What are you reading in Comics/Manga/etc?

Nice! Do they also have the Dark Horse stuff? I think Marvel's re-released some of the Dark Horse books in actual print but I'm not entirely certain since a lot of that stuff is stuff I own in print already it's not something I really paid attention to.

Even that wild mini-series that was based on George Lucas' first draft of Star Wars? The Star Wars?! If they got that one that's another one that patbat should read because it's really out there.

Two Mirrors by Viktor Hachmang, although it’s more a very-nicely-printed art zine than a comic—it’s pretty short, but very dense. Almost entirely wordless, with two very short mood pieces. One’s a take on Borges’s Library of Babel and very dense and rewarding to look at again and again, the other’s the opposite, about the blank page and, while it doesn’t draw the eye, works in a vacuum-sucks-you-in sort of way. Preview here.

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso.
My goodness, this was depressing. Sabrina, the title character, is killed offscreen in a violent murder/suicide by one of her neighbors. Videos are mailed to the local media of the killing, and details eventually leak. The Internet being what it is, countless conspiracy theories grow around this otherwise simple case, with an obvious Alex Jones analogue fanning the flames on his radio show.
The main character is Calvin Wrobel, a divorced airman who was an old friend of Randy, Sabrina's boyfriend, and who takes Randy in after the murder. Randy is in a hopeless spiral of despair and keeps listening to the Not Alex Jones Radio Show. Eventually, Calvin begins to get death threats from Internet Truth Warriors who demand to know the Real Story behind Sabrina's murder, and how Calvin is just covering up for The Man, and Sabrina is just hiding out on an island with the other "victims" of "mass murders".
I didn't really care for the art style -- everyone has the same face and similar body shape -- but the story itself is a sad mirror of society and how there's more than just a fringe element that wants to believe there's some meaning behind it all, that it's not just random chance in an uncaring universe, and how deeply they want to believe in that.

Finished Jeff Smith's RASL last night (third read-through for me). The book presents such an entertaining speculation that has coherence to UFT and other tangents of theoretical physics. All the Tesla history makes me remember when I first read about him in schoolbooks, then later found out about his tumultuous history at university. Other thoughts that crossed my mind were Tesla's presence in The Prestige and how Tesla is a cultural shortcut to "the hidden mysteries of the universe".

I see a Tesla/Lovecraft crossover comic/game/fantasy-entertainment has a dark nerd sweet spot partially mined by the storycrafters of the planet.

This looked interesting - I've been playing Nethack (and other roguelikes) for a few decades, and it has a hunger mechanic, so unless you luck into a lot of food items, you're pretty much going to have to consume a lot of monster corpses.  Many of them have a chance to give you special abilities, many others can poison or otherwise injure you.

This was super cringey.  Really evidence of how much editing and input from others helped make Star Wars the cultural force it was.

My local library finally got all, or at least many, volumes of Saga, so I'm going to try to read them all before we move in August.


Not really a challenge, but I don't want to read more than a chapter or two per day.

Happy Stories About Well-Adjusted People, Joe Ollmann (2014)

I picked this up because I like what I've read of Ollmann. This is similar stuff in the look and tone of his other work; some of the stories are reprints from the much earlier This Will All End In Tears (2006). 

I still have a bunch of issues of Protoculture Addicts somewhere, but I quit buying it once it became a general Japanimationanimemanga thing.

Happy Stories about Well-Adjusted People, Joe Ollmann (2014)


Finished the last story yesterday evening. While each story is thematically different, the thread of intransigence is consistent and stitched throughout. I liken some of the stories contained in this collection to: Tales from the Darkside episodes of Letterkenny. Most of the stories occur in Ontario. The ones distinctly in rural, Southwestern Ontario are those most a dark-version of Letterkenny. @billy , Pastafarian , Baron von Costume , Lt. Broccoli , and sarapen if you haven't checked out this gent's stories, I entreat you to do so. 

Last year I glommed on to Ollmann's The Abominable Mr. Seabrook then moved on to some of his other works before finding something else that attracted my attention. The boomerang of boredom and comfort in seeing something I knew of elicited this rough but valued diamond.

Yeah, me too. I see we're both cheapskates.

I'm starting my move this Thursday, so I sped up my timeline and finished all 9 volumes.  Better than expected, and I expected them to be quite good.

sarapen, I am grateful for your taking a look at Ollmann's work. It does make me feel valuable. Thank you.