A comic anthology edited by Hazel Newlevant, Whit Taylor and O. K. Fox which was successfully crowd-funded. It contains over 40 stories which range from deeply personal to informational. Some standouts include "Jane", by Rachel Wilson and Ally Shwed, about an illegal women's abortion service group in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s; "October" by Kris Louis about dealing with an unplanned pregnancy while also coming out as trans; "Small Mistakes Make Big Problems" by Sophia Foster-Dimino who also designed the fabulous cover; and "Nothing Feels Real" by Vreni.

This trade answers one of the long-standing mysteries of the Mignola-verse. What where those aliens doing, those ones who appeared in like two pages of the first Hellboy trade and then completely disappeared? What was up with the one who showed up dead on Earth in a later Hellboy mission? The visitor, it turns out, was present at the moment of Hellboy's appearance- and his mission was to assassinate the young half-demon. But he didn't. He waited and watched instead.

A very fast-paced near sci-fi whirlwind of a novel. I'm betting the elevator pitch was "The Hunger Games meets Ready Player One". Emika Chen is a bounty hunter, living two steps above homeless in New York City when she tries her hand at hacking into a major online tournament of the most popular virtual reality game, Warcross. Her glitch ends up catching the attention of Hideo Tanaka, the game's genius young founder. He swiftly pays off all her debts and flies her to Japan, to a new life as a professional Warcross player. But there's a lot more going on just under the surface- an international plot, assassination attempts, and a simmering romance. I was vaguely disappointed by the very end when I realized this book is the first of a series- I think it would have been stronger as a stand-alone. The plot carried a single novel well, but I'm uncertain if it can be stretched to more than one.