It has been MONTHS (AprilMayJuneJuly?) since I posted the books that I've been reading.  It's that lovely snowball of shame, that gets rolling when you're busy, then just has more momentum when you have to post about later and ... well, it's summer.  Snowballs have no place in New York in August.

Flight 6 - Flight is always excellent.  I liked this one a bit more than the last few, I'm not sure why.  I certainly liked the Michael Gagne story that continues from previous volumes and seems to have wrapped up here.

The Keepers of the Maser, vol 1 - 5,7 - This is a GORGEOUS story, written by Massimiliano Frezzato and drawn by Fabio Ruotolo, published through Heavy Metal.  The story is part Nausicaa, part Elfquest, and the art is incomprable and in full color.  Unfortunately, the panels seem to be chosen more for their beauty and drama than for their ability to tell a story in sequence with each other, like one of those comics composed of stills from a movie.  So it can be hard to follow.  But so beautiful!  And in the back there are lots of detailed appendices explaining the trippy ecology and technology.

The Elsewhere Chronicles, Books 1-3, by Bannister, Nykko, and Jaffre.  Like Keepers of the Maser, this is a gorgeous story, but unlike KotM, the pacing is great.  Good adventure story, though I wish there were more in each volume.  And more already published!  The characters are really cool and I want to know them more than I do now.

The Eternal Smile, by Gene Yang and Derek Kirk Kim - I rather liked American Born Chinese, by Gene Yang.  I loved Same Difference & Other Stories by Derek Kirk Kim.  Loyola Chan and the San Peligran Order makes me more disappointed and frustrated than nearly any other book that I've willingly read.  The Eternal Smile is part all of those.  Two of the stories come so close to showing a Faith that does good for the world before going horribly wrong and reminding me why I can't subscribe to mainstream Christianity.  All three stories ... do an amazing job of showing the beauty and flaws of their everyday characters in charming and quirky ways and without flinching at the ugliness that sometimes reveals.  Read it, it'll be Good For You, with all that means.

The Burning Wheel Fantasy Roleplaying System - the core book, Character Burner, and Monster Burner - I'm probably going to blog about this later as well, but here it is briefly.  It's a really interesting game system that seems at every design decision to have chosen the opposite of what D&D is, except for the love of tables.  Its mechanics are narratively focused, where D&D is often tactical and combat-oriented; it uses six-sided dice where D&D uses all manner of pretty polyhedra; characters are intricately woven from a life history that determines their stats, rather than the stats determining the character; advancement is integral to how you play and what your character is like, rather than being solely based on monster pelts with story awards tacked on.  You can tell from this description that I generally like it's direction, but ... it's still really fussy to play.  I'm going to keep trying, though.

Bite Me!  A Vampire Farce, by Dylan Meconis - is just that, a vampire farce, albeit one set during the French Revolution.  It's a charming and light-hearted graphic novel with more puns than you can shake a stick at.  It's just fun. 

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, by Guy Delisle - This is a dry look at a very uneventful trip by a regular guy to a FASCINATING place.  Guy Delisle has traveled the world working in the animation industry, and this book is about his trip into North Korea.  He doesn't try anything particularly dangerous or adventurous while there beyond giving a guide a copy of 1984 to read, but it's still an interesting read despite that.


Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, by Guy Delisle - Compared to Pyongyang, this is even more of a travelogue.  He still talks about interesting cultural differences, and amusing fish-out-of-water anecdotes, but while China is very, very different from the US, Canada, or France, it's not as alien as North Korea.  Shenzhen seems a bit tame in comparison.

Local, by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly - I ... just didn't like Local.  I think that reading it was probably good for me.  I couldn't find the heroine sympathetic, or anyone else for that matter.  I was watching people I don't like do horrible things to each other, make each other feel badly, and then feel guilty about it later.  I don't much enjoy that, except that it's probably good to get me out of my comfort zone sometimes to make me think about how other people have it worse than I do.  Look, I'm trying here.  It's a big hardcover book that we bought!

Klezmer: Book One: Tales of the Wild West, by Joann Sfar - Where, o where, is Book Two?  I loved this book so much, and want more of it.  It's about the forming of an itinerant traveling Klezmer band, but it's a folktale, drawn energetically, lovingly, and brilliantly.  I just discovered the notes in the back, as I was typing this, and now I know what I'm reading in bed tonight.

Templar, Arizona, vol. 1-3, by Spike - I get a kick out of this.  Templar, AZ is a long-running, beautifully drawn webcomic about ... a boy who runs away from home into a city where philosophy and politics are everything.  There's a lot more to it than that, but that's as close as I can come without venturing into uber-nerdom ... well, okay, here goes: if the premise of the Planescape D&D Campaign Setting - that there's a place where belief is everything to life, the world is shaped by it and vice versa - were laid on top of our current world, I think that you'd get Templar, AZ.  I also get a kick out of this because I see Spike at least twice a year at conventions and she forgets who I am every single time.  There's no reason to remember me beyond the common friends and frequent introductions, I suppose.  I now hope to be remembered sometime in the future as that guy who she always forgets.  

pbrane: the green man, written by Chris X Ring, "directed" by Jesse Heffring - I didn't like the art style, which is interesting for the fact that it's nearly entirely doctored photographs.  The story is interesting, the sort of apocalyptic matrixey thing that I often enjoy, but it's self-indulgent here (which is saying quite a bit, given that genre as a starting point).  Nevertheless, I picked it up while walking by a coworker's desk and I didn't stop reading it until I'd finished it.  It's an interesting experiment, a decent story, and could be really good if it were edited by someone who liked but didn't love it and who had a will of steel.  Until then: cool stylistic experiment, big story, very traditionally "superhero" despite itself.


Star Ocean: Second Evolution (PSP) - this is a remake of an old JRPG.  It's full of JRPG-y goodness and silliness.  I'm enjoying the skill-focused advancement system, which lets me craft characters in what feel like meaningful ways.  And it's pretty, redone like this.  It's also got a couple of skills that let you tune the difficulty, a mechanic that is much more fully and powerfully executed in The World Ends with You, but which is still good here.

Robocalypse (DS) - I'm enjoying this little RTS for exactly the reasons that it was lent to me.  It's RTS, but your direction is at an extra remove.  As in Lost Magic, you have two different types of unit, one which you control pretty directly and one which you merely point in the right direction and which has a mind of its own.  The latter, the 'minions', often wander off and do logical things that are so not what you wanted.  I like the balance of the direct and indirect control, the strategy vs. the tactics, after a fashion.
There are a bunch more games that I've dabbled with but don't feel qualified to review as "read".  Onward, then...