I haven’t yet mentioned how good Chiang’s art is. It’s good! This series continues to be better than I remembered it being.

Vaughan seems to like to be edgy in ways that I don’t always appreciate, but this series has hooked me in the way that Saga eventually did, so kudos.

Starting to recognize the Vaughan stuff I like from Saga: Unapologetically weird but still holds together somehow. I’m enjoying rereading this series.

Funnily enough, there’s a paper TPB sitting on my bedside table from when I checked it out several months ago so that I could revisit this series.

That stalled out, but I am finding it easier to get through as a PDF on my phone. The series is better than I remember it being from whenever I reread it, but it’s still not so good that I feel like I get some of the hype.

I’ve been a Star Wars fan for long enough to recognize unnecessary expanded universe material when I hear it, but I’ve also been a Star Wars fan for long enough to know that some of it is actually pretty good.

I’ve known about this book for ages and always wanted to read it because the idea of the Kobayashi Maru is just fun. I was delighted to find an audiobook on the Internet Archive and enjoyed listening to it. James Doohan can only do so many voices (I had trouble telling his Chekov from his Scotty), but I appreciated what he brought to the role, the music and sound effects weren’t bad, and the premise paid off.

I don’t agree with everything in the book, but it’s full of great observations that I would gladly tweak to draw slightly different, really powerful conclusions. The author’s “reader-centered theology of scripture” is great, and its meditations on the weakness of God also really spoke to me. This made Ether more interesting than I remembered it being, and I’m grateful for that.

I’ve now read all the TPBs for this series that came in the Image Humble Bundle, and I can’t say I’m in any rush to learn what happens next. For such a wild start to a series, this got dull fast.

This series works best when it explores its basic premise, and for that premise to work, the characters have to kind of remain pastiches of better known Batman ones (though, to the author’s credit, they are much more interesting than superficial parodies). Yet, as the series goes on, Casey seems to want to explore worldbuilding rather than riff on the original premise of the book, and I just don’t find that interesting. Also don’t love AT ALL that he is riffing off of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory for the name of his actual world-controlling conspiracy. Feels like a major faux pas.

I like weird fiction, and this anarchist occult book delivers. I like the mundanity of the occult stuff and the persistent but relatively subtle anarchist themes. It could be better, but the vibes alone are enough for a positive review. Looking forward to reading the next one in the series.

Fascinating read! I’m not as interested as the author in his largely geopolitical thesis, but the raw materials he uses to construct that thesis are depressingly fascinating. They could also make up the elements of an Ellulian thesis on the dangers of power, efficiency, and technical systems. It’s harder to use Apple products after reading the book—and it’s a stark reminder of how the world we live in is so different than the world I’d like us to.

I enjoyed watching some of my favorite characters in this series, but it does not have the coherence or cleverness of the first one.

Still kind of meh at this point, and I’m wondering if there’s only so far that the premise of this series can go. There are some interesting plot developments, though, so we’ll see if things get more exciting in the next volume(s).

Cory Doctorow recently reviewed a newer book from Lubchansky, which I’d love to read. I can’t easily get a copy, though, so I checked this one out again from the library. It is bonkers and beautiful, and there should be more comics like it.

Parts of this are good—especially the Batman-analogue/Catwoman-analogue date subplot that bookends this volume—but a lot of it is meh. I’m also not a fan of the “rich dude has to work to make a problem go away for his company” plot, though we’ll see if that changes any.

Wow, wow, wow. I was intrigued by what I knew about this book when I first bought it but am only now getting to it, five years later. It’s a beautiful book and quietly radical, using the story of Mormon to develop a theology of the world ending around us. Miller explicitly invokes the climate crisis at the end of the book and calls for disciples to be willing to sacrifice all things instead of simply waiting to lose all things. Even outside of that context, Miller’s quasi-mystical reading of Mormon has so much to offer—and is pleasantly aligned with some of the theologies I’ve heard in Community of Christ. This is a good one.

This series continues to be compelling, even if I have some complaints about it. Casey’s dialogue for Black characters sometimes feels stereotypical, I don’t love his use (or depiction) of rape as a plot point, and (like some of the other Image series I’ve read) I feel like there’s a fine line between “comics can be a mature medium” and “let’s draw all the boobs and butts we can.”

And yet. This is a more interesting Batman story than so many actual Batman stories I’ve read. For all my baseline prudishness and legitimate concerns, I don’t (usually) think this is just mature content just to be titillating, and I really want to see how things play out.

Just over a year ago, I read and reviewed Matt Fraction’s Sex Criminals, which felt weird to read and even weirder to publicly acknowledge having read. I got why it received the acclaim that it did but didn’t really like it.

This Image comics Humble Bundle that I’ve been working my way through included the entire run of Sex Criminals, which I don’t intend to reread, but I am trying to read basically everything else in the bundle, including other series that it feels weird to read and even weirder to publicly acknowledge reading. I’ve been oblique in referencing that so far, but it’s hard to avoid with this review.

Still appreciate what this series is aiming for, and there are some good bits in here, but the plot still takes leaps I can’t follow, and my nagging concerns still nag.

So, this still doesn’t sit totally right with me. The sleaze as art choice is still not my style, and I’m not sure which side of the “artistic vs. objectifying” it falls on, though the former is clearly the goal. I also think that plot and character “development” sometimes move too quickly to really land.

If I’m more generous toward this volume, though, it’s because it’s more clear what the creators are trying to do here. The characters are more compelling, with backstories and relationships that make them interesting. The plot twists add genuine drama. It feels like they are trying to prove that comics can be a serious, “adult” (in not just one sense of the term) medium, and I think they mostly succeed? It feels like a comics equivalent of all those blockbuster TV shows I don’t watch, and I can give it credit for that even if there are reasons I tend not to watch those shows.

I keep expecting to like Matt Fraction stuff to be better than I do because I’ve heard so much good stuff about him. There’s something interesting in here, but it also seems sleazy and grimy as an intentional style decision, and I don’t know if that’s my kind of fiction. I’ll probably keep reading this, and it was helpful to read the cast pages at the end so I could remember who everyone was, but I don’t know if I’ll like it any more.

Look, now more than ever, I’m sympathetic toward a story of Canadian resistance to American bullying, and you’d think that giant mech combat would only make that more appealing.

There are just too many strikes against this to be better than “meh,” though. I don’t like blood and gore in my comics, the characters are kind of flat, and the French dialogue needs another edit.

This was dumb. It’s the kind of comic that’s intentionally offensive, but that doesn’t stop it from being dumb and offensive.

The only thing keeping me from rating it lower is that there’s the spark of something interesting in there. Compelling art! Is Jay Leno POTUS, with Dick Cheney as his VP?! It’s Alan Moore’s Comedian turned up to 12! None of that is enough to make it good, but it’s worth some recognition, I guess.

This comic has the raw ingredients (including solid art) to make a compelling story about mortality, existential dread, privilege, and so many other topics. Yet, it doesn’t seem to be able to organize them into something coherent and compelling.

This book starts off strong, with a very interesting exploration of Christology in the Book of Mormon. There are some other interesting observations, too (including a frank-to-the-point-of-productive-discomfort evaluation of race in the Book of Mormon). If I were only reading the conclusion, I’d likely give it full marks. A few things keep me from doing that for the book as I read it, though.

I admit that some of those things are entirely my fault. As with the last two books in the series, I’ve read this one too quickly to appreciate the arguments it’s making. Furthermore, I confess that I have personal biases against a couple of the authors cited even though I don’t know much about those authors—it’s the laziest kind of bias, and while I might still dislike those authors after a thorough evaluation of their work, it’s not solid ground for grumping about their appearance in this book.

This series ended as a disappointment. The grace I was willing to give it with the last volume is gone after it finishing in a pile of anticlimaxes and overused science fiction tropes. Meh.