The concept is quite good. Mixed media showing existing photographs interspersed with the historical fiction of John, a photographer who lands a job with the goal of showing people in the country what life in the dust bowl is like, during the depression.

It does work as a book, and has a serviceable plot. But it is still fairly reductive and ironically centres someone with a very mundane story to capture something intricate. His character arc doesn’t do much at all to disabuse this either. Nor this rumination on the macro art of photography. The art itself is fine but feels like a strange pair with the subject matter. It’s a bit too cartoony, and John himself looks about twelve years old. It all felt a little too incongruent for me to really get into it.

But I actually only picked this up for the Eisner nomination regardless. I like to keep up with what is considered the best from multiple sources.

A fun, solid start to King’s run. It’s a bit out there, with two new heroes that turn into a more complicated arc. It’s bombastic and tried to expand on the origin story a bit. I think it’s overall shaky at best though. And because it is Batman, mental health is just not a thing of course. Everyone’s “psycho” and “crazy”. In a long standing series that tries to make things gritty because of those things, the lack of nuance undermines it at every turn.

Holy crap. This was really damn good. A black man under Jim Crow has a secret in his basement, but when he returns home his life is upended. And boy is that an understatement. What follows is a SFF treat spanning multiple visual styles and some twists that keep things really interesting and fun. And that’s saying something because the art at the start is just phenomenal. Seeing it as something iterated upon is just jazz.

Now here is a title I was very happy to see nominated in the Eisners, because I doubt I’d have heard of it otherwise. Hoping for a hardcover that collects these three issues when it’s completed. It would be so nice.

This has Hickman’s Eisner nominated best short story, and it was alright. As a whole, like most anthologies, this is wildly swingy (heh, there are a lot of Spider-Man stories in it), and I wouldn’t say Hickman’s is the best story. But there’s also some really nothing ones. And some weird fourth wall breaking ones, which I personally tend to dislike. I get it! Comics are fun! But… they can be fun and also be well written and not just zany whatever stuff, and those are the ones I like.

Finding Batman in DC Pride 2022 won it though, and that honestly makes sense, it was better.

I tend to like post modern ennui, and that is this book. It is very Relatable (you will get it if you read the book), but also, that is not just a joke, I did find it relatable. The artwork is fantastic. When she chooses to alter styles and when to use colour or not—all of the stylistic choices feel like they fit what is happening, as well as her character.

If you’re looking for a plot, well, even the book makes fun of itself not really having one. But if you want a rumination and character study, this should be much more up your alley. Auto stuff is an interesting space coupled with visual arts. I can see why this makes a lot of best of lists.

This has really great art, as well as some good issues, but a few felt like filler. Especially coming off of a plot arc that felt like it was just winding up, this segue feels like great entertainment but did seem disjointed, especially in the last couple.

This comes together enough, despite the first few parts clearly being short story/novella formats, that I got on with it. Primarily, I watched the TV show (which I thought was better) and wanted to know what happens after the season end. That was a little over halfway, I think? It’ll be interesting to see if the show sticks to the major plot beats or what.

Overall, though, this was interesting. I like fiction that interrogates stratification of class, even if it’s as literalized as it is here. I enjoy characters usually more than plotty fiction, and I’d say this usually fits that bill as well. I think it did suffer a little bit from my having watched the show first though. A lot of the character development was handled a bit better on the show, and was the best thing about it. That’s just how it is, typically: Whatever medium I consume a story in first, usually is my preference. Not a rule, but seems to be how it goes. I will probably pick up the sequel at some point. The ending was a bit toothless though, so I’m not chomping at the bit.

Most of what this was doing is undermined within its own text or doesn’t come together at the plot level to be engaging. The post modern aspects especially don’t make sense by the end, when it’s revealed what it is we are ostensibly reading. Some of this could be hand waved away by the unreliable narrator of the fictional author and the fact that, by most measures, she seems to be generally a bad reader. And maybe that’s supposed to armour aspects of the book that don’t make sense, since, if this is a “counter narrative”, or a response to something else, it really doesn’t make sense that she would include these just for dramatic effect. But worst of all, the things included still don’t rescue it from being incredibly boring, because June herself, is not an interesting character, even with the meta connotations applied to her.

She’s a white woman who has stolen her friend’s manuscript after her death. Languishing in writer purgatory with a mediocre, forgotten book, she appropriates the text written by a person of colour, making absolutely condemnable and cringeworthy edits to the text to make it yet more palatable to her. When it becomes a success, she justifies her theft as work product inspired by the original manuscript. More of a satirical slice-of-life, rather than an actual plot though, we basically just follow a series of interactions that you’d expect from the reception of the novel, and her subsequent attempts at trying to be a “success” story, despite her guilt haunting her (up to a point).

Because all of the meta context around cancel culture and own voices are wholesale lifted from actual events in publishing, I don’t think this actually engages the reader to think about these topics. It tries to do some both sides, since June is narrating her story and showing her motivated thinking, but because June is unable to engage meaningfully with her critics or with her own abilities, the reader either understands the meta context already, or won’t be on-boarded regardless. It raises a number of interesting topics, but again, can’t actually interact with them through the perspective it’s chosen. And when it does try to, it doesn’t make sense because it calls into question why June would do so. Rather than becoming more interactive for the reader, it only becomes more difficult to suspend disbelief. So, it alternates between serious and satirical in the hopes that it shouldn’t matter.

If the text itself is a joke, and it’s meant to be bad, the fact that it was a massive slog and featured the ultimate boring character, doesn’t do it justice. The closest it comes to being interesting is the idea of authors colonizing their own lives for material, but because the core of that idea was turned toward sexual assault, during one alternating attempt to make June more sympathetic, but we know with the context of the ending, this becomes undermined, it once again becomes an interesting theme that falls by the wayside, just like most everything else fleetingly mentioned as a throwback to Twitter discourse.

Intentionally obtuse, this series is fantastic at showing how all information in a conflict is imprecise and the outcomes from those variables lead to everyone with agency in a war being morally corrupt. Justice is divorced from war, despite what patriotism preaches. When two very different cultures clash the Idea of what the war will be is nowhere near what the real thing is, or what can even be predicted by either side.

Great world building, themes, and pretty well realized characters. Artwork is on point. Really, if I was just more into monster of the week type stuff this would knock it out of the park for me. I can see why this is on so many best-of lists.