Welcome to Weekend Reading 17! One year ago today, on July 18, 2019, SDCC 2019 began and the Beat celebrated our fifteenth anniversary in style in beautiful San Diego.

Weekend Reading 17
The view from the Beat 15th Anniversary Party, SDCC19 – San Diego – East Village on 7/18/19 at 7:06 PM. Photo by Avery Kaplan.

This year, we may not be in the same convention center, or even in the same country – but if anything goes wrong, reading will be our constant! Here’s what we’ll be paging through (or scrolling through, or listening to) while social distancing at our respective home bases this weekend. Please let us know what you plan on reading in the comment section!

Weekend Reading 17
Weekend Reading 17: Tank Girl Colour Classics

AVERY KAPLAN: I’ve been listening to the Gorillaz Humanz album on repeat, and that’s inspired me to spend this weekend reading Tank Girl Colour Classics Book One (1988 – 1990) by Jamie Hewlett, Alan Martin, and Tracy Bailey. As far as prose, I’ll be checking out If It Bleeds, the new collection of four novellas from the man himself, Stephen King (and I’m especially excited about the title story, featuring characters from The Outsider).

Weekend Reading 17
Weekend Reading 17: Usagi Yojimbo/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

TAIMUR DAR: My intro to Usagi Yojimbo like probably most people was through Ninja Turtles. I’ve been reading the current Usagi Yojimbo series when Stan Sakai started publishing it through IDW last year. The Usagi Yojimbo animated series news this week has me jonesing for some classic Miyamoto Usagi adventures and I happened across the Usagi Yojimbo/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Complete Collection that I picked up from freebie pile from my office last year. 

Weekend Reading 17
Weekend Reading 17: How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?

CAROLYN HINDS: I haven’t read speculative fiction in a while, so I’m excited to start back with How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?, by N.K. Jemisin. On my reading list are works by other Black women, Parable of The Sower by Octavia E. Butler and Freedom in the Family by Tananarive Due.

Weekend Reading 17
Weekend Reading 17: Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics

AJ FROST: Just wanted to say that Taimur is in for an awesome ride with that TMNT/Usagi Yojimbo joint. Great stuff. As for me, I’m all over Tom Scioli’s Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics graphic biography. It’s an amazingly-rendered portrait of Jack Kirby, his life, and his contribution to popular culture. Where would be right now without Kirby’s fecund imagination? His characters have touched all of our lives in one way or another and this book puts most of them into an historical context. This is a can’t miss book for fans of this medium that we cherish so much. 

Weekend Reading 17
Weekend Reading 17: Corto Maltese

JOSH HILGENBERG: There’s a major gap in my European comics knowledge, so I’m taking this weekend to dig into Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese series. I’ve already started (is that cheating?) and I can say at the very least that I want more comics in this album-style format. Aside from that, it’s a nice change of pace genre-wise from the overwhelming amount of sci-fi/fantasy I read. I’m also on the lookout for more European comics recs if anyone has ‘em!

Bango Skank was here
Weekend Reading 17: If It Bleeds

RICARDO SERRANO: I discovered, to my surprise, that Stephen King released a new book featuring a sequel story to The Outsider, titled If It Bleeds. That’s a horror buffet for me right there. I felt empty after Ralph and Holly’s creature case came to a close and wanted more of them (even after the excellent HBO adaptation). On the comics side, I’m in a Firefly mood. BOOM’s relatively recent acquisition of the license has produced some great stories already—especially those concerning Mal’s and Zoe’s Unification War experience in hindsight—and it looks like there’s way more to come.

Weekend Reading 17
Weekend Reading 17: Osmose

ARPAD OKAY: Art book and agitprop. As Black As Resistance by Zoé Samudzi and William C Anderson is a book I hesitate to describe before I’ve read it, but it seems like it will confront racism not as the product of colonialism-capitalism but a pointed anti-Blackness that informs contemporary violence in America. Also Osmose, the art of Sibylline. Flowers, fashion, fantasy, the cosmic, the mythic, specific color palettes. Armor and blossoms? Yes.

Weekend Reading 17
Weekend Reading 17: Wolverine

BILLY HENEHAN: After listening to this week’s Robservations podcast, I became very interested in reading Wolverine by Chris Claremont, Frank Miller and Joe Rubenstein. I still remember the first time seeing the trade paperback cover, as a kid growing up in Queens, and being blown away by the book when I got my young hands on it. I was already a fan of Uncanny X-Men then, but this series was unlike what Marvel’s merry mutants were up against each month. I still have that original trade from the 80s somewhere, but thankfully I can pull up the issues immediately in Marvel Unlimited with the tap of a finger.

Weekend Reading 17
Weekend Reading 17: Young Avengers

GREGORY PAUL SILBER: I loved the first four issues of Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Mike Norton, Matthew Wilson, et al’s run on Young Avengers as they were originally coming out in 2013, but I never got around to finishing the series (I can’t read em all, folks!). Now that I have a copy of the newly-released “Complete Collection,” I look forward to changing that. Plus, as a Kickstarter backer for the PanelxPanel One Shots series of monographs edited by Hassan Otsmane Elhaou, I can top off Young Avengers with Style and Substance: An Exploration of Themes and Craft in Young Avengers by Rasmus Lykke. I can’t wait to take a deep dive into one of the most beloved superhero comics of the past decade!

March Book One by Rep. John Lewis

The Beat is saddened by the death of Representative John Lewis and continually inspired by his life. Please read more about the March trilogy, the bestselling and award winning graphic memoir by Rep. Lewis.

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