Books 79-82

79) Swamp Thing, volumes 6-11 (reread): Why yes, I am missing volume 5, with the first John Constantine story. I've read it before, but don't own it. This set of volumes covers through American Gothic and the Outer Space arc, and is very, very good stuff. Got me thinking about the prevlanace of space opera/SF sequences in ongoing comic books - almost everyone has their voyage into space arc, given a long enough run from single writer.

80) The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee: Pulled this off the shelf because Mylescorcoran and his group just ran a Judge Dee game. I'm wondering how the hell Chinese detective stories setting has not been made into a professional game system! The characters have a high degree of authroity and autonomy, the genere has reliable small groups (Jidge Dee is the judge, his sherrif/watson type, along with two martial artists and a con man for his deputies), and it's an interesting social setting. I will almost certainly pitch something on this soon.

81) The Ballad of Halo Jones: one of Alan Moore's unfinished works, this 2000 AD series with Ian Gibson is a fascinating, if depressing, analysis on the need to break out of decaying soceital niches. Moore fortunately completed enough to feel like the series has a resolution, but there's clear that there's more story for Halo.

82) The Complete DR and Quinch: I'm clearly on a Moore kick here, since his books just got shelved to the front. This violent, juvenile farce done with Alan Davis was one of my first exposures to his work, and it's quite a bit of mental whiplash between this and Halo Jones, which he was writing concurrently. Not quite as funny to me as it was 22 years ago, but still funny.