I backed Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos’ Kickstarter a couple of months ago, ‘Zine100: How Not to Be Colonized By Outreach Programs’. It was a fun and educational mini-zine that was handmade by Stephanie. Her passion and experience in community-based health advocacy are apparent and appreciated in the booklet. She tackles a challenging subject that is also not widely known with an approachable and accessible narrative and art style.

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 really appreciated Khouri’s artwork, with its heavy linework. This book also shows how important color is to a story, for mood and setting. The entire book was presented in a warm palette of yellows and oranges, which insinuated to me, a planet with a different type of sun.

This past week I read ‘Aster and the Accidental Magic’ by Thom Pico and Karensac. What a fun book. Thom and Karensac created a great world for the protagonist, Aster to explore. I really love this type of youth-oriented graphic novel genre that has characters interacting with their day-to-day magical surroundings.

It is exciting to see the writer and the artist world build together and seemingly work so well as to play on each other’s creative strengths.

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.

Erica does such a great job developing the personalities of the three sisters in the book, allowing them all to have their own distinct and relatable journeys and emotional story arcs.

If you have not reread Watchmen since the pandemic, I recommend reading it. It holds a different sense of duty, responsibility, and produces an odd sense of hope that I did not extrapolate from previous reads.

This past week I read issue 3 of Crimebusters by Scott Harris King. He was our guest a few months ago on Episode 47 of Storycomic Presents. He was promoting this comic book back in late November last year.

This past week I read the graphic novel, ‘Cardboard’ by Doug TenNapel with my 6-year-old. We had a great time reading this book about a boy who received a magical cardboard box. It was so imaginative and relatable to any child or adult that plays with empty cardboard boxes.

This past week I read Eddie Pittman’s “Red’s Planet” Volume 2. Despite that I never read part one, Pittman did a really good job easing the reader into the story by alluding to what happened in part one while still making part 2 its own stand-alone story.

A few years ago I had the great opportunity to meet the more famous Barney Smith while I was at a conference in San Antonio Texas. I spent the entire afternoon with him and I had a great time learning about his work making art on toilet seat covers.

This past week I was also fortunate enough to get my hands of Lords of the Cosmos issues one , two, and three. I am reading them so I can send in a letter for the letters section of issue 4. I really enjoyed how Jason Lenox designed the universe and the wide and diverse cast of characters has made it really enjoyable as well

It was a slow week with reading. I did however put together a new lego set! So technically I read the instruction book for the lego set.

This week I finally got in the mail the last issues I needed so I could read Part 12 – 22 of the X-men event “Ten of Swords”. Since I am only a year or so back into reading comics, I got the strong impression that this event has set up some significant story seeds for the future.

I just read ‘Heck’ by Zander Cannon and it was a great book! it was a hefty 250+ pages, but the story carried me through and it had a great take on Dante’s Inferno. The character development was good. A great amount of action, intrigue, and emotion.

Highly recommend this story for anyone who likes hell-themed adventure stories.