Blog Update for July 2008

This is the latest monthly update to the right column of the blog, updating my favorite comics and TV for the previous month. The listings are alphabetical, not by rank of how much I liked them in comparison. My criteria for what makes the list is when I read them, not necessarily when they were published. This is basically also my own records of what I read/liked for the inevitable "End of Year" lists I feel like making.

This is extremely late going up. July was a busy month with San Diego, and August has been a busy month so far due to AC difficulties at the store and a variety of other stuff. But it seems to be calming down a tiny bit now, so maybe the August post won't be so late.

Despite it being a five week month, I really only had 20 comics that made my Top 20. But it was still a pretty good month. There were 4 Marvel and 4 DC (plus 3 Vertigo), 3 Boom!, 3 Dark Horse, 2 Image (both from Jay Faerber) and 1 Devil's Due. Actually, Vertigo and Image technically got 1 more each, because there were two issues in July of Northlanders and Dynamo 5. My favorite writers who had more than one book for me the month were Dan Abnett (with two Boom! and two Marvel, the former co-written with Ian Edginton and the latter with Andy Lanning), Jay Faerber (for his Image books), Brian Wood (DMZ and Northlanders) and Mike Mignola (BPRD and Hellboy). Tons of one book writers on that list, though, including Johanna Stokes, Mark Waid, Tim Truman, Tim Seeley, Bill Willingham, Paul Tobin, Marc Andreyko, Josh Elder, Chuck Dixon and even Jeph Loeb (with Tim Sale). All of these writers, of course, are people who I'd enjoy more than one book a month from. There were mostly familiar faces in the single issues, with the new books being "series of miniseries" like Hellboy, BPRD or Warhammer or relaunches like Conan, but there were a couple of genuine #1s, including Station and Marvel Adventures Super Heroes.

Due in large part to San Diego taking a week of my time, I actually only read 10 graphic novels this month. Well, sort of. I got in a Conan mood and read Volumes 0 (Born on the Battlefield) through 5 (Rogues in the House), but I'm counting those as one slot. My novel for the month, read on the plane to San Diego, was Darkly Dreaming Dexter, which I borrowed from my buddy Nick several months ago. It was a good read, but honestly? I prefer the TV show.

As usual in the summer, my TV watching is way down. I'm watching (and loving) Burn Notice, and also catching up on Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Spaced and The Wire on DVD. I've seen all the episodes of the former two already, but I'm watching the DVD sets and listening to commentary and special features and such as well.

I added six new RSS feeds this month, half of them for artists who I knew and liked but didn't know had webpages until San Diego made me decide to go ahead and look for them. So I've got feeds for David Petersen (Mouse Guard), Sean "Cheeks" Galloway (Spectacular Spider-Man, among others) and Nikki Cook (super-awesome indie cartoonist). I also added Pundit Kitchen (which can only be described as lolcats for politics) and two webcomics spinning off from videogames, the Penny-Arcade guys doing a Fallout 3 riff on Bethesda and an Andy Diggle/Colin Wilson webcomic for Bionic Commando.