One of my favorite things about reading Christmas-related stories is how the writer interprets the mythos. . with that said, I do not want to spoil any parts of the story, but the Jack Frost story arc is innovative and amazing.

This week I received in the mail my copies of issue 1 and 2 of ‘Bric-a-Brac’ from Ryan Haack. I started reading it with my daughters this week and they really loved it. The artwork is great and fits the story and Ryan did a great job in putting together a great plot.

I’m really excited to see what happens in Issue 3 now.

If you have not reread Watchmen since the pandemic, I recommend reading it. It holds a different sense of duty, responsibility, and produces an odd sense of hope that I did not extrapolate from previous reads.

This past week I read issue 3 of Crimebusters by Scott Harris King. He was our guest a few months ago on Episode 47 of Storycomic Presents. He was promoting this comic book back in late November last year.

This past week I read the graphic novel, ‘Cardboard’ by Doug TenNapel with my 6-year-old. We had a great time reading this book about a boy who received a magical cardboard box. It was so imaginative and relatable to any child or adult that plays with empty cardboard boxes.

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.

A few years ago I had the great opportunity to meet the more famous Barney Smith while I was at a conference in San Antonio Texas. I spent the entire afternoon with him and I had a great time learning about his work making art on toilet seat covers.

This past week I was also fortunate enough to get my hands of Lords of the Cosmos issues one , two, and three. I am reading them so I can send in a letter for the letters section of issue 4. I really enjoyed how Jason Lenox designed the universe and the wide and diverse cast of characters has made it really enjoyable as well

It was a slow week with reading. I did however put together a new lego set! So technically I read the instruction book for the lego set.

This week I finally got in the mail the last issues I needed so I could read Part 12 – 22 of the X-men event “Ten of Swords”. Since I am only a year or so back into reading comics, I got the strong impression that this event has set up some significant story seeds for the future.

I just read ‘Heck’ by Zander Cannon and it was a great book! it was a hefty 250+ pages, but the story carried me through and it had a great take on Dante’s Inferno. The character development was good. A great amount of action, intrigue, and emotion.

Highly recommend this story for anyone who likes hell-themed adventure stories.

This past week I read Nathan Hale’s educational graphic novel, ‘Big Bad Ironclad’ which is part of his ‘Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales’ series.

The format of the book is really good. I loved how Hale utilized the page formats and frames to help tell the story. Almost every page was a master class in graphic design.

I read Jeffery Brown’s ‘Lucy and Andy Neanderthal’. It’s a kid’s graphic novel book that was educational in nature that taught the reader about Neanderthal life 40,000 years ago. It was a fun and quick read and he did a very good job understanding who his audience is for the book.

This past week I read the miniseries, “Crucible”. It was from Impact Comics and meant to wrap up the publishing line by bringing an end to original heroes storylines while attempting to relaunch the line.

As a fan of The Comet, I was sad to see his story end, but how it ended was such a beautiful Shakespearean tragedy, his return in Crucible completely extinguished a beautifully tragic end to a hero by bringing him back as a one-dimensional villain.

This past week I read Geof Darrow’s ‘Shaolin Cowboy’. I love his illustration style he adds so much tiny detail. He reminds me of an adult-themed version of ‘Where’s Waldo’ Martin Handford. As a reader, I can easily tell that Darrow absolutely has a love and passion for wide frame images, and the graphic novel read like a spaghetti western.

I have always been a fan of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland world, and seeing a story about the Walrus and the Carpenter was pretty fun. Landridge was able to keep the spirit of Carroll alive with the tertiary characters and sprinkling in poetry as narration.

This past week I read the trade paperback of the Marvel Comics event from 2006 and 2007. Even over 10 years later, the storyline is still relevant; where we can see that conflict does not need to be good versus evil, wrong versus right, but competing ideologies. Now that I’ve read this again after I’ve watched the MCU version of this storyline via ‘Captain America 3’;

I took a journey through my bookshelf again and re-discovered “Tick: The Naked City”. I haven’t read that in probably 20 years or so. It’s still a fun book to read. It’s amazing to see all the new IPs that came after that were inspirations of what Ben Edlund made. Granted, the bumbling and oblivious superhero wasn’t created by Ben, but he popularized it.

This past week I read the first eleven of the 22 issue X-Men cross-over event, X of Swords.

There is no specific groundbreaking storytelling here, but I am enjoying how Hickman is establishing a deeper mutant mythos within the Marvel Universe.

The first volume set up the world and was heavy with intrigue and court politics, whereas volume two is a magical travel adventure that dives deeper into the world. It ends with more questions than answers.