It’s mid-July, and we’re still here, still inside, and still reading: it’s Weekend Reading 16!

As always, we hope you’ll let us know what you’re reading this weekend in the comment section.

Weekend Reading 16
Weekend Reading 16: Squirrel Girl

AVERY KAPLAN: The homemade skirt/mask combos artist Erica Henderson has been showing off on Twitter have inspired me to return to The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (also by Ryan North, Rico Renzi, Clayton Cowles, Derek Charm, and many more creators over the course of its run). As far as prose, I’m going to check out the next book in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series, Gone Fishin’.

Weekend Reading 16
Weekend Reading 16: Leschek’s Flight

JOSH HILGENBERG: I’m super behind on all my ongoing series, so I did the responsible thing earlier this week and bought a bunch of comics on itch.io. Whoops! Anyway, I’ve got Leschek’s Flight by Sebastian Stamm, Ellie Connelly and the Eye of the Vortex, Ch. 1 by Indigo Kelleigh, Liatris by Char, and Glow by Dia Ja, Anny Maulina, Bryan Valenza, and Nic Shaw all on deck, and I’ll probably check out issue #4 of Protector by Daniel M. Benson, Simon Roy, Artyom Trakhanov, Jason Wordie, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.

Weekend Reading 16
Weekend Reading 16: Goldie Vance

RACHEL A. DAVIS: My Mom asked me to recommend some comics for her summer-school-from-the-patio class. In scanning my bookshelves, I re/discovered Goldie Vance vol. 1 by Hope Larson, Brittney Williams, and Sarah Stern. I flipped through some pages and fell back in love with the bright, buoyant art. I am looking forward to re-reading this trade and, for sheer tonal dissonance, some Chad in Amsterdam issues. By Chad Bilyeu and his assorted artists, this series chronicles Bilyeu’s expat life in Amsterdam, Delaware the Netherlands. I am hoping this can scratch my Covid-induced travel itch.

Weekend Reading 16
Weekend Reading 16: Mapping Out Utopia

ARPAD OKAY: Zines. I’m giving the Mapping Out Utopia series by Tim Devin a read, as well as Chris Strunk’s An Incomplete History of Long-Gone Illegal Punk Venues in Boston from 2000 to 2015 or Somewhere Around There. The latter appears to be the conflict between dreams of collectivism and the crushing nihilism of the last decade. The former is a little less Young Ones and a little more Joyful Noise, a treasure hunt neighborhood by neighborhood for landmarks dedicated to public service, and what they are now.

Weekend Reading 16
Weekend Reading 16: The Girl from the Other Side

PHILIPPE LEBLANC: This forecast for this weekend is rain, so it will be a good time to go back through some melancholic reads. I’ll be catching up on the latest volume of The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún volume 8 by Nagabe. I’ll get to Stjepan Šejić’s Harleen, which was highly recommended by my niece. I’ve also been convinced by my colleague Arpad Okay to go back and read Simon Roy’s Habitat. It’s a nice companion piece to the current Protector series he’s writing.

Weekend Reading 16
Weekend Reading 16: Flags of our Fathers

GREGORY PAUL SILBER: Sometimes, you just wanna see Nazis get their asses kicked. At least I do. That’s why I’m reading Captain America/Black Panther: Flags of Our Fathers by Reginald Hudlin, Denys Cowan, Klaus Janson, Tom Palmer, Sandu Florea, Pete Pantazis, and Joe Sabino. With the premise of “Cap and Black Panther (T’Challa’s grandfather) team up to fight Nazis during WW2,” I don’t anticipate it being particularly deep (although it could end up surprising me!), but the creative team is impressive and frankly, I’m not looking for anything deep right now. I’m a simple man: I like superheroes created by Jack Kirby, Klaus Janson’s inks over Denys Cowan’s pencils, and Nazis getting punched in the face.

Weekend Reading 16
Weekend Reading 16: Rose

TAIMUR DAR: As our intrepid Eic Heidi MacDonald can attest, I’m a huge fan of Jeff Smith’s epic Bone. Going through my library, I discovered around the time I bought the complete one volution edition almost 15 years ago, I had also picked up the prequel comic Rose that Smith wrote and Charles Vess illustrated. For whatever reason, I never got around to actually reading it so it’s the perfect time to rectify that! 

Weekend Reading 16
Weekend Reading 16: The Old Guard

RICARDO SERRANO: After getting my soul crushed by The Last of Us 2, this weekend I’m replaying Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order to bring myself back a bit from the darkness. Also replaying the PS4 Spider-Man game, a gleefully indulgent superhero game that brings smiles to faces each time a web swinging session is in play. Finally, seeing that Greg Rucka’s and Leandro Fernández’s The Old Guard Netflix adaptation is now streaming, I’m reading the trade paperback…just to be able to say the book was better than the movie!

Weekend Reading 16
Weekend Reading 16: Roanoke Colony

JOE GRUNENWALD: This weekend I’ve decided to begin a full Marvel Cinematic Universe rewatch, which I imagine will take up most of my time (it’s a lot of movies). Still, I do want to carve out some space to read The Roanoke Colony by Chris Schweizer, one of the first books in First Second’s line of History Comics all-ages graphic novels. Schweizer is a cartoonist whose work I really enjoy, and the lost colony of Roanoke is a historical mystery that’s always fascinated me, so I’ll be sure to check that out between superhero movies this weekend.

Weekend Reading 16
Weekend Reading 16: The Last Wish

KYLE PINION: I’ve been religiously playing The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt (5 years late, I know I know), but this has prompted me to finally read Andrzej Sapkowski’s original novels of the series. I have the first three and am working my way through The Last Wish right now, which is a short story collection that probably meets the definition of a fix-up. The writing is breezy but quite funny and entertaining, and in some ways it reminds me of something Mike Mignola might write in the early days of Hellboy, with its standalone monster hunts and roots in Slavic folklore. There’s also spins on specific fairy tales that made me jokingly refer to this book as “King’s Quest but serious”. It’s fun. After absorbing more literary sci-fi recently, it’s nice to decompress with an easier read. Between this and Michael Moorcock’s Elric books (more to say about that in a future installment perhaps), I’m getting quite a dose of white haired guys whose swords are a chief defining feature.