SHUT IN THEATER: Weekend Reading 167

The summer continues with July, and so does our long-running column, with Weekend Reading 167! No spoilers, but The Beat Elite will be spending our hot summer weekend inside with a big stack of comics!

What are you going to be reading this weekend? The Beat wants to hear from you! Give us a shout and let us know, either here in the comment section or over on Twitter @comicsbeat (assuming cis executive chairman and chief tech officer Elon Musk hasn’t driven the floundering failure of a website directly into the ground by press time).

AVERY KAPLAN: The other day, my Mother-in-Law sent me an NPR article on “splooting,” the act of squirrels lying on their stomachs in order to survive otherwise unbearable heat. This has inevitably led to a desire to re-read The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl! I’ll be starting with the volume collecting the first 2015 run by Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Maris Wicks, Kyle Starks, Chris Giarrusso, Rico Renzi, and Clayton Cowles. How far will I get in the series? Possibly to the Derek Charm era!

TAIMUR DAR: As I mentioned last week, I’ve been on a bit of a Mark Russell kick lately. Finished Exit Stage Left last weekend, so I’m moving onto The Flintstones comic series he did with artist Steve Pugh. Again, like Snagglepuss, I hear Russell elevated admittedly silly material to craft quite a sophisticated series. Likewise, I’ll be diving into Daredevil: Man Without Fear by Frank Miller and John Romita Jr. which I must have read years ago but it’s been a while so it deserves a reread.  

CY BELTRAN: In honor of the movie coming out on Netflix, I’ll finally be checking out ND Stevenson’s Nimona, which I just happened to score a copy of within the last couple of weeks. I’ve heard such great things about the book that I just had to get my hands on it. I also can’t remember if I’ve brought it up here before, but I’ve got a copy of Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer that I’ve been desperately trying to get to, and in light of everything going on in the world and the long weekend, I think now is the right time to sit down and check it out. Then, trying to get thru my huge stack of unread books, I’m also gonna look at Pulp and Night Fever from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (with Jacob Phillips on colors for the former).

You can peruse the 166 previous entries in The Beat’s Weekend Reading archive by clicking here.