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. Yes, comic books get dumb, and so does Star Trek, but it was enjoyable despite all that. I think I have all the IDW Star Trek series (thanks Humble Bundle!), so here’s hoping I can get through it all.

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. It also does what Lower Decks does best, which is to pay homage (and make fun of) what makes Star Trek fun. So glad I read this.

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.

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. It’s a fun listen in most of the ways that count, there’s a clear love for 1980s San Francisco that comes through, and I can believe it as Marty Hench telling the story of how he got started in his career.

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. It’s also a product of its time in a very specific way—20+ years later, it’s much harder to get excited about heroic secret agents facing off against mean old terrorists. What I love about The Sandbaggers (which inspired these comics) is the way the show reveals the moral vacuum at the heart of Cold War espionage (even for the “good guys”), and I’m not sure this series is willing to go there—at least not in its first issues.

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. On n’arrive plus à croire, et si je ne m’amuse plus à lire, est-ce que cela vaut la peine ?

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 really confused me, since it had never occurred to me that one could critique Common Core from the left.

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. The details of Joseph Smith’s life and early Mormon history are sometimes sparse or ambiguous; more importantly, they’re hotly contested. I don’t mind at all a critical take on Smith, but even though the author is clearly respectful of the historical figure even with his warts and all approach, there’s a deeply ingrained Mormon skepticism in me that wonders if any of the choices verged on the salacious. That’s not a critique of the book so much as a personal observation and a wish that I could have enjoyed the story while setting aside the instinct to be skeptical of non-LDS tellings of the history (which is all the more ridiculous given that I’m going on 5 years of not practicing in that faith).

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.e., I should have already figured that out by now), but this book pushed my thinking in ways that are going to stick. I’m more informed than many on Israel and Palestine thanks to a few classes in college, but this still brought in new perspectives that had never really landed before.

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.

John Siracusa recommended the anime adaptation of this on the year-end episode of The Incomparable, and the premise sounded interesting enough to try getting into manga again.

I love stories that explore the mundanity of fantastic worlds—there are lots of things I don’t like about the Star Wars prequels, but Jedi Knights resolving trade disputes is great—and this story delivers on that. It picks up after a D&D-style adventure party has completed their quest and asks what happens next. More particularly, it asks what it means to be a long-lived elf in a world of mortals with lesser lifespans. It leans into low-stakes tasks and semi-useless spells. It has interesting characters and great callbacks and connective tissue.

Despite meaning to reread this ever since I first read it, this is my first reread. While it’s very clearly related to Red Team Blues, it’s remarkable how different this book is. Rather than a tight thriller, this feels more like a meandering story that has a clear throughline but skips from event to event as more than a decade goes by. There’s a fun framing device that makes this work, though.

So, I actually finished this last week and am behind on bookblogging. It’s the third time I’ve read this book (twice on audio), but with the final book in the trilogy coming out next month, it was time to revisit the earlier ones.

This book is fun in an action movie sense while also being a searing critique of wealth and of our society’s seeming inability to take care of the poor. Wil Wheaton does great narration on the audiobook, and it’s just an enjoyable listen all around.

C’est méchant de dire que cet album m’a été utile pour combattre l’insomnie hier soir ? Bon, c’est exaggérer un peu (n’importe quel livre aurait suffi), mais mes sentiments complexes envers cette série continuent.

C’est assez intéressant de revisiter l’Amérique latine, et il aurait servi comme occasion de critiquer le militarisme américain, mais pourquoi donc éléver un Irlando-Américain comme « sauveur blanc » pour ces rebelles ?

Je continue à lire, mais je continue à me demander si j’aurais du me mettre à collectionner une autre série de bd.

Je reprends donc cette série en lisant les albums que j’ai en format physique. C’est comme avant : J’aime l’art, et il y a des éléments de l’histoire qui m’intriguent, mais ce n’est rien de spécial.

The book feels like fanservice, but not all fanservice is bad! Dan Moren recommended this at the tail end of a recent episode of The Incomparable, and I was surprised that I hadn’t heard that a new George Smiley story was coming out. In conversation with my partner later, she mentioned that she’d told me when she saw it in the news and that I’d brushed it off. That tracks: I had some trepidation about someone else writing in Le Carré’s world, but it’s quite well done.

I think I’m all caught up on TPBs now. It looks like a new one ought to be coming soon, but I might start reading issue to issue, because it’s just that good.

Strong return to the series after the major twists in Volume 9. It does a good job of continuing the themes of the series while still shaking things up—and continuing to deliver major changes.

Comics do a lot of dumb things to keep readers hooked, shake up the story, etc. When Saga does them, they work. I knew the twists in this episode were coming, but wow did they still land.

I say this about a lot of Saga, but this volume in particular shouldn’t be as good as it is. And yet…

Sometimes depressing art is the best art, and I felt that way about this volume. Saga is violent sometimes, but it never glorifies that violence, and that’s one of its strengths.

Like with my first readthrough, I’m noticing that every volume is good, but some volumes are just a cut above. This is one of them. What a series.