Chad’s Comments (group member since Mar 22, 2018)

Chad’s comments from the I Read Comic Books group.

Today's trip to the LCS.

Void Rivals #2
Alien #4
World's Finest #17
Something Is Killing the Children #31
X-Men Red #13
Big Game #1
Knight Terrors: Shazam! #1

Last week's adventures in comics.

Monster ★★★
Psychologist Alex Delaware helps his police detective buddy investigate a couple of murders revolving around an insane asylum. These 3 graphic novel adaptations of the Alex Delaware novels seem to be chosen at random but that's OK.

Power Girl Special (2023) #1 ★★
Ugh. DC brings Power Girl back just to muck with her again. This one shot should be a reintroduction to her character. Instead unless you know her incredibly complicated history already, you'll only be left more confused.

New Talent Showcase: The Milestone Initiative (2023) #1 ★★★
A bunch of short stories set in the Milestone universe featuring new writers and artists with established inkers and color artists.

Araña and Spider-Man 2099: Dark Tomorrow ★★★
This prose novel was alright. It suffers from having a really weak villain. Judas Traveler is just lame as can be.

Midnight Sky ★★★★
A pretty good series about an Invasion of the Body Snatchers type infiltration of the Earth. 13 years after the invasion began one family struggles to survive.

24 Panels ★★★
An anthology put together to help those suffering from PTSD after the Grenfell fire in England killed 72 people. The gist here is that you have 24 panels to tell your story so the stories are short.

Immortal X-Men by Kieron Gillen Vol. 3 ★★★★
All of the fallout of Sins of Sinister. No one on the Quiet Council trusts one another and it's all starting to fall apart.

Knockturn County ★★
If Dr. Seuss made a noir comic about gambling and spousal abuse, it would be this comic. I get it. It just all feels kind of lame and the rhymes quickly began to wear on me.

Head Wounds: Sparrow ★
I decided to check this mess out when I saw it finally hit Hoopla. It's a complete and utter mess. Oscar Isaac just slapped his name on it even though I doubt he had much to do with the final product. Everything about it feels slapped together. Nothing makes any sense or is explained.

Multiversity: Harley Screws Up the DCU ★★
This is a regression to the Coney Island era of Harley with all of the slapstick and jokes. Tieri actually does a pretty good job of revisiting that but then he also wrote that comic for awhile too. Harley is given a time machine and creates a future where she killed all of the heroes in their infancy allowing Starro to take over the Earth without the Justice League there to stop her.

Bush Leaguers ★★
An irreverent comedy comic about a Brooklyn baseball team that is more concerned with fighting than playing the burgeoning game of baseball. They are pursued by the overly law-abiding Teddy Roosevelt when he was police commissioner.

The Lunar Ladies ★★
Goofy, retro sci-fi with a race of women living inside the moon back in prehistoric times. It's OK in a bad D-list movie kind of way.

Mindbender ★★★
If it had been fleshed out with some more answers it would have been really good. It's about a man who has been catatonic for 16 years after manifesting something that killed a bunch of people as a boy. Now he's back from exploring other dimensions.

Wolverine: The Best There Is - The Complete Series ★★★
Possibly the most violent and gross Wolverine comic you'll ever read. Wolverine gets abducted and experimented on by a bunch of folks with healing factors that have been around for centuries. This book is filled with nonstop technobabble. Too much to make this really good.

Star Trek: Countdown ★★★★
This was actually pretty good. It fleshes out what happens at the beginning of the Star Trek reboot movie that kicks off the Kelvin timeline. A lot of the Next Generation cast shows up.

Star Trek: Spock - Reflections ★★
This wasn't nearly as interesting as the lead-in to the Star Trek reboot. It's cherry-picked moments from Spock's life as he ventures back to Earth to lay an old friend to rest.

Star Trek: Nero ★★★
Fills in what Nero was up to in the 25 years his crew had to wait for Spock to show up in the Kelvin timeline of the Star Trek reboot.

Karma ★★★
Starts off pretty boring about a photographer meeting a super model and starting a relationship. Then gets hot and heavy and very steamy into hard R territory. It's an extremely adventuresome relationship too which I didn't expect. Reminded me some of Stjepan Šejić's stuff.

Harrower ★★
Too short and not fleshed out enough to be good. It's like watching a 'B' level horror flick. Brahm Revel's art wasn't very good either.

Army of Darkness: 1979 ★★★
A by the numbers Army of Darkness mini that hits the same beats as the movie just in a different time period. This time Ash gets transported to New York in 1979 where a gang called the Warlocks have the Necronomicon and are turning the other gangs to bloody mush (literally). Ash takes over a gang called the Half Dead and goes after them. It's all a weak sendup of The Warriors.

Bettie Page: Curse of the Banshee Collection ★★
This starts off OK with Bettie and another female agent hunting down a banshee. Then it just makes less and less sense as it goes along. It's not helped by how anachronistic the dialogue is. It's supposed to be 1954 and Bettie and her coworker are constantly using words words like "bitchin" and "goddamn".

Vampirella VS. Purgatori ★★★
This was fine. Kind of your standard fare for this corner of Dynamite. Vampirella is fighting Lillith yet again. Lillith can destroy the world if she can corrupt just one of the 36 pure humans on the Earth. Purgatori is sort of helping Vampirella while also playing her own game.

Once Upon a Time at the End of the World Vol. 1 ★★★
Jason Aaron's new series at Boom. A hellish dystopian future where only a few people still survive along with all the rats. Mezzy is on the run from the group that trained her to be a badass. Maceo is a kid with his head in the clouds. He's lived a sheltered life in a flooded skyscraper with his parents while the world burned around them. Something happened to them in the past and he's been all alone inventing for a long time. When Mezzy crosses his path, he decides to tag along which begins a begrudging friendship while being pursued by the Wasteland Rangers.

Today's trip to the LCS.

TMNT / Stranger Things #1
Immortal X-Men #13
Parker Girls #8
X-Force #42
World's Finest: Teen Titans #1
Sirens of the City #1
Antarctica #1
The Hunger and the Dusk #1
Planet of the Apes #3
Planet of the Apes #4

More old Europe Comics I tried to catch up on last week and some other odds and ends.

The Daughters of Salem: How we sent our children to their deaths: Part 1★★
A sensationalized version of the Salem Witch Trials (Although we don't get to any trials in part 1.) It's honestly kind of boring.

Memories of a Crappy Pooch★★
A strange story about an old woman whose dog dies in an oddball accident. Then it's about her friends trying to comfort her and we get some flashbacks into her life that are somewhat difficult to put in the proper timeline.

White Claw - Volume 1: The Egg of the Dragon Queen★★★
This may be titled White Claw but the main character of this first volume was the rogue, Taho the Quick. He's part of a dragon clan that kills dragons and after wounding a dragon is tasked with carrying a dragon egg to the rest of the dragons.

Vizilsan: Blue Rabbit's Crystal★
Oof! This was real bad. I'm not sure why this even became a comic. There's so much text. It's written as prose and the art is bad. Real bad. Some generic fantasy claptrap that I couldn't be bothered to keep up with. Reads like someone wrote some fan service thing like Turkish Star Wars. (That's a real thing. Get drunk and watch it in a MST3K way. It's beyond awful.)

Rage★★
An overlong story about an extremely unlikable boxer from the French projects rising to fame. It's the same story you've seen in Rocky with nothing new to add except the guy is a grade A ass.

Keepers of Lost Time★
I have no idea what was happening in this science fiction comic from Serbia. It's about two cultures, one advanced, one primitive that swap items once every set amount of time. Who knows why? Who knows why one of the primitives gains powers? Who knows who half the cast was as they came and went? This is just terrible.

1066: William the Conqueror★★
A retelling of William the Conqueror based on a tapestry. Even though I knew the basics, I found this really hard to follow. The characters tended to look the same and there were quite a few of them. Their motivations weren't really provided which didn't help.

Hearts at Sea★★★
A comic about a neurotic guy with a good job working at the family's company. He lives a small life and has an overbearing mother. He's also very lonely. So he sneaks away on a singles cruise where he meets a bunch of old ladies and train wrecks.

Bérézina, Vol. 1: The Fire★★★
Follows Napoleon's campaign into Russia. The book begins after three grueling months where Russians have fled while destroying all their crops and taking their livestock with them leaving the French tired and hungry as they enter a deserted Moscow. A deserted Moscow that is really one big trap...

Flora And The Shooting Stars★★
Flora is now in her forties and recently divorced. She's considering getting back on the horse again and begin dating. So she does the whole online thing to various results. This felt really superficial with little new to say.

Yallah Bye★★★★★
This was intense. It's about a French family with a Lebanese dad. They head to Lebanon on vacation to visit family in 2006 when Israel starts bombing the country. You can feel all of the tension as their fear and terror grows, knowing everything is out of their control and if they are going to survive all of the random but continuous bombings. I can't even imagine going through this like the Lebanese did.

Dodin-Bouffant : Gourmet Extraordinaire★★★
A comic that will make foodies' tummies grumble. When a food connoisseur's chef dies, he goes through a lot to find a worthy successor. A nice little story based on a century old book.

The Wolves of La Louvière★★★
World War II from the perspective of a Belgium family. It's based on the diary of one of the girls. The story starts as Germany is invading Belgium and details life in occupied Belgium throughout the war. Some people try to get by, some people resist, some collaborate.

The Grande Odalisque★★★
Two female, high end art thieves rob paintings from famous museums. Alex is the impulsive, unreliable one. Carole is always in control, bailing Alex out of trouble. When their next job is a heist at the Louvre, they bring in a third girl, Sam. Their's little characterization here. It's all nonstop action.

Tentacles at My Throat★★★★
Zerocalcare returns with three stories revolving around his school, all about 10 years apart. They are all very funny and irreverent. They are certainly embellished or maybe just completely made up.

Tebori - Volume 1★★
This is about a young man in Japan who has gotten himself into some trouble with a gang. He's sent to learn from a master tattoo artist. Years later, he's become as good as his master. That's when he finds out that his master secretly tattoos Yakusa in the room above the store.

The Forgotten Slaves of Tromelin★★
A true story about slaves shipwrecked on an extremely small island in the South Pacific for 15 years. There's two stories really as it goes back and forth between this story and the story of the scientists excavating the island in 2008. The story of the excavation is overly packed with detail and drones on and on without providing any new details. There's not much point to it other than making the reading very dry and tedious.

In Search of Peter Pan★★★
A writer hides out in a small village in the Alps with writer's block. The village has the threat of an avalanche any day hanging over it. Over the years counterfeit coins have continued to pop up here.

The Roots of Chaos, Volume 1: Lux★★
It's 1953 and a British man working at Scotland Yard gets a call that his mother has just died in a hit and run with a bomb on her even though she's supposed to be in a nursing home. He begins to find out about a secret life she had involving Yugoslavia.

El Mesías★★
A rich man in Spain falls from grace during the 2008 recession. He hears about a town that has enveloped communism and seems to be doing well. At times this almost seems like a farce. I do think this is something that you'll only get if you understand Spain's history of dealing with fascism, communism and socialism throughout the 20th century and beyond.

Body and soul★★
A look into a handful of unsympathetic people's lives in Paris.

Ark Land★★★
A girl, her two dogs and robot live as scavengers in the future where people live off of the alien tech falling out of the sky.

The World Book of Records★★★
It's about a man who works at the World Book of Records who is bored with his job. He's tired of people who think they need to come up with a way to get their name on some obscure record they just made up. Then he gets a letter from someone who goes a much darker path to make the list...

The Last Jungle Book - Volume 1 - Man★★★
An adaptation of The Jungle Book broken into 4 segments. This first volume is the story we know of from Disney, Mowgli as a child growing up among the wolves while Shere Khan tries to get to him.

Sykes★★★
Your standard Old West tale of a Marshall tracking down the outlaws. The ending that showed the rest of his life after the main story was over felt really tacked on and actually detracted from the rest of the story.

Black Adam: Rise and Fall of an Empire★★★★
Back in the day after Infinite Crisis, DC skipped ahead a year with all of its comics and 52 was a year long, weekly comic where you could look back and see what happened in the DC universe while the big three of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman all disappeared. This collection cherry picks all of the Black Adam stuff that happened and it's all excellent. You can see it's a murderer's row of talent writing the book. It's a terrific journey of an anti-hero as he climbs and falls. That moment where the hammer first falls is just brutal.

Deadly Neighborhood Spider-Man★★
This one is all about the art. The story doesn't make any sense. Taboo from the Black Eyed Peas is back writing comics for Marvel. This one even has Pete and friends singing along to the Black Eyed Peas during a road trip. I mean, come on!

Silent Partner (Graphic Novel)★★★
I'm not sure why this 4th book in the Alex Delaware series was randomly chosen to be adapted into a graphic novel. Delaware is a psychologist. He's on the outs with his girlfriend when he sees an old flame. She wants to see him professionally but kills herself before their appointment so Alex starts looking into her. Things get extremely complicated.

Thor, Vol. 6: Blood of the Fathers★★
This feels exactly like what it was, a book where the author disappeared and left someone else to pick up the pieces. So this version of Thor ends with a thud.

The Web: The Graphic Novel★★★★
I thought this was a much better adaptation than the first Kellerman one. It's about Alex Delaware and his girlfriend Robin heading to a small island in the South Pacific. Alex has been hired to help a doctor there organize his research for 4 months. The island seems to be on its last legs as the military base there is winding down. This starts with a murder and finishes with some nutso stuff you could never guess was coming.

Spider-Man: Fake Red★★★
The art is way better than any other Manga I've read with Marvel or DC characters in it. Full backgrounds too. The story is about a normal kid who finds a Spider-Man suit in an alley and decides to help out even though he doesn't have super powers.

Future State: Gotham Vol. 3: Batmen at War★
Oh my god, this was terrible. Five different Batmen are running around fighting one another. One of them is Damian returned from Hell. He looks just like Zoltar from Battle of the Planets. It all reads like a terrible manga.

Fantastic Four: Life Story★★★
An alternate timeline story where time for the Fantastic Four passes normally from the 60's to now. It's bold in some of its choices. Ben Grimm is no longer the life long friend of Reed Richards. He's just some guy that Johnny knows so he doesn't have the ties to the rest of them.

Last week's adventures in comics, getting caught up on Europe Comics edition.

Seven Places Without You ★★
Seven vignettes taking place after a woman breaks up with her boyfriend for unknown reasons. Nothing much happens in this. It's random little interludes as she copes with being without Jorge.

Taxi Tales: The Fragrant Lady ★★★
Gündüz started these Taxi Tales after working as a cab driver in Istanbul. I doubt this one is true as it reads like a letter to Playboy or something.

The Only Living Girl #1: The Island at the Edge of Infinity ★★★
In this sequel to The Only Living Boy graphic novels for kids, Zee awakens in this weird amalgam world of her father's creation. She and her friend Erik are the only two humans left in a dystopian world populated by fantastical creatures.

The Art of Dying ★★★
A Parisian cop learns that he may have a daughter from his ex-wife upon the daughter's death. It's been labeled a suicide but it's soon realized that's not the case as the worst gang in Barcelona is involved.

Malaterre: Part 1 ★★
An awful man has kids and then abandons them for five years. He then returns and sneaks off with two of them to a jungle plantation his family owned when he was a boy. This is only the first half of the story and the shady things going on are vague at this point.

Malaterre: Part 2 ★★★★
This 2nd volume is more from the perspective of the children than the delinquent father who desperately wants to reclaim his family business in the jungle but in no way knows how to manage it. The whole thing is a downward spiral as it all gets worse and worse and the father secretly dodges creditors and the government.

Renée Stone: Murder in Abyssinia ★★
Seems to be trying for a 30's mystery vibe. Renee Stone is a mystery writer in Ethiopia to see the coronation of Haile Selassie. While there she and a new friend stumble upon some kind of mystery. This really wasn't very interesting and Stone was vapid and shallow.

Aldo ★★
Aldo may be immortal but no one believes him. Or he may just be a crackpot. I found this too out there and often unclear about what was happening.

Blossoms in Autumn ★★★★
This is one of those books where I'm mad at myself for letting it set on my shelf for so long before reading it. It's about two older people who find each other later in life. One has just lost her mother and is dealing with never having married but runs her own business. The other has recently been laid off from his job as a mover. The first half of the book can be pretty dour as these two struggle to deal with their bodies getting older and being alone. Then when they meet the book turns to joy.

Arale ★★
Very nicely illustrated but a confusing story that you just get dropped into. It's a world where World War 1 never ended and Russia is doing well. Rasputin has some mages keeping the Czar's body alive. Baba Yaga is on the opposite side (of what I'm not entirely sure).

The Defender - Volume 1 - Legal Eagle ★★★
A legal story about an Iraqi woman accused of war crimes in France for 20 years before when she was still in Iraq. Our legal expert heads to Iraq to investigate.

Adventures of Kid Lucky by Morris - Volume 1 - Cowboy in Training ★★
These one page strips of Lucky Luke as a kid feel really dated.

Percy Shelley ★★
Percy Shelley would definitely be considered an awful person these days. Someone who because of his money and charisma was able to slide through life, getting away with being an incorrigible human being.

Secret Elites ★★★
In 19th century England a bunch of strangers are scooped up and dropped into a secret program working for the Crown. They (and us) are given very little information as they have to figure out puzzles to keep moving on. It has the feel of a video game.

Pierre ★★★★
I thought this was a really strong beginning. It's about a boxer who uses math to calculate how to beat his opponents. His best friend T.J. and T.J's new girlfriend, Anne. All three are keeping secrets about who they really are and that begins to play out.

Authorised Happiness ★★
Contains 3 stories of government run amok in a Kafkaesque setting.

Sun Vol. 1 ★★
A wealthy family with a coffee business has two daughters vying for control of the business. When one loses out, she gets pregnant after a drunken rampage. The mother is cold and wants nothing to do with the son while his grandparents dote on him. The story just keeps getting darker and darker.

The Angels of Nostradamus (Arthus Trivium #1) ★★★★
This was very good. It's about Nostradamus and his three disciples who canvas the countryside righting wrongs and the like. A plot to kill the king is revealed leaving the three to figure out how to stop it. There's a supernatural element that I wasn't expecting either.

A Hell of an Innocent ★★
Great art but a strange off-putting story. It's about an Australian man who has been in hiding for the last 27 years for killing his wife. In the 70's, his brother confessed to the crime on his death bed and the brother heads home. He's plagued by visions of his dead wife graphically talking to him about all the men in the town she slept with.

A real job ★★
A slice of life comic about a young Spaniard who moves to Berlin to pursue his dream to be a comic book artist.

Theodore Poussin 1. Captain Steene ★
This was terrible. I don't understand how there are so many volumes. It's about a paper pusher that longs for adventure and joins the crew of a ship sailing to Asia in 1927. He keeps getting visited by this shady character as things get worse and worse for him. None of it makes any sense and it was dull as can be.

Double 7 ★★
This story set during the Spanish Civil War was hard to follow. The characters and story kept shifting to something different so that the blurb on the back only really applied to the second half of the story. The first half was about 3 mercenary pilots from France, America and Russia who are in Spain fighting against Franco's forces.

Miles Morales Suspended ★★
This go around Jason Reynolds really wanted to write a book of poetry disguised as a Miles Morales book. You can't go more than 2 pages without there being another one.

The Regiment - The True Story of the SAS, Vol. 1 ★★
I was looking forward to this one but the articles at the end were more informative than the comic itself. The story was disjointed, skipping chunks of time without notice.

Melvile: The Story of Samuel Beauclair ★★★★
A writer in a small town has hit a block he can't get past and he has the added stress of a pregnant wife to take care of. He answers an ad to paint a house in order to bring in some money. There he meets a brother and sister who he becomes friends with and maybe more with the sister. The twist was well done and I didn't see it coming.

Spirou - The Diary of a Naive Young Man ★★★
This was OK. It's about Spirou working as a bellhop at a fancy hotel in Belgium right before World War II. Within the hotel, Germany and Poland are negotiating Poland's surrender to avoid war.

Legends of the Pierced Veil: Izuna ★★★
A decent but dense read set in Japanese mythology of some sort. But this isn't Manga. It's put out by a French publisher. There are a lot of terms that weren't familiar to me. But it's about two different realms, one of man and one where the Kami reside, these fox creatures with antlers. The two realms end up clashing together due to the humans, of course. Some of the motivations and reasonings were hard to decipher with this first go through. Where this book really shines is the art.

Today's trip to the LCS.

By the Horns: Dark Earth #10
Thor Annual #1
X-Men: Before the Fall: The Sinister Four #1
X-Men #24

Canavan wrote: "I haven’t read that particular run, but for my money The Winter Soldier was by far the best of the Cap films, and perhaps the best MCU movie period.."

Ed Brubaker's run is easily the best run of Cap ever.

Ed wrote: "Paper Girls was a pretty good adaptation. I wish it could have continued."

We stopped watching the TV show 3 episodes in. Too dark and missing all of the fun of the comics. The comics I've read through 3 different times now.

Ed wrote: "Chad wrote: "... Colored: The Unsung Life of Claudette Colvin ★★ ..."

I liked that one quite a bit more than you. I had never heard of her. I had always thought that Rosa Parks acted spontaneously..."

It was an interesting story but the art was so terrible. Everyone looked like little ants. I'll probably just go read the book it was based on instead.

Today's trip to the LCS.

Fables #159
Predator #4
Thor #35
X-Men: Before the Fall: The Heralds of Apocalypse
Alien #3

Evy wrote: "Kivu really sounds like something I would like to read.."

It should be available digitally from Europe Comics or you may be able to track down a physical copy since you're in Europe. It originally came out in 2018. The nice thing is that it's all in one volume.

Last week's adventures in comic books.

Zombillenium Volume 1: Gretchen ★★★
An introduction to a monster theme park staffed by actual monsters.

The Kingdom of the Blind - Volume 1 - The Invisibles ★★
A story about the surveillance state in the near future that doesn't have much to say.

Kivu ★★★★★
The story is about a young brother and sister in a small village in the Congo. Their whole village is brutally murdered. Meanwhile a young employee of a Dutch multinational is sent there to find a new warlord to take over. Once he gets there and finds out what is really happening he decides to help. This book will absolutely wreck you.

Tosca Vol. 3 ★★★
The princess is still kidnapped with her father laying siege to Florence. He doesn't know where in the city she is though and won't commit to an attack in fear of harming her.

La Isabela (Jakob Kayne, #1) ★★★
This reminded me of Assassin's Creed. It's about a man and his brother who are the last hippocrats. They are memory eaters meaning that no one can remember their faces. The main character is sneaking into a besieged city to rescue a family before Sulieman can sack it.

Of Gods and Men: 1. The End of the Beginning ★★
While the artwork was quite good, you're thrown into the middle of a confusing story that's only somewhat explained by reading the one-page character sheets at the back. That's not how I want to read my comics.

Shelley 2. Mary Shelley ★★
This veers from historical fiction to Mary Shelley's other novel, The Last Man in the second half of the story and it's so off-putting. To go from a real world story to an end of the world scenario just doesn't make any sense.

Nhun the Huntress ★
I found this story of cave people a complete waste of time with terrible art.

Theatre of the Wind (Nanami #1) ★★
The Neverending Story for bored teenagers.

The Revenge of Count Skarbek (1. Two Golden Hands) ★★★
A painter returns after everyone thought he died 10 years before. Now he's out for revenge against those who wronged him. His plan is to get the men to implicate themselves during a trial.

Tokyo Underground (Otaku Blue, #1) ★★
A sociology student in Tokyo is investigating Otaku for her thesis. Otaku is some kind of fetish that girls dress in cosplay or something, it wasn't explained well at all. Her relationship with her boyfriend is also falling apart as he's filming a J-horror film. Then there's two police detectives investigating a series of murders where a different body part is cut off a young woman. This should be exciting but it's all very boring.

Noir ★★
A crime writer finds out his life isn't what he thinks it is and decides to take revenge. This heavily inked black and white artwork looks like it was put through a xerox machine a few times.

Snitches Anonymous - Mission 1 ★★★
Tom and his young friend get involved in investigating a burglary ring that Tom's father (who is a police captain) has been trying to solve for a while. Tom recognizes a kid in a photo as someone who goes to his school and the kids eventually figure out what's going on.

Yasmina and the Potato Eaters: Part 1 ★★★
The only thing Yasmina cares about is cooking vegetarian food, mainly for her father. He works at a pommes frites (french fry) restaurant but only eats Yasmina's masterpieces. She runs into trouble when the community gardens she gets her food from are taken over by a company that makes these strange addictive potatoes.

Yasmina and the Potato Eaters: Part 2 ★★
Part 2 of this story goes off the rails as the people who eat these potato chips begin to act like dogs, including Yasmina's father. It gets really goofy and you can see how much this is meant for kids as opposed to all ages.

John Life is Worth Fighting For ★★
This is a PSA to get your colon checked out at 50 because colon cancer strikes early. It reads like a PSA too.

Colored: The Unsung Life of Claudette Colvin ★★
This is a case where the original book this is based on works a lot better than the comic book translation. The story is about Claudette Colvin, a teenager who refused to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama in 1955 a few months before Rosa Parks did. The art is incredibly poor.

Aristophania 1. The Kingdom of Azur ★★★
Some very good art to go along with this story of 3 children growing up rough in the 19th century. There's some kind of magical element involved as well as this old woman tries to protect them from this man who seems to be invincible and both hangs out and eats rats.

Timo the Adventurer Book 1 ★★★
What's a boy to do when he's read every book in the village? Time to head out on your own to do some exploring. He documents all the odd creatures he meets in his notebook, describing each one. Younger readers will enjoy this a lot.

Spirou in Berlin ★★
Spirou and his friends get stuck in East Berlin (in the days right before the Wall came down) after voluntarily heading there when their friend disappears. I had a hard time following parts of this. It was really goofy at times too.

The Bugle Boy ★★
An old soldier wishes to find the bugle he lost in WWII. He heads north with his granddaughter where he buried it only to find a whole other thing going on with it. This was a strange story. Straight up goofy at times and not very interesting for a WWII story.

The Year of Loving Dangerously ★★
This was OK. I liked it more as a book about living in New York in the 80's than about this guy sleeping with different women every night because he couldn't afford a place to live after getting kicked out of Columbia.

The Man with the Monkey Face (Kid Noize #1) ★★★
Good art. The story was just OK. It's part of some concept album by an artist I've never heard of.

Irons 1. The Engineer ★★★★
I quite liked this mystery. It's about a engineer who investigates the bridge between Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick in Canada when it fails. It's a neat idea and the kind of thing you come up with when you have to drive on a crazy long bridge like that every day.

Buffy: The Lost Summer #1 ★★★★
A really boring Buffy comic about the Scooby gang headed to New Orleans to see Antiques Road show so Spike can secretly get his poetry back from when he was alive.

Nancy Drew Omnibus Vol. 1 ★★
Oh man, was this boring. I'm not sure if it was adapting actual Nancy Drew stories but that's kind of what it felt like by how wordy this was.

Gurvan: A Dream of Earth ★★★
Follows a man training to be a pilot in the midst of a war where they know nothing about the other side. It's just nonstop space battles with all the pilots being grown as clones. Then Gurvan begins to learn about the other side...

Jennifer Blood, Volume Four: The Trial of Jennifer Blood ★★★
Jennifer goes on the run with her kids, murdering people in convenience stores for cash along the way. She's completely off the deep end and at this point you just want to see her caught (or dead).

Jennifer Blood, Volume Five: Blood Legacy ★★★
Jennifer Blood has been sentenced to life in prison. I'm sure it'll only be a few issues until she gets out. Then there's some rich guys living "The Most Dangerous Game" that goes no where and a few issues where the legend of Jennifer Blood is an influence on people while she's at large.

The Sandman Universe: Dead Boy Detectives ★★★
The Dead Boy Detectives have migrated from London to Los Angeles. There they get involved with a bunch of Thai ghosts and legends and Thessaly is somehow involved.

Masks Volume 1 ★★★★
This was one of the first times Dynamite did their gather all the heroes together thing. You've got their big boys in The Shadow, Green Hornet and Zorro. Then you've got all their eminent domain characters they've gathered like Green Llama and the Black Terror along with many others.

The Adventures of Red Sonja, Volume 1 ★★★★
Even though she's wearing a metal bikini, I'm surprised how progressive Red Sonja's character was from the start. She wouldn't take gruff from anyone, male or female. She's constantly proving those who think women are the weaker sex wrong.

The Flash Vol. 18: The Search For Barry Allen ★★★
Mainly a bunch of Dark Crisis loose tie-in issues where all the speedsters go look for Barry. This also spoils something that happens in the annual which wasn't collected for some reason.

The Flash Vol. 19: One-Minute War ★★★
This was alright. It's about an alien civilization that can move at superspeed and takes over the Earth before anyone even knows it's happening. Only the speedsters can move fast enough to keep up. This is becoming less of a Flash book and more of a DC's speedsters book. Roger Cruz takes over as the main artist and the art isn't great.

Harley Quinn Vol. 3 : Verdict ★★★
The whole thing with Verdict wasn't very interesting. Part of it is Riley Rossmo's terrible art. It makes my eyes bleed.

Void Rivals #1 ★★★★
I had no idea what I was in for when I picked this up at my LCS last week. The clerk just told me I needed to pick it up. Loved the Enemy Mine type beginning with the two pilots from warring cultures stranded on an unpopulated planet. Then that reveal! Totally had me fooled.

Today's trip to the LCS.

World's Finest #16
NIghtwing #105
X-Force #41
Titans #2
Ultimate Invasion #1
Incredible Hulk #1
Danny Ketch Ghost Rider #2
Avengers #2

Last week's adventures in comics. Lots of Hoopla reads before they expire edition.

Batman: Urban Legends Vol. 5 ★★★
This collection of Bat-Fam stories was surprisingly good. There are 4 multipart stories in this one.

Damage Control: New Employee Handbook ★
I'd say Adam Goldberg needs to stick to writing TV shows but The Goldbergs which is "based" on his life is awful too. The premise is there's a new intern working at Damage Control that keeps screwing up and gets handed off to a new department each issue. It's not at all funny though even though it's trying very hard to be.

Lucky Luke - Saddles Up ★
Everything about this was bad. The art is terrible. I needed context clues from the story to realize one of the villains was a woman. The art was so goofy and poor I couldn't tell. The story is dumb. It's goofy wannabe slapstick about a cowboy trying to get the first bicycle across the Old West to San Francisco for a race.

Little Witches: Magic in Concord ★★
A reimagining of Little Women where they are witches. Most of the story beats are the same, the story just now includes magic and Laurie and his grandfather are now witchfinders.

The Black Mage ★
Oh my god, this was so terrible. I can't believe how on the nose this story about a racist world of magicians is. The people who liked it call it a parody but I think it's written in earnest. This is the kind of thing conservative hillbillies will hold up to make fun of because of how "woke" it is. It's about the St. Ivory school of magic that opens up its doors to its first token black student actually named Tom Token. He has a crow familiar named Jim. The headmaster actually wears clan robes and is named Lynch.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Feast of the Moon ★★
A crummy prequel to the fun movie. Watch the movie first if you feel like making yourself read this one.

Cosmoknights, Vol. 1 ★★★★★
Ah! I'm mad at myself for waiting so long to read this. It's terrific. It's got knights in mech suits fighting over princesses to win their hands in marriage for their sponsors for all the wrong reasons. So you have this dichotomy of medieval knight battles in a sci-fi setting. Behind it all is this lesbian couple and their young friend trying to win each battle to secretly set the princesses free from the patriarchy.

Skyward, Vol. 1: My Low-G Life ★★★
20 years ago Earth lost most of its gravity while our main character was a baby. Now her father's a shut in and she just wants to travel the world. Meanwhile, the stereotypical bad guy wants thing to remain the same so he can continue to rake in the dough. Don't think about any of the actual physics behind this. It's all nonsense. Everyone on Earth would be dead if this happened. Once you get past that, you can allow yourself to enjoy the book.

The Girl and the Glim ★★★★
I didn't expect this to end just as it was getting started. Hopefully we'll see more because right now we have no answers, only questions. It's about a girl who moves to a new town and isn't fitting in. For some reason she can see this little electrical creature but no one else can. There's also a bunch of evil versions that seem to be feeding off emotions. So they begin to go after them even though everyone else thinks she's a weirdo.

Gotham Academy #1: Maps of Mystery ★★★
Reprints all of the Gotham Academy stories from backups and anthologies that have come out since Gotham Academy ended. They, of course, all revolve around Maps.

Distorted ★★
Reminds me of the TV show Heroes where a bunch of random people gain powers and the stories don't really connect for a very long time. It's the X-Men if there was very little story behind it and they were just shown using their powers in secret.

Radical: My Year with a Socialist Senator ★★★★
Don't let the title fool you. The book has very little to do with socialism. It's a year spent in the trenches with a freshman state senator from New York City. It's very much about the political process of getting legislation passed and just how incredibly difficult it is. I live in the NYC metro area and a subject that concerns everyone that lives there is gentrification and how incredibly high rent is. Elected in 2018, the Senator's main goal was to get rent reform bills passed before the current bills all expired in June of that year. Pretty much the entire book is about trying to get that passed as a whole.

Junkwraith ★
This is some kind of allegorical story about growing up and leaving the past behind, I think. The storytelling was so poor that I'm not really sure. The main character gets upset when the other ice skaters make fun of her and throw her ice skates away. This creates a "junkwraith" or ghost that will eventually steal her memories if she doesn't come to peace with it.

The Secret of Danger Point ★★★
A great comic for kids with a mystery angle. There's a supernatural element as well but it fit the story except for the ghost boyfriend at the end.

Boylon Heights ★★★
Some solid noir set in the deep South. There are a ton of racist remarks made in this so be forewarned. The detective is black in 50's era Mississippi. Pretty much every white person in this is a racist piece of $#!+.

Gods of Brutality ★★★
It's about a heavy metal singer who goes to Hell and prays to Odin and Zeus to save him so they send Thor and Hercules to Hell to bail him out. The four issues are the 3 of them fighting demons. It's like a 70's album cover come to life.

The Vampire Slayer, Vol. 1 ★★★
A good start to another universe set in Sunnydale. Your four main characters are there. The difference is that Willow and Giles screwed up and Willow is now the Slayer. And Xander is gay now (which if the show ever got rebooted would probably happen as well.)

The Vampire Slayer, Vol. 2 ★★★
This is fine. The dialogue is good and I like that the cast are all twenty-somethings with jobs now. This moves too slowly though. Part of it is Boom's dependence on collecting stories in 4 issue chunks even when the story is longer. I think this will probably read better digesting it all at once.

Third Wave 99 ★★★
A solid beginning hampered a bit by the 4 issue format. It's about a guy in Florida running a surf wear brand and running from his past. His past comes looking for him when they find out where he's at.

Nyx: Daddy’s Girl ★★★
Nyx attempts to merge her human and demon sides. Much better than I expected because I expected crap.

Vampiverse ★★★
Dynamite has already did this same story for Red Sonya. This one is done better though. It's your standard multiverse is in danger story. There's an evil Vampirella who is killing all the other Vampirellas in the multiverse.

Jennifer Blood: Bloodlines Vol. 1 ★★★
Jennifer Blood is back in Dynamite's attempt at the Punisher. This time she's hunting down all the criminals in a town full of criminals who turned rat and went into the Witness Protection Program.

Jennifer Blood, Volume Three: Neither Tarnished Nor Afraid ★★★
Jennifer went from revenge to straight up murdering people in this volume as she found she could no longer hide what was going on. The descent into madness was kind of interesting but the series seems to be going off the rails.

The Ninjettes ★★
Meh. Give this a pass. I'm glad Ewing became a much better writer after this. This sucked.

Ruta S. wrote: "Chad wrote: "Ruta S. wrote: "Teen Titans, Volume 4: Light and Dark ★★
I had really high hopes for this one with the arrival of Raven and Trigon, but it was a bust. And I heard it does not get any b..."

The Wolfman and Perez run from the 80's is the original run the cartoons are based off of.

The Geoff Johns run was with the next generation of heroes of the time so it has Tim Drake as Robin, Impulse, Cassie Sandsmark as Wonder Girl, Conner Kent as Superboy, etc with Cyborg and Beast Boy from the 80's version as mentors. It's Geoff Johns so it's easy enough to get right into without knowing their whole history.

Ruta S. wrote: "I thought I was the only one who didn't get the hype about Fence comic books. I waited for it to get better and for the coupling everyone talked about to happen but it never happened and now I'm afraid to read the fifth volume."

I don't get the Fence love either.

Ruta S. wrote: "Teen Titans, Volume 4: Light and Dark ★★
I had really high hopes for this one with the arrival of Raven and Trigon, but it was a bust. And I heard it does not get any better at the last volume."

That Scott Lobdell run is a dumpster fire. I recommend the original run by Wolfman and Perez and the Geoff Johns comic from the aughts. They are both really good. The New 52 runs are really confusing because they muck with continuity, wiping out the most famous run of Teen Titans from the 80s/90s.

Today's trip to the LCS.

Void Rivals #1 <-- A new Robert Kirkman book. The clerk at the store said to read it right away before something in it gets spoiled so I'll see what that is.
Doctor Strange #4
X-Men Red #12
Wolverine #34
X-Cellent #4

kaitlphere wrote: "I have added Welcome to the New World and Forbidden Harbor to my to-read list! I've been reading a lot of graphic nonfiction lately and Welcome to the New World sounds like it would complement some of that reading. I'm disappointed to hear about Lore Olympus. I need to read volumes 3 and 4 yet myself."

I hope you enjoy them. Welcome to the New World should definitely complement your nonfiction reads. Other people love Lore Olympus so maybe you'll enjoy it more than I did. It just feels like a story that's going nowhere to me given that it's based on mythology that is a few thousand years old and we all know how it goes. I found Plunderworld way more enjoyable than this. But it's sweet where this is full of conniving, awful, vapid people.

Last week's light graphic novel reads:

Zaroff ★★★
I'll just start by saying I don't know that we needed a sequel to "The Most Dangerous Game", (This is a sequel to the movie, not the original short story.) but if we are going to get one at least it's good.

Elma, a bear's life - Volume 1 - The Great Journey ★★★
A little girl who is being raised by a bear go on a big journey. The story is pretty slight but the illustrations are a delight.

Hedge Fund - Volume 1: Money Men ★★
It's interesting I guess. Movies have done this type of financial crisis type thing so much better while making it easier to follow. You probably need to actually work on Wall Street to follow some of this.

Last of the Atlases ★★★
I liked what I read of this but this volume was too short, maybe the length of an American comic. It's mainly about some gangsters running hidden poker machines in France. But it's also about some birds that aren't migrating.

Operation Copperhead Chapter 1 ★
A story about Peter Usinov and David Niven's time in World War II. The framing sequence set during Death on the Nile and just the storytelling in general made this hard to follow. It's also incredibly short even for a European comic. Harambat's terrible art also made this a chore to read.

Atom Agency - Volume 1 - The Begum's Jewels ★★★
I loved the pop art look of the book. The story though, relies on the detective agency fumbling around until things fall in their lap without much detective work or it relies on Dad's contacts from the war helping out.

The Battle, Vol. 1 ★★
There were so many characters in this with similar uniforms that it was really difficult to maintain who was who. I know it was one of Napoleon's main battles but it was extremely difficult to keep up with what was happening.

Glory Days (1. Chaos) ★★
Flits back and forth between three women in their twenties. One is depressed after breaking up with her boyfriend. The second incredibly stressed out about writing her dissertation. Finally, the third girl screwed her roommate's boyfriend and has been ostracized from her social circle.

The Midlife Crisis ★
This was very dated, originally written in 1996. It's about how all husbands leave their wives in their 40's (except I never did). The art style is terrible. It looks like caricatures from a comic strip. It's about how the wife gets through life after her husband leaves her but the storytelling is very disjointed.

Bob Marley in Comics! ★★★
A succinct look at Bob Marley's life. The comics are written by Gaet's while the text that sometimes appears between chapters is by Sophie Blitman. The text does provides a bit more depth to what you've already read.

The Undertaker, The Vagrant & The Assassin (Stern, #1) ★★★★
I quite liked this tale from the Old West about an undertaker in a frontier town in Kansas who no one really talks to. He becomes more involved with the town members when he autopsies the recent death of a drunk.

Welcome to the New World ★★★★
This began as a connected series of comic strips that appeared in the New York Times. It was later turned into a book with many more strips after winning the Pulitzer. It's about a real family of Syrian refugees who came to America the same day Trump won the election in 2016. That however is not the main focus. It's about the family itself and how they had to quickly acclimate to life in Connecticut. Learning English, sending the kids to school, finding a job so they could support themselves, etc.

Forbidden Harbor ★★★★
The story of a teenage boy who wakes up on a beach with no memory. He's taken on as part of the crew of a ship when he's discovered by its captain. There he travels from Asia back to England. Along the way he picks up all of the duties on the ship as if he's done them before. When he returns to Plymouth, he's taken in by three sisters who are trying to run an inn after their father was accused of treason and disappeared. He also meets a madame that he reads poetry to every day. It's a good story if a little long at 300 pages. Like a lot of European comics there is plenty of nudity and adult situations. It's all illustrated in gorgeous, highly detailed, black and white pencils.

X-Men '92: House of XCII ★★
This is a "What If?" story about what if the X-Men cartoon entered the Krakoan era back in the 90's. An interesting idea that really didn't go anywhere new.

Green Arrow: Stranded ★
A very quick read that adds virtually nothing to this YA version of Green Arrow's origin story. Nor does it at all make me think he'd become Green Arrow after reading this. Ollie is a kid on a hunting trip with his dad, his jerk of a business partner and his asshole son. They crashland while flying home and Ollie has to learn to shoot things in order to eat. That's pretty much the entire plot.

DC Pride 2023 #1 ★★
This year's group of Pride stories were some weak sauce. Even Grant Morrison's story didn't make a lot of sense but then again it's about a Green Lantern on an alternate earth and his Green Lantern book was terrible and didn't make any sense. Honestly what I liked best was the prose which I typically hate in comic books. But Phil Jimenez's foreword and the written tributes to Rachel Pollack's passing were the best parts of the book.

House of Slaughter Vol. 3: The Butcher's Return ★★★
The Boucher's find one of Jace's charges and he goes back to New Orleans to find him. Better than volume 2 but it's still moving too slowly for me at this point.

Fury (2023) #1 ★★★
A solid 60th anniversary one shot about a new Scorpio. Ewing does a good job of weaving the story around both Nick Fury and Nick Fury Jr.

Bishop: War College ★★★
Bishop and Tempo get transported to another dimension where all of the X-Men are black. Meanwhile the mutants they are training have to stop the Fenris twins from breaching the pit. This was OK.

Lore Olympus: Volume Three ★★★
Not much happens in this but talking... and more talking... and more talking. The relationship between Hades and Persephone cools off as Minthe steps between them and Hades is trying to make it work.

Lore Olympus: Volume Four ★★★
This thing moves at a glacial pace. It all tends to be fan service. It's kind of the Twilight of comics.

Batman by Grant Morrison Omnibus: Volume One ★★★★★
Did a reread of this run when I discovered the library had this omnibus. It's terrific. If you haven't read Grant Morrison's Batman run you should. It only gets better from here.

Giant-Size X-Men ★★★★
Five loosely connected stories with some killer art, all by Hickman.

Superman & Robin Special (2022) #1 ★★★★
Even though Jon Kent's been ages up to 18, there's no reason the Super Sons can't still get together. Jon and Damien Wayne team up when something gets loose inside the Fortress of Solitude.

Carnage: Black, White & Blood ★★
Even though carnage is a character I care little about, these stories were surprisingly bad given the writers on at least half the stories are top notch.

Fantastic Four Anniversary Tribute (2021) #1 ★★★
For the Fantastic Four's 60th anniversary, artists tagteamed in to each redraw one page of Fantastic Four #1 and Fantastic Four Anniversary #3 where Reed and Sue get married. I thought this would be a chore to read as the comics from this era can be hard to get through but this wasn't half bad and it was cool to see all of these current artists draw 2 classic comics.

She-Hulk, Vol. 1: Jen, Again ★★★
She-Hulk resets with a new job as a lawyer again, this time working for Mallory Book. That doesn't go very far though as for at least these 5 issues there's no lawyering. Obscure Avenger Jack of Hearts shows up on Jen's doorstep with little idea of where he's been since he caused Jen's powers to go haywire and blew up in space. This comic gives new meaning to deconstruction. Almost nothing happens in this thing. Yet, it was still OK. There's just no advancing of any plots.