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.

This past week I read Nathan Hale’s educational graphic novel, ‘Big Bad Ironclad’ which is part of his ‘Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales’ series.

The format of the book is really good. I loved how Hale utilized the page formats and frames to help tell the story. Almost every page was a master class in graphic design.

I read Jeffery Brown’s ‘Lucy and Andy Neanderthal’. It’s a kid’s graphic novel book that was educational in nature that taught the reader about Neanderthal life 40,000 years ago. It was a fun and quick read and he did a very good job understanding who his audience is for the book.

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