This book reminds me of Hervé Le Tellier’s L’Anomalie, which feels insulting and maybe even heretical. L’Anomalie is a Prix Goncourt-winning, highbrow, Oulipo novel; this is by a guy who writes Star Trek parodies and kaiju books. L’Anomalie is relatively restrained in its conceit, with an impossible “duplicate” plane landing three months after the original one; this has the moon turn into cheese for a lunar cycle. Yet, both books are powerful in their exploration of how the world responds when something ridiculous and clearly impossible happens.

I’m in a grumpy mood this morning, so I might be a little harsh here, but nothing’s really standing out. There are some interesting things here (Spock resisting the Borg! Minor Wrath of Khan cameo!), but I think there are continuity errors, and even if there aren’t, it’s just not super interesting.

I kind of thought this was dumb. There’s an interesting idea in there, and maybe I would have liked it as something shorter in an anthology, but I didn’t enjoy it in the form it took.

Once again, anthologies are fun. I almost didn’t read this, because it felt weird to read and review a single issue of a comic, but I’m glad I did! Q meets Decker who’s wrestling with what it means (along with Ilia and V’Ger) to be an all-powerful being! There’s a funny and great story about Data’s cat! Ezri Dax consults with past symbiont hosts in a way that makes it seem more interesting than DS9 ever did!

Anthology collections are fun, and this is no exception! Some stories are better than others, but short stories spanning Trek time and characters make for a good read.

And thus ends my Queen & Country reread! I remember being disappointed by the final volume when I first read it, and I’m glad that it held up better this time around. I also appreciated some of the technical details that came up in the supplemental materials. There is so much that goes into comics that I just don’t notice!

This is an ambitious book—probably overambitious, and I don’t agree with all of the claims, especially with 60-70 years for Ellul’s ideas to marinate in continued technological development. Yet, his ideas are valuable and prescient—I don’t buy his claims as an ontological argument, but I think they make for a compelling theoretical framework for making sense of lots of what’s happening today.

This ended in a confusing rush that spoiled all the fun that I was having, but up until that point it was great. Not high art by many means, but exactly the sort of thing two comics companies should do as a crossover so long as they had the licenses to make it happen.

I have more Star Trek IDW comics to read, but I’ve completed this whole series! It ended on a good note, with a tribute to Leonard Nimoy and then some semi-fourth-wall breaking explorations of what it means for there to be two timelines in “main” Star Trek canon.

I have a lot of complaints about this volume, not least making Khan look like Benedict Cumberbatch. It also has some of the stronger stories of this series, so I’m trying to give it some benefit of the doubt.

Another day, another TPB’s worth of Star Trek comics. Not terrible, but not keeping my attention either.

Finishing this up tonight, I appreciated reading through the sample script and other supplementary materials included at the end of the book. I have the horrible habit of consuming media without any technical appreciation for how it is made. I write for a living, so I have some appreciation for what writing fiction must be like, but I have zero understanding of film (or at least very little), and it occurred to me while reading this script that I read a lot of comics without really understanding the creative process there.

It’s probably unfair to get pickier about these comics over time, because this is the kind of story I would have liked to see when I first began reading through, but now it’s boring compared to some of the more interesting arcs. Alas.

This picks up near the end with some interesting ethical dilemmas (though it’s not clear how much of a dilemma they actually are), but it feels like the interesting premise of the first volume has kind of run out of steam. I’m still considering picking up the third volume (and I wonder if I’ve been too harsh on this one), but I can’t say it’s kept my attention as much as I’d hoped.

Now this is how a comic book company uses a Star Trek license: Using a universe-hopping Q to take the Kelvinverse Enterprise to a bad future Deep Space Nine setting for plenty of extradimensional being nonsense and fanservice. Keiko O’Brien is a starship captain! Q merges with one of the Prophets! It’s not high art, but it’s exactly what I want from the medium.

There is one really good story in here and one okay one, but I finally found the limits of my impatient with Star Trek and/or comics nonsense, and it was a Star Wars-like “let’s take a character who barely appears on screen and explain why they are the most important person in the world” story smack in the middle of the volume. Not going to stop reading the series, but it’s definitely slowing me down.

Lots of comic book nonsense mixed with Star Trek nonsense, but it’s still a fun read, and that’s what I care about right now.

Some interesting original stories in here, even if the pon farr one obviously riffs on TOS material (I even admit that it does an interesting job of considering the alternate continuity’s implications for that storyline). Some of the art was weird, but I’m used to that at this point.

Some more dodgy art in this one, but also some fun exploration of backstories. It’s not the best the comics medium has to offer, but I’m enjoying it a lot.

One of the stories in this collection has the creepiest attempt at capturing the Kelvinverse actors yet, and that was pretty hard to get through. The stories in this volume were all pretty good, though, so I can try to look past it. Playing with the Mirror Universe within the Kelvinverse was a fun idea in particular.

There’s something inherently fanservice-y about spinoff comics, especially comics that are interested in reimagining beloved stories for a reboot. Not all fanservice is bad, though. I think the art is getting better, I appreciate those riffs, and if it’s not the best Star Trek, it’s fun to spend time with Star Trek.

This continues to be better than I expected. I’m just not likely to watch TOS anytime soon, so it’s interesting to see these takes on old stories, even if the off-model Chris Pine and company art bugs me. There’s also finally some branching into original stories, which is interesting.

I expected to rate this lower, because there’s a lot stacked against it. From what I can tell, the first stories are rehashes of TOS episodes within the Kelvinverse continuity, so you’ve got episodic 1960s plot points transported into a comic book spinoff for a reboot movie. The uncanny valley take on the 2009 Star Trek actors in the art isn’t doing it any favors either. It was a fun read nonetheless.

I can’t claim to have read all of the “choose your own adventure” comics in the world, but I’ve read a few in my time, and this is a good one! (Though I really need to figure out how to finish Jason Shiga’s latest…) The art and the dialogue capture Lower Decks perfectly—I could hear the characters’ voices in my head as I read. I loved the puzzle-y bits, too, where you have to explore multiple paths (and also “cheat” at certain times) to get to a true ending.

As I wrote in my last review of this volume, this really steps things up. It better captures the ugliness and senseless brutality that The Sandbaggers also did—it also liberally cribs from Sandbaggers plot points, but I see it more as loving homage than plagiarism. I still don’t think it’s as good as The Sandbaggers, and the changing art style sometimes bugs me, but I think this might be the peak of the series.

Having survived one Backderf book and knowing that this is his more famous work (it won an award at Angoulême in 2014), I decided to give it a try. The story is of Backderf’s childhood association with Jeffrey Dahmer, who grew up to be a serial killer. Dahmer’s crimes are horrifying—I had to put the book out of my mind before going to sleep—but he was caught when I was 3, so I wasn’t really aware of the story.

I was intrigued when I heard that Mormonism would feature prominently in the third (but first?) Martin Hench book. Mormonism is hard to get right in fiction, and I wondered how Doctorow would do. The answer: Some things were off, but overall, he got things right. It nagged at me some, but overall, I appreciated his take. That’s not the most important part of my review, but it’s representative of everything I want to say about this book.

I’ve been revisiting a lot of my comics collection in recent months, and after finally finishing XIII, I thought I’d revisit this series. In fact, I’ve been wanting to reread Queen & Country basically since I first read it. This first volume in particular has seen a lot of revisiting, especially the early pages. That made it hard to appreciate the volume this time around, and it was harder to get through.

Alors, quelques mois plus tard, j’ai enfin fini de relire les albums XIII dans ma petite collection. J’avais l’intention depuis plusieurs années de grandir cette collection, mais après cette relecture, je ne suis plus sûr. J’aime bien l’art, les histoires sont parfois intéressantes, mais il y a bien trop de choses stupides qui se déroulent dans ces pages. Cet album-ci montre bien une chose : Vance et Van Hamme sont attirés par les États-Unis (par le bien et le mal américains), et ils essaient d’incorporer tous les genres possibles de la fiction américaine dans leurs histoires : les espions, les militaires, les immigrés, les cowboys, les complotistes… tout ce qu’on pourrait imaginer dans un film hollywoodien doit aussi être intégré chez XIII.

Bon, ce n’est pas que j’avais fort envie de reprendre cette série, mais il n’y avait que deux tomes qui restent dans ma collection, et j’ai d’autres choses à relire après avoir terminé cette relecture. Il y a dans ce tome tout ce qui m’attire et tout ce qui m’agace de la série XIII. J’ai pas trop envie de tout répéter. Il suffit de dire que c’est intéressant comme histoire d’aventure tant qu’on arrive à oublier toutes les bêtises y présentes.

J’aime bien les « Chroniques » de Guy Delisle, et j’étais content de pouvoir acheter cet album-ci. Pourtant, je l’ai trouvé moins intéressant que les autres que j’ai lus. C’est peut-être que le Myanmar a beaucoup changé depuis—même si je suis loin d’être expert sur le pays, ça fait bizarre d’entendre parler d’Aung San Suu Kyi avant sa libération, et avant le commencement de la tragédie des Rohingya. En tout cas, je continue à aimer le style de Delisle (en écriture et en dessin), et ça fait que je pardonne beaucoup même si je m’ennuyais plus que prévu.

I’ve read this before, so I knew that I would enjoy it this time, but I had forgotten just how good it is. The premise is bonkers: It’s a noir story featuring a detective from an alternate history where the U.S. made part of Alaska available to Jewish refugees in the 1930s. The story picks up in the mid-2000s, when a strange murder unfolds in the months before the “Federal District of Sitka” is returned to Alaska.

When I was in grad school, I was pretty centrist: more liberal than most of the students from BYU (where I’d just finished my bachelor’s) but more conservative than most of the students at MSU. I had an odd experience one day when a fellow student far, FAR to the left from where I was teasingly chided me for a Facebook post I’d made defending Common Core from one of my BYU friends who was convinced it was a communist plot.

This is an excellent graphic novel adaptation of the earliest of Mormon history. The art is good, the story is compelling, and I enjoyed reading it. I came close to buying this twice in the past year after finding it in comics shops, and I was delighted to find that my local library had a couple of copies. I do wish that I either knew a lot more history or a lot less history going into this.

This book has been on my radar for a few months, and I’m glad to have found an audiobook I could check out (though I doubt I’d have regretted an impulse buy—this would be a good book to have on hand). Palestinian Christian ministers and theologians always call me to account in a way that I appreciate. I don’t think I should need someone from my own faith tradition (broadly speaking) to tell me how bad the situation in Palestine is (i.

Like everything I’ve read from Graeber, I appreciate the overall argument that he’s making and I find the evidence he marshalls compelling. At the same time, there’s a density to the latter that I admit having trouble following, so I don’t always see how it leads to the overall argument. Even with those caveats, I’m happy to endorse this read. I’m interested in how Graeber explores the relationship between moral thinking and economic modeling—as I posted earlier, I also find his thoughts on the moral dangers posed by abstracting interpersonal obligations into quantifiable debt with the help of money.