The To Read List:

A Tale of Sand by Ramón K. Pérez
Moriarty: the Dark Chamber by Daniel Corey, Anthony Diecidue, Perry Freeze, and Dave Lanphear
Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba
The Light by Nathan Edmondson and Brett Weldele
Lost Dogs by Jeff Lemire
The Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire
Skullkickers Vol. 1 & 2 by Jim Zub, Edwin Huang, and Misty Coats
Siegfried by Alex Alice

Read This Week:

Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton
Snarked: Forks and Hope by Roger Langridge
Princeless: Save Yourself by Jeremy Whitley and M. Goodwin

Added This Week:


The Re(a)d Diary by Teddy Kristiansen and Steven T. Seagle
Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (novel)

So, this week was spent recovering from Comic Con, getting back into the swing of things with work, and running my own indie comics business. Amidst all that craziness, I had a little bit of a cold following con, so I decided to use that as an excuse to sit around and read whenever I wasn’t busy working. I thought I’d get through a lot of graphic novels, but my wife had other plans. Every once in a while we co-read a book. What this means is we get two copies of a book and read them simultaneously, discussing little bits as we go. We did this with The Hunger Games trilogy, and now we are doing it Game of Thrones. It’s a good book and ate into some of my graphic novel reading time.

 
At this year’s con I was really interested in checking out some Young Adult reading. I picked up Princeless and Snarked. Princeless I had heard about for a while but could never find in local stores, because it was always sold out. Snarked won the Eisner award for best All Ages series, so I had to get it.

Princeless is a very cool book about a princess locked up in a tower who decides to save herself instead of waiting for a prince to save her. It is a very interesting book that pokes fun at a lot of the gender roles typically found in fantasy. The art is bright and colorful, and the characters really come to life and jump off the page. I especially liked that there a quite a few jokes in there for older readers. This is my favorite type of all ages story. It’s a fun read for kids, but will also be very entertaining for adults.

Roger Langridge’s Snarked expands the story of the Walrus & the Carpenter into a thrilling tale of two con artists who must step into the unwanted role of heroes. This book is awesome and definitely deserves the praise that has been heaped upon it. Langridge not only tells a humorous story, but he builds a new fantasy world using the characters of Alice in Wonderland to great effect. It’s always wonderful when someone can take existing literary characters and craft an entirely new story and even new world with them. This book has a lot of modern humor and ideas in it while capturing the magic of older fairy tales.

So, I had never read Kate Beaton’s comic strips before. My wife is a big fan of hers, and we went to Kate’s Comic-Con panel, and I was on the floor in stitches. Beaton utilizes the classic 3-panel comic strip to tell raunchy jokes about everything from history to superheroes to classic literature. Her book Hark! A Vagrant collects 160 pages of these comics and was some of the funniest stuff I ever read. My favorite  of her recurring characters has to be the mystery-solving teens. Normally, mystery-solving teens are very driven and will solve mysteries at any cost, but what about those teens that are more like normal teens, apathetic and bored with everything. What would happen if they had to solve a mystery? Check out the link to find out.

So, that’s what I read this week. Let me know if you read any interesting graphic novels, and I will add them to my list. Until next time, keep reading.