(This is actually from a couple months ago on February 14, but I forgot to give it a proper number until now, so it goes in here! Gee, that's convenient.)
As seen in The Sun newspaper! So that's the sole decent thing worth reading in The Sun.
I was initially annoyed that there were no creator credits in the front of the book, and the strips themselves are credited as "by Aardman and Titan Comics"...
...but there were group credits at the very back of the book, at least.
Mostly anonymous comic strip creators, we salute you!
Probably the final Byrne project that I liked, altho' a lot of his little peccadillos are very obvious here.
He forces in retcons of characters that haven't yet appeared in the X-Men's history (Storm, Phoenix), and splits up the cast of characters in issue #1 whom we don't see them back all together until final issue #22 (a bit like his approach on Alpha Flight). Also, his tendency to cram his story into others' past stories (Fantastic Four #102-104) and creating characters (Aria) that have nothing to do, and manuevers characters into uniforms they don't wear anymore to explain why they wore them in an old Captain America story.
He also inelegantly shoehorns in his characters from Marvel: The Lost Generation. Plus, I remember how pissy he was about the book being cancelled because it wasn't bringing in the numbers.
In short, I like the concept and the treatment of the characters and Byrne's artwork. But. (shrug)
*I have read these stories previously in floppy comic format.
Not only were these the best dozen or so issues of a superhero comic in the 2000s, I'd call them the best dozen or so issues of a superhero comic from Marvel.
Also, for some reason, I am now dressed as a black sheep.
*I have read these stories previously in floppy comic format.
It's been a while since I read a Star Trek novel — I haven't followed them since the Novelverse was destroyed in order to put the Paramount+'s post-Nemesis canon TV timeline in its place — but this was a pretty good one. It's a prequel to the first season of Picard (and made me appreciate that season a lot more) that fills in the details and the history of the Romulan star's destruction and Picard's attempts to provid escape and harbor to the Romulans on their affected, soon-to-die worlds.
It's afternoon and I'm back from lunch in the jury duty waiting room, wondering if or when they're going to announce "BULLY, THE LITTLE STUFFED BULL" to report to the bailiff, whose name, despite my television expectations, will probably not be also named Bull. In the meantime I have finished another book (yes, I'm a fast reader!), Rickie Lee Jones's autobiography The Last Chance Texaco.
I (and John) have been big fans of Rickie Lee since her 1979 debut album (remind John to tell you how he rode his bike from Clay to Cicero to buy the LP at a record store on Route 11...well, actually, that's just about the entire story right there), and I really enjoyed her autobio. She's had a tough life not only as a woman in the music business but growing up with inattentive or hostile parents, with lots of family tragedies and runaway stories. But it's not downbeat, and I really whipped through it eagerly this afternoon.
Greetings, pals, from the big-ass waiting room (filled with hundreds of people and yet only one bull) at Kings County Supreme Court in Downtown Brooklyn. Yes, that's right, I'm on jury duty! I asked for an exemption on accounta me being 1) a stuffed animal and 2) only seven, but they wouldn't allow it under the new "Stuffed Animals Must serve Jury Duty" legilature they put through last year. That's okay, Pal John had to serve on jury duty at the same time, so he's keeping me company while we wait to see if we'll be called to serve on a jury. I'm preparing my ACAB arguments in my head even now as we speak.
Because a bull's solemn motto is "be prepared," John and I have arrived with our messenger bag full of snacks, a thermos of cocoa, an iPad crammed full of comic books, and three, count 'em, three books. Because we are both really fast readers and I just know I'll be here all day; might as well make hay while the sun shines. I don't understand that adage, so I got some reading done instead.
First book: I have read Rex Stout's And Four to Go, a collection of four holiday-themed Nero Wolfe mysteries. If you ever wanted to read about Wolfe dressed up like Santa Claus, this is the book for you. I love Rex Stout's writing and I haven't read them in many years, so any of them I pick up now (you can see how used this one was when I got it from the thrift shop) are a lot of fun.
Also, I figured I could pick up some of Archie Goodwin's fast talk if I hafta deal with cops like Sergeant Purley.
There's some books on my gotta-read-'em-all-in-2024 bookshelves that I pluck out, but then decide not to read after all. Here's the first of them.
I got this (for $4.95 at Hamilton Books, ultra-cheap) because I liked the cover and I thought it was much more of a casual history than it turned out to be.
But it turns out to be an examination of Brexit (well, at least it's faintly anti-Brexit), using historical context to explain how Britain got to Brexit. I must have misread or was misled by the online description when I bought it. Really beautiful cover, though! But the book isn't my cuppa tea (ha ha). I read a couple chapters but now it's going into the donation bin.
As a bull of seven, I'm definitely too old to finish reading a book I'm not really into.
My fifteenth book read of the year: The Naked Clone: A Nick Nolte Mystery, by Conor Lastowka, Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett, and Sean Thomason, the writers and performers at RiffTrax, who have made a pretty good running joke of actoe Nick Nolte living a grizzled, homeless life of dumpster-diving and derring-do.
And hey, comics folks, that's artwork by Bob Fingerman (Minimum Wage and more) on the cover!
It's a noir down-and-out private eye comedy novel, which each chapter being tag-team written by one of the RiffTrax writers and then left for the next creator to follow up on. Sorta like D Challenge, then, huh? — except a lot more rooting through piles of rats. Among the mysteries half-conscious Nick nolte has to tackle aret he titular (tee hee) clones, missing movie executives, and a multiverse of Nicks, including a duck Nick Nolte, who is (quite logically) named Duck Nolte. Leading to one chapter beginning:
That duck later saves Nick Nolte's life.
I suppose the proper place to read this book would be in a grim and gritty place like a taco restaurant in Penn Station, which is exactly where I read this, except Penn Station and its restuarants are no longer noir and are actually more well-lit and clean, which would be a staggering loss to any down-on-his-luck private dick looking for a suitably scene-setting location in which to have his novel read. Believe me: there's a Shake Shack and a Chick-Fil-A scheduled for this place soon.
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I enjoyed The Naked Clone quite a bit, and it was very funny. If you've laughed at Mike Nelson's nolte bits on RiffTrax, pick this one out of your local garbage stuffed dumpster and give it a read.
A swift read (showing how little I've gotten at my books in 2023) but enlightening. It's a synthesis of many scientific studies into cat behavior and therefore a little dryer than some books, but I picked out a lot of ideas to think about with Kitty Pryde.
A lot of stuff on feral cats and house kittens and farm cats which doesn't apply to Kitty, but I liked the format, especially the chapter-ending checkpoint list of summing up the ideas from that section. Two paws up.
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