this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the SIWELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the SIXTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2020 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
GR has deleted the pages for several of the stories i've read in previous years without warning, leaving me with a bunch of missing reviews and broken links, which makes me feel shitty. i have tried to restore the ones i could, but my to-do list is already a ball of nightmares, so that's still a work-in-progress. however, because i don't have a lot of time to waste, i'm not going to bother writing much in the way of reviews for these, in case GR decides to scrap 'em again.
i am doing my best. merry merry.
DECEMBER 5: BABYCAKES - NEIL GAIMAN
...we'll think of something.
Humans are smart.
It's what makes us superior to the animals and the babies.
We'll figure something out.
five pages of sequential art n' narrative. you have time for this.
gaiman chose an excellent title for this updated A Modest Proposal; a modern moral-predicament satire which, even shrunk down to this tiny fragment, still has a sting in its tail.
welcome to my spooktober audio advent calendar, where, each day during the month of spooktober, i will be celebrating by listeningSPOOKTOBER DAY EIGHT
welcome to my spooktober audio advent calendar, where, each day during the month of spooktober, i will be celebrating by listening to a free audio short from nightfire's Come Join Us by the Fire series, and you can join ME by following the links. let's all be scared together!!
[image] 23 minutes
one way to calm/quell your pandemic-anxiety is to listen to a story about a much worse pandemic. this is a nice long one, so the story has plenty of time to develop, and even though it starts with a shocker of an opening line, the journey towards that eventuality is a slow and unexpected burn. it begins with the privations following a cataclysmic Event and goes through a lot of turns, but it keeps the drama very close to home, as the situation changes people in unpredictable ways. wearing a mask won't keep you safe here, pals!
welcome to my spooktober audio advent calendar, where, each day during the month of spooktober, i will be celebratingSPOOKTOBER DAY SIX
all caught up!
welcome to my spooktober audio advent calendar, where, each day during the month of spooktober, i will be celebrating by listening to a free audio short from nightfire's Come Join Us by the Fire series, and you can join ME by following the links. let's all be scared together!
[image] 19 minutes
well, i suppose at least one of the stories collected in the Come Join Us by the Fire project was bound to be about fire, although this isn't necessarily a fireplace you'd wanna gather around, once you listen to this story's opening line:
The thought of tossing our baby in the fireplace first popped into my head a month or so ago.
earlier this year i read this author's novel Whisper Down the Lane, and i did not love it. this one is so much more effective at bringing the chills, which is partly due to the narration—this is the first story in this series i've encountered that's actually read by the author themselves, and chapman did such a great job; using this casual-conversational tone that often sounds like he's holding back a giggle, which makes the actual content of the story so much creepier. don't listen to it on an empty stomach, or you might start getting some controversial cravings.
wonderland-meets-neverland with more prescriptive scarification and cannibalism.
this is a fantastic read from a very dark imagination. the story-elemewonderland-meets-neverland with more prescriptive scarification and cannibalism.
this is a fantastic read from a very dark imagination. the story-elements are almost too bonkers to type out: dora is a girl who is sometimes a rock, birthed outta the earth for a wanna-be father who very quickly didn't wanna-be a father no more. abandoned & anomalous, she spends her days in the company of thistle, a boy she has come to regard as an adopted brother. thistle lost his true name when he was kidnapped from his/our world, led across dimensions and forced into servitude—an attendant to the masters of a twisted fairytale place known as the gardens. here, time stands still—for the masters, anyway—who enjoy a neverending cycle of croquet, feasts, and hedonistic revelries; never aging, never remembering anything beyond the pleasures of the moment. less fortunate are their mortal servants like thistle, who suffer horrible punishments for minor infractions and are killed when they get too old. and thistle, although doing his best to disguise it, is getting too old.
there's also a purple lady named ghorbi who trades and travels and makes wishes come true...for a price, porla the fish lady and her pet corpse, a kindly pair of vittra, a powerful librarian-entity, mysterious hooded beings who preside over the crossroads between dimensions, and a troupe of actors who perform the stories of all the worlds, empathy-chameleons* who can permeate their borders.
it's got all the traits and trappings of a fairytale—the creatures, the journeys, the tests, the power of names, and it's beautifully melancholic when it's not being a straight-up gleeful bloodbath.
augusta is a terrific villain who would be great friends with jill from seanan mcguire's wayward children series while dora was hanging out with the rock-narrator of The Raven Tower. and while i'm here recklessly namedropping other things, even though i stupidly haven’t read Piranesi yet, i get the sense that it might sorta be a gentler flipside of this story. we'll see how accurate my book-spidey senses are about this whenever i get around to reading it.
* figurative, although literal empathy-chameleons would fit right in here
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i won a book! but since it pubs on tuesday, you will probably get the chance to read it before i do, so no spoilers please!
fulfilling my 2022 goal to read one book each month that was not published in my country that i wanted badly enough to have a copy shipped to me from fulfilling my 2022 goal to read one book each month that was not published in my country that i wanted badly enough to have a copy shipped to me from abroad and then...never read.
oooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best horror 2020! what will happen?
THIS HAPPENED:
CONGRATULATIONS, WINNER! goodreads choice awards best HORRoooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best horror 2020! what will happen?
THIS HAPPENED:
CONGRATULATIONS, WINNER! goodreads choice awards best HORROR 2020!
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SPOOKTOBER COMIN' AT YOU LIKE
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this is not so much a reinvention of the gothic novel as it is a game of pin the crazytown tail on the classic gothic storyline.
and it is beautifully done.
if you’re a fan of gothic novels, whether they be the The Castle of Otranto or the Rebecca kind, you’ll dig the first 2/3 of this one. it’s all there: big crumbly isolated house, stormy storms, imperiled women, too much silverware, you know the drill.
if this is your first toe-dip into the genre, know that gothic novels are in no hurry to get where they’re going and the characters always take longer than the reader to get a handle on their situation. gothic horror is a slow simmer all about building atmosphere; the descriptions of rooms, wallpaper, clothing, trees. it’s about slowly uncoiling dread. it’s about nothing much happening until it does. it’s about an author walking the ambiguity line between the supernatural and plain old madness for as long as possible before canting the reader one way or the other.
and when this one cants, it cants HARD, shifting into some cronenberg-channelling-lovecraft fireworks that are super-icky and wonderful and it plays far rougher then your typical gothic does.
i totally misjudged the tone of this book before reading it. the cover and “mad max with cannibals” angle fooled me into thinking this would be a fun i totally misjudged the tone of this book before reading it. the cover and “mad max with cannibals” angle fooled me into thinking this would be a fun horror novel to read for spooktober but, while it was indeed fun, it isn’t horror. it’s a pure picaresque drawn in very broad strokes—stock characters, typical post-apoc wasteland setting, survivors of the fittest with adaptive moral compasses, and more functional weapons and bullets than should exist so long after the end of manufacturing—you know the type. but even though there’s a lot here that’s familiar to even a tourist to the genre, it’s still a lot of fun.
it’s like True Grit plus the mark twain coming-of-age novel of your choice with a lot more cannibalism, as a sixteen-year-old girl known as “kid” is picked up in the middle of the desert by a ragtag bunch of “sharks” toting garbage bags full of rancid meat of dubious origin in their jeep and joins this surrogate family with a casual shrug, embarking on a series of adventures that will involve death, near-death, and being left for dead, guns, explosives, an endless parade of adversaries, plots, betrayals, and well-roasted meat.
it’s a world characterized by the toughest of love. kid remembers the lessons of her long-departed father: Trust no one. Eat anything edible, even if it’s gross. And always bring enough water to get there and back again, and learns new lessons from wolf, her adoptive father figure, who teaches her how to swim, in his own way, when they are pursued to the very edge of a cliff by their enemies:
”I can’t!”
“Learn,” he says, “or die.”
He pushes me over the edge.
again, this isn’t a horror novel. despite the brutal situations, it’s barely even dark. kid reads much much younger than sixteen, and she’s remarkably unhardened by the events of her life. told through her perspective, the book has an almost dickensian feel, and she’s this plucky guttersnipe urchin slipping through dangers unscathed*, wide-eyed with an unquenchably positive outlook and all the blithe self-sacrificing tendencies of one of the more annoying superheroes.
it’s weird how much fun this is. the characters are central casting stereotypes, and the layer of whimsy brought to the table by kid’s reese witherspoon-esque attitude is so situationally dissonant, but something about it is undeniably appealing in the most cartoony way.
”All right,” Wolf repeats. He looks more disheveled than usual. He’s covered in blood, dripping from his dreadlocks and down the front of his shirt. It’s hard to tell how much of it is his own. He pushes up his goggles and glares at us. “All right. You know what? I am sick of this. I am sick of being pushed around and tied up and all of that shit! Come on, people, we’re supposed to be the bad guys! What the fuck is going on here?”
something about it just hooks you and drags you along on its rollicking carnival ride and it’s more fun and warmhearted than any book with this much casual killing ought to be. not scary enough for spooktober, but not a flop at all.
oooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for best horror 2018! what will happen?
when history’s not bad enough, add monsters!
writers adhering to thioooh, goodreads choice awards semifinalist for best horror 2018! what will happen?
when history’s not bad enough, add monsters!
writers adhering to this philosophy can either turn that historical atrocity frown upside down and play it for laughs by making zombies stagger across the deck of the titanic, OR use it to exculpate humanity by redirecting blame; identifying a villain that is not (or no longer, in the case of the undead) bound by human expectations of civilized behavior - 'oh, hitler was a vampire, no wonder he so bad!' OR the supernatural can be used to enhance the horrifically real - gently drizzling the past’s bad times with a monstery glaze.
The Hunger is an example of this third approach. nothing about this story has been lightened by its transition into the monster mash-up genre, and while some of the unneighborly impulses can be attributed to dark inhuman forces, there’s plenty of ordinary shitty behavior that’s as human as it gets.
as you probably already know, this book is about the donner party, a manifest-destiny sitch gone wrong and one of the main reasons there are so many mcdonald’s studding the lengths of america’s highways. travel-hanger = danger.
like The Terror, which is another example of this brand of historical ripped-from-the-headlines horror whose gaps are filled with monsters, both nature and the ancient-unnatural contribute to a tragedy played out in a desolate landscape where it's desperately cold, people eat people, and the snow keeps its secrets.
also similar to The Terror is the fact that, for a suspiciously long time, this reads more like historical fiction than horror, to the extent that i thought i had misunderstood something along the path of me-wanting-this-book. don’t get me wrong, i was enjoying it, but it was a slow-paced, well-researched historical whose events were plenty harrowing without any monsters, and once the spooooooky element did slink into the story, it wasn’t to provide additional horrors, it was just offered as an explanation for why the real horrors occurred.
not that an explanation was needed - i mean, this was a situation already pretty much bound to fail - the proto-reality show about the explosive potential when strangers from different backgrounds, religions, and financial means were thrown together, responsible for themselves and their families, but also dependent upon each other for survival over an unpredictable, under-explored terrain where one misstep could lead to disaster, where a few ounces of cargo could be all that stood between survival and destruction. the dilemma of protecting one’s own vs. the good of the group - whether you could afford to help out a less fortunate family when the unexpected arose, if doing so might cause your own family to suffer, mistrust, travel-fatigue, paranoia, the temptation of other men’s wives and daughters (whether these opportunities were being offered or not), cold and mud and wind and rain and boredom and the smell of oxen and unwashed human and children crying and jesus is it any wonder people started eating their fellow-travelers when provisions ran low miles from anything except snow and … more snow? i feel half-mad just typing all that out and it might not even take anything as extreme as watching someone i love starve to death before i started seeing everyone around me as a walking buffet.
as a historical, it’s grand - the backstories of those involved are amply fleshed out; fattened for the slaughter & all the better to eat you, my dear. it explores why people decided to take the journey despite the risks - what they were running from, what they hoped to find, what their alternatives to attempting the crossing were, and although i’m not convinced this story needed an extra push into the eerie to explain why it all went so horribly wrong, the mythologized bits are woven pretty tightly into the real facts and it’s well-blended, without seeming shoehorned in or silly, which is no small feat.
the epilogue was a bit disappointing - after such a long and languid book, it’s kind of a confusing blurry rush of a ta-daaa, but other than that, high marks from me.
fulfilling my 2019 goal to read (at least) one book each month that i bought in hardcover and put off reading long enough that it is now in paperback.fulfilling my 2019 goal to read (at least) one book each month that i bought in hardcover and put off reading long enough that it is now in paperback.
in the “books i didn’t read in a timely manner olympics,” this one is in the running for “most shameful karenfail” medal, because i had this as an ARC, and it sounded so great, i meant to read it immediately, but never got around to it, and then when the hardcover came out, i loved the cover so much
[image]
i had to buy it even though i still hadn’t read the ARC, reasoning “well, maybe there were errors in the ARC and now i will read it as the author intended,” but i STILL didn’t get to it, and then when the paperback came out, i loved that cover so much,
[image]
i was tempted to buy ANOTHER copy, but i restrained myself because growth.
and now, thanks to setting myself very specific 2019 reading goals, i have finally read it. and, yeah - it was as good as i’d hoped.
it’s a western-themed novel set in the now even more wildernessy wilderness of post-Event canada, where our young narrator elka discovers that the gruff man she only knows as “trapper;” the father figure who has been raising her for the past ten years, is more than just a facially-tattooed woodsy loner, he’s a straight-up monster; a wanted man named kreagar.
she’s been his ward and protégé since she was seven, when a storm (and storms are serious in post-Event canada) flung her more-or-less on his doorstep, separating her from her grandmother, with whom she'd been living since her parents left her to make their fortunes in the gold prospecting game, leaving her with only vague memories and a letter.
when elka inadvertently learns the truth about her surrogate father from a formidable lady-magistrate with a particular revenge-bone to pick with him, she decides to set out and find these long-lost parents; a journey through darkness and danger, where she will learn the truth about the world beyond trapper’s woods and (wait for it) AND ALSO ABOUT HERSELF.
if anyone needs taglines for lifetime original movies, i will be in my trailer.
it’s all the things i like: wilderness survival, vengeance, epic journeys across uncompromising landscapes, girls with potty mouths who are deadly with a knife - because say what you will about trapper - he may have raised her rough, but he raised her to survive in a world that barely managed to survive itself. but it’s also about nicer, softer things: coming of age and coming back to society and human kindness and trust. when elka meets penelope, theirs is a friendship born of literal life-saving exchanges, but they also have very complementary skill sets: elka has all manner of survival skills and animal instincts, but she’s never had to learn social skills, while penelope can read and navigate the ‘civilized’ world, and she knows how to manipulate; which is a wholly human trait elka’s only just learning about.
it’s a win-win book: one part cat-and-mouse manhunt with blood and brutality, one part finding a place in the world that doesn’t require quite so much blood and brutality. plus, wolves and backwoods philosophy:
I don’t much like roads. Roads is some other man’s path that people follow no question. All my life I lived by rules of the forest and rules of myself. One a’ them rules is don’t go trusting another man’s path. No matter if that’s a real one trodden into dirt or all them twists and turns his life has taken.
it’s a gritty and funny and strong debut, and i would really like to read her second book, Bitter Sun, although it looks like it hasn't been published in the US yet, so i guess i can put it off for now AND THIS IS HOW THE SLIPPERY SLOPES HAPPEN!
turns out, i'm an idiot. now, i know there are those of you who have been saying this for YEARS, but, me - being an idiot - well, i'm slow to catch onturns out, i'm an idiot. now, i know there are those of you who have been saying this for YEARS, but, me - being an idiot - well, i'm slow to catch on.
i burned through the entire Chew series earlier this year, and became really excited to get my hands on a copy of the comic i am right here reviewing: the Chew/Revival mashup (or, if you prefer, the Revival/Chew mashup, which is right here: Revival/Chew).
in this story, characters from these two wildly dissimilar series meet up to investigate a crime, and the artists draw both their own characters, as well as those from the other series.
in case you haven't read these series, here's an example of the artwork from Chew:
so, it's quite exciting to see how a project like this will pan out, with such different illustration styles.
the Chew half of the story was reprinted in Chew, Vol. 11: The Last Suppers, but i wanted to read the other side, so i went on the internet and bought myself a copy.
turns out i had read the Revival side of things, which was included in Revival, Vol. 4: Escape to Wisconsin. now, way back in 2014 when i read it, i hadn't read any Chew, and it's a good thing i'd forgotten some of the details of the story, because in this crossover event, there is a major spoiler for Chew, Vol. 6: Space Cakes, which was volume that made me yell aloud when i read it, so i'm glad i got to have that experience pure and not rooned for me by some too-realistic-looking tony chu. of course, i remembered the story immediately when i flipped to the Revival side of the flip-n-read comic (yes, i read the Chew side first even though i'd JUST read it in Chew, Vol. 11: The Last Suppers because i was deferring the pleasure of this long-anticipated crossover event), but for some reason, it hadn't occurred to me that this would have been the connected story - for all i knew, there could have been multiple crossovers between these characters.
but nope. just this one.
the Revival half is much stronger in terms of story - it's actually one of my favorite things to ever happen in the Revivalverse
that's not the tony chu i have grown to love. tony chu doesn't say "haha."
so, even though i'd (apparently) read them both before, i'm glad i have them in one volume now, because it's a special object, and doing the flippy-thing is fun and very good exercise.
however, i'm sad that colby didn't get drawn Revival-style. presumably he was off doing ... something else
while tony was investigating, but i really wanted to see how his sexxy-robotish self would translate into more realistic-artwork.
but, there's one other nice detail - i have just started reading the Saga series, and there's actually a Saga nod here in the form of a visual reference:
man, so here we are again - all caught up on chew with no more chew to look forward to for a while. however, since the next book will be th
[image]
man, so here we are again - all caught up on chew with no more chew to look forward to for a while. however, since the next book will be the LAST book, i may go full-nerd and buy the comics as they come out individually instead of waiting (im)patiently for the collected graphic novel. which is a financially irresponsible thing for someone with money woes to do, since i will still have to buy the graphic novel for completion's sake, but kanye didn't get where he is today by making cautious and sensible decisions. from now on, i live my life WWKD-style. which is convenient, since we share an initial, if not a tax bracket.
urinary things (maybe a spoiler for something that happened in #9, but out of context, in this series, who can even say what is going on? i will be thoughtful nonetheless)
come on, tony - forgive and forget! (view spoiler)[what's one ear devoured between friends? (hide spoiler)] you don't see will graham sulking through paris! florence, maybe, but not paris!!
i have loved watching the relationship between these two change over the series, and - more to the point - i have loved getting the background scoop on savoy's motives. he's got some plans this time that are going to change everything.
only one more adventure to go. (or five, if you're in kanye mode)
ALSO - one very fun & frustrating thing about this book is that it includes the chew half of the chew/revival crossover/switcheroo, which is weirdly and fortuitously the only other comic series i read. so while i love seeing the revival characters basically looking like funko versions of themselves:
i do not like being teased! fortunately, despite my money woes, i can afford the two bucks or whatever that this crossover thingie costs, and then i can start tracking down all the poyo adventures and read those to get my chew fix until - snif - the end.
in closing, you gotta love a series cheeky enough to use assessments like this one in their back-cover blurbs:
LAST TIME, GUYS! now that i am all caught up on reviewing the chews (if not the other giant stack of pending reviews) i will hopefully be a
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LAST TIME, GUYS! now that i am all caught up on reviewing the chews (if not the other giant stack of pending reviews) i will hopefully be able to review them book-by-book as they come out like a normal person and not like the laziest person in the world as i have been up to now.
i will say that this volume was a little bit of a letdown, considering how strong chew 9 was. that's not to say there's nothing cool in this one, because there are some very big things that happen in realizations
and somehow still more weird food-related powers popping up whose reveals get funnier and funnier as the series goes on and you think "surely this well has run dry!!" but no - the well provides.
but despite there being some closure to some storylines here, it felt a teensy bit fillery to me, and the whole "brace yourself for tragedy" thing these guys like to do in this series fell flat for me only because they already murdered my heart 4 books ago so anything after that is anticlimactic
but i'm still completely invested in this story and i'm not going anywhere. so, last lazy time, here we go:
i burned through all ten published volumes of this series in a matter of months, and while i managed a fairly coherent review of the first volume, i am overwhelmed by the thought of going back and reviewing volumes 2-10, trying to recapture that innocent mindset that didn't know what happened in subsequent volumes and trying to stay within the lines of the volume i'd be reviewing.
my hat is off to you serial comic book/graphic novel reviewers who are able to consistently churn out smart, comprehensive, and entertaining reviews that manage to discuss the book itself as well as its place within the larger universe of the series or character's existence.
i can't do that. i read these so compulsively and so quickly - like jamming cookies into a mouth that was already crammed with cookies - that it's just too much road to backtrack and too many metaphors to mix and since i have so many other books that i have to review, i'm going to take a totally cheap opt-out review path and just post pictures from each book that i enjoy for reasons pertaining to the plot, or just cuz i like the damn pictures.
and maybe now that i have to wait a couple of months until volume 11 comes out, i'll be able to do that one proper review-style, but right now - too full of stress and anxiety and just wanting to make this stack of books needing reviews go down LGM.
good things, big things, gingerbread things and more.
what will happen now???
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i know i still have to review volumes 2-9 of this, and this isn't going to be a proper review, either, but just a loooong groan about how i already burned through all of the published books in this series and now i have to wait until MAY to continue with the story and that is so UNJUST!
and yes, i read this volume while i ate an entire rotisserie chicken with my hands. like a fox in my own chicken speakeasy.
we are so close to getting through all these chews! and i'm actually going to say a little more about this volume than that boilerplate thi
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we are so close to getting through all these chews! and i'm actually going to say a little more about this volume than that boilerplate thing i've been putting up (but if you love the boilerplate thing, don't worry - it's gonna be included here as well - phew!) because i think this one, along with volume 6 (as heartbreaking as that one was) is probably my favorite so far. i love all the callbacks and mirroring this series indulges in, i love all the background jokes, i love when they have crossovers both subtle and overt
and in this one, i even liked the little side stories that i'd resented in previous volumes for breaking up my STORY. i mean, there are some amazing vegetable wars here…
but this is all getting too close to being an actual review, which is going to be SO CONFUSING to anyone who has been anticipating these lazy-lazy chew-reviews of mine. so, to get back to the lazy:
i burned through all ten published volumes of this series in a matter of months, and while i managed a fairly coherent review of the first volume, i am overwhelmed by the thought of going back and reviewing volumes 2-10, trying to recapture that innocent mindset that didn't know what happened in subsequent volumes and trying to stay within the lines of the volume i'd be reviewing.
my hat is off to you serial comic book/graphic novel reviewers who are able to consistently churn out smart, comprehensive, and entertaining reviews that manage to discuss the book itself as well as its place within the larger universe of the series or character's existence.
i can't do that. i read these so compulsively and so quickly - like jamming cookies into a mouth that was already crammed with cookies - that it's just too much road to backtrack and too many metaphors to mix and since i have so many other books that i have to review, i'm going to take a totally cheap opt-out review path and just post pictures from each book that i enjoy for reasons pertaining to the plot, or just cuz i like the damn pictures.
and maybe now that i have to wait a couple of months until volume 11 comes out, i'll be able to do that one proper review-style, but right now - too full of stress and anxiety and just wanting to make this stack of books needing reviews go down LGM.
i burned through all ten published volumes of this series in a matter of months, and while i managed a fairly coherent revilet's do this again, yeah??
i burned through all ten published volumes of this series in a matter of months, and while i managed a fairly coherent review of the first volume, i am overwhelmed by the thought of going back and reviewing volumes 2-10, trying to recapture that innocent mindset that didn't know what happened in subsequent volumes and trying to stay within the lines of the volume i'd be reviewing.
my hat is off to you serial comic book/graphic novel reviewers who are able to consistently churn out smart, comprehensive, and entertaining reviews that manage to discuss the book itself as well as its place within the larger universe of the series or character's existence.
i can't do that. i read these so compulsively and so quickly - like jamming cookies into a mouth that was already crammed with cookies - that it's just too much road to backtrack and too many metaphors to mix and since i have so many other books that i have to review, i'm going to take a totally cheap opt-out review path and just post pictures from each book that i enjoy for reasons pertaining to the plot, or just cuz i like the damn pictures.
and maybe now that i have to wait a couple of months until volume 11 comes out, i'll be able to do that one proper review-style, but right now - too full of stress and anxiety and just wanting to make this stack of books needing reviews go down LGM.
only three more to lazily review before i'm DONE! so, this again:
i burned through all ten published volumes of this series in a matter of months, and only three more to lazily review before i'm DONE! so, this again:
i burned through all ten published volumes of this series in a matter of months, and while i managed a fairly coherent review of the first volume, i am overwhelmed by the thought of going back and reviewing volumes 2-10, trying to recapture that innocent mindset that didn't know what happened in subsequent volumes and trying to stay within the lines of the volume i'd be reviewing.
my hat is off to you serial comic book/graphic novel reviewers who are able to consistently churn out smart, comprehensive, and entertaining reviews that manage to discuss the book itself as well as its place within the larger universe of the series or character's existence.
i can't do that. i read these so compulsively and so quickly - like jamming cookies into a mouth that was already crammed with cookies - that it's just too much road to backtrack and too many metaphors to mix and since i have so many other books that i have to review, i'm going to take a totally cheap opt-out review path and just post pictures from each book that i enjoy for reasons pertaining to the plot, or just cuz i like the damn pictures.
and maybe now that i have to wait a couple of months until volume 11 comes out, i'll be able to do that one proper review-style, but right now - too full of stress and anxiety and just wanting to make this stack of books needing reviews go down LGM.
first off, this is the book that followed the book that almost ruined me, so i can totally relate to the sentiments herein
*this one already had a kinda sorta review, so i am adding my form-letter review and pictures to the end, but i'm keeping the squawking at the top bec*this one already had a kinda sorta review, so i am adding my form-letter review and pictures to the end, but i'm keeping the squawking at the top because i still feel this pain.*
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???
i don't know how you comic book people do it, writing consistently interesting reviews of these things without getting either bogged down or burned out. i still haven't reviewed volumes 2-5 of this because i never know what to say and i'd rather keep reading 'em to see what happens next than to slow down and try to discuss a part of a story that's still happening. but THIS one, something definitely needs to be said...
i just read a bunch of reviews of this on here and - was there a memo? DID WE AGREE TO JUST NOT TALK ABOUT IT?? OR EVEN FREAKING ALLUDE TO IT??? AM I THE ONLY ONE FREAKING OUT HERE???
i guess so. suffice it to say, something happens in this one that surprised me.
and this is exactly why i've tried to make sure i have one volume on deck in-house before reading one of these. and this is - naturally - the one time i failed. and now i have to wait until wednesday to buy the next one (next few - i learn from my mistakes) to see what is going to happen now.
AAAARRRGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!
as promised, this again:
i burned through all ten published volumes of this series in a matter of months, and while i managed a fairly coherent review of the first volume, i am overwhelmed by the thought of going back and reviewing volumes 2-10, trying to recapture that innocent mindset that didn't know what happened in subsequent volumes and trying to stay within the lines of the volume i'd be reviewing.
my hat is off to you serial comic book/graphic novel reviewers who are able to consistently churn out smart, comprehensive, and entertaining reviews that manage to discuss the book itself as well as its place within the larger universe of the series or character's existence.
i can't do that. i read these so compulsively and so quickly - like jamming cookies into a mouth that was already crammed with cookies - that it's just too much road to backtrack and too many metaphors to mix and since i have so many other books that i have to review, i'm going to take a totally cheap opt-out review path and just post pictures from each book that i enjoy for reasons pertaining to the plot, or just cuz i like the damn pictures.
and maybe now that i have to wait a couple of months until volume 11 comes out, i'll be able to do that one proper review-style, but right now - too full of stress and anxiety and just wanting to make this stack of books needing reviews go down LGM.
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