100% Completion

Shiba Inu Rooms, chapter 17

Aliens vs. Avengers #1

Teen Titans #1 

Daredevil (2019-) #28

Taro Miyao Becomes A Cat Parent, chapter 30

Teen Titans #2

Micronauts #55

I Want To End This Love Game, chapters 3-8: I Want To End This Love Game is a romance manga the Viz app recommended for me and I was a bit desperate so I went, “yeah, why not?” It’s basically a more brain-dead version of Kaguya-Sama: Love is War—two high school friends are each secretly in love with the other, and go through various tricks to get the other to confess rather than just confess themselves.

Kaguya-Sama does something similar (the leads are classroom rivals, not childhood friends) but there the manga-ka (Aka Akasaka, which is apparently not a pseudonym but really should be?) not only gets comedic mileage out of the omniscient third person narration but also crafts stories that are in their absurd way dissecting the cruelties of the Japanese class system.

By contrast, I Want To End This Love Game has stuff like, “oh, when I petted your head, did your heart beat faster?” Ya know, what are you gonna do?

Lobo / Road Runner #1

Wolverine: Revenge #2: This is the second issue of the Jonathan Hickman/Greg Capullo’s “what if Wolverine but Kill Bill told in order and Jonathan Hickman wouldn’t stop pointing to all the worldbuilding he did?” It was so dull that when I went to read issue #3 on Marvel Unlimited this morning, I literally had forgotten everything that had happened in issue #2 and had to re-read it.

I Want To End This Love Game, chapter 9-15

Teen Titans #3

Jonah Hex / Foghorn Leghorn / Yosemite Sam #1

Batman / Elmer Fudd #1: As you can probably tell by the other entries, I read the first volume—was there a second?—of the DC/Looney Tunes crossovers. Although I still fall on the “cold” side of the hot & cold spectrum about Tom King, reading this more at the same time with the other issues, it really does point out what a weirdo home run of a book this is. Of course, no small part of that is due to Lee Weeks being just fucking excellent in every particular (the whole thing wouldn’t work if the thrilling Batman parts didn’t feel really thrilling) but yeah King somehow tops even the Punisher/Archie crossover for not just pulling off an unlikely pairing but triumphing with it.

(And maybe it’s also a world-class roast of Frank Miller, maybe? Fudd’s first person narration and turning all the other Tunes into human underworld types you’d find drinking next to Marv? Maybe?)

But yeah, I gotta give props where props are due.

Astro Baby, chapter 26

Akane-banashi, chapter 141

Hima-Ten, chapter 25

Blue Box, chapter 179

Kunigei, chapter 17

Micronauts #56

Red Cat Ramen, chapter 131

Cross Game Chapter 0.1 to 0.4: Hopefully there’s a findable explanation as to why the Viz app broke these into pre-”chapter one” chapters? I mean, there’s definitely one hell of an in-story reason for it—one of the central characters dies before the “actual” chapter 1—but couldn’t they have just put “prologue” in front of the chapters or something? Especially since the chapter pages inside the manga fall out of step (at least for a while) with the app’s numbering. Odd.

I Want To End This Love Game, chapter 16-40

DandaDan, chapter 180

How to Grill Our Love, vol. 12

Chainsaw Man, chapter 189

Micronauts #57

All New Venom #2 (2024-)

You're So Sloppy, Hotta Sensei, chapter 40

Absolute Batman #4

Teen Titans #4

Taro Miyao Becomes A Cat Parent, chapter 31

Beat & Motion, chapter 47

Show-Ha Shoten, chapter 37

I Want To End This Love Game, chapter 41-53

Cross Game Chapter 0.5-1.0

Cross Game Chapter 1-11: OK, so now we’re in Cross Game proper and I should rant about it here, but I’m still a little shy about doing so for a few reasons.

One of those reasons is this came on my radar after seeing Abhay mention it over on his Tumblr—like much later, a year and change—and honestly I don’t think I have anything to add, especially now that I looked up and re-read this post which really just nails what’s so great about manga-ka Mitsuru Adachi: the storytelling is just God Tier stuff, page after page of it.

If I was thirty years younger I’d probably be way more hyperbolic about reading 150 chapters of it as Trump took office and everything just started turning to shit instantly: “The only reason I’m still alive is because of Cross Game!”

But nah, I’m an old guy who, although deeply and consistently sad that his lifespan is probably going to end more or less at the same time as America and/or quite possibly the apex of the history of the world, is kind of relieved that I wasn’t there for the tough stuff at the beginning and will be too old to do much during the tough stuff at the end, a.k.a., “sure I just sat around and read comics while the possibly-Potemkinesque vestiges of American democracy tumbled, but hey they were some god-damned excellent comics.”

World's End Harem After World, Vol. 18: Final volume of “What if Y The Last Man but horny?” (Which actually got off to a rocky start all those volumes ago because it was really more like “What if Y The Last Man but horny, but not really horny since the last man is a no-nutter?” and then they brought in a second, much hornier Y and things went much better.)

I don’t know for sure but if I had to guess the creative team did such a good job in the fan ratings wrapping up the original series, the editors invited them back for a second go-round which didn’t land well with the fans at all. The creators really stretched believability to get to the big cliffhangers in this volume, which they then toss away with some cheap and easy resolutions, and a few bouts of desultory boning.

In a way, it’s kind of a shame? But I guess there’s also more than a certain amount of “look, it’s a harem fantasy book, how much creativity should you really expect, anyway?” The thing is, you don’t have to look around much in the manga world to see all kinds of otaku freaks who are really, really going to put as much world-building as they can into their harem fantasies. It’s possible World’s End Harem :Fantasia, by the same writer but with a fantasy setting instead of a sci-fi one is indeed one of those books—though from what I sampled it just seemed like the standard trope of “there is no way we can win unless we from an alliance with this other ally, and there’s no way we can do that unless someone is able to do the impossible and win over the powerful but sexually dismissive queen of the fire nipples.” (All the “creativity” more or less begins and ends with the double-page spread of the world map, in other words.)

Absolute Superman #3

Those Not Afraid #1

The God Inside Me, bonus chapter

Cross Game Chapter 12-54

DandaDan, chapter 181

My Dearest Patrolman, vol. 3

Chainsaw Man, chapter 190

Teen Titans #5

Cross Game Chapter 55-90

Shiba Inu Rooms, chapter 18

The Immortal Thor #19

You're So Sloppy, Hotta Sensei, chapter 41

You're So Sloppy, Hotta Sensei, chapter 42

Cross Game Chapter 91-115: I will say that, although Adachi is indeed a god-tier cartoonist, he does do a mystifying thing around this part of the narrative wherein a doppelgänger of the dead character turns up to complicate things. It’s weeks later and I still find myself thinking about it. Why? Why did he—? Is it….was Adachi a big fan of Chris Claremont and Paul Smith’s Uncanny X-Men back in the ‘80s? (Claremont and Adachi were born only two and a half months apart which is utterly mind-wrecking to consider.)

I don’t know, but to the extent I have a caveat about Cross Game, that’s it. But maybe Adachi does a sequel where the character turns into The Goblin Queen so it’s all worth it. (Even if not, it is still all worth it.)

Taro Miyao Becomes A Cat Parent, chapter 32

Teen Titans #6: By the way, the reason these Teen Titans issues keep popping up is after finishing up Haney’s run on The Brave and The Bold, I thought I’d load up the Teen Titans Omnibus and keep the Haney love coming…

Which kinda didn’t work? I know Graeme loves this stuff and I can appreciate it in small chunks, certainly. (Nick Cardy’s art really hits that DC Silve Age sweet spot of being both exciting and soothing simultaneously.) But there’s a lot less craft to Haney’s stories here and they feel largely anachonistic—if they’d been published six to eight years earlier than they would’ve actually appeared, that might’ve helped.

Anyway, I mention it here at the last issue I’ve read to date. I’m gonna have to at least read one more issue—issue #7 is the Mad Mod!—but it’s clearly pretty low on the priority list.

Who Killed Jimmy Olsen Vol. 1 TPB: Like Batman/Fudd, also a re-read and also with a writer I tend to end up on the cold side of the “Hot & Cold” thing. And sorta like how Weeks is the MVP, my reread of this was definitely improved by Steve Lieber’s art.

Unlike Batman/Fudd, I put it down going, “yeah, this was good. It was ok. Yeah. It was a’ight.”

BTW, we’ve hit the “I should really write a larger essay…” portion of the newsletter, because I should really write a larger essay about how Matt Fraction is basically the comic book writer version of David Foster Wallace: not just because he’s funnier, and smarter, and better-looking than 95% of his contemporaries, but also because (to me) he so psyches himself up and out into trying to out-top everyone’s expectations of himself that (a) he at times seems direly unhappy; and (b) the work itself ends up being about 20% fussier than it really needs to be, even when part of the intended entertainment value is how fussy the work is.

Survival in Another World With My Mistress, Vol. 1: I’m not much an isekai dude, but because the title (and maybe the age rating) made me think it’d be a bit more centered on sexy romance times, I gave this one a shot.

And yeah, but really it was the isekai stuff that was the fun part of these two volumes: essentially, the guy who dies and is reborn in the fantasy world is a gamer and is able to do things as if he was a guy in a RPG—his ability to craft items, especiallys walls in fences in the time it takes an in-game character is a joke the manga-ka busts out to remarkable success.

Honestly, I’m not much of an RPGer either, so it helped a lot that all of the guy’s moves mostly match up perfectly with your character in Stardew Valley.

So far, I’m not willing to pay more money to read additional volumes—I basically had some coins on Bookwalker that were expiring at month’s end that made me get what I did—but I’d certainly be willing to read the rest of it if it came up on Azuki or K-Manga or something...

Cross Game Chapter 116-140

Kunigei, chapter 18

Cross Game Chapter 141-156

Insufficient Direction, chapter 1: Speaking of Azuka, this was kind of weird/fun thing to stumble across—Insufficient Direction is a manga of a wife dealing with her otaku husband…except her otaku husband is in fact Hideaki Anno, the writer and director of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which taught an entire generation of anime fans they should be on antidepressants (and also that they were trans, I guess?).

The wife, Moyoco Anno, is hersel an accomplished manga-ka (her biggest hit appears to be Happy Mania which ran for ten volumes though she’s worked steadily from the early 90s through to the current day) so the comedy in Insufficent Direction stems from Anno’s attempts to keep her own inner otaku at bay and live a normal life in the face of a cheerfully oblivious nerd husband.

It’s a very slight manga in just about every definition of the term—the whole thing runs twenty-two chapters or so, most of which top out at nine pages or so—but it’s charming as hell, not least because Moyoco portrays herself as “Rompers,” an enormous whirly-eyed baby. But a lot of the charm comes from seeing Hideaki Anno not as one always imagined him (depressed, driven, miserable) but as a self-distracted bumbling pop culture obsessive whose biggest worry in purchasing a new house is whether he’ll get enough shelf space to display his Ultraman statues. Hideaki Anno—he’s just like us!

Insufficient Direction, chapter 2

Red Cat Ramen, chapter 132

Akane-banashi, chapter 142

Blue Box, chapter 180

Hima-ten, chapter 26

Micronauts #58

Insufficient Direction, chapter 3-6

DandaDan, chapter 182

Insufficient Direction, chapter 7-11: Oh, also, as a bonus, each chapter has an annotation section that explains each of the many, many manga and anime call-outs made by both characters throughout. I actually want to re-read and screenshot those as together they form a little mini-compendium of the obsessions of otaku of a certain age.

Micronauts #59

Kowloon Generic Romance, Vol. 9

Micronauts: The New Voyages #1: So I am still slooooooowly making my way through the third volumes of ROM: Spaceknight and Micronauts, and ROM seems to have gotten a second wind. (I mean, maybe? Mantlo is still on the book and maybe/sorta emerging from the depressed fugue state with which he built up to the end of the war with the Direc Wraiths, but really you’ve got Steve Ditko being inked by P. Craig Russell (among others) with some really excellent coloring by Petra Scotese.)

But Micronauts….man, Micronauts! Volume three of the Omnibus entirely omits the X-Men/Micronauts miniseries (due to what many believe to be objections to the material by Hasbro) which is a crucial turning point in Mantlo’s latest (and last) battle between Karza and the ‘Nauts…and then the whole thing gets wrapped up super quickly after and Mantlo either quits/is pushed from the book he helped birth and raise for five or so years.

And then, to make things worse, Peter B. Gillis comes along. Oh god. Maybe i’ll write more about it when I finally finish the volume but it’s not good. It’s so, so, so bad.

Micronauts: The New Voyages #2

Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theare #3: Issue #2 was a pretty big step down from the glory of issue #1, but issue #3 regains a lot of ground. Like a lot of ground. Scioli not only has Dracula finally emerge from the shadows but he contrives to also get Frankenstein, a mummy, and a werewolf in there too, and then have them hit with a growth ray so you have Godzilla battling it out with giant-size versions of the Universal Monsters…plus the Great Gatsby uses his wrist stake gun to kill off the vamprie Sherlock Holmes. It’s just the absolute best kind of inspired nonsense.

Metamorpho: The Element Man (2024-) #2: Speaking of inspired nonsense, the second issue of Al Ewing and Steve Lieber’s Metamorpho is even better than the first: if nothing else, Ewing has clearly been stockpiling music jokes for when he finally got around to using the Mad Mod, and all the ones I caught were top-notch. I really want this book to succeed, damn it!

You're So Sloppy Hotta Sensei, chapter 43

My Marriage to Saneka, chapter 1

Rom Spaceknight #60

Insufficient Direction, chapter 12-22

Survival in Another World With My Mistress, Vol. 2

Rom Annual #3

Rom Spaceknight #61

Micronauts: The New Voyages #3

Beat & Motion, chapter 48

The God Before Me, chapter 25

Red Cat Ramen, chapter 133

Akane-banashi, chapter 143

Blue Box, chapter 181

Hima-ten, chapter 27

Blooming Love, chapter 43

My Marriage to Saneka, chapter 2

Ogami-san Can't Keep It In Vol. 7

You're So Clumsy, Hotta Sensei, chapter 44

Rom Spaceknight #62

Rom Spaceknight #63

Mister Miracle by King & Gerards TPB: After Batman/Fudd, I figured what the hell, let’s give this another go as well…and again, it totally holds up. To the extent I have qualms, it’s more about not realizing how much King really does return to the same thematic material very directly in later work. Some of the ground covered here also pops up in Strange Adventures—in fact, at one point, Scott Free is wearing an Adam Strange t-shirt which is a juicy little bit of presumably accidental foreshadowing—and it seems like it could be incredibly rewarding to theorize why…but I either don’t have it in me, or part of me just can’t feel the spark of intuition that would guide me through it?

I will say that Mister Miracle still feels like a graphic novel dudes like Chabon and Lethem would appreciate (and in the case of Lethem, try their hand at crafting): a novel where Kirby’s concepts are re-tooled to speak to contemporary reality and psychological complexity. (It’s also more than a little annoying? But kind of like the connection to Strange Adventures I’m just not in a good place to delineate why. Maybe I’ll nail it in the third re-read?)

Rom Spaceknight #64

Rom Spaceknight #65

Chainsaw Man, chapter 191

Shiba Inu Rooms, chapter 19

Rom Spaceknight #66

Rom Spaceknight #67

Micronauts: The New Voyages #4

Origin, Vol. 8: This one was kind of a blow, because the first thing that happened was at the very end of January, I suddenly wondered, “Huh, when’s the next volume of Boichi’s Origin out? It’s usually out around now.” So I went to Amazon and discovered that it had come out earlier in the month but because they hadn’t listed it as either a graphic novel or part of a continuing series—even though I scour Comixology’s listings every week, even though I have all seven of the previous volumes, this 100% would’ve slipped away if I hadn’t decided to look.

The second thing that happened was, after cursing and swearing while buying and downloading, I started reading and by page thirty I went: “Oh fuck, this is getting canceled.”

At the end of those thirty pages, Origin is attacked by a robot who looks exactly like his father and has his secret identity revealed to the woman who loves him and who he’s sworn to protect. It’s a whole bunch of stuff that comes out of nowhere, the sign of a dejected creator flipping to the end of their outline for the series and bringing in stuff they’d probably planned to start seeding in another five years or so.

Literally a week later, I was reading the first chapter of Boichi’s new serial, The Marshal King, on MangaPlus. It’s not hard science Machine Man; it’s Boichi doing a steampunk Western (a la the highly popular Trigun). What can I say? To quote Avon Barksdale: The game is the game.