The final day of April has arrived, and with it comes Weekend Reading 109! Here at Stately Beat Manor, we’ll be waiting for May Day in a familiar fashion: holed up with a big ol’ stack of books and comics!
As always, we hope that you’ll consider sharing your weekend reading plans with us. Give The Beat a shout-out, here in the comment section or over on social media @comicsbeat, and let us know what you’re paging through!
AVERY KAPLAN: This weekend, I’ll be checking out Green River Killer: A True Detective Story by Jeff Jensen and Jonathan Case. Then, thanks to some good fortune at the second-hand book shop, my prose reading will be The Currents of Space by Isaac Asimov.
GREGORY PAUL SILBER: I hope it’s not gauche to use Weekend Reading to recommend something I contributed to, because I can’t wait to dive into PanelXPanel #58: The Metafiction Special. Sure, there’s a lot of me in there––my interview with Grant Morrison(!!!) runs 16 pages, plus I wrote the issue’s introduction and helped curate the metafiction essays––but this monster of a magazine issue is like 130 pages total, with intriguing content I still look forward to reading by a bunch of other talented contributors… including The Beat’s own power couple, Avery and Rebecca Kaplan!
TAIMUR DAR: Spending most of the weekend finishing up my press coverage for the DC Showcase animated shorts from the past few weeks. But I’m hoping to have time to enjoy The Usagi Yojimbo Saga Volume 3 from Stan Sakai. I’ve been a fan of Sakai’s beloved character for a few years but only really took a deep dive into the comics during the pandemic of the last two years. You can probably surmise my interest in returning where I left off reading the original Usagi Yojimbo comics is in no small part to the new Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles cartoon on Netflix out now on Netflix. While I still would’ve preferred a straight adaptation for animation, I enjoyed Samurai Rabbit for what it is. Plus we’ll always have the original comics to enjoy Miyamoto Usagi adventures.
REBECCA OLIVER KAPLAN: I had a pain procedure a week ago, and I am still recovering. I have an epic weekend of reading planned because what else am I going to do in between eight hour naps. In my OCD quest for writing the definitive piece on Emma Frost’s queenly fashion, I’m reading Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d by Janet Arnold, which is an inventory of the Queen’s Wardrobe of Robes prepared in July 1600 for the British Library. I’m also starting TWO omnibuses this weekend. The first is Moon Knight with contributions including Doug Moench, Bill Mantlo, Bill Sienkiewicz, Don Perlin, and Janice Chiang. Continuing with the metafiction fun for a future piece on breaking the fourth wall, the other is The Sensational She-Hulk by creators including John Byrne, Todd Britton, Kim DeMulder, Petra Scotese, Dave Gibbons, and Chiang.
Dean Simons: After a rather busy week of ‘Life Stuff’ I hope to relax with the third installment in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series, The Sword of the Lictor. Comics-wise I am reading through one of my French graphic novel acquisitions – with the help of my phone and the Google Translate camera mode. Ignacio Minaverry’s Dora is not available in English (yet???). Originally released in Argentina, it was picked up by a small French publisher that I stumbled across. It is an interesting series about a 16 year old Jewish girl in 1960s Europe who becomes a Nazi hunter. There are four books in the series available in French and I hope to finish the first and start the second this weekend.
