It’s Saturday in mid-May 2023, and that means it’s time for Weekend Reading 160! As usual, The Beat Elite are getting lost in a good book inside Stately Beat Manor.
What will you be paging through this weekend? The Beat is waiting to hear from you! Give us a shout-out in the comment section or over on social media @comicsbeat, and let us know what you’re thinking!
ADAM KARENINA SHERIF: There are a couple of promising first issues from DC Comics in my immediate future including Spirit World #1 by Alyssa Wong and Haining. I’m excited to see Wong in the DC sandbox having been a Marvel mainstay the last few years and previews of Haining’s art with Sebastian Cheng’s colors have been quite special.
I’m also excited about Green Lantern #1 by Jeremy Adams and Xermánico. There have been some great, trippy Hal Jordan stories recently, but the promise of a more grounded book, disconnected from too much cosmic shenanigans is quite welcome for me.
And outside of the superhero realm, I’m here to recommend The Great British Bump-Off to all fans of Giant Days, that baking show, murder mysteries, and actually-funny funny books. John Allison really doesn’t miss when it comes to character and humor, and Max Sarin is still one of the best cartoonists working today in terms of rhythm and expression. Lovely, lovely colors from Sammy Borras, too. The book’s from Dark Horse and the second issue came out this week. Seek it out!
TAIMUR DAR: Among the many things Brian Michael Bendis accomplished during his Avengers tenure and work at Marvel was putting Jessica Drew a.k.a. Spider-Woman back in the limelight. It only recently occurred to me that I never read the Spider-Woman: Origin miniseries that he co-wrote with Brian Reed with art by the Luna Brothers. As someone who enjoyed his work with the character and is looking forward to seeing Jessica Drew on the big screen in Across the Spider-Verse, I’m rectifying that by reading the Spider-Woman: Origin miniseries over the weekend.
BILLY HENEHAN: One of the bright spots of the pandemic was staying with my brother and sister-in-law for a week. We streamed season 1 of Locke & Key on Netflix nightly. I really dug it. It’s now a couple of years later and I’m finally reading the comic book series that inspired the show. Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft by Joe Hill, Gabriel Rodriguez, Jay Fotos and Robbie Robbins is my weekend read this week.
AVERY KAPLAN: I’ve been inspired by Billy to pilfer his reading plans, so I’ll also be reading Welcome to Lovecraft. While I first read Locke & Key years ago, I got the chance to meet Hill and Rodriguez at a Netflix event just before the show was released for streaming. The experience ended up being one of the last things I did before lockdown. However, it’s now been a couple of years since I read the series, so I’ll be pulling it from the shelf between The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom binges. In addition to Locke & Key, I’ll also be re-reading the first volume of the Animal Crossing manga by Kokonasu Rumba. Since we ended up with two copies, Rebecca Oliver Kaplan and I will both be reading it while he’s visiting New York City – or “Acrossing the Miles,” if you will.
REBECCA OLIVER KAPLAN: I am traveling this week, so I have downtime without access to screens and other technologies that often distract me from weekend reading goals. In fact, thanks to having reduced the number of distractions (even if it was thrust upon me), I finished the first TPB on my weekend reading list before 7 AM this morning: Plastic by Doug Wagner, Daniel Hillyard, Laura Martin, Ed Dukeshire, and logo with book design by Eben Matthews. It’s like a serial killer version of Lars and the Real Girl, and I loved it. I’m also reading the official Animal Crossing: New Horizons manga with Avery Kaplan and NBM Graphic Novel’s David Bowie in Comics by various artists. Finally, I picked up an unofficial guide to The Fast and the Furious films to seem like a badass as Gregory Paul Silber, Avery, and I continue our FF watch party.
DEAN SIMONS: Things are pretty busy and hectic on my side but in the evenings I have been settling in with some old-school shonen manga – Gosho Aoyama’s early 2000s Detective Conan series – to English language audiences (currently at volume 2; translated and adapted by Joe Yamazaki and Naoko Amemiya) – and old, old school manga with Osamu Tezuka’s Brave Dan (1961; translated by Kyle Vandersteen). Brave Dan feels heavily Disney-influenced as it follows an escaped zoo tiger who crosses paths with a lost Ainu child separated from his parents. The two become partners in this odd yet rather heartwarming tale.
You can peruse the 159 previous entries in The Beat’s Weekend Reading archive by clicking here. Weekend Reading is edited by Avery Kaplan.
I got my copy of “Fast Times in Comic Book Editing” by Shelly Bond w/ Imogen Mangle “and a host of artists” on Saturday and highly recommend it especially you have a special place in your heart for the 90s Vertigo books!
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