I picked this up (along with Arca, some titles I’ll be reading and reviewing in the future, and a few that I’m going to skip because they are Not My Thing) in a Humble Bundle for recent IDW titles. I’ve read Wilson’s run on Ms. Marvel (or at least most of it), but I’ve bounced off some of her other stuff, so I wasn’t sure what I’d think of this.

I forgot for a while there that I was waiting for this to come out on hoopla! I finally remembered yesterday, looked it up, and checked it out. I think I’ll appreciate this volume more when I can binge read it alongside some of the others. I forgot some of the context for the major plot developments, which got in the way some. It continues to be a weird-but-amazing series, though, and I can’t believe how easily it hooks me, despite forgetting the context and despite the levels of blood and violence being higher than I usually tolerate.

Arca isn’t perfect—the plot moves at the speed of convenience, the characters aren’t terribly deep, and the twists are either predictable or “huh?” Even with those critiques, though, I nearly gave it full marks, because it’s really good. I love the art and panel design, and the dystopia as metaphor for modern social problems lands really well. I really enjoyed the read!

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting (I think the “biography” subtitle is misleading), but it’s good! It’s organized around specific understandings or depictions of Jesus in Mormonism, and while it isn’t afraid of exploring the weird and controversial (I may be citing this at some point for a paper that touches on arguments about a polygamist Jesus), it’s also good about contextualizing Mormon beliefs within broader trends, thereby making (some) things (slightly) less weird.

I’m glad I found this book through the UK library. I had read that it’s foundational for the ideas Ellul would explore through the rest of his career, and that pans out. I don’t agree with everything, and I think he overreaches sometimes, but I did find this book compelling, and a good addition to my Ellul studies.

This is more the kind of thing I’d expect from OOTS “purchase only” content. The additional stories were fun, the author commentary was interesting, and there’s at least one panel I might be able to work into a conference presentation, so that’s nice.

Cory Doctorow reviewed this book on his Pluralistic blog recently, and since I typically enjoy the books he recommends (well, the ones I try, anyway), I gave it a try. The writing style is not my favorite, and I don’t know that it needed to be one of those books that is written by an in-universe character, but both of those fit really well into the themes of the book, so I shouldn’t complain.

This apparently took us two months to watch, and I think I would have enjoyed it more if that hadn’t been the case. I actually didn’t really enjoy the season arc so much—individual episodes were great, though, and the show continues to be fun. Hard to believe there’s only one season left to get through!

This is a funny show to rate! I believe I learned about it from David Loehr on The Incomparable, who spoke highly of it. I did enjoy watching it, which is why I’m pretty positive about it. Thinking about it critically, the overarching plot is kind of hard to follow, the individual mysteries don’t have any way of solving them but “trust that brilliant main character is brilliant,” and the show almost knows how contrived its confessions at the end of each episode are.

Il faut peut-être que j’arrête d’essayer de lire des œuvres philosophiqies ou théologiques en français (même si je n’ai payé que 10€ chez Cultura), car j’avoue avoir du mal à tout comprendre dans de tels livres. Pourtant, ce que j’ai compris dans ce livre j’ai beaucoup aimé. Lagandré distingue entre le théisme et la religion d’une manière fort intéressant, et il arrive à exprimer plusieurs pensées qui m’arrivent d’une manière bien moins mûre depuis des années.

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.

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’ve had this on my radar since listening to the audiobook and thought I’d give it a try. It is terminally 80s in some ways (I liked the music anyway, but the sound effects felt like bad Doctor Who), but there were some excellent choices for adapting it to radio. It kept what I found interesting about the book: depicting the possibility of another way of living but without settling for naïve utopia.

I think I got this in an NPR Humble Bundle, and I’ve been meaning to relisten to it for a while. It’s a real mix of good and bad: Thanks to John Williams and Ben Burtt, it’s got some great audio to work with; however, it does a lot of awkward “tell since we can’t show.” It sometimes feels like it’s reaching to fill in an extra four hours, but also it maybe demonstrates that Star Wars could maybe be a miniseries with some better writing?

This was a very interesting subversion of stories like The Last Starfighter, where a young “chosen one” is called to save not their own people but another, not through violence but through peace. It wasn’t perfectly done, but it was a compelling story and invoked the then-contemporary Gulf War in all the right ways.

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 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.

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.

I have some complaints about this show, but I was so relieved to find myself smiling at the jokes that I’m giving it some grace. It’s a wonder I keep listening to these, but I spent a lot of time driving this weekend and needed something to listen to—besides, I’ve owned this collection for years without ever getting past Mort. I don’t know how much longer I’ll keep going, but I want to give it a try, at least.

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.

There’s something especially dark about the voice actor who played Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit) starring as a naïve Englishman in this story about the horrors of nuclear war. I’ve wanted to read the book this is based on for quite some time—and may yet read it now that I’ve found a copy on the Internet Archive—but I got to the radio adaptation first. The couple at the heart of the story are so naïve as to make the story heavy-handed, but it’s also a good literary device for just how helpless one is in the face of nuclear weapons.

This bounced off of me at first, which surprised me, because I remembered liking it when listening to it years ago. I think it might have been a case of the Mondays, though, because by the last episode, I was totally on board. It’s funny, adapted well to radio, and worth the listen.

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.

The finale was a perfect summary of everything I love about this show, but I had some trouble getting into the earlier episodes.

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.

It was really fun to introduce this to kiddo this weekend by watching it as a family. I don’t think this movie will ever be as good as it was when I was a teenager, before I could see the seams and tiny faults with it, but it will always be beloved in my family—and now including kiddo.

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.