Gar “I‘ve grown a lot of horns in my time and, professionally speaking, these feel like they‘re for show, rather than being functional. Same can be said of the wings really. I mean you can already fly.” Raven (the dark-winged queen) “With a beat of these wings cities will be blown to dust”
Gar “Sure, if that‘s what you‘re into.”

Poor and middle class white people help rich assholes set the country on fire, out of fear that people of color might get access to parts of it

I feel like someone should write a paper about the creation, idealization, and destruction of simple binaries and how that relates to magic in this book and English Language fantasy. There‘s a lot going on there even if the bare bones of the story are YA wish fulfillment. Also, I desperately want to know why the protagonist is from Florida, while the magic school is in Scotland, and the author is Australian.

“But I smile and sit and eat dinner with them, because almost belonging is better than being alone”.

Readable, but not in depth. Does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin.

I like how this book dealt with not being “chosen”.

It‘s weird how much of homophobia is about power dynamics, even during a revolution.

“They confuse manliness with brutality” Sigrid Schultz in reference to Goering and the Nazis

Group of survivors of a monster apocalypse get to the source of the outbreak in the heart of West Hollywood prepared to fight monsters and find a fancy gala at the Pacific Design Center: “What‘s the battle plan if it‘s just white people?”

It seems like the people who made this had fun doing it. It‘s a campy media aware monster apocalypse story. “What if Shawn of the Dead was about a group of queer teens visiting a drag show in WeHo? And there are dragons?”.

This feels like a solid start to a story. The main character is more relatable than charming. But she‘s only little, by which I mean a college student.

Cool setting, nice use of language, and just a pretty pretty book. It‘s like a Susanna Clarke amuse-bouche, it won‘t satisfy you, you‘ll just want more. And by “you”, I mean me.

This graphic novel moved from art style to art style, team roster to team roster, tone to tone faster than Nightcrawler teleports from place to place. It felt like a lot of missed opportunities. Only potentially for Excalibur completists.

What this really made me wonder is, what if the Weimar Republic hadn‘t ended? In WWII books the end of the Weimar Republic always feels like a forgone conclusion, but I don‘t think it felt that way to people living through it.

It felt like a weight I didn‘t know I was carrying was lifted to read a fantasy about someone with a chronic illness. Real seeming chronically ill characters, where it‘s every day, don‘t show up much in genre fiction. Then I started to wonder why the character wasn‘t stressing about paying for their medication. I thought they must be fabulously wealthy. Then I remembered, the author is Irish not American. Now I‘m just kinda sad.

Whew, I don‘t know much about Bauhaus. But the dislike that the author holds for Gropius‘s wife Alma, seems over the top and problematic.

This doesn‘t have a plot, it‘s just a series of cute cat drawings, and I‘m okay with that.

This is an interesting topic. Having more walkable communities, better transportation, less car centered growth is always the hope. It always seems so potentially doable. But ….

I only have #6 in this series, so all I know for sure is that it is very, very pretty.

Emma Frost rally‘s everyone to fight fascists and reference‘s Mean Girls.

“You could have left…maybe you would have gotten away. I‘ll never truly understand you”. “We didn‘t leave …because we belong! Because we say so.”

This reminds me of It by Stephen King; the story has the same sort of cyclic horror and abuse hiding behind a the facade of a “nice” town. Unlike It, the monster in loving is a religion (or cult), and the religion is a pyramid scheme, and it remains undefeated by the end of the story. That tension of the monstrous thing confronted but not defeated, just escaped, feels very adult.

#Choose20 comics that stuck with you or influenced you. Post one cover a day, in no particular order. No reviews, no explanations. Just covers. Day 20:Castle Waiting Volume 1: Lucky Road

#Choose20 comics that stuck with you or influenced you. Post one a day. No reviews, no explanations. Just covers. Day 19 : Hopeless Savages #4

#Choose20 comics that influenced you or stayed with you. Post one a day. No reviews, no explanations. Just covers. Day 18: Giant Days - Volume 4

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. Post one a day. In no particular order. No reviews, no explanations. Just covers. Day 17: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. One comic a day, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews. Just covers. Day 16 - The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. Post one a day, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews. Just covers. Day 15: Uncanny X-Men 303

#Choose20 comics that influenced you or stayed with you. One comic a day in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews. Just covers. Day 14: Relish

Meh. This was less about Vivian Gordon than it about people around her.

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. Post one comic a day, in no particular order. No reviews, no explanations. Just covers. Day 13: Locke & Key #2

This was a pretty breezy history of lipstick in the US specifically. And, more specifically, how lipstick was sold to woman and thus what being a woman was supposed to mean at different points in history. The ways economics and makeup interact drew special attention.

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. One a day, in no particular order. No reviews, no explanations. Just covers. Day 12: Books of Magic #35 The Burning Girl

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. One comic a day, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews. Just covers. Day 11: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. One comic a day, in no particular order. No reviews, no explanations. Just covers. Day 10: Grayson 5

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. One comic a day in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews. Just covers. Day 9: Strangers In Paradise volume 2

The frantic multiverse travels of Dead X-men is enjoyable, although too high stakes to be fun. I read this based on the team make-up. So if you like Jubilee, Rachel, Cannonball, Dazzler, Frenzy and Prodigy you might like this. (I will never understand Prodigy‘s power. Someone explain it to me.)

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. One comic a day in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews. Just covers. Day 8: Leave it to Chance: Shaman‘s Rain

Saga sets up gut punches really well.

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. One comic a day, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews. Just covers. The Cartoon History of the Universe: Day 7

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. One comic a day, in no particular order. No reviews, no explanations. Just covers. Day 6: The Wicked, the Divine.

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you, or influenced you. Post one comic a day, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews. Just covers. Day 5.

…I don‘t know. I guess alternate realities, where characters are so different that all they share is a mild aesthetic connection to characters you already know, doesn‘t appeal to me.

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. One comic a day, in no particular order. No , no reviews. Just covers. Day 4: A Distant Soil 2nd series #16

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. One comic a day, in no particular order. No reviews, no explanations. Just covers. Day 3: Finder Talisman.

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. One comic a day, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews. Just covers. Day2

#Choose20 comics that stayed with you or influenced you. One comic a day, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Day 1

This is ok. Unsurprisingly, wealthy absinthe collectors are as out of touch as wealthy art collectors. The author seemed casually wealthy in a way that made me dislike him. Not a bad person, just weirdly casual. The way he talked about googling the forger‘s name, made it sound like he‘d never searched for anyone online before. Still, low stakes true crime for the win.

There are so many irons in the fire in this book that it‘s hard for me to know what was sincere, what was parody, what was a meditation on the inherent unreality of plot structure, and what was just a fantasy novel. There‘s lots of funny lines, there‘s purple writing that I‘m 85% sure is genre aware parody, there‘s reevaluations of problematic fantasy tropes.