It’s the last weekend in May, and that means it’s time for Weekend Reading 10 – or Weekend Reading X, if you’re social distancing on Krakoa!
Once again, we’ve asked the Beat staff to share their weekend reading plans, and as always, we hope that you’ll share your plans with us in the comment section.
ARPAD OKAY: A new one and an old one from Simon Roy this weekend. The Roy stories I’m drawn to often feel like Connie Willis writing Adventure Time, and his mini Griz Grobus is definitely the mood equivalent of her To Say Nothing of the Dog. Imagine resurrecting your clan’s ancient robot guardian to find out how annoying he is is the literal stuff of legend. I’m also going to re-read Habitat, another sci-fi story about a survival society rediscovering technology and the ensuing catastrophe it (re)awakens.
RICARDO SERRANO: I’m digging into Christopher Priest’s Black Panther run this weekend. Such a classic and deeply radical stretch of storytelling for a character that definitely needed to expand his horizons come the days of Marvel Knights. Priest was the perfect writer for it and, even though I’ve read some of it already, I want to see the run all the way through. Wakanda forever [crosses arms, wishes he actually was in Wakanda right now].
TAIMUR DAR: Courtesy of my friend who loaned me his copy last year but I never got to return it before the pandemic, I’m diving into Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits by Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd. Wonderful history book of the original elastic superhero with reprints of original Jack Cole stories.
AVERY KAPLAN: In honor of the renewal of ABC’s Stumptown, I’ll be reading volume 2 of the comic series, The Case of the Baby in the Velvet Case by Greg Rucka, Matthew Southworth, and Rico Renzi. Then, I’m going to read a comic I have been looking forward to since I first heard it had been announced: Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang, Gurihiru, and Janice Chiang.
MATT O’KEEFE: I’ve been waiting for all the issues of Basketful of Heads to release so I can read it all in one go. I’m extremely excited to read Joe Hill stories other than Locke & Key in the format.
NANCY POWELL: I am interspersing prose reading (Octavia Butler’s Kindred) this weekend with a goody I have been saving since last year’s Comic Con: Raina Telgemeier’s Guts. Everything Telgemeier has written has been so heartfelt and personal, and I can’t help but feel sad as I await her next book.
BILLY HENEHAN: As part of my quarantine spending, I picked up all four volumes of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus. I had been debating between buying the giant all in one volume and these four, and was happy to find all four of these in hardcover at a reasonable price. This saga has been referenced in so many comics, TV shows and movies that came after, from the Super Powers cartoon of my youth to Grant Morrison’s JLA to the recent Justice League movie, that I’m excited to finally read my way completely through the source material for the first time, starting with volume 1 this weekend.
GREGORY PAUL SILBER: I bought a number of classics recently, so now seems like the time to finally crack into them. One is Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Elektra: Assassin, one of the few books from Miller’s 80s prime that I haven’t yet read. I’ve also got my eye on Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Bá, especially after hearing The Beat’s own Alex Lu discussing it so passionately with Matt Lune on the Shelfdust Presents Podcast. Am I in the mood for a surreal psychological action-thriller or a tearjerker that will make me contemplate my existence? Maybe both. We’ll see!
