Saturday has arrived, and it brings with it Weekend Reading 120! It’s the lull before the storm of SDCC ’22, and as you can imagine, we’re savoring our quiet time here at Stately Beat Manor.
What will you be paging through as you try to read your way away from Monday? The Beat wants to hear from you! Let us know here in the comments or over on social media @comicsbeat.
AVERY KAPLAN: I’m pretty excited about the upcoming Paper Girls adaptation on amazon, so I’ll be revisiting the first volume of the comic series by Brian K. Vaughn, Cliff Chiang, Matt Wilson, and Jared K. Fletcher. As far as prose goes, I’ll be digging into another used-bookstore score: The Best of Trek 8, a 1985 collection of essays originally printed in Trek Magazine edited by Walter Irwin and G. B. Love. Published just before Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was released in theaters, I’m curious to see where “The Previous Generation” of Trek writers were at during this period.
ZACK QUAINTANCE: I recently picked up a copy of Nick Drnaso’s forthcoming Acting Class at the American Library Association Conference, and I’m planning to start (but probably not finish) that this weekend. I really loved Drnaso’s last book, Sabrina, and given the concept of this one — it follows 10 strangers taking an acting class that resonates with each of them in different ways — I fully expect to enjoy this one, too. I’m also chipping away at the classic Green Arrow run penned by Mike Grell, a pace of one-comic-per-day, and I’m enjoying that quite a bit, sort of kicking myself for not reading it earlier (although not in the same way that comic tends to kick people).
DEAN SIMONS: Cometh the weekend, cometh the…activities? After a couple months of piecemeal play, I am making headway with the Nintendo Switch game Triangle Strategy. I am down to the last third of the game and would like to see how it ends. Lots of text involved so it somewhat counts as reading (right?). Alongside that, last weekend I began checking out the Yu-Gi-Oh manga after hearing about the shocking death of its creator, Kazuki Takahashi. The manga was on my radar but I never sat down to read it. It is not what I was expecting and often weird as hell. Bizarrely fun shonen fare. Currently at volume 6. I am also dipping into early Lucky Luke by Morris. Late ‘40s/early 50s BD. Glorious (shame the Comixology files all got downgraded so my reading isn’t entirely pleasurable – I can’t zoom in on the art without significant blurring).
TAIMUR DAR: In between prepping for SDCC next week I’m hoping to make some time to enjoy some reading. The Boys Season 3 may be over but luckily there’s always the original comics to read. I read the first volume awhile back and kept meaning to continue it. So I’m going to be reading The Boys Volume 2: Get Some by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Plus a few more comics in my weekly reading pile to get through before my flight on Wednesday.
REBECCA OLIVER KAPLAN: I will be moderating a panel at this year’s SDCC, “The Summer of Baby-Sitters Club.” As a fan of the franchise since I could read, I plan to immerse myself in all things BSC before Thursday at 11 a.m. PST in Room 23 ABC. To begin with, I pulled out some of the classics from Ann M. Martin like The Truth About Stacey, in which we learn Stacey has diabetes (a groundbreaking character development in 1986), and Jessi and the Dance School Phantom. I will also be re-reading some of the graphic novels, beginning with Gale Galligan’s Logan Likes Mary Anne! Last but not least, I will be rounding out all the middle grade fun with something more serious, Abe Riesman’s True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee.
