What are you reading... Now...

[Allio]

finished reading My Romantic Youth Comedy is Wrong. As I expected book 1

just started reading Overlord book 2

[Allio]

Started reading The ever after high/monster high crossover yesterday. It's pretty much an ever after high story with two characters of monster high in it, which isn't bad as Eah is superior in every way.

I love the series for how meta it gets. And in the book it cranks the dial up to 12. Its hilarious how it just breaks into a "choose your own adventure" book in the middle.

[TurtleTitan97]

Reading the following currently:

The Demon by Jack Kirby
Uncle Scrooge by Carl Barks
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick
Superman: The Golden Age Vol. 1
Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle
Wonder Woman/Conan by Gail Simone

[Candy Kappa]

The English translation of the bansenshukai, a ninja manual. Or rather skimming and reading some parts here and there, it's a pretty dense book but it's interesting

[TurtleWA]

Today I read Deviations. My order of most entertaining to sorta enjoyable is as follows:

-TMNT
-G.I. Joe
-The X-Files
-Ghostbusters
-Transformers

I have never read any G.I. Joe before. It almost got first from me. X-Files almost got second. I could have done without reading Transformers.

[D-ray]

Due to my lack of type (and money to spend) I'm just reading the Usagi Yojimbo series of Comics.
It's awesome for ancient Japan culture fanatics, but is hard to appreciate if you usually prefer funny or goofy stories. It's extremely serious in alot of levels.

But I definitely recommend it!

[Autbot_Benz]

Book 5 of Swamp Thing in the Can enjoyed seeing Batman Jim Gordon Harvey Bullock show up and Lex Luthor. Swamp Thing being trapped in Space in interesting. Just need to get book 6 to have all of Alan Moore's run.

[Voltron]

I decided to pick up Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It's informative, but man is it a slog. The translation is written in this really complicated way that makes it really difficult to catch the meaning of things. There're no notes, either, so if he goes off on some contemporary, there's little to no explanation of what he's on about.

Basically, the whole thing boils down to "Stay positive, be nice, and work hard." That's the TL;DR.

[frank_one]

Alien by Alan Dean Foster. It is based on the original screenplay, so there's stuff that was cut from the movie or slightly different.

[Andrew NDB]

Embarrassed to say, nothing. I went into this forced lockdown and shutdown like, "Nice! I'm going to read all the novels I've bought that I've never read!" But I haven't.

[FrederikWolferson]

Im trying to read the whole of Horus Heresy. Some of it can be a bit of a chore.

[FrederikWolferson]

Finished Black Company Shadow Games and started Old Man's War to break up the Horus Heresy marathon a bit.

Finished reading Red Star Over China written by journalist Edgar Snow written in 1937, very impressive, as a Chinese though this is my first read of it.

It's the first book that introduces the early stage of red army and its party. It broke the blockade of the reporting and make people outside know what really is. The book do have errors of details by still irreplaceable.

Sadly there are still one-sided or even biased reports nowadays and there is still a lot of misunderstandings. And I do admit reading a whole book patiently is not fit many people's life styles anymore.

[Leo656]

Just finished reading these in TPB. I've read the single issues several times but I must admit that on the whole the story plays a lot better without ads and chapter breaks.

I remember reading it as it came out monthly, and to be honest it was a bit hard to get into that way. The way the story reveals itself in layers with the reader only being given the full picture right before the end makes it a lot of fun to read all at once, but in bits and pieces with a full month in between each chapter it was a very divisive piece of work at the time it was first published.

That was during the time when each of the three Superman books was given its own writer and independent storyline that would ostensibly last for a full year - Azzarello on "Superman", Greg Rucka on "Adventures of Superman", and Chuck Austen on "Action Comics" - as a way to refocus the Superman books and get things back on track after what had previously been a very rough period for the character across the board. Most of the Superman books published between 2002-2004 were "uneven" and inconsistent, to be perfectly kind, and some of them were downright awful. So the "new era" that was set to cover 2004-2005 was designed to simplify things and give people a new jumping-on point.

Unfortunately, that didn't really work out as well as it was hoped, especially since Austin's run on Action was so dreadful, he was kicked off of his own story before it finished. Rucka's run on AoS was much more well-received, being a rather straightforward Superman story, very well-written even if not altogether groundbreaking. And then "For Tomorrow" was somewhere in the middle, for most people. Everyone agreed that the art was fantastic, but not everyone liked the slow-burn, in media res storytelling and were hungry for something more conventional and straightforward. Again, the Superman books were coming off of a REALLY bad slump, and for the most part people were desperate for something more "back-to-basics" than what this story ended up being.

I do very firmly believe that the timing of the project had an unfair effect on the overall perception of the work at the time it was being published. In a vacuum, reading it as its own stand-alone piece of work, all in one sitting, I feel that it's quite brilliant. In 2004-5, though, it was a bit of a hard nut for many people to crack. One thing I remember vividly was everyone getting very hung up on the continuity of it all, where it "fit" within the other DC and Superman comics that were in print at the same time, and they were letting those concerns affect their ability to take the story on its own terms. Now, to be clear, this story IS in-continuity - much of the unresolved plot threads were directly planting seeds for "The OMAC Project" which came out shortly thereafter - but nobody reading it had any way of knowing that at the time, and since AoS and Action made no reference to the events of this story at all, some people were quick to dismiss it simply because there wasn't more obvious connective tissue to the other Superman books. I'm on-record as being a huge fan of continuity, but at the same time it can very often hurt the ability to enjoy a story on its own merits if you spend too much time thinking about where it fits with other, unrelated stories. And I do believe that's what initially happened with this one. Between the "Where does it fit?" questions, and the fact that the story often jumps seamlessly between flashbacks and present-day scenes without much transition, along with the fact that most of it isn't fully explained until the very end of the story, reception to this one was VERY mixed during its initial run.

That said, when taken on its own and read in a single sitting, I feel that all of those issues evaporate, and what you're left with is simply a really great Superman story, one that deals powerfully with themes such as Hope and Faith, Superman's constant internal struggle between doing "Too Much" and "Not Enough", and how far he's ultimately willing to go to "save the world".

It didn't much hook me as a monthly read, but since then it's easily become one of my all-time favorite Superman stories, and it's one that I feel still often gets unfairly overlooked. It's great.

Huge Recommendation.

[IMJ]

It's hard to believe those Jim Lee Batman and Superman runs were so long ago now. Lee coming onto those books got me excited about those characters for the first time in years back then.

That was like a lifetime ago now.

[Leo656]

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Omnibus - Vol. 1 showed up in the mail today.

[FrederikWolferson]

Twist of Faith. The DS9 continuation.

[Leo656]

The books I ordered from Power-Con came yesterday: The Toys of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and the Character Guide and World Compendium Supplement Vol. 1


The Supplement is simply an add-on to the original Character Guide, with some updates and additional information the original book didn't have. Cool stuff.

But the BIG item is the Toy Guide. At 750 pages, it covers EVERY He-Man, She-Ra and MOTU toy line in existence (pre-Origins, so from 1982 through 2018 when production on the book started), and the level of detail is absolutely insane. Figure and packaging photos, background information, variant and re-release comparisons, Trivia Facts, release timelines, interviews with the creative staff and more. Every single figure, playset, beast mount, vehicle, and accessory pack ever released for the original MOTU, She-Ra, New Adventures of He-Man, 2002 Commemorative Sets, 200X reboot, MOTU Classics, Club Grayskull, and Super 7 Filmation figure lines is covered in detail. It's truly amazing.

That said, it doesn't cover EVERY single thing, such as kids' roleplay toys and other licensed items, as the thing would have more pages than the Bible if they literally covered every toy ever released. But even "just" focusing on everything released in the various action figure lines is a massive undertaking, and you have to figure that's what most people would be most interested in, anyway.

An easy recommendation for collectors and casual fans alike. It's available on its own through various retailers, but I pre-ordered the two books together through Power-Con (for about $100 altogether) to ensure that the people who worked on these books (as well as the previous several Dark Horse MOTU hardcovers) would be paid for their hard work and dedication in putting all of these things together. The staff who've worked on these hardcovers have lost money on each of them, pretty much doing them out-of-pocket as a labor of love for the fans, and the results have been incredible so I was more than happy to go with the "premium" option to ensure they get a little something for all their efforts this time.

[FrederikWolferson]

Finished "Inside the Soviet army". Very interesting read. Even if Suvorov was probably hyping up the threat,being an MI asset and all that.

[Autbot_Benz]

re-reading the final 8 issues of Justice League Dark. I got them in book form just re-read Issue 20. Good story and I love the art by Kyle Hotz the way he draws Constantine is cool.