Saturday is here, and it brings Weekend Reading 125! This weekend, we’ll be hunkering down in Stately Beat Manor and getting caught up on some reading.
As always, we hope that you’ll share your reading plans with us, as well! Let us know what you’re paging through, either here in the comment section or over on social media @comicsbeat.
AVERY KAPLAN: This weekend, I’m reading The Savage She-Hulk Omnibus, collecting all twenty-five issues of the series that introduced the character (plus Marvel Two-in-One #88). After the first issue was written by Stan Lee and penciled by John Buscema, the remaining issues of The Savage She-Hulk were written by David Anthony Kraft and penciled by Mike Vosburg, with many inkers, colorists, and letters rounding out the creative teams. While I’ve previously read the more recent Shulkie runs (like those written by Mariko Tamaki, Dan Slott, and Charles Soule, and John Byrne‘s Sensational She-Hulk), the arrival of the series on Disney+ has inspired me to finally check out the character’s first run (which was fittingly spurred by 1977’s The Incredible Hulk TV series, as referenced by the first line of The Savage She-Hulk: “Call him David, or Bruce, Or Bob — What does it matter?”). I’m especially excited to see the letters pages were included in this omnibus, but less excited to see that forty years later, the trolls are still reciting the same misogynistic drivel they were in 1980. “She-Hulk is a disaster,” reads a letter in She-Hulk #5, “She is an insult to Marvel’s ingenuity and to all your fans.” Gee, the more things change…
DEAN SIMONS: Finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War this week so I plan to take a break between novels with one of my favourite short story anthologies – the August edition of Forever Magazine. The periodical’s 91st issue features Carter Scholz’s novela Gypsy, Madeline Ashby’s Work Shadow/Shadow Work, and Indrapramit Das’ Incarnate. Side note: I love Ron Guyatt’s covers on the magazine. As for comics: Edgar Jacobs’ Mystery of the Great Pyramid (Part 2).
George Carmona 3rd: Part prequel, part sequel, Heat 2 is a return to the world of Michael Mann’s all time movie classic Heat. Joined by Edgar Award-winning author Meg Gardiner, we are brought back to 1995, to the day after the events of the movie as there is now a massive manhunt for the lone member of the bank robbing crew, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer). Running parallel to that storyline is an earlier spotlight covering the time homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) spent before coming to LA in Chicago and more of Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro). Heat 2 has been something I’ve been waiting for for a long time and as soon as I saw it in a store I grabbed it, so far no regrets with its traveling beyond LA to other cities, describing rich and textured environments, exploring the criminal worlds I’m very comfortable just reading about.
TAIMUR DAR: It’s been a tough week so I’m definitely due for some comfort reading. Nothing better than some Lincoln Peirce comics so I’m going to be digging into The Complete Big Nate #6. Fittingly, new episodes of the Big Nate cartoon just dropped on the Paramount+ streaming service so it’s definitely a good time to be a fan. Plus catching up on some of this week’s new comics read pile like Batman – One Bad Day: The Riddler by Tom King and Mitch Gerads.
