SHUT IN THEATER: Weekend Reading 131

Weekend Reading 131 coincides with the first day of October 2022! You can bet that we’ll find time to page through a book or two as we’re decking the halls for Halloween here at Stately Beat Manor.

What will you be reading through as the season turns spooky this weekend? The Beat is waiting to hear from you! Give us a shout-out and let us know, either here in the comment section, over on social media @comicsbeat, or by whispering our name backwards three times over the flame of a red and black candle (after midnight, of course)!

AVERY KAPLAN: October may have only just begun, but my spouse and fellow Beat writer Rebecca Oliver Kaplan and I have already made it through about 25% of The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” specials. This has put me in the mood for more Matt Groening, so I’ll be re-reading The Simpsons/Futurama Crossover Crisis from Bongo Comics, now in a nice hardcover collection from Abrams Books. The two-part crossover is from a creative team that includes Ian Boothby, James Lloyd, Steve Steere Jr., Andrew Pepoy, Rick Reese, Nathan Kane, Joe Mason, and Karen Bates. Plus, the back matter includes a variant cover gallery with work by the likes of Sergio Aragonés, Kyle Baker, Evan Dorkin, Sarah Dyer, Geof Darrow, Alex Ross, Stan Sakai, Herb Trimpe, Michael Allred, Laura Allred, Jason Ho, Bernie Wrightson, and more. As a devotee of the World of Tomorrow, my weekend is looking bright!

DEAN SIMONS: First up is the eye-catchingly spectacular The Only Child, by Guojing. I actually found it in the children’s picture book section of a bookstore but it is a fascinating silent comic loosely based on the author’s own memories of being a small child in the China of the 1980s. Highly recommend a perusal – I hope to read the whole thing at least once this weekend. On top of that, at night I have been reading some early Lee & Kirby Fantastic Four before I nod off. I am not always in the mood for vintage but the first whiff of miserable autumn/winter weather definitely helped. I will likely read issues 4 and 5 of the series under a heavy blanket over the weekend.

TAIMUR DAR: After seeing a sneak peek of the upcoming Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur cartoon during the SDCC panel, I’m really excited for when the animated series arrives this February. Can’t wait to see what new stuff they showcase at NYCC next week. It dawned on me that I never read the original comics from writers Brandon Montclare and Amy Reeder and artist Natacha Bustos. So I’m going to rectify that this weekend by reading Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur Vol. 1: BFF this weekend.   

ARPAD OKAY: I am a big fan of Núria Martínez and ordered some micropress anthologies from Spain that she’s in, which arrived earlier this week. I got a few issues of Amorcito which look just awesome, sci fi and horror and personal and cute, bedroom zine aesthetics, total ShortBox feeling comics (Martínez’s book for SB rules). Experimental and diaryesque. And I got the two issues of Neodimio that are in print, though they are all online as pay-what-you-want PDFs. No less ShortBox but way more sci fi, packed with stories and printed in monochrome. Mail-order is still fun!

REBECCA OLIVER KAPLAN: I am reading some of the books that I picked up while I was volunteering at Clexacon in Anaheim, California. First up, I was totally sold on a lesbian noir comic because of flying nipple clamps, Donna Manicotti Dyke Detective #1 by Noelle Messier, Laura Soret, and Juan Alarcón. Then, it’s officially October, so I decided it’s time to read a book that’s been on my list for a long time, M is for Monster by Talia Dutton.   

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