A year for comics

I wanted to start writing about my Native American Heritage Month reading this week, but I am still finishing two of the books.

That is after already reading six, plus some others that we will get to. Last year I ran into an issue with having a hard time finding books I had planned to read through the library. I had to completely rearrange my intended reading, but then I also added the books I could not find to my Amazon wish list so I would remember that at some point I needed to buy them.

I felt a sense of urgency with both books and music this year, which will also get more time later, so I ended up buying all of the Native American books except for one, Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study. That was partly price, because in the first round I bought the four least expensive ones, and then I added some, but I kept holding back from that one, without being sure why.

Along with more historical books, I like reading some poetry and comics on the subject, though they can be hard to find. Reading material with stereotypes can be educational, but it wasn't necessarily the way I wanted to go. I was looking at Rob Recommends on Blue Corn Comics:

http://www.bluecorncomics.com/

Various titles that I searched for were not available through the library, and even hard to find to buy, but when I searched one title, Darkness Calls, that showed up as a Hellboy arc. Not only that, it was in my digital library. All right!

It started in the English countryside, which did not seem promising. He was quickly transported away from that, but then he was traveling through Russian folklore. I reached the end, and read into The Wild Hunt to get some resolution, and still no Indians. Upon further searching, there is a completely different, anti-suicide themed comic with a similar title, and that's what I should have been reading.

I kept thinking that I should just get that last book from my wish list, and it would give me ideas for comics to read, but it still didn't seem right.

Two things became clear from this, and Hellboy was important in both of them because of the way I devoured those arcs.

One is that when I do read that critical study, it is going to send me off down some path that I do not have the free time for right now. Next November it will be my first book.

Also, I have a lot of comics that I have been neglecting to read. My Dark Horse bookshelf has 172 titles, and 196 on Comixology. Okay, I have read a lot of them, especially on Comixology, but sometimes there were great offers that I only had time to accept, not to read. That includes an amazing Hellboy sale Dark Horse had.

In addition, a lot of them were free introductory volumes, many of which I have read but where I wanted to get back to the series because it seemed promising. Sometimes I read all of the series that was out up to that point, but more was going to come out. It's time to circle back.

So in 2017 I am going to read a lot of comics. The next two library request batches will include Hinterkind and Amulets and I will be making my way through my Hellboy backlog one or two (and maybe sometimes three) issues per day.

That leads to another thing: there are individual issues on Goodreads now, at least for some of them. I mean, I am used to trades being there, and I have sometimes marked a trade as read and written a review even if I only read the individual issues (despite missing out on bonus content like sketches and essays).

It is very hard to write a review of a single issue. If it makes you want to read the next issue it did its job, but to speak coherently about themes and impact without having the full storyline is not something I am used to. At first I was writing inadequate single phrase reviews, which did not feel right. Then I left no comments, and that did not feel great, but it was better than a pointless review. Then a friend saw one of the blank ones and asked for a review!

I figured that out. I will mark the issues as read, and then when I complete the arc I will post review comments on the first episode of the arc. (Hellboy arcs are more clearly delineated than lots of books.)

I am not going to put reviews up for Darkness Calls and The Wild Hunt until I get back there and look back over them. As tempting as it was to go on, I went back to the beginning and I will be getting the full view this time.

Continuity is exceptional in Hellboy.