Hinata, Kageyama and the teammates they've just met already have a practice game! It's against one of the top high schools in their area- and two of the members where on Kageyama's team in middle school. This is the beginning of a satisfying rivalry already in the making :) I love the way this author draws fast motion, I look forward to watching how he ups the ante, art wise, when we get to the more serious games.

This remains a solid and very fun story! By the end of this volume we've finally met all of the members who will make up Karasuno's volleyball team for, I assume, the majority of the story arc. A great batch of quirky characters, some of whom struggle from over-confidence, some from nerves. All of them are diamonds in the rough, but finally they have a coach who is ready to polish them into brilliance.

The first thing I noticed on getting my copy of this, the third and final book of this trilogy, is that it's 100 pages shorter than the previous two. Still, it is a satisfying conclusion and I'm glad the author didn't feel the need to pad it out with unnecessary content. I can't say much about the plot here without spoiling things, but I maintain my opinions from the first two books that Lawrence is good at coming up with ideas and characters, but that the plots are stronger than the prose. Almost every major character in this book is female, and many of them are queer. There are moments in which it shows that a male author (who I think is straight) wrote them, but overall these books are quick and enjoyable reads.

Set in Los Angeles in the very near future, this fast-paced hilarious comic shows the logical absurdity of apps, job shares and crowdfunding campaigns taken to the extreme. Charlie Ellison, who works 12 part time jobs, wakes up one morning to discover someone has started a REAPR campaign on her and people have raised over 1 million dollars to see her killed. Naturally she turns to the DFEND app, but only the lowest rated bodyguard, Vita Slatter, is willing to take on her case. Everyone from random grandmas with guns to full-time professional assassins are after Charlie, hoping to scoop up that prize money. Vita and Charlie have to figure out who started the REAPR campaign and why, on the run and trying to stay alive for 30 days until the campaign is over. The art of this comic is fantastic, with expressive body language and wonderful visual humor. Vita is shown to still have feelings for her ex-girlfriend, a police detective, but some sexual tension is building between Charlie and Vita as well. Very interested to see what messes these two get into in book 2!

A fast-paced and delightful volume which fleshes out the team which is brewing to be Karasuno's biggest rival!

Someone (speak up) keeps adding my zines to Goodreads... so I guess I should review them! This work seeks to reconcile my feelings for the Harry Potter series with my frustration over some of JK Rowling's recent actions and the direction of the continuing cannon. The three main focuses are the "Magic in North America" stories from Pottermore, JKR's liking of several transphobic tweets on twitter and the valuable life lessons I learned from the series. This zine isn't an attack on the books, it is a deeply affectionate critique, and a meditation on loving flawed media. This zine was written in July 2019, and so does not react to JKR's mid-2020 bullshit. You can read this zine for free on my tumblr, patreon or instagram, or buy a physical copy or PDF copy on etsy. I donate 50% of the proceeds to the Native American Rights Fund.

I got this book in advance of it's August release date because I am one of the contributors :) It's a wonderful collection of short pieces, most previously published on The Nib, a few of which were commissioned new for this volume. I had read probably half of them or so in the past, but the ones that stood out on this pass included Hazel Newlevant's "Queer Uprisings Before Stonewall"; "Queerness has always been part of life in the middle east" by an anonymous author; "Decolonizing Queerness in the Philippines"by Trindad Escobar; "When You're Invisible in Pop Culture" by Bianca Xunise and Sage Coffey; "The Homophobic Hysteria of the Lavender Scare" by Kazimir Lee and Dorian Alexander; "Livejournal Made Me Gay" by JB Brager; "It's all for the Breast" by Alexis Sudgen; "Witch Camp" by Melanie Gillman; "The American Revolution's Greatest Leader was Openly Gay" by Josh Trujillo and Levi Hastings; and "The Wonderfully Queer World of Moomin" by Mady G, who also illustrated the beautiful cover.

Visually pleasing, narratively a bit scattered. Igort is an Italian comic artist who published extensively in Japan, and spent various periods of his life living there while working with the publisher Kodansha. This book is a collection of short comics, memories, movie and book reviews, and anecdotes related to his experience/obsession with Japan and it's history. I can relate to his engagement with Japanese culture, but I'm also vary of reading too much into this male, Western interpretation of the country. Also note that the majority of Igort's time in Japan was in the early 1990s.

The art in this book is very pleasing, but the story is fairly slight. Three siblings chase their cat into the forest and stumble upon a hidden temple to the Greek gods. They break a jar, and release some version of Pandora's curse on their small town- almost immediately, monsters begin attacking them. Confusingly, the first monster they face is a chupacabra, a creature who comes from South America myths, and later they see a jabberwocky, which comes from Lewis Carrol's poetry. These both felt out of place in a story based so heavily on Greek mythology. I also found the ending of the story a bit rushed .