It’s already Saturday again, and the omicron variant has arrived just in time for Weekend Reading 87! Boy, Futurama really was ahead of the game.
As usual, the Beat team will be staying inside Stately Beat Manor and getting lost in a good book. What will you be reading this weekend? Please share your plans with us in the comment section, or over on social media @comicsbeat!
AVERY KAPLAN: My spouse gifted me a copy of A Gift for a Ghost by Borja Gonzáles, with an English translation by Lee Douglas, and I’m looking forward to enjoying this fascinating looking graphic novel this weekend. Then, I’m going to check out The Plague and Doctor Cain by G. E. Gallas, because who hasn’t had enough plagues lately?
TAIMUR DAR: When IDW started publishing Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo a few years ago, it was the perfect jumping on point and I instantly fell in love. With so much time on my hands during the pandemic, I used the opportunity to dive into the original comics from the past few decades. Earlier this year, IDW published Usagi Yojimbo: Origins, a TPB collecting IDW’s Usagi Yojimbo Color Classics #1–7 that present 1987’s “Samurai” storyline in color for the first time. Gonna finally check it out this holiday weekend.
ARPAD OKAY: I’m making my way through the second half of a book I started years ago, The Forest in Folklore and Mythology, by Alexander Porteous. It’s a (now) Dover Publication originally from 1928, not Fortean per se but written in that way, a collection of lore, a list of hearsay, sometimes deeply thought provoking connections between nature and society, sometimes a total slog through a globe’s worth of different names for the world tree (why I put it down halfway through). I love folk and fairy tales and thoughtfully curated stuff like Lin Carter’s A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings really does it for me. This is much drier than that, Porteous is no Lord Dunsany when it comes to spinning tall tales, but if you are interested in uh forests this one’s definitely worth tracking down (s/o Big Idea Bookstore).
JOHANNA DRAPER CARLSON: Hawkeye by Matt Fraction and David Aja, of course. I watched the first two Disney+ episodes of the series, and they’ve taken so much from this series, I thought it would be fun to go back to the source, conveniently available in two hardcovers or one softcover volume.
CORI MCCREERY: I took a week off work to finish my reading and writing for my long-running Triangle Era Superman project (you can read many of the entries of that series here). I’m currently right at the beginning of the creative team switchover in Y2K, so it’s lots of issues by Jeph Loeb, Joe Kelly, and Mark Schultz. Oh and a certain egotistical billionaire just announced a bid for president. That could never happen, right?
