This past week I read the miniseries, “Crucible”. It was from Impact Comics and meant to wrap up the publishing line by bringing an end to original heroes storylines while attempting to relaunch the line.

As a fan of The Comet, I was sad to see his story end, but how it ended was such a beautiful Shakespearean tragedy, his return in Crucible completely extinguished a beautifully tragic end to a hero by bringing him back as a one-dimensional villain.

This past week I read Geof Darrow’s ‘Shaolin Cowboy’. I love his illustration style he adds so much tiny detail. He reminds me of an adult-themed version of ‘Where’s Waldo’ Martin Handford. As a reader, I can easily tell that Darrow absolutely has a love and passion for wide frame images, and the graphic novel read like a spaghetti western.

I have always been a fan of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland world, and seeing a story about the Walrus and the Carpenter was pretty fun. Landridge was able to keep the spirit of Carroll alive with the tertiary characters and sprinkling in poetry as narration.

I wanted to first thank all of my guests for being a part of my podcast. When I started it at the beginning of last February, I had no idea that we were going to be facing such a tough year.

Talking to them has been equal parts inspiration, social connection, and therapeutic. I have been consistently humbled and encouraged by the conversations and I am looking forward to seeing where next year will take us. In our inaugural year, we were able to produce 50 shows!

This past week I read the trade paperback of the Marvel Comics event from 2006 and 2007. Even over 10 years later, the storyline is still relevant; where we can see that conflict does not need to be good versus evil, wrong versus right, but competing ideologies. Now that I’ve read this again after I’ve watched the MCU version of this storyline via ‘Captain America 3’;

I took a journey through my bookshelf again and re-discovered “Tick: The Naked City”. I haven’t read that in probably 20 years or so. It’s still a fun book to read. It’s amazing to see all the new IPs that came after that were inspirations of what Ben Edlund made. Granted, the bumbling and oblivious superhero wasn’t created by Ben, but he popularized it.

This past week I read the first eleven of the 22 issue X-Men cross-over event, X of Swords.

There is no specific groundbreaking storytelling here, but I am enjoying how Hickman is establishing a deeper mutant mythos within the Marvel Universe.

The first volume set up the world and was heavy with intrigue and court politics, whereas volume two is a magical travel adventure that dives deeper into the world. It ends with more questions than answers.

His book was sitting on the shelf for a while, so I decided to finally read it this past week. What a fun story. My first impression review of the book is that it is a good cross between Twin Peaks and Stardust.

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.

I just read Volume 1 of The Autumnlands by Kurt Busiek and Benjamin Drew. I really enjoyed the talking animals’ setting and the world is established. There is some insinuation that the world is our own far-flung future and I like the story so much I went ahead and found Volume 2 online and purchased it.

The series so far is reminiscent of James Gunn’s film with how both successfully interweave a compelling storyline with the complexity of multiple character development arcs.

As a reader, I became connected to the world before I was connected to the characters. At the end of the book, I was really excited to see more. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a volume 2. Not sure if Zander Cannon even made one

The story felt rushed and honestly didn’t do much for me. Instead of concentrating on character development, it seemed like the writer, Kelly Thompson was shoehorned to start some meta plot story seeds for the larger Marvel Comics universe.

I reread the 18 issue series “The Comet” from the short-lived 90’s DC spinoff publication series, Impact Comics. They had 6 titles, and my favorite, by far with The Comet.

I still think he had the best superhero origin story. Once Rob Conners (The Comet) discovered the origin of his powers, he basically spiraled down mentally and he eventually died.

This past week, as I have been waiting for some back issues to arrive, I jumped back into the Dime Comics app. If you have any IOS devices, I highly recommend it. It’s packed with thousands of golden age comics from the 1930s to the 1950s. I’ve been reading Green Hornet Comics from the early ’40s.

Society changes, writers change, art changes; and if one feels that the addition of updating the back story of a character is offensive, then do not read the comic book. Comic books have always been at the forefront of human rights and social justice issues and that will never change.

…I mentioned in some previous posts that I’m reading the in X-men titles. I read the first 4 issues of the new Cable series. I need to do a bit of research to figure out why Cable is now a young man and not the old gruff guy he was when I read him 20 or so years ago.

We had a full week of podcasts! Since our last update, we had 3 more interviews to add to our library. The first one was with well-known artist and YouTube star, Scott Serkland. He talked about his career as an illustrator and cartoonist and provided some tips on how to make a living on it.

This past week we interviewed Beserat Debebe from Etan Comics. I had a great time talking with him about his new Kickstarter project, Hawi (Issue 2).

I also attempted to interview the famed Scott Serkland of Serkworks Lab, but my internet was acting funky so I postponed the interview for later in the weekend.