I’ve barely read any comics lately (because, er, I’ve been reading comics), so I think these are the ones I’ve read over the last month or so? Unheard of!
Cathon’s Pineapples of Wrath is very amusing.
I love her cartooning — it’s just extremely appealing.
And the story is loopy in a satisfactory way. Class.
I’ve read most of this stuff before in a couple of small-press books from Adam Szym.
It’s still scary!
The new piece is the most complex one of them all, and it really works — it’s unnerving and mysterious and you don’t quite know where this all is going, even though it relies on common tropes as “nerdy put-upon boy spirals” and “lizard/corn people from space” with some Charles Burns-ey sexual ick dynamics. But that lizard/corn thing… Szym’s art chops aren’t quite up to doing what he wants to do — I found myself confused at points just because I didn’t know which character I was looking at, or whether Szym was trying to tell us that all these people were really made from corn. Or something.
But still, very entertaining.
I think this one landed on all of those Best of 2025 lists?
And I’ve enjoyed his previous books, so I thought I’d like this one, too. It’s quite traditional — we have a wise-ass main character who’s sent back in time to view historical events and Learn A Lesson. And I think those parts mostly work.
But it still comes off as relentlessly didactic, and I lost interest about one third through. Perhaps it’ll do great in high school history class, if there is such a thing still? The current US regime may have banned them for all I know…
I didn’t much care for Mimi Pond’s latest book (also on all the Best of 2025 lists), and for much the same reason. But this is from 2014. And I somehow missed it the first time around, but I definitely read the followup.
And it’s just great — it’s funny, it’s touching, and it really feels like you’re getting an insightful account of an interesting time and place.
I really like the artwork and the storytelling, too. I just smiled the entire time I was reading this.
Yes! I got caught up on about two or three months worth of serial comics.
I quite like The Mortal Thor, even though it seems to be getting lost in the weeds by issue four already — the series started off without much context, with this Norwegian guy with amnesia, but we’re starting to get infodump upon infodump of what’s been going on over 60 years of Thor continuity, and that shit’s deadly.
The Black Cat is pretty amusing, too, even though the artwork is so Marvel standard. It’s hard to work up all that much enthusiasm, because it’s Marvel, so of course it’s going to get cancelled in a couple issues. That’s it with Marvel: If they’ve got something good going, it’s either going to be cancelled or they’re going to run it into the ground with some lame crossover event or other. All these perfect jumping-off-points…
And I got the final batches of the Age of Revelation issues — that I bought by mistake because the web interface on G-Mart is so confusing.
But I continue to be surprised at how non-awful these books are. And they all have kinda-sorta proper endings, too.
But of course, there’s duds, too.
Finally, I got caught up on my Spirou abonnement. I’m trying to trick myself into learning French by having this weekly deadline of books that I have to read unless I want them to stack up.
This batch, though, has some really good pieces, like the Seccotine thing.
The biggest news is the Attila serial, which is just hilarious. It’s about Attila the Hun, but as he’s running a camp and taking care of various annoying things that happen there.
And also lots of other funny stuff.
And that’s it? That’s not a lot for a month. I must step up my comics reading!