Tag: Illustrated

Books

Book 668: Charlotte Brontë Before Jane Eyre – Glynnis Fawkes

Geoff W

cover art for "charlotte brontë before jane eyre" and amazon affiliate linkI stumbled across this illustrated biography of Charlotte Brontë after one of my google alerts (“Boston” and “Brontë”) alerted me to this article (Seven Days, Vermont’s Independent Voice). I’ve been meaning to read an actual Brontë biography forever really, but specifically since the 2017 release of To Walk Invisible on PBS and my visit to the Parsonage in 2018.

I read The Mother of the Brontës last year which covered a good portion of this and some of the inspired works cover similar time periods because they were all so young. The downside of the Brontës and Austen are how short their lives were and we can only glean so much from the few letters and drafts of their works that exist, but there are instances where a little creative license and ingenuity can make these well known facts and situations seem new again. And that is the case with this Fawkes work.

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Books

Book 644: Encore (The Backstagers #3) – James Tynion IV, Rian Sygh & Walter Baiamonte

Geoff W

The Backstagers, Encore, Volume 3 cover artOf the three, this was my favorite. Rebels Without Applause and The Show Must Go On were both good reads and absolutely must be read together, but I think this one was more what I was expecting when I picked up the firs tone. This is a series of vignettes centered around Valentine’s Day and Halloween. They’re short, they’re adorable, and they don’t require knowing the entire backstory of those first two volumes.

My favorite of the stories was the Valentine’s Day story around Beckett. Who doesn’t love a bah humbug story with a happy ending? It didn’t hurt that Jory and Hunter were extra adorable.

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Books

Book 643: The Show Must Go On (The Backstagers #2) – James Tynion IV, Rian Sygh & Walter Baiamonte

Geoff W

The Backstagers Volume 2, The Show Must Go On coverThis was a  good quick read and a must read if you want to have any idea about what’s going on in Rebels Without Applause. They really should’ve put this into one collection. Maybe they did it because of the timing of these last four issues, but it wasn’t worth reading one and then waiting for the other.

The Backstagers: The Show Must Go On contains all the backstory that Volume 1 really needed to make it make sense, mostly. There seems to be a time jump between issue four (end of volume one) and five (beginning of volume two). I’m not sure if I’ve missed a lot (there are novels and I believe this was a webcomic) because the whole thing seems more disjointed than I thought looking back on it.

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Books

Book 638: The Backstagers: Rebels Without Applause (The Backstagers #1) – James Tynion IV, Rian Sygh, and Walter Baiamonte

Geoff W

I’m not sure how I came across this one. I think after finishing Bloom I wanted more LGBT (emphasis on G, because well obviously) graphic novels/works. I didn’t realize these were comics more in the line of Fence than Bloom and Check, Please! That being said it was a fun quick read.

The plot I don’t think has fully been developed in these first three issues (it’s a compilation) and so that left something to be desired. I liked the characters, the Backstagers were of course wonderful and the actors were annoying, and the setting is intense and I have no idea what’s going on there, but based on the pretty heavy foreshadowing I’m guessing I’ll learn more.

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Books

Book 636: Bloom – Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau

Geoff W

SO MUCH CUTENESS!!!!!!!!

Seriously though! With the second volume of Ukazu’s Check, Please! being pushed back to April 2020, I needed more adorable gay comics/graphic novels in my life so I went searching at the local library and found this one. I’d seen it at a few bookstores in LGBT young adult sections, but hadn’t given it a second thought.

Bloom is the story of Ari Kyrkos and Hector Galea. It’s a coming of age, coming out, coming together, teen rom-com type book and it was wonderful. You’ve got the meet-cute, the miscommunication, the driving passions of each of them, the drama-point, and then the adorable make-up/happily-ever-after.

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