December Reading Plans

Happy December Everyone!

Having entered the final month of 2014, I’ve got eight books ahead of me and hopefully a couple weeks I can dedicate to clearing out the various magazines, comics and trade (collected comic) collections I’ve gathered over the last year.

Most exciting for me will be the first three volumes in Phillip Jose Farmer’s The Dungeon series, a six-volume collection that has intrigued me for years as I came across various volumes at various used-bookstores, and as I found earlier this year that volumes three and five were written by Charles de Lint, I’ve now got the excuse to finally buckle down and check them out.

Each year after I’ve finished my various pre-selected reads, I hit the magazines and comics I’ve added to my collection – top spot this year goes to the zombie-themed Afterlife with Archie, followed by the Hack/Slash Army of Darkness Crossover, and hopefully catching up with Astro City again.

Reading Series: Jumping right in or playing catch up

One of my favourite super-hero comics these days is Kurt Busiek’s Astro City. If you’ve never read it, you really owe yourself a look. The stories focus on Astro City, which, like Superman’s Metropolis or Batman’s Gotham, has more than its share of heroes and villains, but with Astro City, the stories focus on all sorts of different residents of the city, over the course of decades and seen through the eyes of heroes, villains, and regular folks on the street.

The problem for me is, the series actually started back in 1995, and although it has a relatively small run, the time between each new release is long enough I’m always forced to decide between trusting my memory of comics I read 20 years ago, or re-reading the entire series each time a new volume is released.

I'm currently two volumes behind the current trade (technically three volumes, but I only buy my collections in softcover, rather than the pricier hardcover versions which show up a few months earlier), and so I can either jump in exactly where I left off, or re-read seven other volumes first.

Luckily, the series is pretty excellent, so if I decide to re-read, my punishment is to read an awful lot of good comics and get myself extra excited for the new stuff.

Well look at that, I think I just answered my own question!

Things I've Noticed: Coming up with a research paper can be tricky

As part of my Comic book course I'm taking this fall, I'm required to do a research paper project on a topic that interests me about comics and graphic novels.

The tricky part now is narrowing it down to just one.  As a horror fan, I'm definitely interested in how horror comics are handled in terms of school and public library collections aimed at youth.  People tend to get touchy on the idea of scary things being made available to their kids, so I'm sure I'd find a lot of existing papers on the project, but it may be a case of biting off more than I can chew.

Next up is a look at comics that focus on Superheroes, but from non-traditional directions - think Gail Simone's Welcome to Tranquility or Kurt Busiek's Astro City, heck even Greg Rucka's Gotham Central, to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

Finally, I'm really interested in comics crossing over with other styles of stories; fables, urban legends, even nods to the pulps (which is where comics really came from).  In the end it's pretty tricky, but I need to make a decision this week, so I've got some thinking to do.