We talked about the novels I read last year (in two parts!) and I did most of that reading at work. At home it's tough reading prose because I have small kids and when those kids go to bed I like to play video games. But comics and manga, for whatever reason, that I can do at home and I got through a good deal.
My favorite comic is Archie's Mega Man comic but I'm pretty salty about how Archie treated it. They stopped publishing the trades without comment and then eventually put the series on permanent hiatus. Sure, they let the creative team have an issue to wrap up the series but it was a small gesture. At the beginning of last year I finally gave up on Archie publishing the rest and bought the remaining single issues off the secondhand market and read the whole series straight through (55 regualr issue plus two crossovers with Sonic). I'm glad to say that the series did not disappoint and the story and art remained top notch till the end. I just wish I had a nice set of trades sitting on my shelf rather than trades and a bunch of single issues. I read a bunch of the Sonic comics that are by the same writer, Ian Flynn. He moved with the series to IDW and when that first trade came out I was there to read it too. A great start! Looking forward to the second volume of that next month.
I read the second and, sadly, final volume of the Darkwing Duck comic. It was so good! It was basically like the cartoon...but a comic. Such a bummer that it didn't sell well. I was able to get the first two volumes of the newish Power Rangers comic, which I saw at the library and tried on a nostagic whim. They were pretty good! Made me sad the library system didn't have any of the other volumes. The first volume of Star Wars Tales had some pretty funny stories (my favorite being a meeting where they name the Death Star) and some that were serious but still good. But speaking of funny and good, I snagged the first...and again, sadly, only...volume of The Spectacular Spider-Ham. It was delightfully goofy.
If you guys have not heard of the Lunar Chronicles novel series, well, listen. It's really good. It has two graphic novel spinoffs, Wires and Nerve vol 1 and 2, that follow after the novels end and they are a fun reunion with those characters.
And then we finally get to some manga. I read the first two volumes of Case Closed, a comedic mystery series. I'd like to get some more of those. One of the last cartoons I remember watching regularly as a kid (on Saturday mornings, you know, when that used to be a thing) was Cardcaptor Sakura. I recently came across the first omnibus (of four) of the manga and read through that. Nothing to knock your socks off but it was just a really enjoyable, easy read. I'd like to get the next omnibus sometime. Finally, my mother-in-law found some cheap Pokémon books and bought them for us. Turns out they are the first six volumes of the original manga run. I read the first one and while the characters are all the same from the show, they are sooooo much better and less annoying and the stories are all different. Plus I love the old squat, chubby design of Pikachu. I'm in the middle of the second volume right now.
Ours didn't come in a fancy box but those are the books. Red is so much better than Ash!
That's it for comics and manga in 2018, but I've got more to read this year. I ordered the first omnibus of the Dragon Ball manga and also the first for Astro Boy. Nothing like spreading yourself thin, right? Lol. I've got one more blog left about last year's reading, but it's just a miscellaneous clean up and shouldn't be as long. Thanks for reading!
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