This felt like a real rollercoaster of a read. As a child of the 90s, I knew the Jim Carrey adaptation of this (and the animated adaptation of that) existed, but I never encountered them. At some point, I learned that there was an original comic source to all of that, but I never expected to read it.

I approached the book with open curiosity, hated the first part of it, and then got mostly won over by the rest. It’s interesting in art and premise, it is dark without being too much so, and I appreciate it for what it is.

Peut-être que c’est bête de tellement aimer un petit « storyboard » qui n’a même pas de fin, mais ça fait un moment que je m’intéresse à l’art de Boulet, et ça m’a fait beaucoup de plaisir de m’offrir une petite bd en numérique à quelques euros seulement. J’aime l’histoire, j’aime surtout l’art, et j’espère que les Éditions Digitales vont trouver beaucoup de succès parce que j’aimerais bien acheter plus de choses comme ceci.

Vampire stories aren’t really my thing, but as far as vampire stories go, this is a good one! 90s New York is an interesting setting, I like the cultural shake-up, and the art is a lot of fun.

Hellboy reminds me a lot of Atomic Robo. I love the idea, I like the art, it’s pulpy in a fun way, but after a while, I just get bored of it.

Okay, so I didn’t actually read the final TPB. I cobbled together individual issues from hoopla (boooo, hoopla) but couldn’t be bothered to review them individually.

That’s probably good, because I didn’t like the first issue at all—I had trouble remembering what had happened in the previous TPB and struggled to get back into the plot. I still think the plot is kind of dumb, but reading the remaining issues reminds me that I like Guillory’s characters, art, and clear personal investment in this story. I’m being generous with my rating, but I think he’s earned it. (Chew is still too weird for me to try, though).

There’s so much about this series that shouldn’t work. The protagonist is clearly meant to be feminist but borders on angry manhater and is clad in typical comic book superheroine attire. Would it surprise you to know the creative team is all male?

Yet, for all of its very clear faults, there’s something about it that works? Or at least that I found to be an engaging read. Maybe there’s something here under the problems, or maybe I’m just part of the problem. 🤷🏼‍♂️

I chuckled at the Ben Reilly scenes in the second Spider-Verse movie because I know the jokes about 90s superhero comics, but I hadn’t actually experienced 90s superhero comics.

While, now I have, and I get the jokes even more. This was hard to convince myself to finish: It felt like a trying-too-hard attempt to build an interesting comics universe, but it just wound up being dumb and sometimes poorly illustrated.

Incredibly helpful collection of source documents (especially for a non-historian like me) but would not recommend to anyone that doesn’t have a specific research question. Not exactly a page turner!

I own a physical copy of this book but sold out to hoopla to listen to it over the weekend so I could say I’d finally read it. I appreciate just how practical this book is: outlining steps one can take rather than simply appealing to an abstract anarchist ideal.

I also felt a real tension while reading this. The ideals it sets out really speak to me, but the amount of work and commitment that it would take to actually follow these principles feels intimidating to me.

On one hand, this is the first manga I’ve read where I saw why the art form is as revered as it is. Good art, interesting premise (somewhat silly, but no more than XIII, which I love more than I should), and not too gratuitous (but still some).

On the other, I felt that it didn’t catch my attention for the whole volume, and I’m torn on whether I’d enjoy reading the next four.

A lot of what I was looking for in this book is already available in other sources, and while I appreciated the normalizing of Latter-day Saint temples for a lay audience, it would also smack of apologetics if Stapley weren’t also so unflinching in addressing controversy and taboo. It’s a wonderful resource, and it’s accounting for important events of the last decade made it an invaluable read.

I struggled with how to rate this one. I’m going to settle for this: Just because a series that knows it’s being dumb and fanservicey does not automatically elevate it above being dumb and fanservicey.

I have been meaning to read this book for years and finally got to it. On one hand, it’s excellent, and I’m kicking myself for not having read it before. On the other, it’s so well-suited to a current project that I’m not sure I would have appreciated it earlier.

Not life-changing, but a pretty good comic. I didn’t know about this apparently legendary story, but it was fun to learn about.

Like the last volume, I’m less convinced by the plot as it continues, but there’s still so much about this that’s good. I appreciate the portrayal of faith without being preachy, I like the art, and there is still plenty of humor.

This is the last PDF I own, and I didn’t realize there was a fifth TPB that rounds out the story. I’ll have to track it down somehow…

I’n pickier about this volume because it’s harder to follow up on a good premise than to set it up, but it hasn’t entirely jumped the shark, and I’m still enjoying it.

This volume has some more obvious furniture moving so that important things can happen later, but it’s still great so far.

Uh, this is amazing—and in a way I never would have expected. I don’t usually do body horror, but it’s just restrained enough for me to work with. The concept is fascinating, the art is good, and there’s a sense of humor that has me checking every detail in every panel for a chuckle. Glad to be getting back into this huge bundle of comics (but also, I just bought a bunch of Dark Horse titles, sooooo).

Such a helpful collection of data, and I’m pleased by how many echoes of Ellul are in there, as I move forward with trying to apply his thought to Mormonism.

I thought for sure that I would be more critical of this the second time through, but I found (again?) that the last third of this is the interesting part, even if the leading up to it feels confusing.

It’s very interesting to read this after having reread Dawn of Everything and after reading There Never Was a West for the first time. I can better see the connections between those three pieces—and how they might inform my future writing.

Rereading The Dawn of Everything finally pushed me to use an on-hand Libro.fm credit to get this in audiobook so I could give it a try. I find Graeber to be a bit uneven (I appreciate most of what he writes, but I don’t find all of his arguments totally convincing), and so I waffled on whether to give this full marks.

Ultimately, I went with the more generous rating, because even if some of his ideas didn’t land with me, it’s useful to have so much of his thinking captured in one place. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll need to get a print copy of this for the same research project that Dawn of Everything had me thinking about.

I wasn’t expecting to count this as a “work read” when I decided to reread it a couple of months ago, but wow, did it ever help make sense of some ideas I’m kicking around for a potential book project.

Like my last read, I have to admit that I’m ill-suited to evaluate the historical or anthropological claims. I really appreciate the framework it brings to its inquiry, though, not least for the way it echoes similar ideas in Jacques Ellul’s work. This gets me thinking about anarchist commonalities between these authors, which is something I want to explore more.

Would I read more of this? Absolutely. But I’m also glad to have exhausted the volumes available at my library, because as fun and cute as the premise is, there’s only so much I can read in a short time without getting tired of it.

Part of me feels like there’s only so long you can drag along the premise of “retired yakuza becomes stay-at-home spouse,” and a lot of the humor here builds on, rather than outright challenges, traditional gender roles. Yet, it remains a fun read!

This series is clearly formulaic and episodic, but it’s still fun (and since I struggled to follow the ongoing plot of My Hero Academia, maybe it’s an easier entry point for me).