2021 Comic Reading Challenge

2,622 comics for the year. I think my DCUI and MU subscriptions are starting to really pay off. If they were all $5 comics, that is an over $13,000 value. Not bad.

I’m still re-reading Wonder Woman. It really is amazing how much her story jumps around whenever a new writer comes to the fore. They move her to a new city, cut ties with old friends, and start up wacky new adventures until another writer comes along. With her Golden/Silver Age stuff she just had longer times with the same or similar writers so it felt more continuous, even though they only kept a few key recurring characters over time. At least she stayed in one place.

Enjoying the King in Black with Marvel right now. I’m a sucker for epic world-changing crossovers, even though they happen like every year I still love them.

The new Elfquest is still as good as ever. I’ve been reading it almost 40 years but still love it.

I’m a Smurf collector so the new Papercutz Smurf Tales was fun. They still have material from Peyo that hasn’t been translated into English so it’s all new to me.

Red Sonja. Sometimes they get good writers and I love the stores (Sonyaversal), sometimes it’s just eye-candy with no plot that makes me wonder why I spent five bucks. I wanted to collect all things Robert E. Howard but this one I could technically skip since his Red Sonya of Rogatina lived in the 16th century and never wore a bikini. And yet, here I am.

Scout comics White Ash series is great. Found it on Kickstarter. It’s the modern world, fantasy characters from another dimension, star-crossed lovers, and a great art style. Worth checking out.

The Spreadsheet:

Summary







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You gotta check out ECHOLANDS, in print. Its all 2 page landscape spreads and, there’d be alot of zoomin in and out with a digital read. The book is friggen gorgeous!

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Really dug it, the early spider-ness feel but in new and way more topical style. KAARE ANDREWS is one of my “here’s my money/time” creators. ZERO YEAR was awesome, the RESISTANCE, interesting, the only title I was just blah towards was BAD MOTHER. Gonna check out the new RUSSELL, ENNIS books soon, way high hopes for those ones.

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I have every TPB that they have released. So far, the only book I have been blah towards is Old Haunts. Archangle 8 was really good and it was nothing like I was expecting.

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There’s a bunch up for borrow on COMIXOLOGY, thanks for the rec

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Here’s how ECHOLANDS reads, as an example

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Honestly, I stumbled upon them with the Hotell tpb. When I realized it was a new comic publisher and every tpb is $9.99 I picked up each tpb in that first round. Now I am too far in to stop because I want that full collection of books.

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Sounds familiar, heh. The curse of the funnybook crew.

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Testing 1 2 3

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It works!

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September was a weird month for me. I had a total of 149 comics read over the month, bringing me up to a grand total of 1,464 for the year. This is a bit lower than average, but overall not too shabby, I suppose. As I mentioned at the tail end of last month, I recently subscribed to Comixology Unlimited, and that’s where the weird part comes in. See, when I got it, I figured I’d be digging into all the good indie stuff that I’ve been missing. I wanted to get caught up on Black Hammer, and finally read all of Astro City. Stuff like that. Instead, all but like three issues of the Comixology total were somehow related to Archie. I don’t really know what happened, other than Mark Waid is a really great writer. Seriously his Archie reboot run is amazing. There’s some problems in the last couple issues, because he wasn’t writing dialogue (Veronica doesn’t sound like Waid’s Veronica at all), but then he came back with the '41 and '55 minis and fixed it right up. Anyway, here are the charts:

Here’s for the month:
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The year in total:
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The day by day breakdown:
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And the day by day as a line graph:
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Some highlights and lowlights:

As previously mentioned, Mark Waid’s Archie is great and honestly one of my favorite comic runs of all time. Even if you aren’t into Archie, I suggest you at least read the '41 and '55 minis because those work really well as their own things.

Teen Titans Academy also continues to hit the mark for me. I’m actually pretty impressed with the Shazam! mini that ties into it, as well. I didn’t have high hopes for it after how the character was handled in Future State, but it’s been pretty fun so far. Oh, and Superman: Son of Kal-El is a very surprising highlight. Honestly, Infinite Frontier as a whole has had me pretty impressed. We’ll see how well that holds up as the other books start popping up on DCUI and I can start reading more than the relatively small sample size I started out with.

And I haven’t brought this up yet, but I’ve been reading through the Invincible trades, and it’s pretty dang good. They should make a show out of it. The dialogue feels a little off at times, but it’s by no means awful, and the book definitely makes up for it in other places.

I also read Superman: For Tomorrow. That was… not as good. It’s so cynical and just… blah. Superman is possibly more out of character than I’ve ever seen him. And his whole motivation for a good bit of the plot is that I guess he forgot that Jor-El did try to save the people of Krypton? He acts like Jor did nothing but pretty much every iteration of Clark’s origin shows that he tried to do a lot, it’s just that the Science Council didn’t believe in him. Also I don’t really get why the priest was in the book. I guess Azzarello wanted some deep and poetic message in the book about faith, but, um… he kinda forgot to include the “deep” and “poetic” parts. Instead it’s either just stupid, pretentious, or both.

The Archie reboot run also kinda fizzled out after Waid left and Nick Spencer took over. It wasn’t, like, egregious or anything, but it’s a huge let down after Waid. It starts to become this weird hybrid of what came before and Riverdale, and it turns into a potential murder mystery with witches and secret cults. Then it just stops and turns into a fashion drama when Mariko Tamaki takes over, which I guess was kind of better, but the Katy Keene arc was also… not very good. I read the whole thing and I still don’t even know how old Katy is supposed to be.

A pretty solid month, overall. Not sure what I’m focusing on this upcoming month, but with the sudden resurgence of my love for Archie, and October being the spookiest time of the year, some Archie Horror might be in order.

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Have you read Betty and Veronica by Adam Hughes? He does interior art as well as writing! It really was an amazing find that I stumbled upon thanks to a $2.99 sale on the Archie website.

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I have! Between that, Waid’s Archie, and Zdarsky’s Jughead, they really came out swinging with the New Riverdale reboot.

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Saw VENOM 2 with the boys yesterday, better than the first, better than expected really. But what’s GREAT? my youngest, right now, is on the couch beginning the reading journey that is MAXIMUM CARNAGE.

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I finished reading the year 1959, off to the 60’s

Summary

DC
Action Comics #252
Adventure Comics #267
Brave and the Bold #25,26,27,28
Challengers of the Unknown #7,8
Flash #106-111
Mystery in Space #53-59
Showcase #19,20,21,22,23,24
Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane #8-15
Wonder Woman #48,49,105-112
World’s Finest Comics #100-107

Marvel
Tales Of Suspense #1,2,3,4,5,6
Tales To Astonish #1,2,3,4,5,6

Total Comics 65
Total Comics (2021) 782

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Updated

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Updated

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Wild week. Fell into the HELLFIRE GALA marvel x-thing. Best way to sum it all up: imagine a CW tweener show where the season takes place at prom, with mutants whose main superpowers appear to be able to shoot drama out of their every pore. You got me again, MARVEL. On the other side, the new FLASH was a one and done, with a hokey new villian that WALLY takes out with a punch and a pun, wraps with a sugary, positive bit with his daughter, and then teases some new evil thing from space landing on earth. Total 60s throwback issue, done in 20 pages, LOVED IT. Not every issue needs to be “chapter whatever of a multipart epic that changes everything!”…

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What’s everyone’s WW 80th anniversary reading lists?

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