Okay, yes, I just listened to this a couple of months ago, but I was doing a relisten of the BBC Radio 4 Smiley adaptations, and I wanted to see how this held up reading it where it fits chronologically. It holds up well!

I like this novel a lot. It’s fun to see Smiley being competent in the field, and I appreciate how it complicates Ann without making Smiley the bad guy in the relationship. It’s the fun kind of fanservice, and while I hope this doesn’t go all Tom Clancy in its posthumous franchization, I wouldn’t mind another from Harkaway.

This was fine. I’m glad I read it, so I can continue my Doctorow completionism, but I’m not sure I would have missed much if I didn’t. You can see the beginnings of Walkaway in here, but it just makes me want to reread that yet again.

Ça faisait plusieurs mois que je voulais lire ce livre, et j’ai été content de pouvoir en commander un exemplaire—surtout avant la folie actuelles des taxes douanières. Je dirais pas que le livre m’a deçu, car il y a plusieurs passages qui m’ont impressionné. Pourtant, il me semblait peu organisé et trop concentré sur des « preuves » que la Bible est un livre anarchiste. J’aime assez bien les inteprétations qu’Ellul a proposées, mais toute insistence que la Bible doit forcément dire telle ou telle chose m’agace. J’aurais préféré une attitude qui soulève la possibilité d’une telle interprétation.

I made a mistake with this reread—not in the reread itself but in starting it this early. I forgot how much these collections suck me in—and, therefore, how quickly I go through them—so now I’m done and there are still several weeks to go before the next PDF gets delivered to me and I still have to disentangle my brain between what I’m reading daily and the specific context of the new collection. It’s not a huge deal (and I liked this collection!), but food for thought before the next time I try this.

I enjoyed this collection, too, even if Billie and Ruth’s relationship always makes me slightly uncomfortable for how broken it is. Willis is good at this, and I enjoy reading these in collections even better than one strip at a time every morning.

I’m rating this higher than on my last readthrough. I couldn’t tell you why I held back last time, but this time, I was reminded of some excellent strips that have really made an impression on me, so full marks.

Why am I rereading in the first place? I did two full(ish) archive binges of DoA in 2024, so I don’t strictly need to reread this. I did back the Book 14 Kickstarter, though, and I wanted to have some context for when that PDF arrives. I’ve also been doing a lot of comics rereads in 2025, so even though I definitely don’t have the energy for another archive binge, I thought I’d revisit everything post timeskip.

I may no longer be a practicing Latter-day Saint, but this is the kind of cultural artifact that keeps me thinking of myself as Mormon. Peck’s writing—see also Heike’s Void, which I’d love to reread—depicts a beautiful Mormonism that I still feel connected to and that represents what the religion can be at its best.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have complaints about these stories. They’re very male-centered (I’m not sure any of them pass the Bechdel Test), and even though it’s one of my favorites in some ways, the story of the crafting of the Liahona bugs me for the way that it imposes Mormon theology on first temple Israelite religion, as Mormons tend to do.

I didn’t like this at all. The art is weird, and I didn’t like the story. It very nearly got more interesting in the final part, when it started pulling together the previous, seemingly standalone stories, but I still feel like it didn’t stick the landing.

I won’t pretend to be able to distinguish the very fine line that separates boring comic nonsense from amazing comic nonsense, but this is on the right side of things.

Gary Mitchell elevates Kelvinverse Kirk to godhood so that they can play a game of multiversal chess using as pieces infinite Kirks in infinite combinations. The gender-flipped Enterprise comes back! There’s a Kirk raised by Klingons and a Spock (“Simon Grayson”) who’s rejected his Vulcan side! Everything is bonkers (I didn’t even mentioned the gas-based Scotty), but I appreciate a big swing.

I dunno, I guess there’s some good stuff in here, and maybe I’d be more patient with it if I weren’t reading a lot of Star Trek comics in a very short period of time. It just feels like I’m reading it to complete my binge, though, and I can’t say this volume impressed me much.

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. This one is also a quick, easy, funny read in a way that prize-winning French books aren’t always.

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! These are fun.

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. That was a good thing to think about.

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.