It’s already the weekend, and that means it must be time for Weekend Reading 96!
As with every installment, we hope that you’ll share your reading plans with us here at Stately Beat Manor, either right here in the comment section or over on social media @comicbeat!
AVERY KAPLAN: This weekend, I’m going to be reading Star Trek: Voyager: Seven’s Reckoning by Dave Baker, Angel Hernandez, Ronda Pattison, and Neil Uyetake. Then, I’m going to start in on Comic Art in Museums. Edited by Kim A. Munson and featuring work by the likes of Dwayne McDuffie, Art Spiegelman, and M.C. Gaines, I’m eager to explore the ideas in this collection of interviews and essays.
GEORGE CARMONA 3RD: Two weeks have passed since the series finale of The Expanse, wanting to fill the void as well as being a late comer to this epic space opera. I had started this series early in the shutdown, but knowing the last book was on the horizon, I wanted to savor each one. And this week I started the fourth book in this series, Cibola Burn. Written by James S. A. Corey, the pen name of writing team Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck has the intrepid crew of the Rocinante heading deeper into the ring gates as Holden has to arbitrate a land dispute between the Belter settlers and the RCE mega corporation, all while battling a planet that wants to kill them.
TAIMUR DAR: For my birthday last week, my sister gave me a copy of Marvelocity: The Marvel Art of Alex Ross. So I’m looking forward to reading it, especially with that recently announced Fantastic Four: Full Circle graphic novel by Alex Ross coming later this year. And since next week I’ll be interviewing some of the creatives behind the Big Nate cartoon based on the popular comic strip and book series, including creator Lincoln Peirce, I figure I’ll check out some Big Nate comic collections.
DEAN SIMONS: Now in the umpteenth week of the “Mystery Fatigue”, I must admit that I have been feeling pretty low – thus my reading tends to veer towards the equivalent of comfort food. This role has been fulfilled by Hiro Mashima’s earliest series Rave Master. It has a lot of flaws and is pretty generic but it seems to hit the spot. Also, after the sudden passing of the great Jean-Claude Mézières last weekend, I have been rereading and reappreciating his artwork on the bande dessinée series Valerian, with Pierre Christin. Currently I am on Empire of a Thousand Planets, which was serialised between late 1969/early 1970 in Franco-Belgian kids magazine Pilote.
JOHANNA DRAPER CARLSON: Continuing my personal trend of catching up on manga series I enjoy, I have the latest volumes of Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku by Fujita (volume 5 features the friend couple’s wedding and the corresponding debates about how fannish one should be in public and before family) and A Bride’s Story by Kaoru Mori (volume 12 catches us up with many of the recurring characters as anthropologist Mr. Smith brings his camera back across the nineteenth century Silk Road).
GREGORY PAUL SILBER: This probably won’t surprise anyone who read the open letter I wrote yesterday to the McMinn County Board of Education, but I figure this weekend is as good a time as any to reread Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The Tennessee school district banning Maus is a real convergence of things that make me angry: book censorship, underestimating young people’s abilities to process difficult information, fascism, antisemitism, disrespect for the single most important book in my reading history, disrespect for comics in general… anyway, Maus is great, and more entertaining than you probably remember. Give it a read, and a copy to a 13-year-old in your life if you can.
BILLY HENEHAN: It’s a snowy day here in New York City. After coming in from a morning of sledding and snowball fights, I plan on making some hot cocoa and reading Larry Hama, Don Perlin, Jack Abel, Jim Novak and Bob Sharen’s classic G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #2, Panic at the North Pole! Snake Eyes in that cool arctic gear! Kwinn! This issue helped me fall in love with G.I. Joe as a kid and I’m looking forward to returning to it.
CY BELTRAN: After waiting over a year to read it, I finally picked up the trade for The Dreaming: Waking Hours by G. Willow Wilson, Nick Robles, Javier Rodriguez, M.K. Perker, and Matheus Lopes. I’ve heard absolutely nothing but good things about it from everyone I’ve talked to and couldn’t wait any longer to grab a copy. I also had to wait until I finished my reread of The Sandman to get to it and that took much longer than I thought.
