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:
The year in total:
The day by day breakdown:
And the day by day as a line graph:
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.