I definitely read this one too fast, but if I hadn’t, I probably would have gotten hung up more on the continued blood and gore, which I continue not to like. As with the rest of the series, though, there’s plenty that kept me coming back, and even the stuff I don’t like is consistent(ish) with the universe that these creators have established. The happy ending is satisfying, the big swings are still interesting, and Eve gets treated better in the final arcs than in earlier stories (though I think they could have done even better by her).

I didn’t realize how quickly I made it through this! I wrote something in my review of the first compendium about the interesting things that Kirkman can do without being bogged down by a broader continuity, and that certainly applies here. I appreciate the big swings he takes and his willingness to shake up the story and leave it shaken up rather than a creep back to the status quo.

I really like the first novella, and this one isn’t bad, it’s just hard to live up to the strong first start. I’d like to continue working on the series, since I know it’s all well regarded, but I don’t remember many of the details from the first time I tried this, so let’s hope it sticks more this time.

I have some mixed feelings about Invincible, though they obviously are positive enough for me to start a full series reread. In college, I used to own a hardcover collection regrouping the first several TPBs, but I gave it away when moving to grad school. I was bothered by the violence and gore then, and now I can add to that the casual homophobia and ableism of the early 2000s and the low-level objectification and misogyny that are in most superhero comics.

Rereading this after watching the show is really interesting. In some ways, it raises my opinion of the show, after seeing specific lines and scenes that they clearly drew from. However, as I wrote last night, I also just like the book so much more, and I’m not sure that the things I miss could have been adapted at all.

I love this story, and the radio production is excellent. I like the supporting cast of oddball characters (especially Connie and Toby), and the idea of George’s struggle with his age and his morals is compelling. Maybe it’s still being torn about Honourable Schoolboy, but it just didn’t land as well this time as it has in the past.

There’s an interesting story in here, and I’m usually a fan of Le Carré’s “naïve characters make bad decisions and things go poorly” plots. I just cannot get over what feels like exaggerated East Asian accents in the performance, though. What could be a really interesting exploration of colonization, American intervention, etc. feels more like orientalism, especially when I’m not sure all the actors doing the accents are of East Asian heritage themselves.

Look, I know I haven’t read enough of the Murderbot source material to get snippy about unfaithfulness of adaptations. What’s more, this is a pretty good show! Great design, great casting, and lots of fun. I just didn’t like it as much as I remember liking the novella. I got annoyed by what felt like unnecessary expansions, and there are parts of the worldbuilding that just can’t be captured on TV.

I tend to overthink media, and one thing I’ve been overthinking recently is whether books and radio are more ethical media than television and film, because I understand the former (perhaps naïvely) as involving less waste of resources for the sake of entertainment. I bring this up not because I’m convinced by the argument (which I haven’t really thought through) but because the second season of Andor had me back on the side of television, because how else could you tell such a great story as that?

I mostly skimmed this book, and I would have some quibbles with it if I got more into the details, but I found it really good. Musical theater is far, faaaar outside of my research interests, but this book articulates a fascinating “theology of voice” within Mormonism that will be helpful as I look to write something on Ellul and Mormon Studies.

A relatively short comic with good art and a compelling story. In some ways, I would have liked a written memoir more, but this was a good read.

This took a while to get through for a book I enjoyed so much. It has Andor-level grittiness and complex characters and narratives that make it better than a lot of Star Wars stuff. The audiobook’s use of Star Wars music and sound effects is also a big plus. I’ve already checked out the final book in the trilogy so that it’s not another two years before I wrap it up!

This book isn’t the best of the anarchist fiction I’ve read—it feels a bit stilted or maybe even too didactic at points—but it grew on me, and I enjoyed the story a lot. (It’s also not the worst anarchist fiction I’ve read—looking at you, V for Vendetta). Cory Doctorow mentioned Killjoy’s most recent book on his blog, so I’m giving some of her older stuff a try, and so far, I think it’s pretty good.

Dumb but fun is how I would describe this. It’s got good art and an interesting premise, but the longer it went on, the more tired I got of twists and the harder time I had following the story. It wasn’t bad—but nothing special either.

This one almost won me over. It has good art, and the kind of worldbuilding that goes with an interesting idea rather than explain things. It had a bit more violence than I like and some objectifying art that wasn’t really necessary, but what really lost me was an unnecessary fridging late in the second arc. It could have been something interesting—and frankly still was—but that scene cancelled out a lot of that potential.

I didn’t want to like this. The IDW comics bundle I’ve been working through has been kind of a mixed bag, and this was weird from the get-go. A fast-food employee robs an entire strip mall, which gets him entangled in an effort to summon the devil on earth. It doesn’t sound like my thing at all. It’s so unashamed of its weirdness, though, that it comes all the way around to amazing.

I feel kind of weird rating this above any of the Earthdivers volumes, but hey. The art feels a bit off sometimes, and there were some bits that I didn’t quite follow. The character designs and worldbuilding were great—weird sometimes but stronger for it. The plot was interesting, with some good twists that kept me hooked.

En fait, j’ai lu Stay, la traduction anglaise que j’ai trouvée à la bibliothèque chez moi. Je n’aime pas lire les BD en traduction—traduire « kebab » comme « gyro », ça se comprend, mais c’est quand-même insupportable—mais je ne voulais pas rater la possibilité de lire une vraie BD non plus, L’art est magnifique, et si l’histoire est un peu bizarre, elle est touchante aussi. C’est impressionnant combien cette équipe a pu raconter une histoire tellement émouvante avec si peu de paroles.

This is a very Ryan Northy comic, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s a great adaptation of the Lower Decks vibe (and Fenoglio’s art is a fantastic recreation), but it also has a lot of North’s signature moves. I love his physical comic adaptation of webcomics’ alt text jokes, his voice in those jokes, and his fun with science and public domain characters. I don’t know how much more there is in this series, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for additional volumes.

This is a good book, with a powerful thesis and a great epilogue that ties things together. It isn’t perfect, but I think most of my quibbles are related to the subject matter and the genre. It’s hard to write a book about a contemporary subject of such importance, and I think it’s tricky to write a book that combines history with more of a critical take on the AI ecosystem.

Had to watch this after finishing Andor, and I spent the first half of it being disappointed??? I thought I remembered this being one of my favorite Star Wars movies, but after the depth and maturity of its tv prequel, it feels kind of superficial. The last few sequences won me back, though. Andor is the superior story, but this is a fine action movie and a marvelous piece of fanservice.

Maybe I’m dumb—or not reading closely enough—but I just cannot follow the twists and turns of this series. I love the back of the envelope idea of Indigenous time travelers trying to set things right, but I am very confused by the execution.

This was Star Wars at its best, and there is (unfortunately) no better time than now for it to come out. I’ve wrestled a lot recently with the tension between my love for Star Wars and my aspiration toward non-violence. I don’t know that I agree with this series’s implicit argument that sometimes ugly things are necessary to make a better world, but I appreciate that it deals with that ugliness rather than just letting Luke blow up the Death Star without counting how many people that act of self-defense killed.

This feels a lot like the first volume: great premise, great art, but very hard to follow. Maybe it’s me not paying close enough attention, but it just feels twisty and turny without enough signposts to keep the reader on track.

There’s a lot going for this book: A compelling premise (Indigenous survivors of a climate apocalypse send someone back in time to kill Columbus, hoping that no America will avert said apocalypse), a willingness to interrogate the premise (violence begets violence, can the past be changed, etc.), and great art. I felt like it didn’t live up to that potential, though. I had trouble following the timey wimey twists, there were a lot of shortcuts, and the dialogue and characters sometimes felt flat.

This webcomic is just so good! I really enjoy reading it in collection format, even if it hasn’t been all that long since I read it strip-by-strip. This holds true even if this collection doesn’t have my favorite storylines in it. Looking forward to next year’s collection!

I’m being a little hard on this book because it wasn’t quite was I was expecting. There’s a lot of good stuff in here despite not having some of what I was hoping to find. I do wonder if it would have been better as the original lecture it’s based on: You could hear some of the audio, and I think some of the fat could be trimmed from the manuscript.

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!

I wasn’t sure if I was going to read this—not that I wasn’t interested, but so many books, so little time, etc. However, a friend introduced me to NetGalley, where she was reading it prior to publication, and that pushed me into following her example. I did wait until the end of my time limit with the book to really make progress, and between that rush and my familiarity with Smith’s life, I still wasn’t sure how much I’d get out of it.

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.

In many ways, this is a great book! It’s well written (and well read), and it made me care about baseball in ways I usually don’t. It’s also an interesting story—a great example of the power of statistics and data science to do cool things. That last part, though, is why I read it. I expected to be critical of the book’s take, and I wasn’t wrong. It cheerleads attitudes about (data) science that I’m skeptical of, like its supposed superiority in terms of objectivity and rationality.

Man, I really wanted to like this movie. I’m glad kiddo enjoyed it, I did appreciate some of the Jared Hess vibes, and some of the visual design was pretty good, but this was just an excuse to make a bunch of Minecraft references in a movie, and I have never been more aware of green screens in my life.

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 was a hard book to read, but I’m glad I did. Munther is a Palestinian Christian pastor, and his holy anger and hurt in this book really spoke to me. However, I have a lot of internalized resistance to what he has to say, and things feel so big, and I spent a lot of the book tensing up and feeling overwhelmed. I feel called to repentance by this book, and I’m glad I read it before next week’s Community of Christ World Conference, where a resolution standing against Christian Zionism will be debated.