The adventure begins when opera diva Bianca Castafiore descends upon Captain Haddock’s estate. From there, a missing emerald, eccentric paparazzi, paparazzo mix‑ups, a persistent broken step, and a mischievous magpie turn everything into a comedy of red herrings. Yet the real brilliance is Hergé’s genius at building suspense from nothingness—with a perfectly structured farce reminiscent of classic stage comedy.

This past week I read ‘Turner Family Stories’ from the Vermont Folklife Center. It is an anthology of stories that follow Daisy Turner retelling the stories of her parents and herself over a 100-year timespan from enslavement in Virginia to freedom in Vermont. This book is over 100 pages and features 5 cartoonists, including our ‘Friend of the Show’ Marek Bennett.

This past week I finally finished reading ‘Covid Chronicles’ comic anthology from Graphic Mundi. This is a whopping 270+ page book with 65 individual stories. This book serves both as a therapy for all of us who lived (and are living) through COVID and serves as a time capsule. Although the book was published less than 2 years ago, it is also good to see how far we have come with the science and understanding of COVID.

This past week I read Eddie Pittman’s “Red’s Planet” Volume 2. Despite that I never read part one, Pittman did a really good job easing the reader into the story by alluding to what happened in part one while still making part 2 its own stand-alone story.