Saturday has brought two things: the full moon, and Weekend Reading 163! As you might expect, The Beat Elite is celebrating by locking ourselves in side Stately Beat Manor and getting lost in a good book.

What are you planning on paging through this weekend? The Beat is waiting to hear from you! Give us a shout-out, either right here in the comment section or over on social media @comicsbeat, and let us know what you’re thinking.


Weekend Reading 163
Weekend Reading 163: Vacation & M is for Monster.

AVERY KAPLAN: This weekend, I’m checking out M is for Monster by Talia Dutton. Then as far as prose goes, I’ll be diving into Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth. I remember originally reading this novel back when it was published in 2008, but I don’t recall much about it (beyond the nice, sunny spot on the public lawn when I sat and read most of it a decade and a half ago, a very long way from the nice sunny spot where I am seated now). Of course, this reading will have to be accomplished between bouts of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which to be fair, involves plenty of reading itself.

Weekend Reading 163
Weekend Reading 163: Sex Criminals.

TAIMUR DAR: Yet another acclaimed comic series it recently dawned on me that I haven’t read is Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky. I’m going to rectify that by reading the first trade collection over the weekend.

Weekend Reading 163
Weekend Reading 163: Ultimate Spider-Man.

CY BELTRAN: While I continue my weird King reading order, inspired by the Rundown’s Roundtable discussion of Spider-Man (and my own excitement for Across the Spider-Verse), I think I’m gonna check out Ultimate Spider-Man for the first time in a few years. Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley have a legendary run, and I’m interested to see how my opinions about it have changed in the years since I’ve read it.

Weekend Reading 163
Weekend Reading 163: Oshi No Ko

DEAN SIMONS: Manga-manga-manga! Trying out some other series that I have been meaning to give a look: Aka Akasaka and Mengo Yokoyari’s Oshi No Ko (translated by Sarah Neufeld) and Masami Kurumada’s Saint Seiya (translated by Mari Morimoto, adapted by Lance Caselman). Oshi No Ko has been selling pretty well in Japan and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Naturally, it is weird as heck – a teen pop star secretly gives birth to twins…and the kids are reincarnated fans who remember their past lives – one of which was the pop star’s murdered doctor. Meanwhile, Saint Seiya (aka Knights of the Zodiac) is a classic 1980s Shonen Jump series that I meant to read aaaaages ago and just remembered to. Old school battle manga.

MARION PEÑA: I’ve been binging Shangri-La Frontier (Ryosuke Fuji, story by Katarina) on Kodansha’s K Manga app. I’ve read about 7 volumes on my own before and recommended it on Deb Aoki’s This Manga Is Awesome panel at last years NYCC. It’s about a VR MMORPG considered a kamige or “god-tier” game with an MC who almost exclusively plays kusoge or “shit games” riddled with bugs or bad game design. Still an extremely fun action adventure romp, and I love the creativeness when it comes to introducing other game ideas that MC actively plays, like a buggy PVP arena fighter that players discover and name bugs themselves to a customizable mech game with lord and flavor text inspired and ripped from Evangelion, to a tokusatsu action game where people roleplay as heroes and villains while interacting with NPCs and environments to build their super move gauges. On K Manga they have chapters simulpubbed with the weekly Japanese magazine release so it’s been fun to read ahead from the NA volume release.


You can peruse the 162 previous entries in The Beat’s Weekend Reading archive by clicking here. Weekend Reading is edited by Avery Kaplan.