The Neurospicy Bean

  This is another one I have honestly no feelings about. I found it chaotic and confusing to actually read, and the color palette made the images a bit difficult to follow. There was also very little characterization at all; all the story really did was follow the big cumulative battle against Knull. Admittedly, that’s probably partially because the prior comics did a lot of the character legwork, and I was just missing out on that. But regardless, I still sort of felt like the emotional core of this one was missing, and it was sort of a slog to get through. I found what I read of King in Black: Wiccan and Hulkling much more compelling.

       This book was so irritating on so many levels. I’m genuinely shocked that this was released (in its collected form) in 2021. First of all, there was nothing terribly compelling about the story in the first place. Second, I didn’t like the art at all. Someone please explain to me why Asgardian women are tall, skinny, and hypersexualized while the men have lumpy cubes with faces for heads? I didn’t find it at all appealing to look at, and while that could certainly be forgiven or even appreciated if it interacted with the story appropriately, but it didn’t. It was just there. But by far my biggest problem with the book is the way it dealt with Loki having a female form (note: I’m going to refer to Loki with he/him pronouns in this review due to him expressing continued identification with maleness, something I’ll discuss in a moment). I can’t really explain my problems with this without getting into spoilers, so: you’ve been warned, spoilers ahead.      Basically, the idea here is

  I love the Runaways characters, and I particularly love how they’re conceptualized in this revamp. This volume does an awesome job covering how the characters are handling their respective traumas and emotions, how their lives have changed, and how they’re trying to cope. It brings the characters together in a way that feels natural and lays groundwork for future stories, not sacrificing characterization for flashy plot moments. That being said, it does mean that not a ton happens in this volume, but I’m looking forward to seeing more of the characters and the story as it progresses. Overall just a fun story that’s a bit different from a lot of the Marvel comics out there.

       So alas, I just could not get into this book. It might be because I read it over a really extended period of time – but part of the reason for that is because I just wasn’t compelled to pick it up. It was fine, there wasn’t anything actively wrong with it really, but there was also nothing special.      So basically it’s about Olive, a nurse who’s terrified of flying, and Stella, an airline pilot. On Olive’s first flight ever she ends up saving the life of a man who works at Disney World and goes viral. She ends up getting a ride from Stella to Disney World so that she can run their half marathon like she promised her brother, but then Stella disappears from her life – or so she thinks. Later, Stella turns up to ask Olive to be her fake girlfriend so that she can get the attention she needs to finally get the promotion she’s been working for. And then all of the classic fake relationship drama ensues. A couple of things were generally missing that I think might have helped this

  The premise of this is really really cool. Basically in an effort to stop an Eternal war (or genocide depending on how you slice it) against mutants, members of the Avengers work with people from both groups to create a new celestial god that will stop the Eternals. Only it fails spectacularly, and the new celestial decides its job is to judge humanity collectively, and if it finds the majority of people lacking it will destroy the world. Because of course. So then this group has to defeat the god they created. It’s very flashy, very dramatic, everything you’d expect from a comic hero event like this one. My favorite element was a series of panels throughout the book following a selection of random people from around the globe. Every segment or so we’d get an update on what was happening to these people, from their response to the war against mutants to their reaction to the impending apocalypse, and so on. Just generally really fun and a compelling read, if a bit hard to follow at p

       This is part of a really cool project that Marvel has been doing the last couple of years where they compile work by creators of a certain identity about characters of that identity – in this case, queer characters. It includes original segments, selections from comics dating back decades (including Northstar coming out as the first openly gay Marvel hero in 1992), and essays by queer Marvel creators. As anthologies tend to be it was a bit hit or miss for me, probably partially depending on the amount of context I had for each character. Interestingly, the two I found most compelling were the two pre-2000 segments included.      One is the Alpha Flight one mentioned above, in which Northstar comes out. It’s intensely emotional and in my opinion, shockingly compassionate for early gay representation. It deals with Northstar adopting a baby girl born with AIDS and then being confronted by a man who blames the media obsession with this so-called ‘innocent’ girl for his gay son bein

  I recently brought my girlfriend of over three years to a Renaissance park my aunt and uncle had invited me to. She’s great with kids (they have four and I’m half convinced the reason they invite me anywhere is to babysit), is only visiting for the summer, and had said she wanted to go to the park. Plus, you know, I like introducing the people I love to one another. So I thought, what’s the harm in bringing her along? Well, when I texted my uncle a heads up that we were running late but were on our way, he told me to have fun with my ‘friend’ and maybe we’d run into one another. I told him that although yes, my girlfriend was coming along because she wanted to check it out, I had planned on spending time with them all evening, and sent an additional text when we arrived. I received no response. We did end up running into them twice. Both encounters were painfully awkward and left my girlfriend and I with the impression that they didn’t really want to spend time with us. Now, keep

  I should start by saying that I have very complicated feelings about true crime, and they definitely colored how I read this book. As a genre, I find it to be frequently exploitative, disrespectful, and dismissive – in general, treating real-life atrocities as a source of entertainment. And this book definitely fell into that trap on occasion. Sure, stories about paleontologists trying to one-up each other are legitimately entertaining, but stories about eugenics, slavers, and Nazi scientists? Not so much. My girlfriend actually read a few pages of it and then said “I bet the author was white.” The worst example of this was a footnote that said something along the lines of “Everyone loves a Nazi villain,” which…the idea that Nazis are just bad guys with high entertainment value, not real-live people who murdered millions, is intensely uncomfortable to say the least. In other areas the author clearly took pains to clarify the awfulness of the people he wrote about, but even so, it was

  This felt a whole lot like a book I’d be assigned to read in school, not understand, and then analyze straight into the ground. Which unfortunately made it not really my kind of book at all. I need to be extra absolutely clear on this review that my rating reflects my experience of reading ONLY. I don’t think that there’s anything inherently bad about this book and I’m certain there will be people who love it. That being said, if you follow my reviews because you tend to enjoy the same books as me, there’s a good chance this book won’t necessarily resonate with you. I don’t really enjoy books that make me work hard just to understand what they’re trying to tell me; I want books to present me with interesting concepts and dilemmas and characters that I can then turn around in my head and find something meaningful in. It felt like this book wanted me to do a lot of work to understand the point it was trying to make, and short of discussing it with a class, that’s not something that rea

  I liked almost everything about this book. Asalin and the rest of the magical world present a fresh, creative approach to the fae that carries the feeling of a fae story, as well as some of the traditional elements like changelings and bargains, without feeling like any fae story you’ve read before. It also integrates technology and the rest of the modern world in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen – most urban fantasy novels bend over backwards trying to explain why technology doesn’t work. Wyatt is also pretty unique as far as transgender leads go. His experience with gender isn’t watered down or simplified for a cisgender reader, and he doesn’t tolerate any assumptions about his experience, either – in fact, he directly shoots down the straightforward “born in the wrong body” narrative. And the plot develops slowly enough to allow the reader to get to know Wyatt as a character, as well as the world of Asalin and Wyatt’s experiences both as a trans person and a witch.      In fact,

  I gotta be honest, I simply have no feelings about this book. I read it because it was on my NetGalley app and because I don’t like DNFing books, but I really didn’t care much about the characters or the plot or any of it. The social commentary was kind of on the nose, the plot was confusing, the horror uninspiring, and the characters hard to tell apart. Plus I’m generally not a fan of demonic horror and magic systems in the first place; I think it’s really difficult to keep them from becoming contrived and to avoid getting bogged down in all the religious context. Not to mention most people either don’t find the devil to be an inherently frightening concept anymore, or are uncomfortable with the Biblical undertones (in my case, a bit of both). And there was just nothing about this book that addressed any of those issues. There wasn’t anything that I aggressively took issue with either; I just have no real thoughts or feelings about any of it. What I’m looking for in a book is someth

  Ah, the eternal struggle of I want to get into superhero comics but where the heck am I supposed to start?? This was my first foray into Marvel comics, at the recommendation of a friend, and it was definitely a new experience. It’s been quite a while since I’ve read any graphic novels at all – probably close to seven years. And I think it’s a kind of reading that you definitely need to get into the habit of to really enjoy properly. So I think a lot of my issues with the book came from 1) not being in the right reading habits to follow it properly and 2) my brain desperately needs to understand character backstories fully if they’ve been covered in another book, and since this is sort of the second installment of these characters (as far as I can tell), I felt like I was playing catchup quite a bit. Not to mention, of course, that most of the characters also have tie-ins to other series and their stories are picking up from those. Like I said, kinda just how comics tend to operate,