Saturday has arrived, and it brought Weekend Reading 142. Winter weather is the perfect opportunity to hole up inside and get lost in a good book, so you can guess how we’ll be spending our weekend!
What will you be paging through this weekend? The Beat is waiting to hear from you! Let us know, right here in the comment section or over on social media @comicsbeat.
AVERY KAPLAN: A fortuitous trip to a used bookstore by Rebecca Oliver Kaplan yielded The Robot Novels, a book club edition of the first two Detective Elijah Baley novels by Isaac Asimov. While I haven’t previously heard of the series, Baley is a character who sounds right up my alley. According to the dust jacket – which is “by Carl T. Herrman” and features an incredible 1950s era rendition of a robot in addition to the copy about the novels – the stories take place in a future in which “Mankind has long been split into two hostile camps.” Earlier this year, I read and deeply enjoyed Asimov’s The Currents of Space, another sci-fi meditation on class and human division. I’m looking forward to returning to the legendary author’s work as ROK and I close out our 8 nights of Star Trek.
TAIMUR DAR: I’m a big fan of the Bram Stoker’s Dracula film that Francis Ford Coppola directed. So naturally, the comic adaptation from writer Roy Thomas and artist Mike Mignola has been on my agenda to read for some time. I discovered the collected trade that IDW published a few years ago is available to read on the free libby app so I’m finally going to check it out. Likewise with Brian Michael Bendis about to publish his Fortune and Glory: The Musical comic about his experience working on the ill-fated Spider-Man musical through Substack, I thought I’d go back and reread his original Fortune and Glory graphic novel detailing his early experiences in the Hollywood system.
DEAN SIMONS: While I usually don’t do anything for Christmas, this time of year makes me think of certain comics. For some time 2000 AD has been doing 100-page X-Mas progs that act as jumping on points and kick off the next year’s serials. 2000AD’s X-Mas Special Prog 2007 was a special one for me. I started reading 2000 AD in 2006 and Prog 2007 was my first time experiencing the 100-page explosion of goodness (and the three week break until the weekly returned). It also introduced two series that are among my favourites – Ian Edginton and D’Israei’s Stickleback (“the Pope of Crime”!); alongside Dan Abnett and Richard Elson’s Kingdom. The latter of which I consider almost synonymous with this time of year so I will be indulging in a return to the early series featuring modified dog warrior Gene the Hackman (tougher and tough), his pack, and his ongoing fight against the hordes of giant insects referred to as Them – from the frozen wastes of Anarchticy to the deserts of Auxtralia.
