I enjoyed reading this book but sometimes struggled with it. The Reorganization era of Community of Christ history remains largely new to me—though I have enjoyed reading “Pragmatic Prophet”—but I struggled some with the organization of the book.

In short,, I enjoyed the content but it felt sometimes that the book was a dumping ground for relevant content rather than the weaving of that content into a clear, cohesive narrative. I didn’t feel like I always understood Scherer’s structural choices for the book, and that got in the way of really enjoying it.

This is, in my view, the weakest arc in all of North’s run on Squirrel Girl, and I think it’s because it’s the only time that North’s story gets a significant connecting to an overarching Marvel plot. It’s not bad—the characters and art are still interesting in the ways that previous stories have been—but I just didn’t feel as engaged by any of it as I had been in previous TPBs.

Like its predecessors, this volume was interesting, and I appreciated what it had to say, but there was just too much that was weird about it for me to really love it. I don’t regret reading it, but I have no plans to buy the physical versions like I thought I might in the past.

The story seemed to get more and more speculative over time, and while I appreciated the intent, it just felt like more and more of a stretch, which felt like it weakened the goals of the author. The art was still weird, and things came off as overly didactic. The main characters lost more and more of the spotlight and their personalities, simply becoming vehicles for ideas.

I read this volume of the series much faster than the last one—perhaps because it was new to me and perhaps because the second round of the election motivated me to finish it—though I clearly won’t finish the series before today’s results were announced.

Thematically, I thought the book was stranger. It put more emphasis on how laws and politics established under mainstream parties could become terrifying in the hands of far right extremists. It was also helpful for learning more about other elements of France’s far right.

I think this is the third time I’ve read this BD, but given the ongoing French presidential election and the possibility that Le Pen will pull off a win on the 24th, I wanted to revisit it—and read the other volumes in the trilogy, which I’ve never done.

The BD isn’t the best—it’s overly didactic at times and the art aims for a photorealism that sometimes verges on the uncanny valley. The digital adaptation also complicates things—there’s no panel-to-panel swipe like many Kindle comics, and it’s hard to read on a phone.

I’ve owned this comic for a while and have been meaning to read it the whole time—especially since reading All of the Marvels and the first volume of Christopher Priest’s run on Black Panther.

Anyway, I finally got to it and I mostly liked it, but it wasn’t as mind-blowing as I hoped it would be. Coates does some really interesting things challenging the idea of Black Panther as an ideal monarch by questioning if such a thing even exists.

I think this might be the best of the series so far, even if it’s not quite good enough to bump it up to four hearts.

First, this is probably the most serious consideration of the far right conspiracy in the series as a violent, racist conspiracy and not just a plot point.

Second, while it’s as chock-full of references to other characters and events in the series as previous volumes, I feel like this volume does a better job than any of the others of trying to weave them together into a coherent whole rather than simply stuff references into a volume.

This volume was better than the last two, probably because it had a more interesting plot than just a series of cameos and because it was less egregious than the others in terms of trying to do social justice but falling short.

At the same time, this continues the series’s predilection for making sure that all of the characters are related to each other in some way, and that gets tiring after awhile.

I love the XIII BD even though it’s dumb, but reading the translations gets on my nerves for some reason. I think a lot of the appeal of the series for me is practicing my French, and a slightly stilted translation obviously doesn’t provide that appeal.

I still enjoy the universe for all its dumbness, though, and I started reading this spinoff series on Hoopla several months ago before turning to something else. I’m toying with the idea of going through them all this time and began by rereading this one.

I’m generally a fan of Doctorow’s writing—his recent collection of novellas (“Radicalized”) is one of my favorites and I also own his entire “Little Brother” trilogy. This collection of stories just didn’t land for me, though, and there are other stories/books of his that felt the same.

I wonder if his weirder, more optimistic stories don’t work for me in the same way his bleak ones do. This collection dates to 2007, and while Doctorow has long been a critic of certain uses of technology, there are some stories in here that seem like they have more faith in the future of tech than I think is warranted in a post-Snowden, post-Cambridge Analytica world.

I don’t think I’ve ever read any Black Panther before, but I loved the movie from a few years ago, and Christopher Priest’s run was recommended in All of the Marvels, so I decided to give this a try.

I see why this run was recommended, and there was a lot in there to like, but at the end of the day, I’m not sure it worked for me. I enjoy comics a lot, but it felt really continuity-heavy, and maybe I prefer graphic novels and self-contained short runs to issues that try to sit in the middle of everything Marvel’s ever published.

I’ve been interested in the idea of running for office since I was in high school, and as I’ve become more politically aware and engaged over the past five years, I’ve thought a lot in particular about eventually running for local office.

I picked this book up with a stack of others a couple of months ago during a particular rush of civic inspiration and since I got a notice that I needed to return it, I blazed through it in a couple of days.