Whoops, halfway through September and I forgot to put this up.
- Ms. Marvel vol. 1: No Normal by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona – The first book of one of the most acclaimed series last year. I get the enthusiasm; this is multicultural, YA superheroism at its most delightful. I’ll probably grab another volume or two of this, and will definitely be bumping G. Willow Wilson’s novel Alif the Unseen up toward the top of my stack.
- Captain Marvel vol. 2: Down by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Christopher Sebela, Dexter Soy, and Filipe Andrade – This book is richly written and structurally interesting–especially the issue shaped around Carol Danvers’s continually morphing to-do list–but I think I enjoyed it less than the previous one. That’s because it’s more tightly integrated with Marvel continuity and characters, and as a DC kid, I just don’t know who these people are. Too frequently I felt like the folks in the theater at the end of The Avengers, asking, “…so who was that purple guy?” This was especially true of the antagonists in the collection’s second story arc.
- This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki – What a gorgeous book. An achingly deep slice of adolescence, tender without being sentimental. I’ll be rereading this one.
- Miracleman Book 2: The Red King Syndrome by Alan Moore and Alan Davis
- Miracleman Book 3: Olympus by Alan Moore and John Totleben – I’d been waiting years to read these books in print. I found scans in the late 2000s of the second half of Alan Moore’s run on Miracleman (starting about halfway through book 2 here), which I had only ever heard written of as a lost masterpiece. Even back then, without getting to follow the story from the beginning, I thought Olympus matched the hype. To have the complete story on my shelves in glossy hardback feels like getting to make good on a promise to my younger self.