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ASTONISHING X-MEN BY WHEDON & CASSADAY OMNIBUS [NEW PRINTING, DM ONLY] | HardcoverSeries: Comic Type: ONE SHOT Winner of multiple Eisner Awards, Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's ASTONISHING X MEN was a smash hit with critics and fans alike from the very first issue winning praise from dozens of top media outlets and racking up nearly every major comic book industry award. Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Whedon and Cassaday (CAPTAIN AMERICA, Planetary) assembled a tight cast Cyclops, Beast, Wolverine and Emma Frost, joined by
Series: Comic Type: ONE-SHOTWinner of multiple Eisner Awards, Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's ASTONISHING X-MEN was a smash hit with critics and fans alike from the very first issue - winning praise from dozens of top media outlets and racking up nearly every major comic book industry award. Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Whedon and Cassaday (CAPTAIN AMERICA, Planetary) assembled a tight cast - Cyclops, Beast, Wolverine and Emma Frost, joined by returning fan-favorite Kitty Pryde - and set forth a groundbreaking pace, from the chilling opening pages and the reinvention of the team to a startling new threat and the unexpected return of a beloved X-Man! Building on their momentum, the superstar creators ratcheted up the danger and drama in the series' shocking second half, creating a must-read book that can truly be called \"astonishing\"! Collects ASTONISHING X-MEN (2004) #1-24 and GIANT-SIZE ASTONISHING X-MEN #1.
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4.7 ★★★★★
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★★★★★ 5
Just such a fun story!
Format: Kindle
LitRPG/GameLit is a hit or miss genre to me, often concentrating on gimmicks with stats or using harem elements to draw in fans instead of concentrating on creating a good story with strong world building. With that said, the hits in the genre can stand up with the best of more traditional fantasy and sci-fi. Dungeon Crawler Carl definitely fits into the hit category for me. In fact, I rate it as highly as my favorites in the genre, 8-Bit Bastards by Joshua Mason and Mogworld by Yahtzee Crowshaw.
The world building is just fantastic in this story. The idea that aliens would destroy all above ground structures, and then re-purpose them into an underground dungeon like a Role Playing Game is just crazy, but it works. Then inhabiting that dungeon with a mix of aliens and more traditional fantasy creatures, and some hilarious plays on modern culture (the KraKaren, for example) just shows the author’s creativity and warped sense of humor. The world is just basically an intergalactic reality tv show, but with real life consequences.
And this is where the fantastic cast of characters comes in. Carl, the erstwhile title character, is just kind of an everyman, a Coast Guard vet who was just kind of meandering through life when the aliens came a knocking. Babysitting his soon to be ex-girlfriend Bea’s cat, Princess Donut, a prize winning show cat, he lucks out as she escaped out the window and he had to chase her outside when the buildings all collapsed. It only gets crazier from there, as he and all the survivors are told they have a specified time to find a stairway leading to the dungeon to try and save their planet, or be stuck on a barren waste of an earth. Carl, unfortunately, chased the cat out in his boxers, a leather jacket, and Bea’s crocs. So armored, he starts his adventures in the dungeon, as he must try and keep himself and Donut alive in the dungeon, while most of the things in the dungeon are trying to kill the “players”. Can you say Goblin Killdozer? Because Carl and Donut meet one soon enough, in a hilariously dangerous first contact. It only gets crazier from there as Donut is given intelligence through a prize in a lootbox, and becomes a player in her own right. She’s still a cat, though, so this leads to some hilarious situations as well, as they proceed through the dungeon to reach the second floor of eighteen. The rest of the characters are a lot of fun, ranging from an alien mentor in the tutorial guild that tries to help them while not getting in trouble, to a group of players escorting a bunch of people from a retirement home through the dungeon. This is hilarious and sad in turns, and is definitely not something I expected to see.
The villains are the usual mix of bosses you’d expect in a dungeon, but with funny twists on them. They are also, in some cases, transformed humans who are playing a part against their will, making the fight against them that much more difficult. There are some choices Carl and Donut have to make that are heart wrenching, to say the least. It was not something I expected, but it added a whole new layer to both the character choices and the story. Some of the villains were just hilarious plays on pop culture, such as multi-level marketing fairies. The aliens that run the game are also an interesting bunch, giving a whole new meaning to cut throat businesspeople. Oh, and before I forget. The AI voice announcer is a total jerk, in possibly the most hilarious voiceover ever.
The narration is performed by one of my favorite narrators, Jeff Hays. I have been a fan of his for years, because his production company, Soundbooth Theater, is one of the best in the audiobook market. He does such a fantastic job of bringing this story to life. Whether it be the voices of the various characters or the AI voiceover, which is hilarious, he gives each character a unique and very distinct voice all their own. You are never in doubt about who is speaking. Its hilarious when he has to read out Donut’s text messages on the chat, since she texts in all caps and he actually emphasizes that. It’s the little touches that really stand out, and his narrative pace is so perfect, he can give classes on how to do it right. If you have the chance, I recommend the audio version.
I was so sad to see this book end. I was so enthralled in it, I was shocked when it ended, but I knew there were more books in the series on audio already, so I have that to look forward to. If you are a fan of LitRPG/GameLit, or just funny fantasy dungeon crawler stories, I think you can find something to enjoy here. I highly recommend this book, and the audio version especially. You won’t be disappointed.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2021
★★★★★ 5
Hunger Games, Hitchhiker's Guide, and Idiocracy all blended together
Format: Kindle
This is one of my favorite series I've read in years. I'll start with a summary of the basic premise of the series. There are some mild spoilers here but it's what I would have wanted to know before going in to the series:
Former Coast Guard sailor Carl is just trying to get his cat out of a tree at 2AM in the morning when the alien Borant Corporation takes over the planet in the blink of an eye, killing the majority of the population. Carl, and others who've survived the initial assault, are then encouraged to enter a Hunger-Games-style elimination contest taking place under the surface of the planet. If any humans can survive all 18 levels of the World Dungeon, they will be granted back control of their planet and all its resources (as well as free health care for life). As it's better than freezing to death in a ruined city, Carl descends the stairway to find a world where high fantasy is brought to life through incredible technology, muddled together with distorted echoes of Earth life.
In fact, the events inside the dungeon are being broadcast live as the latest season of Dungeon Crawler World, the most popular reality TV series in the known universe, watched regularly by quadrillions of sophonts. If Carl wants to stay alive, let alone make progress, he'll have to face crafty goblins, meth-addicted llamas, giant wasps, and many, many even weirder things. But like any reality show, being charismatic and sticking with the program also matters: attracting fans and alien sponsors will net him the best equipment, while deviating too far from the showrunners' intended story could see his struggle... accelerated.
However, he doesn't have to do all this alone: the game has gifted his cat Donut with human-level intelligence and potent magic powers, turning her into a sassy, shoulder-mounted, spell-launching companion with a big personality. Over time, they find other allies as well within the labyrinth, people whose struggles they can relate to and whose backs they can watch. But before long, Carl and Donut realize that winning the dungeon isn't what they should be after. What they really want is to break the game, and to break it so badly that the rich aliens who organized it will regret the day they made others fight and die for their own amusement.
Story-wise, I'd say this series is about 40% Hunger Games (similar basic structure), 40% Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (you will meet the many alien races that populate our galaxy and learn how each one is flawed in its own ways), and 20% Idiocracy (advanced technology... hasn't exactly made people, or aliens, smarter). It manages to be funny, suspenseful, and surprisingly sweet all at the same time, while being more than a bit of a social commentary. If you sometimes feel like the people at the top of our society don't... exactly have ordinary people's best interests at heart... this series may be for you. I've read all seven books so far, some of them twice, and am eagerly awaiting the eighth!
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Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2026
★★★★★ 4
A man. A cat. A dungeon. Not much else.
Format: Hardcover
Dungeon Crawler Carl is certainly a book about a guy named Carl, who is in a dungeon. For the first half of the book, that tells you everything you need to know about it, and likely everything you'll remember. Don't worry, the second half won't burden you with too much more.
OK, that's not entirely fair. There's a cat too.
SIGH. OK, fine. I'm not going to belabor the plot; if you want to know that, read the synopsis at the top of the page. So let's talk about the writing. Matt Dinniman's writing style consists almost entirely of somebody nudging you in the ribs while pointing at something they found funny and going "Ehh? EHHHH?" He comes up with some clever jokes, but the way he's chosen to put them to page basically puts a big neon sign up every time that says "GET READY FOR A JOKE," which takes away most of the humor. It's like he thought the Monty Python "Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge, Say No More" sketch could carry an entire book.
But that's better than his attempts at drama. The author has basically set up a situation with zero stakes, because you know Carl and the cat will be fine. He's set up some obvious conflict seeds that I anticipate will matter in books 2 and 4, respectively. Everything else is just an obvious attempt to gin up pathos. But Matt can't even do that without a neon sign saying "You're supposed to care about these people before something bad happens to them." And then...something bad happens. Shocking, right? He apparently realized at one point that he had completely failed to make us care about a side character, because he suddenly exposition-dumped as much back story as he could come up with right as they got into a perilous situation. No loot boxes for guessing what happens next. When The Witcher books used that trick, Andrej Sapkowski managed to make it shocking the first time, and then each time after it got progressively more gut-wrenching, because you had already come to care about the characters. But Dinniman's side characters are just a name, a weapon, and some background actions that barely matter as they occur behind self-insert character Carl. And Carl barely has more characterization than that. I think there were maybe 4 times in the book where he got around 2 paragraphs of back story that went any further than "My girlfriend was cheating on me! She's the worst! *Sniff* and now she's goooooonnne!" And even those instances were pretty much generic protagonist backstory A.
OK, so he hit a single on humor, struck out on drama...what's left? I guess there are some attempts at suspense. But once again, Dinniman's neon sign problem comes into play. To be clear, I'm a very credulous person. I take things at face value and don't look for deeper meaning. My brother figured out the twist to The Sixth Sense after about 20 minutes, and I was gobsmacked at the end. I just want you to understand what kind of person you're dealing with when I say that this book failed to surprise me once. The writing follows a very clear "set up the thing, try to distract you from the fact that the thing was set up, pay off the thing" pattern. More than once, the thing that was being set up was immediately followed by someone essentially saying "Oh, that probably doesn't matter." *Narrator Voice* "It mattered." As soon as any short time jump occurs, you know something consequential happened in it, and Dinniman wants to keep it quiet to "surprise" you in a few pages. And it's usually that fast; no tension building up, just "...and here's how we did it!" My wife used to complain about songs with obvious lyrics, where one line would leave the singer with nowhere to go except the words that came next. Everything was so obvious you could almost sing along the first time you heard it. This writing is exactly that, expanded to more than 400 pages. Oh, and be ready for the book to end on a cliffhanger that feels no more consequential than a typical chapter break and leaves you flipping back and forth thinking your copy must be missing a few pages.
OK. I got all that out of my system. So now the questions remain: Why did I still give it 4 stars, and why did I just order the second book?
Let's start with the obvious one: The humor isn't bad. It would be funnier if it weren't broadcast so obviously, but I laughed out loud more than once. I laughed twice. Which is more than once. And I snickered a few times. And smirked several times. And smiled quite a bit. I even read one joke out loud to my wife, and she chuckled. So there's that.
Also, for an obvious self-insert protagonist, Carl is moderately lovable. Dinniman avoids the obvious hangdog "woe is me" traps that a character like this could fall into, where everything goes wrong and the character whinges endlessly about it. He also doesn't try too hard to be a tough guy or start morphing into an anti-hero. The closest Carl ever gets to that is the occasional thought of "It would be so easy to [do the bad thing] to gain experience..." Then he shakes his head, says he's not that kind of person, and moves on. Because he's not that kind of person. He's somewhat tough, somewhat capable, and knows the rules of the kind of video game the dungeon is based on. I don't hate him.
There are a few clever plot devices. For instance, Dinniman figures out a way that characters can "say" things to each other that wouldn't make sense to say in context, or that would take too long to say in their current circumstances. Then, he creates an in-universe reason to keep the characters from abusing this ability to communicate the way some people do with psi-links in a tabletop RPG. There are enough things like that to make me want to see what he comes up with next.
Finally, I think I'm sticking around because there's a lot of potential here. It's barely visible, just underneath the surface, but it's there. I kept thinking about the first Dresden Files book, which was a LOT rougher than this, but spawned one of the best-written new characters in the past 20 years. I feel like Dungeon Crawler Carl has that same ability to be great, and since there are a bunch more books (and soon a comic!) about this universe, apparently something is going well. So I'll try another book. And maybe another. Maybe I'll get lucky and be wrong about my prediction in the 4th paragraph. I hope Dinniman learned how to surprise me. And if not, I'm sure I'll still have things to smile about in the next book.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2025
★★★★★ 5
A Hilarious, Action-Packed Thrill Ride!
Format: Hardcover, Format: Hardcover
A Coast Guard veteran and all around good guy, Carl, lives in an apartment with his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut. On a cold, winter night, Donut slips out of a window and gets stuck up a tree. And it’s a good thing she does! Wearing nothing but a jacket, boxers, and a pair of slippers that don’t fit, Carl goes outside to try to coax her down. He’s just about retrieved the cat, and then it happens.
The whole world is changed. In the blink of an eye, every building, car, and piece of technology on the planet is flattened. Smooshed. Gone. A bodiless voice announces that anyone who doesn’t want to live off whatever is left on the planet will need to enter stairs. Carl and the cat do so, and that’s when the fun starts.
It seems the galaxy has had a long-running and massively popular television program that follows “dungeon crawls”—classic role-playing/video game scenarios where adventurers go into a medieval dungeon, explore, fight monsters, win treasure, gain experience, become more powerful, and then proceed to deeper, harder levels. Earth has been selected to serve as the setting for the current season. That’s right. The Earth has been destroyed for the sake of a galactic television game. By entering the stairwell, Carl, Donut, and a couple million other humans have become participants in this game. Instead of remaining a pet, Donut is made into a fellow “crawler,” like Carl. She can speak, and reason, and fight—all with the personality one would expect from a cat named Princess Donut
The rules to this galactically televised dungeon crawl are intricate. But essentially, Carl and Donut begin to mentally see stat screens, just like in an RPG video game: health, various skills, their strength, dexterity, intelligence, and constitution. In classic 80’s kids Dungeons & Dragons style, they have unlimited encumbrance, meaning they can carry anything they can pick up, file it away in “inventory,” and pull it up whenever needed. They‘re on level 1 of this season’s crawl, a classic dungeon with tunnels, doors, chambers, and monsters—lots of different monsters. There’s a countdown running, so they only have so many days to find a set of stairs that will lead them down to the next, harder level. And if they don’t find the stairs before the timer runs out, the level they’re on will collapse. There’s all sorts of lethal dangers awaiting the crawlers. And that’s what takes up the bulk of the book.
There are daring encounters, puzzles to sort through, and lots and lots of monsters to fight. In each encounter, the reader is given real time stats of the characters. After their initial shock, Carl and Donut slowly form an endearing partnership, one that proves quite successful in this dangerous game they‘re forced to play.
I’ll confess for the first quarter of the book, I was skeptical. It felt an awful lot like one of my kids watching someone else playing a video game (which is something I don’t really understand). But Matt Dinniman does a masterful job of weaving in enough subplots—both inside and outside the dungeon—so that both a cohesive story and genuine character development emerge from all the excitement of fighting kobolds, or rigging goblin explosives, or figuring out how to slay a “big boss” monster that vaguely resembles a cat-hoarding old lady. There’s depth to this dungeon.
And of course there’s action. It’s compelling, page-turning, fun. And funny. Dinniman has a sharp, occasionally crass, often dark sense of humor and he knows how to use it in all the right places. There’s snark, and absurdity, and physical comedy, and some snort-through-your nostrils lines. Think of a homebrew Dungeons and Dragons campaign melded with a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy vibe that‘s centered around a likable hero and a hilariously self-absorbed cat.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and will definitely be pursuing the series. Highly recommended.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2025
★★★★★ 5
Wish I’d jumped in sooner
Format: Kindle
Great book, easiest read I’ve had in years. Particularly enjoyed switching between the audio and reading. One of the best audiobooks out there for sure, not quite a radio play but the characters do all get proper voice acting and they are brilliant. Book one had me hooked but book 2 really sealed the deal, grateful that there are so many more to read. The comedy, the horror, the bonkers world building, and some really great character work make one of the most insane setups for a book feel easy to buy into and believe in. I’ve been looking for a series that captures my imagination like this for a while and I think I’ve found it.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2026
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