Friday, March 25, 2005

Two Short Things

Thing #1: I think I'm finished with JMS's Amazing Spider-Man. It wasn't the "Sins Past" story that did it to me, but rather the just completed "Skin Deep," which was boring boring boring. I think he's run out of things to say about Spidey. I had already planned on stopping the floppies and moving to trades, so I haven't pre-ordered any further issues, but if I continue at all at this point it'll be because the public library gets a copy of the trade.

Thing #2: Speaking of the public library, I returned the massive tome of American Elf: James Kochalka's Collected Sketchbook Diaries this morning, after having read about 10% of it. On the one hand it's a pretty amazing achievement: five years of daily journal entries in comic strip form. On the other, that's something like 1800 comics about Kochalka's mostly mundane life. I think I got the jist of it from the amount that I read. I can see why many others would like this so much, but it's not for me, and I've got huge stacks of other comics stuff to read.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I enjoy it when people review things they *aren't* into as well as their favorites. Thanks for trying out new things.

Nik said...

I'm still hanging in on ASM, mainly because i'm such a Spidey geek I've collected it more or less nonstop since #229 or so more than 20 years ago. That said, JMS does feel like he's running out of steam. I wish they'd get Dan Slott or someone else on board.

As for the Sketchbook Diaries, me, I love 'em, but I think they read best in small doses -- a few pages at a time. Reading them all at once definitely got to be too much for me. But it's one of my favorite recent comic works.