anecdotes about his childhood. His lawyer, Maxine Dixon, gave a powerful speech which ended with her requesting that he now be left alone.

There was no noise apart from the fierce wind and the flapping of what I thought was a flag, but proved to be someone’s tracksuit pants. Several people approached the hearse to take close-up photos during the service. The crowd was a fairly good cross-section of Wellington, a mixture of dark corporate suits and substance-happy teens. The service over, the boot was closed and the car trundled off to Makara Cemetery, to bury a human being.

The crowd, impassive but tense, began to disperse. There was a terrible sense of sadness in the air. I wish that everyone who had commented on blogs saying good riddance to Blanket Man’s death could have seen it.

Shy, aimless 25-year old Jimmy follows his best friend Sara from Oakland to New York, and finds her establishing an adult career with a rather sophisticated boyfriend. Jimmy can still see the beauty of the world around him, but is painfully aware that he should be an adult by now – he doesn’t have a bank account, and his mother is pressuring him for grandchildren. He tells her he’s going to New York for a web design job interview at Google, but he’s never heard of Dreamweaver. He’s hopelessly outclassed by real life, but seems resigned to it all.

Shiga’s round-headed characters occupy a world familiar to anyone who’s read the original Generation X by Douglas Coupland, except instead of blaming the Boomers for their problems, this younger generation realize their malaise is self-inflicted, although the rules of life have changed to the extent that it would require a Herculean effort to achieve even a modest fraction of what older generations have taken for granted.

The slightly numbed air of the story is aided by scattering panels sparingly over the pages, and the colour palette is restricted to shades of red (in Oakland) and light blue (in New York), which makes the simple and clear artwork surprisingly lush.

A novel and painstaking (yet ultimately inessential) addition to the vast library of related works that orbit Tintin like the rings of Saturn. Summarizing anyone’s life in a 60 page graphic novel is impossible without extreme simplification, and although Hergé’s controversies aren’t avoided, it’s rather like being raced around a Tintin museum five minutes before closing. Without already knowing details about Hergé, you’ll just be confused, and as a biography, the late Harry Thompson’s Tintin: Hergé and His Creation (recently reprinted in paperback) is superior.

The attractive book is designed to look like a Tintin volume, down to the portraits on the inner covers, but although the artwork by Barthélémy is excellent and adopts many of the graphic conventions that Hergé popularized, it’s fairly scratchy and crowded by comparison. Like the recent film, there’s many references to the original artwork and quite a bit of slapstick, but this project might’ve worked better by handing the artwork over to a studio that could reproduce Hergé’s style exactly.

Definitely not for anyone who’s suffered a loss in the family recently. Hill and Wheeler (in much better form than Oil and Water) take a big exuberant piss all over Dr. Seuss, and hilarity ensues. It’s not until the child narrators of this rhyming picture book dress their (apparently slumbering) grandpa in a swastika thong that you begin to feel as though some sort of line has been crossed, but then they summon a lesser Cthulhu demon and put a horse in a gimp mask, so the thong is forgotten.

It’s packaged as a Little Golden Book parody, and at the back there’s a list of other books in the series, including But I Poop From There!, The Haunted Dildo and The Racist Eggplant. Please let these titles never exist.

Enigmatic, charming and melancholy. One day Charlie the mouse (a frustrated author living in an isolated house) is visited by a bluebird called Mr. Solitude, and a cheerful giraffe who nails a string of party lights to his wall. He invites Charlie to a wild local carnival, which he cautiously attends wearing a blank white mask, like Kaonashi in Spirited Away. He encounters Mr. Solitude several times, leading to a potential love interest (a female doctor mouse), but only reaches an epiphany after accidentally breaking his favourite coffee cup, sending the boat painted on the side free “to put to open seas”.

This is a very elegant book, drawn in a messy style reminiscent of Krazy Kat, with thoughtful and dreamlike intervals set in a riotous world of happy anthropomorphized animals. Unusually there’s no introduction or biography of the Coup de Coeur-winning author, but unlike many comics, the author is not the important thing here.

This study of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is a bit of a missed opportunity, but demonstrates how difficult it is to achieve Joe Sacco’s standard of graphic reportage. The authors joined a group from Oregon traveling to the Gulf Coast to investigate the effects of the oil spill on the local community, interviewing many stoic residents still debilitated by Hurricane Katrina five years previously, and pre-numbed to the outrageous lies and obfuscation of BP.

The artwork (by the creator of the brilliant Too Much Coffee Man, unusually subdued) is simple and clear, and the stories of devastation and ruined lives fairly unambiguous, but its solemn, hectoring tone isn’t as informative or as vivid as, say, A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge and we spend rather too much time with the members of the Portland touring party, who are extremely flat and unlikeable characters.

Clever, but overly calculated. Bright 13-year-old Joe’s father has died fighting in Iraq, and he and his mother face eviction unless they can promptly locate the deeds to the family house. After another dreadful school day bullied by jocks, Joe retreats to his attic bedroom and has a hypoglycemic fit, finding himself in an enchanted kingdom where the geography and characters are loosely related to the contents of his house – his rat Jack has become a mighty warrior, an overflowing bath becomes a waterfall.

He is assigned a quest – to descend into the underworld of Hypogea, battle King Death and restore the throne of light – or, in other words, get down to the basement and fix the fuses, and find a soda so he doesn’t fall into a diabetic coma. He knows it’s all a hallucination, but realizes the only way to survive is to play along with the analogies. The quest is long and extremely detailed, with a baffling array of new characters appearing every few pages (like Game of Thrones with teddy bears and rayguns), and lots of set pieces, explosions and life-lessons learnt. Because it’s a Vertigo title, there’s also amusing cameos from Batman and Superman.

It’s all very rich and imaginative, but nothing new if you’ve read or watched The Neverending Story or Time Bandits, and despite the imaginative setup, the story arc is so predictable and the ending so heart-warming that it’s obvious it’s going to be turned into a film.

Intriguing, this one. Advertised as “the world’s strongest energy drink” and expensive at $5 for a 250ml can, Ammo is a berry-flavoured drink with a strong, slightly unpleasant aftertaste. If you drink it from the can, it gives you an unnerving red Joker smile. It contains 80mg of caffeine (about the same as a can of Red Bull or V) and originally contained BZP – but Coke used to contain 9mg of cocaine, so there!

I’m not sure in what sense it’s the “strongest” energy drink – maybe it’s the 605 kilojoules of energy, 10g of panthothenic acid, or 1200mg of glucuronolactone? To its credit, apart from the “world’s strongest” claim, the ad copy isn’t too belligerent, apart from claiming that it “will make other energy drinks seem like a weak cup of tea”. And the (legally unenforceable) R18 rating. And the demand that it be served ice cold. And the name. And the bullet holes printed on the packaging. Oh, dear…