It’s Saturday, and that means it’s time for Weekend Reading 110! As always here at Stately Beat Manor, we hope that you’ll give us a shout-out and let us know what you’ll be reading this weekend, either here in the comment section or over on social media @comicsbeat.
AVERY KAPLAN: This weekend, I’ll be reading SANTA, SJW Latina Superhero, the second book in the A LA BRAVA universe by Kayden Phoenix, with art by Eva Cabrera, color by Gloria Felix, and lettering & design by Sandra Romero. Then, for my prose reading, I’ll be checking out The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, another killer used bookstore score.
DEAN SIMONS: After much frustration with the Comixology app (which still habitually freezes and crashes often enough to throw me off the reading experience), I leaped on that frankly amazing Cinebook Humble Bundle of European Science Fiction and Fantasy comics. It has the entirety of Pierre Christin and the late Jean-Claude Mézières’ Valerian & Laureline series – all 23 books – which practically makes it a steal but it also includes another series that I really enjoy and want to reread – Sylvain Runberg and Serge Pellé’s Orbital (plus the entirety of the scifi by Brazilian artist Léo). The digital books – all in English – are redeemable on Izneo which is the French rival to Comixology. While the app isn’t perfect (it still crashes now and then), page turns are fine and it won’t take me several minutes to reboot and continue my books when a crash does happen. So this weekend I will be re-indulging in more Valerian with…The Land Without Stars!
TAIMUR DAR: For the first time since before the pandemic, FCBD returns to the first weekend of May. I’ve been an unabashed Ninja Turtles fan since childhood and have been reading the current IDW series from the very beginning. In his breakdown of the Free Comic Book Day ‘22 titles, Joe Grunewald wasn’t blown completely away by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles FCBD Special 2022 but did have high praise for Sophie Campbell’s art. But as a longtime TMNT fan it’s probably the FCBD title I’m most keen to check out.
Naturally, in show of support of Team Beat I bought a digital copy of PanelXPanel #58: The Metafiction Special that features Gregory Paul Silber’s interview with Grant Morrison and an essay on meta-fiction in newspaper comics by The Beat’s own power couple, Avery and Rebecca Kaplan!
CY BELTRAN: Once again I return to weekend reading with a random series I’ve decided to do a deep dive on and once again I have no idea if I’ll actually get all the way through it. I’m working at my local comic shop’s FCBD (First Aid Comics in Hyde Park Chicago! Come say hi!), so we’ll see if I have any time to even read. This week, I’ve been reading through Jim Starlin’s original cosmic odyssey in prep for a massive read-through of most of Marvel’s cosmic comics. I’m at the end of this first saga, so I’m gonna be checking out Avengers Annual #7, Marvel Two-in-One Annual #2, and The Death of Captain Marvel. The first two books were worked on by Starlin, Joe Rubinstein, Tom Orzechowski, Petra Goldberg, Annette Kawecki, and Archie Goodwin, while Death of was created by Starlin, Steve Oliff, James Novak, and Al Milgrom. We’ll see if I get to the Eternals stories I have lined up next weekend…
BILLY HENEHAN: For reasons I don’t fully understand, I decided to pull up Adam Warlock’s first series from the early 70s, including the soft pilot for it in Marvel Premiere, and just start reading. I’m not up to the Jim Starlin era, that starts in issue 9, and I’m up to issue 7. Right now, Adam Warlock is teaming up with a heroic, shirt and tie and iron mask wearing Doctor Doom while battling a beastly Reed Richards. I loved The Evolutionary War as a teen, so I’m excited to get some High Evolutionary backstory here. But I feel like I’m just slowly clawing my way closer to Jim Starlin’s character defining run. I can’t wait for those issues to start.
