What comic are you reading at the moment.

Desolation Jones is a fun story with absolutely magnificent art by JH Williams III. The first storyline is, plotwise, almost like a spoof of what mid-00's Ellis writing - but the strangeness of the secret underworld of retired spooks is conveyed really well through the art.

Unfortunately the second volume seemed set to be much more interesting, with some off-the-wall Philip K Dick wackiness going on, until Ellis had some weird-sounding IT Disaster that ate all his projects (AFAIK this was also the thing that killed Doktor Sleepless) and he basically abandoned it.

Popped into the comic shop again after having done some more investigation and it turns out that I can still get the regular manga version of the later volumes of Dragon Ball - it's just that the volumes are numbered and branded as part of the Dragon Ball series (as opposed to how Viz has them branded as DBZ in the UK editions). The page size is larger and page count higher than the UK versions too.

While I was there, I picked up Paco Roca's latest, El Abismo Del Olvido, which I have a strong feeling is going to be about Spain's tricky relationship with its period of fascist dictatorship. To lighten the mood from that, I also picked up the collection of El Show De Albert Monteys, which I'd previously read in the digital Orgullo Y Satisfacción series from a few years ago. More on all of the above as I read them, although I may end up starting Dragon Ball from the beginning while I'm at it…

I'm almost 7 volumes into my Dragon Ball re-read, and it's largely enjoyable fun (although some of the humour e.g. Kame Sennin being a constant lech falls into not so much "hasn't aged well" as "was always kinda dodgy" territory).

There are regular collections coming out as far as I can tell (both digital and physical) but it can be hard to find them because even the 2000AD webshop is ludicrously cluttered with reprinted collections of older stories. I think they're deliberately keeping the Case File collections to a fair way behind the current publishing schedule so as to not cannibalise sales of individual trades - the most recent one I see on the webshop is volume 44 which looks like stories from 2007.

On the other hand, "A Penitent Man" looks like the most recent collection of Dredd stories, and it's a reprint of a set of stories from last year. As far as I can tell, for any kind of reading order you're probably going to have to find a community-assembled one.

I finished my re-read of Dragon Ball and am 1 volume into Dragon Ball Z. I had forgotten how much of the original series focused on the Tenkaichi Budokai tournaments, and some of the fights in there. I've got another volume of DBZ ready to go, but I also don't want to race through it so I've spaced my reading out with a few single issues I picked up recently.

Count Crowley: Mediocre Midnight Monster Hunter #1 was, unfortunately, mediocre at best. I picked it up because the Francavilla cover caught my eye, not realising that it was a variant cover. Nor did I realise that this is a sequel miniseries to a previous mini that I'd never even heard of, although it does make an effort to get you up to speed. All told, it's a derivative Fright Night-type story, and the fact that it still hasn't moved beyond that in its second miniseries tells me that this is not for me.

Blue Book #1 is a James Tynion & Michael Avon Oeming book, two names which are enough to at least get my attention, and the fact that Oeming is channeling Darwyn Cooke & David Mazzuchelli (to my eye at least) in the artwork seals the deal. I'm not sure exactly what this is yet - issue 1 reads almost like a documentary of 20th century UFO encounters, with a backup cryptid story, but it was enjoyable enough that I'll be looking for more of this.

(A bit of search-engine magic later leads me to this Substack post where Tynion explains that "The goal with BLUE BOOK is to take true accounts of UFO encounters and adapt them to the comic form, without sensationalizing or altering the
course of events to suit our narrative.")

Quantum #7 is a recent addition to the UK anthology comic market, which caught my eye mainly because it was on sale in WH Smiths. I'm a sucker for the anthology format and was pleasantly surprised by this - most of the stories are serialised, and there is enough variety in setting and genre to make for a good mix. You can see that the folk behind this have looked at what makes 2000AD successful, and I really hope this works out and builds momentum for them.

On a whim I picked up Gente Basura recently, and it was a really enjoyable collection of single panel pitch-black humour cartoons. Very much in the same vein as Hugleikur Dagsson's Should You Be Laughing At This? in that some of the jokes will make you laugh out loud and then immediately wonder if doing so makes you an awful person...

I'm now reading my way through a recently updated collection of Charles Burns' Skin Deep.

A recent bookshop visit enabled me to pick up the latest Blacksad volume, so instead of either continuing with Dragon Ball or starting on the Paco Roca comics I have in the backlog heap, I've started a re-read of Blacksad from the beginning. And damn, I'd forgotten just how stunning the artwork is...

I'm finished my Blacksad re-read and am all caught up - it's a gorgeous series to revisit.

Next up will probably (finally) be El Abismo Del Olvido, a good couple of months after I originally bought it...