The final Saturday of 2022 has arrived, and it brought Weekend Reading 143 along for the ride! Here at Stately Beat Manor, we’ll be celebrating the changing of the year in the only way we know how: with a big ol’ stack of books!
As always, We hope you’ll consider sharing your reading plans with us. Let us know what you’ll be paging through, either right here in the comment section or over on social media @comicsbeat.
AVERY KAPLAN: This weekend, I’m closing out 2022 by reading the second book in N.K. Jemison’s Great Cities Series, The World We Make. I’ve already made it through the first few chapters, and I can already tell that, just like The City We Became, I can look forward to another memorable novel. In terms of comics, I’m very excited to read the next entry in the Cat Kid Comic Club series by Dav Pilkey: Collaborations. This mixed-media comic series continually delights me with its laugh-out-loud gags mixed with insightful observations about how sequential graphic narrative can serve as an irreplaceable method of expression and interpersonal communication.
REBECCA OLIVER KAPLAN: I am closing out 2022 with one of the graphic novels that I got for Christmas, Numb to This: Memoir of a Mass Shooting by Kindra Neely, who survived the Umpqua Community College mass shooting in 2015, which left eight students and a professor dead.
TAIMUR DAR: For the last two years I’ve been taking great advantage of the libby app to borrow books I’ve been dying to read as opposed to buying physical copies myself, especially since these days I barely have any room in my tiny studio apartment. One such recent book I’ve been dying to read is Luda by Grant Morrison, their first fiction novel. While I’m at it, I’m eager to read Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons #3 by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Nicola Scott, the conclusion to this epic DC Comics Black Label miniseries.
DEAN SIMONS: On impulse, I decided to dip back into reading Aquaman and revisited the Jeff Parker run (New 52 series, #26-40), who is predominantly joined by the superb pencils of Paul Pelletier. While I largely find the modern superhero genre hard to consistently stick to of late, what makes Aquaman conceptually a fun read is that it has the potential for political intrigue, horror, scifi and fantasy without having to fight common criminals in colorful costumes. Reached #34, just the Maelstrom arc left. Also I have been dipping into John Porcellino’s King Cat zines with the aid of the Drawn & Quarterly collections. The more recent collection, From Lone Mountain (2018) covers the issues that John released between 2003 and 2007. Every release is like an intimate letter to the world from one human being to another through a mixture of short comics, prose, illustrations and more. Great stuff.
ARPAD OKAY: I got an art book in the mail! The catalog from an exhibition I caught at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art earlier this summer that featured the work of Nura Woodson Ulreich. Nura’s style of painting is cherubic, but absent of emotion, and so kind of surreal, eerie stuff. She was a salon artist before the Great Depression, a (somewhat experimental) children’s book author after. Everything about her work has this dark spiritual Lynch-but-storytime vibe, but her early paintings particularly so. I’m really hoping that the biographical parts of Finding Nura: Rediscovering an American Modernist get into her late 20s Paris work. I’m glad to have a nice print of The Sandman but boy do I want to know what’s going on there.
