I have been enjoying reading some of the comics that I bought through doing Proxibid. One of them is the old New Universe series ‘Kickers Inc’. Jim Shooter created the line of in celebration of Marvel Comics’ 25th anniversary.

As a reader, I knew I was reading a horror comic, but my logical brain was trying to make sense of what was happening and was hoping that I would get some answers at the end of the story, but frankly, I am glad I did not. It made the story’s horror last longer in my mind.

This anthology compromises seven stories of Direct Support Professionals on their duties of support folks living with disabilities. Green Mountain Support Services sponsored the comic and it was written by Mike Luoma and illustrated by several Vermont cartoonists.

I read Eric Orchard’s book, ‘Maddy Kettle: The Adventure of the Thimblewitch’. This was a fun middle-grade-level graphic novel that is around 90 pages.

It was a fast-paced fun adventure about a girl trying to save her parents and floating toad pet from goblins.

This past week I finally finished reading ‘Covid Chronicles’ comic anthology from Graphic Mundi. This is a whopping 270+ page book with 65 individual stories. This book serves both as a therapy for all of us who lived (and are living) through COVID and serves as a time capsule. Although the book was published less than 2 years ago, it is also good to see how far we have come with the science and understanding of COVID.

It was a fun read and one thing that Caleb is good at too is making sure the title is reflecting what the story is about. Issue one gives the reader a taste of where the overall story is going while throwing in an engaging origin story of the main character along with the origin story of the world he has created.

Frankly, I was very impressed by the quality of the story. I immediately connected with the characters and found the story’s backdrop of Eastern Africa engaging. Beserat is great at instilling some cultural-specific terms and actions that serve as a nod to his Ethiopian audience and as a cross-cultural educational piece for an uninitiated western audience.

The description of the book is as follows:

Planet Jurassica is under siege. The sinister space pirates have raided the Imperial palace and stolen the famous Jewels of Jurassica. This looks like a job for . . . Captain Raptor!. . . hero of a thousand space missions; champion of truth, justice, and dinosaurs in space throughout the galaxy. If anyone can track down those marauding space pirates, it's Captain Raptor and the fearless crew of the Megatooth!

I have always loved Neil Gaiman’s stories. They possess an accessible amount of horror and whimsy while making incredibly niche settings easy to understand by any reader. There is no level of condensation to his narrative, and this book is a great example of it.

Nostalgia abound! Much like other branching novel books, this is written in a second-person point of view. How this is different than other books, this is also mainly a solo roleplaying game. The reader first creates the character statistics. I love how this particular branching novel roleplaying adventure makes it extremely portable and accessible anywhere.

I mentioned on my Instagram that this book had some innovative storytelling through mapping and engineering designs, which I found interesting. Ying also sets up a grand backstory that is hinted at in the book, allowing the reader to feel satisfied while wanting to explore this world more.

It was a very fun and quick read, and much like all children’s books, it had a nice moral to its story.

I really enjoyed how Perreault weaved minimalistic frames with more detailed pictures. His style is also accessible enough for a reader to emulate.

This past week I read the 2006 series of the “Defenders”. It was one of my bookshelf discoveries. It was so cool to see that the writers of this series were no other than the writing team of Keith Giffens and J.M. DeMatteis.

I loved their Justice League run in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and was excited to read these first 5 issues.

This past week, I pulled another graphic novel from the shelf to read. I read the graphic novel version of James Patterson’s ‘Daniel X: Alien Hunter.’

The story was pretty standard and it struggled to make the protagonist relatable, but I did really enjoy the illustrations. It was a good balance of cartoon and superhero action established in a painted style.