Justin Partridge > Recent Status Updates

The Searchers (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️; Western Epic by way of harrowing examination of rage and obsession. Why the bells not?!)

My memory of The Searchers is…vastly different than the experience of reading it now. So much so, I think I might be confusing it with another movie altogether.

Man, remember ZERO MONTH?!

TALLULUH.

The really cool thing about multi-hour 40k and Horus Heresy lore videos is that I’ll likely forget probably 70% of this stuff so it will still be interesting and fun once I finally DO drop pod into the novels properly. Ave Imperator!

Nighthawk & Cinnamon! NOW we’re talkin’!

Shane: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️s (Men will literally transform themselves into a wandering enigmatic force of frontier justice and honor rather than go to therapy. This collection has been a lot weirder and a lot more propulsive than I expected it to be. I’m really enjoying it despite my dumb jokes).

The Ox-Bow Incident: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (just a gut punch of a book)

Yeah, this absolutely reads like it was written by a person in crisis

It’s kind of amazing how well this maintains the tone of the Hex volume previously while also telling longer stories and doing more outlandish team-ups. I mean, I’m still not super sure why New 52 editors were SUPER convinced we wanted a bunch of stories about Jeremiah Arkham? But whatevs, HEX!

Classic Western Covers: Pastoral, highly romanticized plains and the heroes who tamed them.

Classic Western Prose: Pointedly existential examinations of the nature of justice and the politics of mobs and the frontier “cities” that bore them.

Good Stuff™️ down Ox-Bow way so far y’all.

Jim Gardener is giving me big My Boyfriend in Canada vibes already and the bastard has even shown up yet.

I had totally forgotten this was about The Bible of Crime!

Chaser.

Shot…

I have to give this back for now but it’s been a total delight so far. I’m genuinely so happy these are back in the general reading population once again.

“See? Missiles are kind of stupid. You can fool them most of the time.”

“Them’s ain’t anarchists! Them’s ROBOTS!”

BLISS, I TELLS YA.

“…we were, of course, all ninjas.”

Bliss.

Ryan North’s FF is great because it will do a story about Reed and Johnny unearthing a constantly blood-barfing skull from the family basement and then turn around and do a story about Ben Grimm’s Skrull daughter having trouble at school.

Just the best possible stuff.

By Ursus, I’m gonna finish this damn thing tonight.

I may try and sprint through this soonish because it turned some directions I thought it would (but hoped it didn’t) and now I’m like 😬😬😬

Finally, FINALLY something is happening in this thing.

Boy Action Comics rules right now. Metamorpho cameos. Colorful Kryptonian criminals. A tremendous backup story. Waid and company just get it.

This continues to be a deeply weird but oddly arresting experience. It’s like…the fact that you’re reading about a NINE-YEAR-OLD is buckwild and that’s not even the tenth strangest thing about it.

Very happy to have picked up a physical audiobook of this and realized I’m a lot further in it than I thought I would be.

“To the Clan, a new life was formed by the ubiquitous essences of the totems, and any relationship between sexual activity and childbirth was beyond conception.”

Huh.

And this was a…hit, was it?