Kicked off the family holiday gathering by watching this with my dad last night. This was a good Indiana Jones movie, I (mostly) had fun watching it, and I’m probably being a little harsh in my rating of it.

However, for all we live in an era where punching Nazis is shorthand for some very necessary resistance to some very dangerous far-right action, I’ve been reading about non-violence lately, and that makes it hard to enjoy media like this. There were lots of “oh, it’s the bad guys, so it’s okay if they die terrible deaths” moments, and I felt uncomfortable at the idea that I was supposed to enjoy that as part of the movie.

I enjoyed watching this show, and I really like the aesthetic it’s been rocking for its two seasons. I was inclined to give it a higher rating than this because of those factors and because I don’t really have anything bad to say about it—however, I’m hard pressed to come up with any praise more substantive than “I had a fun time,” so I’m going to knock off a heart for that.

I almost gave this four hearts because I kind of like how it turned out, and it did touch on some good Spider-Man themes. However, I then remembered all the comic book nonsense that happens here—and the way that so many of these issues demonstrate how terrible it would be to live in the (Ultimate) Marvel universe.

As has been the case for the past few volumes, this has some genuinely interesting stuff in it (the X-Men crossover was more engaging than I’d like to admit), but for the most part, this feels like advancing a broader Marvel landscape than doing actual Spider-Man stuff.

There’s some interesting stuff here, including Bendis’s riffs on power and responsibility and how that relates to secret identities. However, there’s too much welding to the broader Ultimate universe, including introducing characters I just don’t care about. I also still feel like Peter’s attitude toward MJ is more low-level misogyny than anything justified.

Definitely not my favorite of the series. Lots of crossover nonsense with characters I don’t really care about. Way too much casual misogyny (Peter toward MJ and creators toward the women they put in impractical fanservice costumes). Starting to question my commitment to this series binge.

Peter and MJ’s relationship is one of my favorite things to follow in this series, and that makes this volume a real disappointment. It seems like so much of the story is built around forcing drama and idiot balls into these two characters for the sake of adding twists and turns to the plot. Plus, it really comes through in this volume how often MJ is treated as an extension of Peter instead of a character with her own depth and agency. Pretty disappointed in that—and in myself for not paying more attention to it earlier.

This story is interesting, but it suffers from too much of superhero continuity bloat. I also miss Mark Bagley’s illustration—this artist’s faces all look alike, whereas Bagley’s characters are distinct and familiar to me. It’s just meh.

I like herbal tea, but there’s only so much interest I can show in a cookbook on the topic. The only reason I read this was because reading a cookbook is one of the squares on my local library’s 2023 reading challenge. It could be interesting to grow my own herbs and make my own blends, but I just don’t see myself doing it.

I keep going back and forth on whether I’m going to rag on these comics for having silly comicbook logic, and now’s the time I’m really going to do it. Maybe it’s because I’ve never really cared about Venom, but this reinvention of the character feels especially silly. There’s a great conversation between Peter and Nick Fury that feels like it really gets at teasing apart superhero stories in fascinating ways, but as a whole, this was just not my favorite story in the run. My hoopla borrows for the month are gone, so time to log in with a family member’s account to try more Ultimate Spider-Man.

J’aime bien la plupart des personnages dans cette série, et c’est cool de voir un plan se dérouler. Pourtant, la logique narrative ne tenait pas hyper bien, et on avait parfois l’impression que les personnages faisaient des choses juste pour avancer une certaine histoire (et, d’ailleurs, qu’on inventait de nouveaux personnages pour la même raison).

The show started off strong, and there are lots of individual details that I liked (including a compelling dark Jedi who made lightsaber duels interesting again). However, by the end, it felt like a mishmash of fanservice, addressing plot threads from a show I haven’t seen, but then setting them up for a future movie instead of actually resolving them. So many decisions seemed to happen for the sake of plot or convenience, and it was kind of a slog to finish the dang thing.

Reading a second volume hasn’t changed my impression of this series: It’s an interesting premise, but there’s not really enough substance to it to be worth my attention. There’s more out there, but I don’t feel any completionist tendencies about it.

As promised, I’m reading this in honor of Bill Willingham’s badass public domain antics earlier this week. I think the concept of his series is fun, but I’m not sure if I think it’s as great as its reputation. The idea of fairy tale characters living in the real world is full of potential, but the story seems pretty superficial. Will probably keep reading, though.

I really enjoyed the original adaptation of the book (which I’m trying to read now), and the characters and many of the jokes were just as delightful in the second series. As a whole, though, the series felt like it didn’t have much of a plot—or, when it did, that it was moving furniture for a third series.

I don’t remember how I discovered this book, but when ordering some books from France early in the pandemic, I couldn’t pass up the chance to read a Lebanese scholar’s treatment of the Three Nephites in the original French. That said, while there were interesting bits in here, I just don’t know that I follow academic French well enough to really get this. I have a PDF of the English translation that may be worth briefly revisiting.

Lots to love in this movie: The animation is gorgeous, the concept is interesting, the metaphors are well-meaning, and there are plenty of funny bits. There seemed to be too many subplots, though, and when any of them saw a shake-up, it didn’t always feel deserved. It also feels essentialist in the way that D&D does—yes, differences make sense in the fictional world, but since we’re meant to read them onto the real world, it doesn’t always sit right. There are also bits that go unexplained or that don’t hold up to much thinking. I get that it’s a Pixar movie, but they still bugged me when I sat to think about it. I enjoyed it and would watch it again, but it seems like it was an excuse to do some cool animation and that the rest of the movie suffers from it.

This is a fascinating bit of history. Derry was an early convert to Mormonism who emigrated from England to Utah, became disgusted with polygamy and what he saw as an abusive system of tithing and church governance, and returned to the American Midwest, where he joined the RLDS church and became a leader and missionary in that denomination. Like The Giant Joshua, it’s odd to read something that is so clearly “a pioneer story” but isn’t uniformly positive. Andrew Bolton, a former apostle in Community of Christ, gave me a copy of the book after we met at the 2023 World Conference. He wanted to know whether it would be useful for folks with an LDS background looking into Community of Christ. I found the book fascinating from a historical perspective, but I don’t think it would be helpful in ministry. As basically a summary of old journals, reprinted in newspaper articles and then collated in this book, it makes for dry, long reading. Furthermore, Derry’s conflict with the LDS church is put in very RLDS terms that don’t match Community of Christ’s contemporary priorities and identity.

I guess this is interesting enough to keep reading, but my verdict is still the same. Great art, interesting premise, but I don’t know if it goes further than that.

I stumbled upon this series on TVTropes and was happy to see it’s available through Hoopla. I get why it gets the praise that it does, but it just didn’t land with me. The art is gorgeous and the premise (a noir detective in a 1950s America populated by anthropomorphic animals) is bold and compelling. I don’t know that noir is my genre, though—it feels more like tropes strung together than an actual plot, and it sometimes goes out of its way to be lurid. I also get frustrated reading BD in translation: Sometimes the language feels like French struggling to be liberated from an English straightjacket. There’s also something off when Europeans write American history; we heartily deserve to be criticized for our racism, but sometimes the critiques perpetuate prejudice in trying to confront it (this happens in XIII, too).

I’d been meaning to watch this, and kiddo was happy to walk me through it (she’d seen it in theaters). The animation is beautiful and there are lots of fun in-jokes and shout-outs. At the end of the day, though, the plot was thin and the characters flat (though they could have done much worse by Peach). It’s probably the best one could do with the source material, but that doesn’t mean it’s great

I recently read a lot of Saga, it’s not too long ago that I gave Y: The Last Man a readthrough, and I’ve tried this series before, so I was expecting to like this. I did see enough in there to see why it’s so often hailed as a classic, but I found it too edgy for the sake of being edgy or editorial when opportunity allowed. Lind of disappointed, and not planning to read further.

This is new Astro City material for me, even though it’s been around for a while. There’s still a lot of what makes Astro City great in the long “Dark Ages” story, but not enough to make it shine. I think I like Astro City best when it takes a quick dive into an interesting story, plays with some tropes, and just hints at a broader world and continuity. This tries to explain too much and be too connected, and in doing so, I think it loses a lot of the magic. I also felt nervous the whole time about a white creative team working with two black protagonists; it felt like it skirted the edge of stereotype sometimes.

This is a fun concept—a teenager named Clark Kent who’s tired of the jokes about being named after the fictional Superman suddenly develops Superman’s powers and has to figure out how to live with them. Busiek strikes me as the perfect person to write a story about how a world familiar with superhero tropes would deal with their becoming real, but as much as I love little bits of this story, I just don’t know that it will ever stand out as a favorite of mine.

I really wanted to like this more than I did! North and Henderson are one of my favorite creative teams in comics, and North’s dialogue and Henderson’s art come together in perfect ways throughout the story. At the end of the day, though, I don’t know if there was enough to that story or to the worldbuilding to really interest me. There are neat ideas in here, and the plot comes together in smart ways at times, but neither feels fleshed out enough to really stand out.