TV Finales FAQ

All That’s Left to Know About the Endings of Your Favorite TV Shows TV Finales FAQ brought back a lot of fond memories for me, in two distinct categories. The first was that of watching many of the various TV shows covered. The second was when I used to scarf up books like this one, media surveys and volumes of pop culture trivia, back before we had the internet for that purpose. I’ve missed these kinds of volumes (although my […]

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Twelve-Cent Archie

Bart Beaty’s Twelve-Cent Archie resembles a grab bag of blog posts put under book covers. There are 100 capsule pieces, in no immediately obvious order, each lasting 2-4 pages and covering some aspect of Archie comics cover-dated from December 1961 through July 1969, when Archie publications sold for 12 cents. He’s read all the works the company put out in that time period, 17 different titles. In particular, he’s focusing on the work of artists Harry Lucey (Archie), Dan DeCarlo […]

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Modern Masters: Paolo Rivera

I really like the guys behind TwoMorrows. They made a go of publishing historical magazines and books about comics at a time when few others were. However, their publications are aimed at a core, comic shop-based, male audience that is so clearly irrelevant to what I enjoy about the medium. Take, for instance, this latest volume, the 29th. (It’s labeled 30 because number 23 never came out.) As the series has progressed, the subjects have gone from well-known, acclaimed creators […]

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Martyrdom: The Coloring Book

What a weird world we live in, that this book would be published at all. Martyrdom: The Coloring Book is what it says on the cover. It’s a coloring book for adults, written by Hallie Fryd and illustrated by Julia Gfrörer (Black Is the Color). Each set of two pages consists of, on the left, text about the life and death of a Christian saint who was killed for her or his faith and on the right, a line drawing […]

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Calvin: A Novel About Schizophrenia With Hobbes

Out next month is a fascinating novel by Martine Leavitt. Calvin is the story of a 17-year-old, born on the last day of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip and coincidentally named to match, who’s convinced Bill Watterson can fix his life. Calvin has just been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and hearing the voice of an imaginary tiger is one of his symptoms. After his hospitalization, he finds a mission. “I just need Bill Watterson to make one more comic strip […]

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The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss

Max Wirestone combines geek culture, Millennial struggles, and the detective genre in The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss. It’s a fun read, with plenty of touch points for a particular generation or type of fan. Dahlia is unemployed and living in friend Charice’s apartment. Charice tends to throw outrageous theme parties, at one of which Dahlia is hired to find the Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing, a digital reward in an MMORPG. Jonah snagged it from his gaming guild after […]

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Black Widow: Forever Red

Marvel seems to finally be realizing that there is an audience for works about their superhero women. There’s still no word on a much-desired Black Widow movie, even though she’s, due to her being part of The Avengers, their best known female character. Instead, she gets a book, one written by best-selling YA author Margaret Stohl. I didn’t think, going in, that I wanted to know more about the super-spy. I’m ok with her being a kind of female Wolverine […]

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Death on the Prairie

The series of Chloe Ellefson mysteries, which deal with murders taking place during the 80s in various Wisconsin historical sites, expands with this latest volume by Kathleen Ernst. Death on the Prairie ranges further afield, through a series of Midwestern sites associated with Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House on the Prairie stories. The books were published from 1932-1943, describing events from her pioneer childhood in the 1870s. I read the books as a kid, of course, and we […]

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