This was given to me as a present, purchased as a “blind date with a book,” wrapped in parcel paper with just the first line of story adoring the cover.

A large, 24/7, unethical supermarket, late on Friday night.

Enticing. In what way is this supermarket unethical? Is there something sinister going on here? Is the meat at the butcher’s counter not what it seems? Probably not, we never really learn anything much about the supermarket. It seems to be unethical merely in the way most businesses are. Every chapter in the book, and they are 124 of them and most of them are about three pages long, starts with a similar bit of scene-setting that is utterly irrelevant to anything that actually happens. And in the end what happens is not terribly a lot to a protagonist that I never really found myself caring about.

The 2024 annual feels a little insubstantial, mostly being setup for upcoming storylines, but I always appreciate some more of Surge and Kit and Sonic flirting with Knuckles was fun. A lot issues #76 to #78 is also setup but in a way that is picking up the pieces after the big bang in #75 and setting up new directions for things a bit more. Lot of cute moments here too. Belle in her wagon house with Motobud, Amy thinking Blaze is so stoic standing stop the Tornado while she’s actually shitting herself, the big group hug with the girls and the gays and Silver the Hedgehog. All the locations are, of course, gorgeously rendered and I love the race sequence between Blaze and Surge, and the way they use the trails to contrast Surge’s chaotic nature with Blaze’s careful control.

People from a bunch of different alien species stuck at a space truck stop due to a natural disaster. I don’t have much of a review here, honestly. Great book. Fantastic series.

It is very funny that one of the first things in this book is a chapter on mythbusting misconceptions around meditation which boldly states that the point of meditation is not to get psychic powers and, in fact, developing psychic powers is only something that should happen well down and the line and manifesting them as someone who is new to meditation can be dangerous!

It does, in spite of itself, give some pretty straightforward and (to me, being very new to this and so not having much real room to judge) seemingly effective guide on vipassanā meditation, though also draped in a lot of attempts at explaining the author’s understanding of Buddhist philosophy in self-help language and lofty descriptions of the supposed life-altering benefits of mindfulness that I don’t really care about.

I suppose that I will only be able to judge the real value of this book to me down the line but at the moment I think it has given me a solid start on practising shutting my brain off and not being overwhelmed by my thoughts, something I have been needing to learn.

Even putting aside my dislike for the naming scheme that simply labels it as a cross promotion and nothing else—art is ever more stripped to branding exercises not even trying to promise substance—I find it so strange that the title uses the brand name DC itself and not the Justice League. Is the name of the company really more of a draw or recog­nis­able than the actual Justice League them­selves? Do people get excited just hearing “DC”?

Still, this is about as good as it could have been. It’s very pretty (other than the superhero costumes the Sonic characters end up in which look atrocious on them), it has a snappy pace with each issue establishing a new set of ideas to play with before quickly moving on to set up the next one, and it has a few good gags and some charm to it. I especially like the bit in the first issue of the Justice League asking how the hedgehogs got their powers only for Sonic and Silver to say that they’re just normal men.

I picked this book up on a whim in a bookshop when I realised that I had forgotten to bring anything else to read during a trip I was taking.

It is prefaced by the worst map I have ever seen in a fantasy novel and it sets the tone for the rest of it. A bunch of fantasy and romance tropes ground down into an easy to swallow slop.

It seemed like it might have been going in interesting directions early on, with the fairies (I do not respect anyone using the term “faerie” or “fae” because they’re afraid of being silly by just saying fairy) being depicted as these ancient, horrible, shapeshifting beings who cannot lie and whose food you must not eat. Still drawing from standard tropes but ones had me second guessing them and the story constantly. But no, it turns out that all the stories humans have about fairies in this setting are just wrong and they’re really just standard fantasy elves.

Our protagonist’s point of view often doesn’t feel informed by the world and her life in it and just based on fantasy tropes. The assumptions she makes, the things she takes as facts or how she understands the things around her often seem out of nowhere. She is barely literate but can somehow infer a detailed history of the world from a mural. She seems to just intuitively understand so much about magic and fairies as the plot goes on despite having previously established basically everything she was raised to think about them is wrong. When she is trying to practise reading she makes note of words to look up the pronunciations of later. How is she going to do that, exactly? Does the fairy library have Google? Nothing seems at all thought through.

Some of the later revelations and resolutions seem like something that everyone involved should have some extremely complicated feelings about at the very least but these characters have no emotional depth at all so I am not going to waste time trying to unpack them myself when no one else involved is bothering to.

I don’t respect it at all but I can’t say that I had a bad time reading it either. It did get a bit tedious when the romance completely took over for a few chapter but thankfully the plot did pick up again after that. It filled time.

I put a reservation in for this book in the library a few months ago and then got an email that it was ready to be collected on the same day I really hit a breaking point with my burnout. There are a lot of things in here that I need to remind myself of and internalise.

I don’t want to nitpick the book too much but I do think the way that various overlapping societal pressures are lumped into the book’s monolithic “Laziness Lie” is reductive and just kind of annoying. It awkwardly straddles the line between systematic criticism and general self-help advice book and falls into the pitfalls of the latter of flattening, sanitising and universalising struggles to make them easily digestible. There are still a lot of unexamined assumptions baked into the writing of the kind of life the reader has and the kind of life they aspire to and I was a little aghast at a few of the accounts given and the way that they were framed as positive.

Unbelievably charming idea done with the same love, care and humour as Samanthuel’s other little creature RPG projects and makes even the little peak into the implied story we get really touching.

Didn’t have me bawling the way the first two books did but it did make me cry.

This novel consistently delivers on providing truly baffling adaptational choices. From a ghost story about Franz Ferdinand’s car, to daring the reader to find and visit its fictional locations, to Kayako keeping her diary updated after her death or her hatred being compared directly to 9/11 this book had me shouting utterly incredulously at its pages at least once a chapter.

I bought this from a German listing with no photos of the inside of the book. The cover was in English though so I took the risk and hoped it would be in English rather than in German. It was not. I ended up reading it using machine translations with my phone.

Interesting adaptation of the Ju-On: The Curse that eschews the nonlinear structure and ties the characters together more than the original; Mizuho is now the daughter of the realtors who sold the house to the Murakami and Kyoko is her aunt (and also looks very cool). It has a bit more gruesome violence than the movie was able to do with real actors. The gaps in the original film where the events of 4444444444 and In a Corner happen are filled in here with different, bloodier, ends to the characters. Kanna’s jaw getting ripped off, left to the viewer’s imagination in The Curse, here gets shown as Ma commanding stray cats to ram themselves down her throat until it gives way, which means that the Saeki family cat finally gets a kill of its own.

It also, despite the violence she is inflicting, shows Kayako as a more sorrowful character, wanting to end people’s suffering and being anchored, seemingly unwillingly, to where she died, but still aware of what she’s doing.

I have never been fat enough to warrant comment from anyone outside of doctors and family but I do struggle a lot with self-image around my weight. I don’t have the same experiences as the author but the stories she relates throughout this book are nothing short of appalling. The casual disregard people can have for the humanity or autonomy of fat people is shocking and the books demands to be heard and treated as a person are important.

I do think it’s not a fantastic book, though. It’s fairly repetitive and could do with more structure to it and I would have appreciated diving into a bit more detail of the studies citied throughout the book, but this is not an academic literature review and to its credit it does provide citations to go look yourself. That I have not done so is perhaps hypocritical of me but I do not have the spoons for that right now.

I think that the author does have blind spots and makes some sometimes galling statements around her perception of how the world treats other people. One that stuck in my mind was a comment about how common refrains about queer people preying on children being a thing of the past. In 2020 it should have been clear to anyone just reading news headlines that this was wishful thinking.

The books is also very American, frequently referencing the particulars and policies as U.S. institutions and companies as well as popular culture. That’s not really a mark against it, the author is American and she is writing about her own life (and I at least am passingly familiar with these things through American culture hegemony), but it did make me feel that much more separated from the perspective of the book.

An interesting book that I read for normal reasons.

What voice I hear when I read dialogue in these comics varies a lot. When I read the mainline Sonic comics I usually hear Roger Craig Smith’s voice in my head as the hedgehog, but if it’s something where he’s a bit more immature it’s often Bryan Drummond. For Seasons of Chaos it’s Martin Burke from the O.V.A. with a matching Lainie Frasier Tails, but when I turn the page over to Sonic Learns to Drive he’s Jaleel White now. Sonic encompasses a bunch of different tones and styles and this book is a nice collection of some of the lighter stories with the younger versions of the cast.

Seasons of Chaos itself feels like it delivers on the promises of the Mega Drive miniseries that got cut short by the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic’s cancellation with an expanded, post-Sonic Mania cast who are also captured so perfectly in Aaron Hammerstrom and Reggie Graham’s art.

Sonic Learns to Drive is goofy fun that feels like it is hitting every single obvious joke to make but it lands them well.

Dr. Eggman’s Birthday and Amy’s New Hobby are two cute stories to end it out on, particularly the latter with its celebration of making your own little comics, which feels particularly meaningful given how much of the staff of the comics came from fan communities in the first place, and stands in stark contrast to how Sonic Boom and that era of Sonic media handled the idea of fan fiction with disdainful self-mockery.

I got this on a whim as part of a three for two offer, being a fan of Doctor Who since the 2005 series but only having seen bits and pieces of the older show and not much in the way of expanded universe material. I enjoyed it. The title story is by far the most substantial, trying to be a condemnation of the misogyny of a lot of sci fi adventure fiction but making the female cast suffer by way of demonstration. Emblematic of the approach is when Ace is told to put on a gold (presumably; the comic is in black and white) bikini, to which her response is to kick a guard square in the chest, steal his sword, and escape, only to quickly fall back into peril and be forced into the slave attire anyway. Much worse things happen to women in the story from there.

The art is impressive enough at times but often falls into uncanny and offputting in ways that extremely realistic styles do. It’s feels like making a comic out of stills taken from the show paused at unfortunate moments mid sentence that make the characters look as bad as possible. Included in this version are some redone pages that might be argued to look better than the originals in isolation, but in practise massively contrast with what’s either side of them in a terribly jarring manner. In the originals you have strict black and white with clear lines and contrast with the redrawn ones done entirely in digital brushes with no sharp lines and a million shades of grey. The contrasting styles could, maybe, have been used to dilettante the reality of Earth with the imaginary construction of the titular empire but that is not how they are used at all. In fact when I saw how the soldiers in fatigues looked in the painted pages I thought it made them look like plastic figurines, which I thought might tie into how Ace describes the empire of stinking of polystyrene cement, but those were the real UNIT troops, not part of Alex’s mindscape.

The second largest part of the book is The Grief which is a fairly middling riff on Aliens in which the Doctor guilt trips a guy into doing a big heroic sacrifice and then leaves him to die, followed by him in The Raven picking up a samurai to bring to the future so that he can murder a bunch of gangsters. I know these stories are trying to be part of an era of constructing the Doctor as a darker, more ambiguous, schemer but it just comes across as petty and mean.

Memorial tries to put this scheming to a better, more touching use, but the backstory being a highly advanced purely good lovely alien species being wiped out by another purely evil alien species seems very unimaginative, especially coming just off The Grief which had the same thing. Cat Litter is kind of fun with the chutes and ladders spread but I felt like I was missing some context reading it, which the commentary at the back of the volume confirmed and I have nothing much to say about Conflict of Interests or Living in the Past.

The story is straightforward but effecting and it is brought to life wonderfully in the art, especially Nathalie Fourdraine’s colouring and it’s a masterpiece in the use of light and darkness and it’s just lovely to revisit in in paper. And there’s just so many little details: The boarders changing based on the lighting throughout the comic, getting darker as they venture into the depths of the Death Egg and glitching out in time with Mecha Sonic.

There’s lots of great little moments throughout. I love when it briefly turned into Aliens everything turns green. And Mecha Sonic is just so cool.

I do think Sonic’s injured leg is something that he seems to just get over far too easily in the climax and really nitpicking things a small detail I noticed on reread: Sonic consistently walks putting his weight on his injured leg. I guess this is to make it more visible and prominent, and maybe easier to draw, but once I noticed it bothered me for the rest of the book.

An extremely engaging and sometimes moving history of the Russian revolutions of 1917, woven into a story, almost a novel, while staying out of the realm of fiction.

I am not normally one for romance stories and I rolled my eyes a bit at the early flirtations, but this story got its teeth into me. A beautiful story about love and how the people you love affect you, infect you, change you and become part of you.

Strange to read at the same time as A Closed and Common Orbit. It takes a few notes from towards the end of A Closed and Common Orbit and builds a smaller, neater narrative to lead up to specifically them. On its own it might have felt more interesting, coming off the back of the larger book it ended up feeling a little empty. And the fantasy of Panga as the world that successfully pulled back from collapse didn’t feel hopeful to me, it just made me feel bitter about the world. A miracle happened and it made everyone realise that rampant, endless, consumption and destruction was bad. How convenient.

I picked this up on a whim when I saw it in a bookshop that I have a gift voucher for. I’ve watched the show before and enjoyed it so what I’m mostly interested in here is how it works as a comic in comparison to that.

And I do think there’s a lot here that works better on page. Something I’ve never liked in anime is quick cutaways in the middle of dialogue for asides or inner monologue. I think these work better in a comic panel where it’s just a little bit of extra annotation on the page but is almost universally awkward in a show where it’s cut into the middle of dialogue and messes with the flow of conversation. Dungeon Meshi isn’t the worst offender but it’s still not great.

The diagrams that pop up when people are going on a bit of a monologue also work a lot better when you can take time to sit on them, and especially the panels where the meals are shown off after cooking. The extra details of listing out the ingredients and nutritional information really adds to it (and as for the show’s version of that, I am a hater when it comes to overly shiny anime food, shit looks like it’s made of plastic half the time).

That said, the actual cooking sequences do benefit from getting to be animated. Those little montages of methodical preparation are satisfying. The actors in the show are also really good. I am fully just hearing the actors from the show in my head as I read. Except Falin. I never liked her voice. Sorry. (I watched it in English, mostly).

Then there are some issues I take with how they’ve lettered this in English. They have used a comic font with a seriffed I on the uppercase and a sans serif I on the lowercase. This is a standard way of encoding a comic font but the serif I is only meant to be used for the pronoun I and acronyms but they have clearly just typeset it by typing in the sentences normally, so any sentence that starts with I has it seriffed when it shouldn’t be. They also use a different font for asides which doesn’t have a seriffed I.

And then the onomatopoeias are awkward. It seems like some of them have been redrawn but most of them they have just scribbled in a transliteration followed by an attempt at an English approximation in brackets under it. Maybe that’s the standard way to do it?—I don’t read much manga—and I don’t know what would be the ideal approach would be but this way strikes me an awkward middle-ground that clutters the page and slows down my reading.

I think I will just wait for the show to come out and watch it as it does rather than continue reading this, though.

I was sobbing in public multiple times reading this in a way I haven’t since reading Earthsea. I love Sidra and Pepper so much. I see a lot of myself and people who I love in them.