Category: comics

The Gaiman situation

Welp, I saw the There Is No Safe Word article on the Vulture web site on Monday, and I guess I’m still processing it. To be clear, I didn’t read the whole thing. I skimmed a good bit of it, then gave up once it was clear that there was enough bad stuff in it that I didn’t need to read anymore to decide how I felt about it. Having seen some further discussion of it on social media, I’m glad I didn’t read all of the details and will not be going back and doing so.

I’ve been a fan of Neil Gaiman since the early days of Sandman, which started up in 1988, so that’s a long time. I knew about the earlier article/podcast from Tortoise, about six months ago, but I guess I was kinda hoping it was an exaggeration? I don’t know. Anyway, I guess the Vulture / New York Magazine article pretty much confirms that, yep, there’s a big problem here, and Gaiman isn’t the guy so many of us thought he was. It’s heartbreaking.

I took a look at my Goodreads account today, and I see that I have around 35 Gaiman books/comics on it, with about 6 of them unread. I probably have several other unread Gaiman books/comics/audiobooks, both physical and digital, that I haven’t added to Goodreads. So let’s say a dozen or maybe twenty items.

It’s hard to figure how I should feel about his work now. Do I still want to read the stuff that I have? I picked up my copy of The Graveyard Book graphic novel this afternoon, and stared at it for a bit. I bought it in 2016, and still haven’t read it. The art is by P. Craig Russell, who is maybe my very favorite comic book artist. So I’m not going to toss that one. On the other hand, I’ve got some random Gaiman stuff from an old Humble Bundle that I’m probably not going to bother reading now.

I also went through my Amazon wish list, and my Overdrive wish list, and purged most of the Gaiman stuff off of them. I don’t really need to buy any more of his stuff. (I left a couple of American Gods graphic novels on there, since Russell is involved with those, so I might decide that it’s OK to buy them to support Russell’s work. I don’t know.)

Gaiman has posted a statement on his blog, basically refuting all of the allegations. I’d love to be able to believe him, but at this point, I don’t think I can.

In terms of figuring out how to engage with work you love that was created by a guy who turns out to be a monster: I’ve seen a couple of good takes on this on social media, but I didn’t bookmark them, and can’t find them now. It comes down to deciding that, if you love a certain work, and it inspired you, or just made you happy, the guy who created it doesn’t get to take that away from you. If the work still makes you happy, that’s fine. I’m probably not expressing that too well. Here’s an article from The Paris Review that covers this kind of thing pretty thoroughly.

converting EPUB files to CBZ, and ripping DVDs

Here’s a follow up to my post from earlier today. I went ahead and decided to see if I could write a PowerShell script to convert an EPUB file to a CBZ file. I thought this would be a quick process, but of course it got a bit out of control.

I started by asking ChatGPT to write one for me, given some fairly specific parameters. I asked it to use the 7-Zip command line tool to zip and unzip the files. And I told it where to find the images in the EPUB, and gave it the steps to follow to complete the process. It spit out a script that looked pretty good but (of course) didn’t work.

Long story short: I spent an hour or two tweaking the script and eventually came up with this one. It worked fine, and I used it to convert about a dozen EPUBs to CBZ.

I gave up on calling 7-Zip, since passing parameters into 7-Zip from PowerShell turned out to be a very annoying process that I could never quite get right. (And which gave me a bit of deja vu, when I remembered that I’d had this problem at least once before, when I was trying to write a backup script for my dev VM at work, probably ten years ago.) I switched to the built-in Compress-Archive and Expand-Archive commands, which was probably the better path anyway.

On a separate (but semi-related) subject, I decided to watch a Doctor Who DVD this afternoon. I was going to watch the second DVD from my A Key To Time box set, which I bought in 2022. I watched the first disc in 2023, then never got around to the second. Well, now it’s 2024, so I decided I should probably make some progress with it. But my Xbox refused to play disc 2. So I checked another disc, and it was fine. So it’s not that the Xbox Blu-ray drive is broken. The DVD seems to load fine on my PC though. So now, I’m using Handbrake to rip it, so I can watch it via my Apple TV.

All in all, I’m spending way more time in front of my PC than I intended to today. And whatever disc space I saved by futzing with my comic book files is going to get eaten up by the rip of the Doctor Who DVD. Oh well. I guess this is still more fun than work!

using up my PTO

I’m taking three days of PTO this week, to use up the last few days that I can’t roll over to next year. I’m counting it as a bit of an accomplishment that I actually have a few days left to burn, and that I never got sick enough this year to use them up on sick time. (Unlike last year, when I got COVID.)

Of course, I’m sick right now, so I’m taking it easy, and not doing much. I spent some time yesterday messing around with my DRM-free comic book files again. (See previous post.) This time, I decided to see if I could replace some very large CBZ files from an old Star Trek Humble bundle with smaller EPUB files.

This sent me down a rabbit hole, messing around with iPadOS comic book and EPUB reader apps, Calibre, and some other random stuff. I was briefly mad at myself for wasting so much time on it, but then I realized that (a) I’m taking PTO, (b) I’m  sick enough that I didn’t want to do much else, and (c) I actually enjoy messing around with stuff like this, from time to time. So here are some notes on what I did and where I left things.

First: I’m not sure if there’s a good reason why these specific Star Trek comic book files were so big as CBZs and so much smaller as EPUBs. I think Humble doesn’t necessarily put a lot of work into optimizing their files. CBZ files are compressed, so it’s not a lack of compression. (The “Z” is for “Zip”.) And EPUB files are also compressed, so I guess the only thing that would account for the difference would be image file size. So maybe they made the CBZ with high-resolution images, and the EPUB with lower resolution images.

Anyway, I downloaded some EPUBs and tried them out with my usual comic book reading app on the iPad, Panels. They were pulled into the app with no problem, and are readable, but the covers wouldn’t show. I probably should have stopped there and said “fine”, but I decided to mess around some more.

First, I pulled one of the EPUBs into Calibre, and let that mess with it a bit. I verified that the cover was visible in Calibre, so I exported Calibre’s version of the EPUB and pulled that into Panels. That version didn’t work at all though. So I gave up on that.

Then I tried the EPUB in some of my other ebook reading apps:

  • I tried GoodReader, but that doesn’t support EPUBs, only PDFs.
  • I tried the Kindle app, but that doesn’t support large EPUBs.
  • I tried Apple Books, and that worked, but the page size & page turning was a bit wonky.
  • I tried the Kobo app. That worked, but was also wonky about page size/turning.
  • I used to have an app called Marvin that was my go-to app for reading DRM-free EPUBs, but that app was discontinued and is no longer in the app store, so I couldn’t even get it loaded on my iPad.
  • I still have BlueFire Reader, and it still works, but I’m pretty sure it’s not being maintained, so I didn’t even bother trying it.

Most EPUB reading apps are meant to be used for books that are mostly text, so I guess they don’t work great with comic book files. Panels still seems to be the best app overall for reading comics, regardless of file format.

So now I can maybe mess around with the EPUB a bit and see if I can get Panels to recognize the cover. EPUBs are basically just a compressed bundle of HTML and image files. Maybe I just need to tweak something in the HTML? Or I could decompress the EPUB and recompress it as a CBZ file maybe. That would give me a file with the lower-res images from the EPUB but in the better-supported CBZ format.

Stepping back a bit, I remember that I’m messing around with files from a Humble bundle that I bought back in 2016. I haven’t read anything from it yet, and probably won’t, any time soon. So none of this is a big deal.

Meanwhile, I also bought this Hellboy bundle this week, which is actually the third Hellboy-related bundle I’ve bought from Humble. So now I’ve got a ton of Hellboy comics files on my drive, more than I’ll probably ever get around to reading. I just have to remember that having too much to read is a good thing… better that, than not having enough.

Kindle, Kobo, Humble, and DRM thoughts

I’ve been buying various Humble bundles going back to 2012. I think the first couple were probably book bundles. Then, they started selling comics bundles too. I’ve been buying two or three of their bundles every year since then. So it’s not a ton of stuff, but it adds up. Some of the comics bundles, if you download all the books, can take up a lot of disk space. The largest one I have is a Star Trek bundle that takes up 25 GB.

My general approach with the DRM-free Humble comics bundles is to download all the books onto my main PC, then back them up to DVD. I’ve kept them in a local folder on the PC, only moving individual books to OneDrive when I’m ready to load them onto my iPad.

But I’m starting to rethink that. I have 1 TB drive in my PC, and I try to keep at least 100 GB free on it. I bought a couple of Humble bundles this week, and the comics one (Black Hammer) pushed me over the edge into having just under 100 GB free. I found that my local Humble folder had 175 GB worth of comics in it.

In OneDrive, I have 1 TB of storage, and I was using about 170 GB of that. So there’s plenty of room on OneDrive for the comics. I keep all of my OneDrive files local on my PC, so I don’t gain much immediately from moving the comics there. (Though there is some overlap, with stuff I’d copied to OneDrive and also had on my PC.) So I’ve spent some time over the last few days moving stuff from my local folder to OneDrive. I’m almost done now, with the last couple of bundles uploading right now. As you can imagine, it takes a long time to upload 175 GB to OneDrive.

When I’m done, I will consider changing the settings in OneDrive so that the Humble comics folder is offloaded and not always available on the PC. I already have both my MacBook and PC laptop set so that OneDrive is in “files on demand” mode, but I’ve resisted doing that on my main PC, since I like to be able to have the OneDrive files included in my daily backups (via Bvckup 2).

Overall, I’m trying to let go a bit of the idea that I need to have all of my DRM-free comics on my hard drive and backed up. Humble has now been around for more than ten years, and I’m pretty sure all of the stuff I’ve bought from them is still downloadable from their library. So it doesn’t seem as though I’m likely to suddenly lose access to it at any point soon. And, hey, it’s just comics, and honestly, I’ve got so many of them now that I’m probably not ever going to read them all anyway.

Another idea I had was to move them to a separate OneDrive account, as an archive. I have Microsoft 365 Family, so I can set up another user on the family account and move the comics over there, so they’ll be off the hard drive, out of my main OneDrive, but still safely in the cloud. That could be a lot of work though.

Well, I guess the system I have is good enough for now. The other Humble bundle I bought this week was a book bundle, the Ursula K. Le Guin bundle. Humble has been doing book bundles with Kobo recently, including the Terry Pratchett one from earlier this year. For the Pratchett bundle, I actually downloaded all the books from Kobo and pulled them into Calibre. I don’t think I’m going to bother doing that with the Le Guin bundle. Since I now have both a Kobo Libra Colour and a Kindle Colorsoft, I don’t have to worry that much about stripping DRM and moving files around, if I don’t want to. I can read the Kobo books on the Kobo and my Kindle books on the Kindle.

I’m not really happy about the overall situation with DRM on books and comics and music, but I guess I’ve accepted it, to some extent. And I think I’m starting to accept that I’ll never read every book and comic I “own” before I die. I read something some time ago by (I think) Steve Leveen that reframed the issue of having a large “To Be Read” pile as a positive rather than a negative thing. Rather than thinking of your backlog as a burden, think of it as an abundance of options. Every time I want to sit down and read a book or comic, I have hundreds of options to choose from, without spending any money or leaving my apartment. So that’s a good thing, right?

Not at SDCC, 2024 edition, and WordPress issues

It’s become kind of a thing for me to write a “not at SDCC” post every year, during SDCC. I’m probably not going back to SDCC ever again, honestly. The pandemic really created a “hard stop” for me on a bunch of stuff, and I’m thinking now that I’m not likely to go back, ever, on a lot of that stuff.

I haven’t been following the news out of the con too closely. Most of it isn’t that interesting to me, honestly. I haven’t read a lot of comics lately, since I’ve been concentrating on getting through the Wheel Of Time books. And I’m not too interested in any of the upcoming nerd-related TV or movie stuff. I still haven’t watched the latest Star Wars, Marvel, or Star Trek streaming shows. And I only just watched Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, since it just came out on Netflix. I might go see Deadpool & Wolverine in a theater, but probably not. So all this talk about the next big thing doesn’t matter to me, when I still haven’t seen the last big thing.

Anyway, I wanted to see if I could recapture some of the old “con spirit” this weekend, so I decided to watch Alan Tudyk’s Con Man series yesterday. I watched the whole first season. (Which isn’t hard, since the episodes are just 10 minutes long.) I watched some of those previously, when they were on Comic-Con HQ, which I subscribed to, during its brief existence. The show is now available on Amazon Prime, so that’s convenient. I laughed out loud a few times, which is pretty rare for me, these days.

On an unrelated topic: My blog has been kind of flaky this week. I got notices that it was up and down all last night. That doesn’t really matter much, of course, since nobody really reads this blog, and there’s nothing much important on it. But it annoys me. So it sent me down a rabbit hole of WordPress troubleshooting. I don’t think I have much to say about that, though. No big revelations that would be worth sharing, or documenting so I remember them next time. Just a bunch of stabs in the dark, then a shrug, and an “eh, good enough for now.” Everything is working, but still kind of slow, so I’ll just have to see if it gets better on Monday.

I haven’t been sleeping well the past few days, so my energy level is pretty low. I got some exercise this morning, and now I’m likely to spend the rest of the day reading, watching random bits of the Olympics, and maybe watching Con Man season two later.

Heat Wave

We’re in the middle of a heat wave here in New Jersey. And I haven’t been doing well with it. I started feeling bad Wednesday night, then had to call in sick on Thursday. I already had Friday off for Juneteenth; if I didn’t, I would have had to take another sick day. It’s Saturday now, and I’m feeling a little better, but honestly, just doing my laundry has pretty much exhausted me.

I had my groceries delivered from Whole Foods today. It’s been a while since I’ve done that. (I think the last time was in March.) I definitely wouldn’t have had the energy to go over to ShopRite today. (Well, I probably could have managed it, if I had to, but I’m better off resting, I think.) I didn’t leave the apartment at all Thursday or Friday. I might try to venture out briefly today, maybe to get a croissant from the bakery or something like that.

I’ve been thinking about why I’m sick and whether or not I could have made any different choices on Wednesday that could have prevented this. We had an IT Town Hall meeting on Wednesday at work. It was a 90-minute in-person all-hands meeting. I wore a mask, but there were likely a lot of germs going around. Then, later, we had an “ice cream social.” That was outside; they got a couple of ice cream trucks to set up on the patio. I got in line for that, but it was so hot I gave up and went back in. Someone had left a birthday cake in the break room, so I had a slice of leftover cake instead. So now I’m wondering if I picked up the cold from the town hall meeting, the ice cream thing, of if the leftover birthday cake did it. And I’m wondering how much the heat had to do with it.

Honestly, I’m wondering if I can do large (or relatively large) in-person stuff at all anymore now. And/or if I should avoid any kind of shared/leftover food that might have germs on it. I guess it’s good that I gave up on NYCC this year. Garden State Comic Fest is happening today in Morristown. I’d been thinking about going to that. It’s much smaller than NYCC, so I was thinking that I could probably survive it. But I’m definitely too sick for it.

Meanwhile, at work next week, I’ve got continuing fallout from the big project that went into production a couple of weeks ago. I think I’m managing that well. We also have an “agile transformation” project going on. We had an in-person training class on that on Thursday that I missed. And we’ll have two more in-person classes next week. I’m hoping I can make it into the office, and get through those in one piece. But I’m worried about it. Of course, I probably know more about agile and scrum and all that stuff than the people who are running the classes. But I need to show up and engage and figure out whatever hoops the new management wants us to jump through.

To refresh my memory on Agile, I started reading Clean Agile by Robert Martin last week. It’s not bad, so far. I read Clean Code a couple of years ago, so I’m familiar with Uncle Bob’s writing style and his various quirks. His style probably isn’t for everyone, but I’m OK with it. I’m curious to see how far we really go with agile at work this time. There was a big push for scrum a few years back, and we never really did it right. It’s easy to be cynical about this stuff. I hope we “do it right” this time, or at least close enough to right to be useful rather than just an additional layer of meetings and paperwork, but we’ll see.

I also started reading a fairly random book by John Maxwell recently. There was a push at work a while back to learn and embrace the Maxwell leadership style. This was back when I was still a manager. I haven’t heard much about it lately, but then again, I’m not a manager anymore. I noticed this book in my Kindle library, and decided to give it a try. I acquired it in 2009. apparently. It must have been a freebie. I have no memory of buying it, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing I would have spent money on. It’s a self-help book on achieving your dreams, which is definitely not something I’m worried about right now. I’m just hoping to make it through the day, one day at a time, at this point in my life. But the book is interesting enough, in the sense that it’s giving me some insight into a mindset that isn’t my own.

I guess I’m taking a break from the Wheel of Time right now. I finished Crossroads of Twilight about a week ago. I think I’m going to try to read New Spring next. It’s a prequel novel, and was published after Crossroads of Twilight, so it’s next up, if I’m reading in “publication order.” It’s also a lot shorter than most of the main WoT books, so that’s nice.

Well, I guess that’s enough rambling for now. It should get up to 97 later, so I should probably give up on getting anything else done today. Time for a nap, maybe.

priorities, part two

OK, a quick follow-up to this morning’s post:

  1. I watched nearly all of the Roland-Garros men’s final. It was fun! Spoiler: Alcaraz won.
  2. I took a break from tennis at 10 AM to walk over to the Somerville farmers market, and bought a bunch of stuff, so that was cool.
  3. And I got myself into the NYCC ticket queue at 10 AM too. When I came back from the farmers market, I was still in the queue. I didn’t get out of the queue until noon. At that point, all ticket types were still available. I briefly considered buying a four-day pass, but then I saw how much it would cost: $250. (And that’s before whatever taxes & fees they add on.) I could afford it, I guess, but since I was on the fence about going at all, the price kinda pushed me over the edge into “nope” territory.
  4. And, at some point, I realized that I also wanted to watch the Phillies/Mets game from London today. That was set to start at 10 AM, and I thought about maybe switching back & forth between tennis and baseball, but honestly the tennis was good enough to keep my attention, so I stuck with that. I thought about watching the baseball game later, from my DVR, but I’ve already seen the headline to this article, so I know the outcome, which makes me a little less enthusiastic about watching it.
  5. And I usually like to make some progress with the Wheel of Time on Sundays, so I should take some time this afternoon and do that. So that’s likely what I’ll be doing for the next hour or two.

So, for anybody, who wanted to know more than anyone needs to know about what I’m doing with my Sunday, you’re all set now.

priorities

I normally try to take it easy on Sundays. I get most of my chores done on Saturday, so I can rest and goof off on Sunday. I don’t usually have much of a plan on Sunday. I realized this morning, though, that I have a few conflicting priorities. They’re all basically leisure priorities, so I’m not complaining, but I thought it might make a fun blog post.

First, there’s the Roland-Garros Men’s final. That’s starting at either 8:30 AM or 9 AM, depending on who you believe. The NBC/Peacock coverage starts at 9 AM. But the Roland-Garros app says it might start at 8:30. I tuned into RG radio a few minutes ago, and they were airing a repeat of a previous match, so that’s no help. I guess I’ll tune into RG radio at 8:30 and see if the match has started.

I resubscribed to Peacock recently, since they had a deal where you could get a one-year sub for $20. I assumed they’d have more coverage of Roland-Garros than airs on NBC, but they really don’t. I guess that’s all just on Tennis Channel.

My second priority is the Somerville farmers market, which runs from 10 AM to 1 PM today. I have a few things I want to get there today. I also know that there’s going to be a tent there collecting donations for the people displaced in last week’s fire, so I want to give them some money too.

My third priority is the NYCC ticket presale, starting at 10 AM today. I’d kind of decided to give up on NYCC entirely last year, after getting COVID right around the same time that NYCC started. I’ve found myself considering it again though.

And finally, the Pathfinder campaign that my brother tried to put together in 2023 fizzled out, but someone else who was going to participate in that has decided to take the bull by the horns and organize a D&D campaign, so I’ve been invited into that. They had a “session zero” last week, which I missed, because the info got sent out on WhatsApp, and, while I was on the chat thread for it, I’d turned off notifications on WhatsApp a long time ago, due to spam. I think they’re probably doing a session today, though I’m not sure. I feel like I should reply to the WhatsApp thread and see if I can get in on it, but since I missed the “zero” session, I’d be a little behind the curve. And since it’s D&D instead of Pathfinder, I’d be dealing with a slightly different set of rules. I’m not sure I have the mental energy to deal with it right now.

So, wow, even typing all of that up tired me out a bit. It probably makes sense to prioritize activities that involve interacting with other humans, since that’s probably better for my mental health than sitting in front of the TV. But I’m not sure I have the mental energy for any of that. I think I’ll turn on NBC at 9 and watch some tennis, then head over to the farmers market at 10 or 11, depending on where we are in the tennis match.

And maybe I’ll click on the NYCC presale link at some point, and get myself in the queue, just for yuks. Maybe it’s better to just stay out of it though.

I started thinking a bit yesterday about the idea of “listening to my body.” I took two naps yesterday, mostly because I just felt like I had to. As I get older, I think I need to pace myself and be more careful about things. I shouldn’t feel guilty if I decide I need a nap, or take a day off, or whatever. I need to think about keeping myself healthy, overall, for the long run, which, at this point in my life, probably requires more napping that it used to. And fewer comic-cons.

Bah, humbug

It’s the last day of the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, and I’m having mixed feelings about things. I realized today that this is my longest stretch of time off from work this year, except for my five days off with COVID, and that definitely doesn’t count as a vacation. And I haven’t done much with the time.

It’s been a mostly relaxing four days. I had a bit of a wobble yesterday, when they started playing Christmas music here in Somerville, too loud, and I started getting the shakes. I’m half-kidding about that, but the multiple “Christmas music playing all night” incidents here on Main Street have definitely scarred me a bit. So any holiday spirit that had started percolating up in me was quickly tamped down.

I’ve read some actual, printed, standard size, physical comics this weekend. I haven’t touched my “to be read” comics box in quite a while. From my notes, it looks like I might not have read any “real” comics since… Halloween 2021? (That can’t be right.) Well, either way, it’s been a while. (I’ve read some digital comics this year and last year, and some physical graphic novels, though.)

I read all twelve issues of Brian Bendis’ Legion of Super-Heroes run earlier in the weekend. I’d been looking forward to that. It was… OK. I was disappointed with certain aspects of it, and found it overall a bit frustrating, but there were some fun bits. I guess that, if I want to read Legion comics like the ones I read when I was a kid, I should just go back and re-read those.

Today, I read the first six issues of Warren Ellis’ The Batman’s Grave series. I’ve always really liked Ellis, but I haven’t read anything by him since mid-2020, when all the… unpleasantness came to light. At that time, I’d already bought about half the series, and was pretty much committed to buying the rest of it. I don’t think he’s done any comics work since this, so this might be his last long-form comics work? It’s pretty good, honestly. I’m a big Batman fan, but sometimes I get tired of of the character. I don’t think I’ve read any Batman books since this one, around two years ago. (And I notice I mentioned “Batman fatigue” in my review on that one, so I’ve really been cutting back on the Batman stuff, apparently.) Anyway, I’m finding this series a lot more satisfying than the previously-mentioned Legion series. It’s a lot of fun, with some nice banter between Bruce and Alfred, and some great art from Bryan Hitch.

I just googled Bryan Hitch to see if I was spelling his name right, and found out that he’s one of the founders of Ghost Machine, a new comics company that I was vaguely aware of, but hadn’t paid any attention to. It looks interesting, but of course the last thing I need is more comics!

The search also turned up some news about the recent casting of the actor who is going to play The Engineer in the next Superman movie. Again, I was kind of vaguely aware of this, but hadn’t given it any thought. I’d forgotten that The Engineer was created by Ellis and Hitch. I imagine the movie folks will want to play down Ellis’ role there. I can’t say I’m too excited about the movie, but maybe it’ll be interesting. It’s been hard for me to work up any enthusiasm for DC-related movies lately.

And, as usual, that search got me off track from whatever it was I was meant to be writing about here. I think I was going to mention that I had drowned out the Christmas music yesterday by watching Netflix’s Bodies mini-series. I was going to mention that it’s based on a comic that looks interesting, and that I’ve added to my Amazon wish list. I noticed that the comic isn’t available digitally, which is kind of unusual. I have no clue why that is, but I may give in and buy a physical copy at some point.

I’ve noticed that reading comics this weekend has caused me to add a bunch of other comics to my wishlist, and has also moved me to buy a handful, via Amazon/Comixology. Some of that is from books related to the ones I’m reading, and some is from seeing stuff in house ads in the comics, and thinking “oh yeah, I wanted to buy that.” I think the problem here is that I went (mostly) cold turkey on new comics in mid-2020 or so, and that’s when these books I’m reading came out. (And Amazon has some big sales going on this weekend, so I can get stuff cheap.) The Legion books led me to Future State: Superman, which was on sale for $3. The whole Future State thing is one of the reasons I stopped buying comics. I wasn’t opposed to it, per se, but it made for a good jumping off point. But for $3 for a 400+ page book, why not give it a try? I also bought N.K. Jemisin’s Far Sector collection for only $2. I’d actually wanted to pick that up, but just hadn’t gotten around to it. I saw a house ad in one of the comics I read today, so that reminded me, and got me to check the price on Amazon. I also bought a few more books that were on sale for $2 or $3. I don’t feel too bad about any of that, since I’ve bought so few comics this year. Still, my Comixology “to be read” list has 239 items on it right now…

It’s 1:30 PM right now, and I don’t hear any Christmas music outside, so I might be lucky, and yesterday’s music was just a one-time thing  for Small Business Saturday, and not a daily thing that I’m going to have to put up with until December 25.

no more Comixology app

It was announced recently that the Comixology app is going away, and the Kindle app will be the only way to read comics purchased from Amazon. I kinda knew this was coming, of course. But it still seems worth making note of it and blogging about it a bit.

Earlier this year, the layoffs at Comixology were big news, and in early 2022, the revamped Comixology app (based on the Kinde app) was also big news. Amazon has been slowly absorbing Comixology, like a gelatinous cube, oozing slowly down a dungeon corridor. (I tried to get ChatGPT to give me a few funny sentences comparing Amazon to a gelatinous cube, but it didn’t give me anything worth including here.)

I haven’t been reading a lot of comics lately. I’ve been spending most of my leisure reading time working on the Wheel of Time books. I just finished the fifth book, The Fires of Heaven. I started reading the series in March, so it’s taken me about eight months to get through five books. Not bad, really, considering their length and my limited reading time.

But it’s really killed my Goodreads reading goal for the year, which was 75 books. (I’ve only read 28.) I’m thinking about devoting the rest of the year to reading comics. I read two interesting graphic novels this weekend: one from Harvey Pekar and one from Alex Ross. Very different viewpoints in those two, but I noticed that they both briefly mention Sacco and Vanzetti, which makes me think that my next read should be Rick Geary’s book about them, which I bought from him at a con around ten years ago.

I own all three of the aforementioned graphic novels in hardcover, so I haven’t had a reason to open up the Comixology or Kindle app this weekend, but I should do that soon, before they shut down the old app for good, just to make sure I understand what’s going on, and don’t lose track of anything.