What I bought, read, watched, or otherwise consumed — September 2025

One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written on his face. (George Orwell, from 1984)

COMICS

Single issues.

Blood Honey (by Sean Peacock and Sandy Tanaka) is a perfectly fine teen drama amped up to 11 in which a cheerleader and lead fencer at a posh academy who are supposed to be madly in love decide to kill each other. Mayhem ensues. Peacock is a pretty good artist, and the art has a nice, old-school look to it (Benday dots, flat colors, that sort of thing), but the story is pretty slight. Still, it’s mildly entertaining. Unfortunately, Blood Type #1-4 (by Corinna Bechko, Andrea Sorrentino, Dave Stewart, Richard Starkings, and Tyler Smith) isn’t even entertaining. It’s a spin-off from one of Oni’s EC books, and the story of a vampire who gets lost at sea before she’s picked up by a freighter. The original story was fine, but Bechko follows it up with our vampire ending up on a tropical island, where she gets involved with other monsters and vampire wannabes and it’s all just kind of boring. Plus, the main character is just unpleasant, and I know that doesn’t necessarily matter, but sometimes it does, and when you spend the entire series hoping the “hero” just dies horribly, it’s kind of hard to care what kind of trouble she gets into. Oh well. Closer (by Kieron Gillen, Steve Lieber, Tamra Bonvillain, and Clayton Cowles) is a fun examination of, of all things, toxic masculinity, even though Gillen takes a long time to get there and has some fun before revealing it. It’s a nifty little story. Marvel and DC are friends again, for now, so we get Deadpool/Batman, which is a bit goofy. The Joker hires Deadpool to kill Batman, and Wade has fun hanging lampshades about Batman’s entire existence, and of course he turns on the Joker, and Greg Capullo has fun drawing it. The back-up stories are mostly fine — I guess the Wonder Woman/Captain America one is the best one, but that’s damning a bit with faint praise, because while they’re all solid, none really stand out too much. But I’m sure the creators had a good time doing them! In The Hero Trade: Project Chimera #2 (by Matt Kindt, David Lapham, and Dave Sharpe), Hank’s plan to get the kids out of their confinement goes horribly wrong, as we knew it would, but Kindt does a good job building the suspense and he leads us to a bit of a cliffhanger ending which I don’t know if it leads into the trade that’s already out or is setting up future storylines, but it’s still intriguing. Lapham, of course, draws the hell out of it. James Stokoe brings back Orphan and the Five Beasts (why not Orc Stain, Greg asks sadly), and it’s a Stokoe comic, which means it’s balls-to-the-wall in every aspect and very enjoyable. Over in Savage Sword of Conan #10, we get the usual goodies — a good Conan story, a story about cavemen (and -women), and a Sailor Steve Costigan story. All fun adventures! Finally, Robert Kirkman and David Finch (along with Annalisa Leoni and Rus Wooton) have Skinbreaker #1, in which a tribe of human-like people have to decide what to do with their old chieftain — his biggest supporter wants him to continue, but he’s getting old and someone will challenge him, and he doesn’t want it to be the douchebag warrior who will lead the tribe to ruin, he wants it to be his biggest supporter. It’s a tale as old as time, and we’ll see where it goes, but Finch’s magnificent and intricate art is the real star here. You might not love Finch’s art, but you can’t deny that he put in the work on this book.

Collected Editions/Graphic Novels.

Barstow (by David Ian and Rebekah McKendry, Tyler Jenkins, and Justin Birch) is an odd horror story in which an FBI agent arrives in the town to look for another FBI agent who’s missing and gets caught up in a demon-possession plot. It’s violent, sure, but it can also be goofy, as it’s not necessarily what you might expect from a demon-possession story. It’s fun but kind of forgettable. In Boxed (from Mark Sable, Jeremy Haun, Nick Filardi, and Thomas Mauer), an agent of a Shadowy Government Agency™ is teamed up with an AI woman he had to deal with some years before to stop another AI from basically destroying the world. It’s a cautionary tale, of course, but Sable does some interesting things with it. Caesar’s Spy (by Jean-Pierre Pécau, Max von Fafner, Marc Bourbon-Crook, and Lauren Bowes) is about Coax, a Gaul who enters Julius Caesar’s service so Caesar can find out who killed Coax’s wife and child, and even after he does, he still works for Caesar, fighting a threat from his past and generally stirring up shit as Caesar plans to take over Rome. It’s a decent adventure, with strange art that at times looks like really bad CGI and at times is hauntingly beautiful. Weird. Calavera, P.I. (by Marco Finnegan and Jeff Eckleberry) is about a Hispanic P.I. in Los Angeles who dies in 1925 but is brought back to life in 1930 by his former gal Friday to rescue her son from kidnappers. It’s all about racism and human trafficking and Satanic rituals — you know, the normal stuff. It’s not bad. Christopher Cantwell’s Challengers of the Unknown (with Sean Izaakse, Jorge Fornés, Amancay Nahuelpan, Romulo Fejardo Jr., Matt Herms, Lee Loughridge, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, and Steve Wands) is disappointing because there’s not really a villain, so Cantwell sort of turns Mr. Terrific into the bad guy, and it doesn’t really work. There are some nifty parts, but it seemed like more heroes would have suggested to Mr. Terrific that he was being a paranoid asshole. Oh well. Dark Pyramid (by Paul Tobin, PJ Holden, Sara Colella, and Taylor Esposito) is a keen horror story in which a snotty on-line dude disappears while climbing Denali and his equally snotty girlfriend goes out to find him, and she discovers that there’s something horrific inside the mountain. It’s pretty good — Tobin is a good writer, and he throws some nice twists and turns into the story, including the way it resolves — but I’m a bit tired of asshole protagonists who are right about everything so they think that excuses their assholishness. But maybe that’s just me. Still, it’s pretty good. Hornsby and Halo (from Peter J. Tomasi, Peter Snejbjerg, John Kalisz, and Rob Leigh) is a non-Geoff Johns book from the new Geoff Johns Universe, and it’s a fun comic. To keep the peace between Heaven and Hell, and demon girl and angel boy are sent to Earth to be raised as regular kids, with the girl getting a nurturing family and the boy getting parents who don’t really care about him. Now that they’re teens (or tweens, maybe), they start to realize they’re a bit different from regular kids, plus there are agents from both sides who want the peace broken, so that’s a pickle. It’s a good adventure, and Snejbjerg’s art is gorgeous. Ice Cream Man (by the usual suspects, with one issue featuring a bunch of different writers) continues to truck along, and it’s just a lot of fun to read. Tom King stays away from Batman in Love Everlasting volume 3 (with Elsa Charretier, Matt Hollingsworth, and Clayton Cowles), so it continues to be a good read. In this volume, we focus on the cowboy who always shows up to kill Joan, and we find out more about what’s going on, so that’s nice. Metamorpho (from Al Ewing, Steve Lieber, Lee Loughridge, and Ferran Delgado) is goofy fun, as Ewing very much commits to the bit of this being a 1960s comic, even though it’s set in the present, and Lieber goes along with him very nicely. It’s just a good adventure book, with a fun Big Bad at the end. Speaking of Tomasi, he and Francis Manapul give us The Rocketfellers (also with John Kalisz and Rob Leigh), yet another Johns-verse book about time travelers from the future who are hiding out in the present as a Big Bad hunts them. Of course, strange things start to happen, and their relatively stable existence starts to fray. It’s a neat book, and Manapul is excellent, as usual. I’m a bit worried about Brian K. Vaughan’s preoccupation with sex, as his latest book with Niko Henrichon, Spectators, is even more steeped in sex than the early issues of Saga. It’s the story of a horny woman who gets killed and becomes a ghost (which some people do) and her conversation with another, older ghost as they look for the perfect threesome in a world that’s quickly going to shit. It’s beautiful (not surprising) and very well written (also not surprising, as Vaughan can be a really good writer), but man, Vaughan seems a bit obsessed with people doing the nasty, doesn’t he? Sheesh. Finally, the Supergirl back-up stories (by Mariko Tamaki, Skylar Patridge, Meghan Hetrick, Marissa Louise, and Becca Carey) from Action Comics #1070-1081 are collected, and they’re … fine, I guess. More Pollyanna-ish than the first chapter implied, and far less creepy. The story zips along, but Tamaki just makes the same old points about being true to yourself and finding your way and violence never solved anything that we’ve seen a million times before. Not bad, but a bit disappointing.

The best comic I read in September was Assorted Crisis Events volume 1 (Deniz Camp, Eric Zawadzki, Jordie Bellaire, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou). It’s set in a world where things have gone a bit batty, as the narrator of issue #1 explains: it’s a world in which time travelers and parallel dimensions are just part of the landscape, and the people just have to deal with it. I don’t know if Camp named it a “Crisis” to imply it’s what a world would be like if the superheroes never fixed any of the various Crises that DC has pumped out over the years, but that’s what I’m thinking, and you can’t tell me I’m wrong! It’s an anthologized title with that dude on the cover seemingly linking the stories, and they’re very well done. We get Ashley in the first story just trying to deal with the way her reality keeps changing; we have Jesús in the second story seemingly living every moment of his life at the same time; we have the citizens of a town traveling across dimensions to their counterpart town in another dimension, which does not go well; we have a dude speeding through his life and not appreciating any of it; we have a girl who got stuck inside a minute of her life and can’t get past the trauma. It’s kind of a bleak book — the second and fourth stories particularly — but it’s not so bleak that we don’t get moments of grace and joy, and Camp does a nice job highlighting social ills without being too obvious about them, which is often what good science fiction does. Zawadzki has done good work in the past, but he’s brilliant on this book. His linework is as strong as ever, but his imagination runs wild — in the first story, he gets to invent a lot of weird and wacky shit; in the second, he gets to link all the small moments in someone’s life through very neat panel placement and design; in the third, he shows us the story from the perspective of both sets of citizens; in the fourth, Bellaire shines with a stark color palette; in the fifth, Zawadzki uses circular panels wonderfully to show the loop our protagonist is trapped in. It’s a gorgeous-looking book, and the art fits perfectly with the stories Camp is telling. I’m looking forward to more!

TELEVISION

My wife was out of town for a bit in September, so we didn’t quite watch as much as we usually do (plus, one show we were watching lost an episode on the DVR and it’s streaming on Peacock and I don’t want to get Peacock for just one episode and yes, we could do a trial and cancel it, but we moved on and we might go back and do that, we’ll see). So sad! We ended up only finishing one show … I thought it was two, but it turned out that one of them wasn’t quite finished yet, so we have to get back to that one. The only series/season we finished in September was the 10th season of Grantchester, which continues to be a pretty good “cozy mystery” series. What I like most about it is that because it’s set in the 1960s (well, now it is), the writers really can’t shy away from social issues like shows like this can if they’re set in the present. They have to deal with women being treated worse than men, and gay people being treated worse than everyone, and racial prejudice, and the disdain of the older people for the yutes. The murders are almost incidental, as the characters have become so familiar over the years that we care a lot more about Kacey Ainsworth and Tessa Peake-Jones trying to start a business and discovering that banks won’t lend to women and Al Weaver and Oliver Dimsdale trying to work through their relationship even though Dimsdale’s mother disapproves of his sexuality and Rishi Nair running up against racists who can’t accept that he was born in Britain and Robson Green struggling to relate to his son who’s taken to wearing women’s clothing a bit too often for Green’s liking and the always-awesome Melissa Johns trying not to fall in love with the doofus cop Bradley Hall because she doesn’t want to become a housewife. The murders are often connected to these social issues, of course, and the writers do a nice job blending them. It’s just a nice, comfortable show, and I’ll just keep watching it!

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You may have noticed that I didn’t spend a lot of time on reviews this month. That’s partly because this world is just crushing me, and I don’t often feel like writing reviews. There are other reasons — I’m trying to buy fewer comics, which doesn’t always work out, and this month, only a few really struck my fancy — but mainly it’s because I’m bummed out around 90% of the time, and that’s no time to write reviews of things. The fascism that is seeping into every aspect of our lives is so soul-crushing, and I can’t believe someone hasn’t stroked out yet or been murdered by any number of the people someone has hurt, and it’s just shitty all around. Every time someone opens their mouth, what comes out is the stupidest thing someone has ever said, which seems impossible, yet it keeps happening. How is it possible?!?!?

This month, of course, saw a racist, sexist podcaster who loved preaching violence toward everyone else suffer violence himself, and the MAGA crowd lost its fucking mind. Here’s the thing: Out of a population of 340 million, maybe 10 million even knew who Charlie Kirk was? And that might be generous. He was nothing, yet his fans are acting like he was Jesus. Here in the desert, they want to rename a freeway after Kirk, and of course we had the Wrestlemania-style memorial service at the football stadium (the field of which is named after Pat Tillman, who was surely spinning in his grave). In Oklahoma, they want to put up statues of Kirk at every public university, and they want to incorporate his organization’s view of education into high school curriculum. What I don’t understand, though, is this: Charlie Kirk never did anything. He was a podcaster who “debated” high schoolers and preached hatred of anyone who was even slightly different from what he perceived as the “norm.” He didn’t work in government, he didn’t work to get legislation passed, he didn’t serve the country in the military. Who gives a shit about him? If JD Vance drops dead tomorrow, as disgusting as a human being he is, I can buy lowering flags to half-mast — he’s the vice-president. But fucking Charlie Kirk? He didn’t do fucking anything. You will notice, of course, that only a few weeks later, nobody is talking about him. The left never cared all that much about him, and someone keeps fucking talking and saying, as I noted, the stupidest shit, while the MAGA crowd has moved on to other stupid shit. Such is life.

I don’t know what to do, honestly. I have no hope that elections will be held next year, and I have no hope that someone won’t fix them so any opposition loses, and I have no hope that on the off chance the Democrats actually do get control of the Congress that they won’t be spineless cowards like they’ve been for the past decade. In my own, small life, I have no idea what to do. I can’t really do too much, because we still have to care for our special needs child, who takes up a lot of time and money. That’s what’s so frustrating about living through perilous times. The world has become the haven of the super-rich, and anyone who’s not is just trying to keep their house/apartment and keep their family fed. And so the super-rich cackle like hyenas and keep feasting on the world. Fuck them.

I’m also tired of the monetization of everything, which is tied in with our kleptocrat-in-charge. I know that human society has always been geared toward money, but in ages past, it was harder to reach as many people as it is today, so it didn’t feel as prevalent. Now, it’s just so annoying. I watch some of the shows on ESPN, especially when the Eagles win, and I feel so uncomfortable when they dive into gambling, because it feels so smarmy. I get that podcasters talk about their sponsors as a way to cut down on intrusive ads, but it still feels yucky. I hate that every web site — even this one, which, believe me, nobody is getting rich off of — has ads everywhere and you’re constantly having to close them (if you don’t have an ad blocker) or just endure them if they’re just there in the middle of the text (I apologize for the fact that we have them, but I don’t think they’re too intrusive). The entire world feels cheaper because everyone seems to be out there hustling, and while I don’t blame the hustlers, necessarily, because employment sucks so much, it just feels like everything in the world has a dollar sign attached to it, and it makes me sad. I really like playing tennis three times a week, because you’re just playing tennis and there’s no expectation that anyone is going to try to sell you something or that you’re expected to buy anything. It’s just depressing doing anything that makes you interact with the world, because everyone is trying to separate your from your money.

In my life, too, things are fine but a bit trying. My older daughter is about to go onto the state health care, which is fine, but it means she’s going to stop paying me to take care of her and we’ll have to rely on the state for that, which means I’m getting a pay cut. That’s fine — the benefits for her far outweigh the money I get to care for her — but it means I have to get a full-time job, and that’s not going well at all. Meanwhile, a few months ago our younger daughter totaled our car, which was not fun at all, especially because it would have been paid off by the end of this year. We didn’t buy a new car for a while, but this past weekend, we got a 2022 Honda CR-V, which means … a car payment! Just as I’m not getting any money from my daughter anymore and I don’t have a job! Yay! As I noted, I am trying to cut back on comics, but we’re still going to have some issues with money for a time. Because of course we are.

So. You can see why reviewing comics is not at the top of my mind, can’t you? I still like reading comics, and I still like writing longer-form essays about them — check out my latest Comics You Should Own! — and I’m working on a new series of posts that should be fun, but writing regular reviews has become a bit more difficult, because it’s a bit time-sensitive and often, I’m just not in the fucking mood. I also have a treat for you guys, starting tomorrow. I hope you enjoy it! The calendar is turning to October, and the weather is slowly getting nicer, so maybe I’ll be in a better mood going forward, especially if someone keeps getting thwarted in someone’s dictatorial intentions and actually does stroke out because of such thwarting, but we shall see.

If you meet me in real life, I’m not this bitter, I promise. I still have a wonderful family and a nice place to live, and I get along with the people I hang out with, and I’m healthy. I’m still reading comics and books (once again, I’m being slow with my prose reading, so no book reviews this month!), I’m still watching weird movies occasionally (recently, I watched both the 1980s Red Sonja and the 1970s Doc Savage, both of which were terrible), and while I’m tired all the damned time, that’s nothing new. A few years ago, I tracked my weight loss here at the blog, and I was down to 250 pounds. At that point, I had lost about 45 pounds since I was at my heaviest, and I was feeling pretty good. I couldn’t get below 250, though, and it was annoying. Then, in the second half of last year and the early part of this year, I gained about 35 pounds, and I told my doctor I’m sure about 95% of it was stress eating because of the shitty state of the world. I’ve buckled down over the past few months and have lost 15 pounds, and now that the weather is getting nicer, I can exercise some more, but my anxiety over my weight isn’t helping anything. Still — I’m not as unpleasant in person as I might seem in this post, I promise!

How are you doing? I hope life is going well for you, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not! Let’s try to make the rest of the year good, shall we? Start by having a nice day!