I splurged again this month in terms of buying comics 😱 Les 5 Terres - L’intégrale en édition limitée I discovered “Les 5 Terres” recently, I liked volume 1. As I was talking about it briefly on the Bubble Facebook group, an absolute fan told me about the release of a limited edition complete. It’s a thick volume with a very nice hardback cover, dust jacket, 6 bookplates signed by the authors, with a limited edition of 280 copies at the modest price of… 235 €!

Here are some reading notes from the last three days. Setting the context: for most series I read very spaced out, I have a hard time fully memorizing the story, characters, unresolved ongoing plots… And sometimes when I start a new volume, I don’t know who so-and-so is, if what’s-his-name is good, bad or ambiguous, etc. 😅 That’s what happened to me on several comics here. Umbrella Academy T3 I loved the Netflix series, funny, crazy.

Note : Article published with delay. Death Note artbook I am a fan of Death Note. It was only natural that I would fall for a great artbook of Takeshi Obata’s works! There are drawings from Death Note as well as other works by him that I don’t know. And everything is splendid! Death Note Short stories Some short stories in the universe of Death Note a few years after the main plot and humorous strips.

Some opinions on my recent readings: Blacksad volume 6 I really liked it. It is in the continuity of the previous ones, I find the same drawing, the same atmosphere, the suspense and the twists. I think it is on the level of the previous ones, I am just a little frustrated to have to wait for volume 7 with a cliffhanger. Les vieux fourneaux volume 2 I started the series with a lot of delay because despite the good reviews I had seen, the cover with the old and ugly characters didn’t make me want to read it… I bought the volume 1 second hand and I didn’t regret it!

After the plethora of MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) movies and the WandaVision series I saw on Disney+ recently, a visit to a large Parisian bookstore specialized in seen on Disney+ recently, a visit to a big Parisian bookstore specialized in comics could only end with the purchase of this little booklet published by Panini. I naively thought that it would allow me to better discover this strange couple… Disappointing! So yes I laughed a lot, but in the second degree.

🇫🇷 Simonac ! Tu veux-tu améliorer ton vocabulaire québécois tout en lisant une histoire émouvante ? Alors lis donc « Paul à Québec ». Note: I really don’t know if this comic book has been translated to English or even if it’d be as fun to read, because it’s full of typically French Canadian expressions and slang. This comic book is part of a series written by an award-winning author from the Québec province of Canada.

I finished this comic book after 2 days of reading it and it’s a shock! 😱 It’s a realistic painting of the dark side of the USA, the one we hear little or nothing about for some of the stories gathered here. The author of the book that was used as a reference is a pacifist, this can be felt in the choice of the events told, but that does not take anything away from their strength and scope.

Updated in April 2021 with “Dark Victory”. A Long Halloween Batman: A long Halloween (Un long Halloween) by Jeph Loeb & Time Sale was recommended to me by Batman fans in the Bubble Family & Friends Facebook group, a forum used by users of the excellent Bubble application that I use to manage my BD/Comics/Manga collection. Note: This book is a fantastic American comics, I will therefore write this critics in English although I read it in French 🙂

Note : Article from 2019 that I had not posted. Dark reading with Le journal d’un ingénu by Émile Bravo. This volume, the first of a series by Bravo, is part of the “reboots” of Spirou by contemporary authors. Émile Bravo tells here the genesis of Spirou, his unhappy childhood, why he chose to keep his hotel bellboy costume even as an adult, where his squirrel comes from… It’s quite dark in spite of the humor and the little love story, we are on the eve of World War II and Poland and Germany are secretly negotiating an agreement to avoid war in the hotel where Spirou works, in vain as we already know.

I’m not a big reader of American Comics, I really have very few of them, but since a few months ago our local comic bookstore (BD Geek in Antony, I highly recommend it) was celebrating Batman’s 80th birthday by offering a comic for the purchase of 2 Batman comics, I went there with my daughter, and we each chose one book. My choice was this “reboot” of the genesis of Batman by Frank Miller.

Here I’m going to talk about readings that I liked, magazines, books, comic books…, present my favourites and, maybe, make you want to read them :smile I started writing these texts a long time ago, in a private Slack channel at work, and I felt like gathering them here. Note: As of today, most articles are in French! That’s why you may not see many content in English here.