This one just arrived in the mail today.

I'm almost through the first season of Titans.  It has been really good so far.  Doom Patrol should be arriving in the mail in a couple of weeks.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on June 17, 2019, 07:32:14 AMThat is a LOT of manga. On average, how many volumes of a brand-new tankobon series do you give a trial before deciding (assuming no prior commitment to the particular mangaka or characters from previous familiarity) to continue or not? I've always tried to force myself to decide within one volume or two. I just can't keep it on the list if I'm not particularly enthused from the get-go.

I order Viz titles 4-7 months in advance so sometimes I will have 4 or 5 volumes on order before I've read the first one.  For non-Viz titles, it depends on how frequently they come out.  I'll usually give a series one or two volumes at least.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on June 17, 2019, 07:32:14 AMWas that MARS CHRONICLE Vol. 6 the final tankobon of that cycle or is there more to it? I peeked at the end to get an idea whether it seemed "to be continued..." and it does seem to end on kind of a lull in activity... whether that's just a pause before a new phase or that's the end of the "flashback" series I couldn't determine (I still haven't finished reading LAST ORDER). Haven't seen a new solicit for BAAMC since, though. I think I do remember reading somewhere it said that Mars Chronicle is the finale (even if it is a prequel) of the entire Alita series as a whole.

Mars Chronicle is still ongoing, though I don't know for how much longer.  It is supposed to be the last Battle Angel Alita series.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on June 17, 2019, 07:32:14 AMOther times my timing just stinks. I didn't get on board and read JOJO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE from the start, and now there's already dozens of volumes out there, and it's beginning to look more and more daunting (and with the continuing success of it, no end in sight, either).

I tried JoJo's, but didn't like it so I stopped after one volume.  There have been other series where I've checked a volume out of the library before buying the series. 

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on June 17, 2019, 07:32:14 AMBTOOOM! was another series that looked really good when I finally got a look at it, but again... that was when it was already 18 or 20 volumes down the road, so now the prospect of going back and getting them all is a little off-putting, because where am I going to find the time (assuming I can even find them all) while keeping up on all my other manga series?

But now I'm just starting on GANTZ, too, and from what I've heard that's quite long as well -- don't know the exact number of original volumes (30+?), but since I missed it in its first run, I'll just continue getting the Omnibuses (Omnibi?) which I think reprint 3 (or is it 4) of the original tankobon each. Enjoying it so far, but need to catch up to the current omni before diving into Gantz G.

Btooom has been a lot of fun.  The last volume is #26 which should probably come out sometime this fall.  I'd guess September or October.  I started this series when it first came out.


I was also on board Gantz from the beginning and it was a lot of fun.  The original series lasted 37 volumes with Gantz G adding 3 more.  Each volume reads pretty quickly.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on June 17, 2019, 07:32:14 AMThat's nothing compared to One Piece's 90 volumes, but I wonder just how long any creator can maintain the interest level on something that extensive. A popular series may go for years, but doesn't there have to be some drop-off point in readership?

I read Hajime no Ippo and it is over 120 volumes and I am still enjoying it a lot.  One Piece is a series that I loved in the beginning, but started to lose interest in after 50-60 volumes.  I still buy it because a friend of mine buys it from me when I'm done with it.  I mainly just skim through it now.  The same thing happened with Bleach, but I lost interest much earlier, around volume 21.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on June 17, 2019, 07:32:14 AMThere does seem to be a much more finite number of manga series I can follow while they're still ongoing, so I can't keep adding new ones willy-nilly even if they seem trial-worthy; I'd have to drop other things to make room for time to read them all. 

I usually buy whatever series interest me.  The friend that I buy for has requested that I pick up a few series for him that I have then become interested in such as My Hero Academia.  I have occasionally gotten into a series late, such as Black Butler and XXXholic.  In those cases, I try to pick up a run on ebay that contains the entire series up to that point at a reasonable price or at least close to the entire series.

My manga books tend to sit for a while, too.  I caught up back in October, but fell behind again as I started getting caught up on new comics.  As I've been working on my back issue backlog lately, I've fallen behind on each of the other categories.  I plan to get caught up on all 3 eventually so that I can just keep up with new purchases.

To give you a good idea of the manga I read, here is a list of what I've purchased in 2019.

January 2019
A Certain Scientific Accelerator 8
Abandoned Sacred Beasts 7
After the Rain 2
Battle Angel Alita Mars Chronicle 5
Case Closed 69
Children of the Whales 8
Dead Dead Demon's Dededede Destruction  4
Hayate the Combat Butler 33
Kimagure Orange Road Omnibus vol. 1-6
Ultraman 11
UQ Holder 15
Wandering Island 2
Xxholic Rei 3,4
Your Name Another Side Earthbound 1

February 2019
Ao Haru Ride 3
Aposimz 2
Black Butler 27
Black Clover 14
Btooom 23
Captain Harlock Dimensional Voyage 7
Certain Magical Index 16
Food Wars 28
Golden Kamuy 8
Kino's Journey The Beautiful World 1
Magi 34
Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt 10
My Hero Academia 17
One Piece 89
Oresama Teacher 25
Promised Neverland 8
Ran and the Gray World 2
Seven Deadly Sins 30
Teasing Master Takagi-san 3
Tokyo Ghoul :re 9
Urusei Yatsura 1
Yona of the Dawn 16

March 2019
A Certain Scientific Railgun Astral Buddy 1
Anonymous Noise 16
Ao Haru Ride 4
Aria Masterpiece 1
Berserk Deluxe 1
Boruto 5
Children of Whales 9
Chi's Sweet Adventure 3
Dimension W 13
Food Wars 29
Haikyu 31
I Am a Hero Omnibus 9
In Spectre 9
Kaguya-sama 7
My Hero Academia 18
My Hero Academia School Briefs 1
My Hero Academia Vigilantes 4
Platinum End 8
Promised Neverland 9
Rin-Ne 29
Seraph of the End 16
Seven Deadly Sins 31
Skip Beat 42
Yona of the Dawn 17

April 2019 
After the Rain 3
Btooom 24
Case Closed 70
Dead Dead Demon's Dededede Destruction  5
Gantz G 3
Golden Kamuy 9
Magi 35
Smashed
Tokyo Ghoul :re 10
UQ Holder 16

May 2019
A Certain Magical Index 17
Anonymous Noise 14
Attack on Titan 27
Batman and Justice League 2
Battle Angel Alita Mars Chronicle 6
Black Clover 15
Captain Harlock Dimensional Voyage 8
Children of the Whales 10
Dragonball Super 5
Haikyu 32
Kagerou Daze 12
Kaguya Sama 8
Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt 11
One Piece 90
One Punch Man 16
Ooku 15
Ran and the Gray World 3
Snow White with the Red Hair 1
Teasing Master Takagi-san  4
Toppu GP  4
Urusei Yatsura 2
Yowamushi Pedal 11

June 2019
After Rain 4
Ao Haru Ride 5
Aria Masterpiece 2
Boruto 6
Chi's Sweet Adventure 4
Dimension W 14
Elfen Lied Omnibus 1
Emanon 1
Food Wars 30
Kino's Journey 2
Magi 36
My hero Academia 19
Promised Neverland 10
Queen's Quality 7
Seraph of the End 17
Seven Deadly Sins 32
Yona of the Dawn 18

I've started reading my backlog of Four Color issues.  I started with five of them tonight

#21 Oswald the Rabbit - This one is a full length Easter story with egg swapping, a flood, a crazy Woody Woodpecker and more.  I thought it was good, but I prefer the later Oswald stories.

#25 Andy Panda - This starts out with Andy on a remote Pacific island where he befriends a shipwrecked sailor.  The sailor makes a raft and takes Andy back to civilization.  He is kidnapped and sold to a circus, but later escapes.  Like the Oswald comic, it was good, but I like the later stories more.

#28 Wash Tubbs - This was a long running comic strip and this comic features about 6 months worth of story.  Wash is engaged to a beautiful heiress, but a guy he works with will stop at nothing to discredit Wash and steal his girl.  I enjoyed it, even though I've never read Wash Tubbs before.

#30 Bambi's Children - Bambi is all grown up now and has a son and daughter.  This story is about the adventures of the animals in the forest.  There is a poacher out to kill animals, but there is also a good man out to save them if necessary.  Not bad.

#36 Smilin' Jack - This is an aviation comic strip.  I didn't really care for it much.  The series ran for almost 40 years in the papers, though.

I finally finished up the Treasure Chest series - all 508 issues.  Overall, they were fun.  Now I plan to work my way through the Classics Illustrated Special issues and the World Around Us issues that I haven't read yet.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on April 29, 2019, 10:35:14 AM

Quote from: rusty on April 28, 2019, 11:50:21 PMI've been reading the Treasure Chest series that ran from 1946-1972 in 27 volumes.  It was available at Catholic schools and features a lot of historical and religious content, but also has two adventure serials in each issue that aren't bad.  I just finished vol.16 and plan to finish the rest over the next couple of weeks.

I vaguely remember reading those growing up. Was there some sort of science fiction comic strip that ran in it fo a while? Or maybe I'm confabulating... recently I've been reading (online) old back issues of Boys' Life magazine. Well, not really reading it, per se... more like scouring through the run of issues from 1952 to the late 1990s. It had a comic strip (sometimes a single page, sometimes only half a page) called "Space Conquerors!" by Al Stenzl (actually ghosted for the most part by diverse hands) that ran in most issues between October 1952 and September 1972. I was able to save all of those pages and then read all 20 years worth of the strip. It was followed up on different occasions between the late 1970s and mid-1990s by some much shorter science fiction adaptations of stories by Robert Heinlein (Between Planets), James Blish (The Star Dwellers), John Christopher (the Tripods trilogy), and Janet & Isaac Asimov (Norby the Mixed-Up Robot). I seem to vaguely recall some adaptation (possibly of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds) from Treasure Chest... this would have been somewhere in the mid-to-late 1960s issues.

I'm up to around 1962 at the moment in my reading.  Chuck White has been in every issue and usually runs 6-8 pages.  There are 20 issues in each year and there is usually a second 6-8 page strip that runs for 10 issues with another story taking its place after that.  Occasionally there will be one that runs only 5 issues or so.  Other strips, stories and jokes fill out the issue.  A couple of these shorter stories have featured a science fiction theme.  One of them involved a new interplanetary spaceship that is stolen by the creator who was going to be left off of the first voyage.  A family is accidentally onboard when he steals it.  There are probably others later in the run.

It would be nice if the Boys' Life science fiction stories were collected in print.  I love the Heinlein juveniles and enjoyed the Norby books.  It would be nice to see adaptations of these and other stories.  The stories from 1952-1972 appear to be available online to read, though that isn't quite the same to me.

I've been reading the Treasure Chest series that ran from 1946-1972 in 27 volumes.  It was available at Catholic schools and features a lot of historical and religious content, but also has two adventure serials in each issue that aren't bad.  I just finished vol.16 and plan to finish the rest over the next couple of weeks.

Anne Bonnie #7-9 - This pirate series from Blue Juice is fun.  A young girl with farsight is the main character.

Catalyst: Summit 10-12 - This continues to be a nice science fiction mystery series.  I've read a few other Catalyst books, but this is my favorite.

Nancy Drew: The Case of the Cold Case 1-5 - I liked this a lot more than the crossover with the Hardy Boys. I'd like to see more in the same vein.

Princeless vol. 1-7 - Adrienne Ashe is the youngest of King Ashe's seven daughters.  All of the daughters have been locked in towers with creatures to guard them until a prince comes along to rescue them.  Adrienne doesn't want to be there and eventually decides to rescue herself.  She befriends the dragon that guards her and also befriends a half human/half dwarf girl who is a master smith and sets out to rescue all of her older sisters.  Lots of stuff happens along the way and it is a nice series.

Raven the Pirate Princess vol. 1-5 - This is a spinoff of Princeless and deals with Raven, the daughter of the Pirate King who was talked into locking her in a tower by her two older brothers.  She initially teams up with Adrienne who helps her capture a pirate ship.  She then crews it with an all female crew and they set sail to take down her older brothers.  This is also a pretty good series.  Some may be turned off by the LGBT themes, but it doesn't bother me.

Sword of Ages 1-5 - Gabriel Rodriguez's new fantasy/sf series is pretty cool.  The art is excellent of course and the story is nice as well.  There are a variety of races, talking animals, battles and Arthurian aspects as well.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on February 22, 2019, 11:45:14 AMAh heck, since they're going there, why not line up new miniseries for ARCHIE 3000 and DILTON'S STRANGE SCIENCE while they're at it? Hey, even BIG MOOSE got a one-shot.

Archie 3000 is scheduled to get a collection in the near future according to Dan Parent and he has expressed interest in revisiting the series so who knows,.  Maybe it will happen.

I won an auction for books 3-10 of the Archie Riverdale High series by Mike Pellowski.  I already had two of the books, but needed the rest.  I still need the first two books and there was a special as well.  There doesn't seem to be a lot of information out there on the series, but I think there were only the 11 books.

I bought a batch of comics from the 1950s that includes:


13 of the 14 Tom Corbett Space Cadet comics
all 4 Rocky Jones Space Ranger comics
11 Mystery in Space comics
35 Strange Adventures comics

Lark's Killer 1-10 - Bill Willingham has started up a creator owned title about a young street girl from Los Angeles who suddenly finds herself on the run from people who want to kill her after she passes through a portal that takes her to a fantasy world with magic, dragons, assassins, mercenaries and more.  It has been pretty entertaining so far.  There is also the framing story where her adventures are being related from 100 years or so after they happened.


Night's Dominion Season 2 1-4 - The story from the first season continues here.  A city is on the brink of rebellion after the rich elite are slowly strangling the citizens financially.  I'm a fan of Ted Naifeh's work and have enjoyed this, though not as much as Courtney Crumrin.  A third season is underway, but apparently only in digital format.  Hopefully it will see release in trade paperback was completed.


Shadow Roads 1-5 - This series from Cullen Bunn takes place in the aftermath of his long running Sixth Gun series.  The Hunter seeks out those with magical ability and power and eats them.  A small group come together to battle him.  Nice fantasy elements and it has been pretty good so far.

Future Quest Presents 1-12 - These stories were a lot of fun.  I wouldn't mind seeing an ongoing series with some of these characters or another anthology series.  The Jeff Parker written  stories were probably my favorites here.  The Space Ghost three parter was nice in both art and story.


Looney Tunes 238-246 - This series is still fun, even if some of the stories are reprints.  They are from so long ago that they seem new.  I did see one funny accident, though, where they included the indicia from the issue that was being reprinted as part of the story page.  This series is now tied in terms of # of issues with the original Dell title.  That tie will be broken soon.


Scooby-Doo Team Up 20-45 - This series is a lot of fun with the Scooby Gang meeting a different DC or Hanna-Barbera character or group in each issue.  Sholly Fisch does a nice job writing this and even maintains some continuity.  The art is pretty good, too.


Scooby-Doo Where Are You? 76-96 - The stories in here aren't as much fun as in the other Scooby-Doo title, but they aren't bad.  They seem to use a lot of reprints here, though.  That wouldn't bother me too much except that they reprinted a story in #80 and then again in #86.  They did it again with a story in #89 and #96.  With as many stories as they have in their inventory, that is pretty bad.  It's like they hired somebody from Archie to take care of that.


Teen Titans Go! 19-31 - I don't watch the tv show and haven't seen the movie yet, but I do like the comic book quite a bit.  Silly, but fun.


I am now caught up with my major backlog, except for the comics that have accumulated over the past few months after I had caught up with that section.  This leaves about 200 books to get through before my next shipment arrives in a couple of weeks.  That shouldn't be a problem.  It will be nice to be caught up again and I should be able to stay caught up.


Of course, there are those boxes of graphic novels and collections that have accumulated plus 6000+ back issues yet to be read...

DC Comics Bombshells 32,33
Bombshells United 1-19 - These series are based on the statue line and take place during an alternate WWII where most of the active heroes are female.  I thought both series were very entertaining and fun to read.


Gotham City Garage 1-12 - This series was based on another statue line and takes place in a Mad Max type world where the Earth is now pretty barren, except for one surviving with the remnants of Gotham City.  It is run by Governor Lex Luthor and employs thought control to keep citizens 'happy' and under control.  Batman is a bad guy here and serves as one of Luthor's enforcers.  Kara Gordon lives as an adopted daughter of Jim Gordon and when she escape and meets up with female bikers in the outskirts, she learns who she really is.  Not as much fun as Bombshells, but a decent series.


Scooby Apocalypse 16-32 - Dr. Velma Dinkley was one of the scientists who caused the apocalypse with the release of a nanite plague that turned most people into monsters.  She travels around the country in the mystery machine with Fred, Daphne, Shaggy, Scooby and others (including Scrappy) to try and find a cure.  There is a lot of fun in the various adventures they have and it is a nice take on the Scooby world.  Scooby and Scrappy can talk because they were part of a 'smart dog' program from the same scientists that created the nanites.


Injustice 2 1-36, Annual 1,2 - This serves as a prequel to the new game and takes place after the various original Injustice books where Superman went mad and took over the world after Lois was killed.  There is plenty of action with Batman and his allies battling Ra's al Ghul, Gorilla Grodd and others.  Lots of different stories going on here with Hal Jordan, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Damian Wayne, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold and others.  I enjoyed this series a lot, which isn't surprising since I really liked the previous books, too.


Injustice vs Masters of the Universe 1-6 - He-Man is recruited to fight Superman and his allies.  Darkseid gets involved.  Lots of drama ensues.  I didn't like the art or the story anywhere near as much as the regular Injustice books.  Overall it was okay, but not that great.


Now on to the various DC Kids books that have piled up.