forestofglory | Entries tagged with sequential art

The graphic novel pile is still going strong! (I did start watching a mini drama but I’m going to wait until I finish it to include it in one of these round ups)

In other media related news I have figured out that I can read comics from Hoopla on a tablet and that’s been nicer on my hands than reading at my normal computer set up. I’ve also gotten a new timer and have been doing better at taking hand breaks so I’ve been watch more Crush of Music

Lumberjanes, Vol. 1-2 by N.D. Stevenson et al.—There’s a Lumberjanes/Gotham academy crossover that I want to check out, but it's been ages since I read any Lumberjanes so I thought I’d re-read them. Another series about girls who are friends with each other! Friendship is so great! This is definitely an advantage of reading a lot of YA and MG things, though it still would like more female friendships in media for adults. Anyway, these comics are very fun! I have requested several more volumes form the library

The Space Cat: A Graphic Novel written by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford— I was very excited when I learned that Nnedi Okorafor had written a graphic novel about a cat! It turns out this is based on her real life cat. It is extremely cute and very charming! The art was perfect for the story.

Teen Titans: Raven, Teen Titans: Beast Boy, Teen Titans: Beast Boy Loves Raven, Teen Titans: Robin, and Teen Titans: Robin Teen Titans: Starfire written by Kami Garcia, art by Gabriel Picolo—These are like YA graphic novels adaptations of the Teen Titans – that is this own version and not as far as I can tell part of larger continuity, but clearly based on the earlier versions. I’m not super familiar with most of these characters or the earlier version of the Teen Titans but I liked these as their own thing.

I did break my no YA with dead moms rule, as the first book opens with Raven’s mom dying in a car crash. The characters are fun, and I liked seeing their friends and family. The romances do feel really fast and underdeveloped though. But seeing the team form is a lot of fun! The art is good too!

There’s supposed to be one more of these published later this year so I’m going to have to keep an eye out for it so I can read the ending!

Taproot by Keezy Young—A lovely graphic novel about a gardener who can see ghosts. I loved all the lush plants! I would have liked just a little bit more detail about how the magic worked though. The whole book was really sweet.(CW: several of the ghosts are kids)

The Changeling King by Ethan M. Aldridge—Sequel to Estranged, I liked how this dealt with the consequences of the events of the first book. And the art remains excellent!

The Return of the King— Watched with R and the Kid. This one felt the darkest of the three, also the one with the most changes from the book. We took more breaks this time so I felt less over-stimulated by the end, which was good.

This time I have nothing to talk about but things from my pile of graphic novels from the library. I picked up another set of holds, and then put in even more holds, but I’m getting to the end of things I want to check out so it's possible the pile will diminish eventually.

I read so many books in January, after so long of not reading very much. It’s nice but my brain sure confuses me.

Estranged by Ethan M. Aldridge—I really liked this author’s other book, The Pale Queen, so I thought I’d look into other graphic novels he created. This one is good too! The same lovely art, cool world building and some nice found family feelings.

The Lost Sunday by Iléana Surducan—A sweet kids graphic novel inspired by fairy tales. It’s very short. As a non-christian I don’t love the association of Sunday with the day of rest, but it is otherwise lovely. The art is very fun, very expressive with good use of colors.

Gotham Academy, issues 1-18 by Becky Cloonan et al.— I was always going to love a story about plucky girl investigators at a boarding school who are friends with each other! The fact that this is set in Gotham and features appearances by members of the bat family is just a bonus. It’s got kinda a spooky vibe but it’s not really scary. I've been reading comics from the 90s, so it was fun to check out something more recent, and nice to have some different art styles. (I’m not really a fan of 90’s comic art styles even if the city scapes are good)

Mia “Maps” Mizoguchi is so much fun! She's clever and excitable and so enthusiastic about everything! I love her! I'm going to have to track down all the stories she appears in so I can read them.

Stage Dreams by Melanie Gillman—A fun queer western adventure – I appreciated the author’s historical notes in the back. The subdued but warm color plate for this really added a nice touch.

Sanity & Tallulah, Field Trip,and Shortcuts by Molly Brooks—The first two of these were rereads, as I read them a while back and didn't remember them that well. These graphic novels are fun! Sanity and Tallulah are two girls living on a space station. They are friends with each other and have slightly madcap adventures. I also liked how this handled worldbuilding with each book showing a larger and more complicated section of Sanity and Tullaulah’s universe, especially the way the earlier books drop hints about the larger situation but you don’t fully see it until the third book.

Well I haven’t gotten very far with my pile of graphic novels from the library, and in fact I’ve put holds on even more of them so the pile is only getting bigger. But did finish enough things that it feels worth posting another media roundup.

Goat Magic by Kate Wheeler—Another graphic novel, this one with very cute goats. The art for this one was so cute and charming. I did feel a little bit frustrated with the politics, where there was some confusion about bad people vs bad systems. Also the romance kinda came out of nowhere (It didn’t help that I thought one of the main characters was like 12) Still a pretty fun book overall.

The Two Towers—Watched this with the kid and R, who as mentioned have recently finished reading the books. It’s fun to discuss the changes between the book and the movie with the kiddo! Also I forgot how good the armor details are in this! However a three hour movie with some chatting is a lot for me – at the end I was hitting sensory overload and needed to go sit somewhere quiet by myself for a while.

The Legend of the Demon Cat (2017)—I watched this movie with my group watch. It’s about a cat demon but also features Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi and various other historical figures. It was really good, though I’m having a hard time explaining why. It has a really big emotional range – some bits are creepy (and there is a bit of gore), some bits are sad, but some bits are really fun. And Bai Juyi’s character in this is great!

Unboxing Libby by Steph Cherrywell—My kid’s school is doing an optional book club, and this was the most recent book. I’ve been reading the books along with the kid and this is the third book this year. It’s about robots made to be kids toys who end up being used to simulate a human community on Mars. I really liked it! the friendship stuff was complicated and good!

Remember how I was all like “I guess I don’t read much original fiction anymore but I’m at peace with it” in my post about my 2025 media? Yet somehow I have read 10 books this month? They are mostly graphic novels which are quicker and easier for me, but still books are books. I don’t really expect to keep this up but it's nice for now.

Here’s another Media Roundup after not months and months! Hopefully I’ll be reading and watching things other than fic a bit more often and thus post these media roundups more often than I was.

I seem to have gotten into the habit of reading a lot of graphic novels in December and January. I currently have a big pile out from the library – and I’ve read a few of them, and hopefully will get around to even more of the pile.

Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology by Angela Hsieh— A very charming graphic novel about two girls on an adventure. Featuring charming art and very cute geo fauna! (As a Mandarin learner I did find the almost but not quite hanzi characters a little bit frustrating)

The Pale Queenby Ethan M. Aldridge—Another YA graphic novel, this one featuring an f/f romance. I really liked the fae in this book – they were a good mix of beautiful and scary. The art is also lovely!

Crush of Music— I’m still watching this very slowly, the subtitles have mostly been better for the last few episodes –so that’s nice. I’m enjoying seeing Liu Yuning and Zhou Shen interact in this – at one point they played the kazoo together!

Various Batman ect comic—So I mentioned in my 2025 media review post that I accidentally acquired a new fandom, that fandom is batfam. This is embarrassing for me because for years I've been prone to what R calls “the Batman rant” where I complain that punching people in the face is a dumb way to reduce crime rates. Plus I just feel like superhero comics are a space that's pretty hostile to me and my values. But apparently if you give me fic about a family of 3-8 adopted siblings finding each other/bonding and don't make me think too hard about the moral foundations of the universe then I'm willing to suspend my moral disbelief.

Anyways I got sucked in enough to be curious about the source material and have been reading stuff on hoopla. I'm fairly impressed with their comic reading interface too, it has a nice flow. (It doesn’t play well with my RSI issues but then neither does turning pages) The actual stories vary in quality, but some of them are surprisingly good. Even the not very good ones are surprisingly more-ish. I’m bringing a lot of emotional investment in these characters from my fic reading which also helps make the comics more engaging.

The Cross-Dressed Union—I thought that if my media theme at the moment is comfort that I should really start a new crossdressing girl drama since that's a big comfort trope of mine, So I asked around for recs and started this drama about an arranged marriage between a crossdressing woman and crossdressing man. It sounded fun but so far I’m pretty meh about it. I think my biggest problem is that the ML is the main character, and for these kinds of stories I prefer more focus on the FL. Also it's not doing enough with gender

It’s been ages since I did one of these! But I haven’t been reading or watching much that I want to talk about the last couple of months. I read a couple of things that I just don’t have anything to say about, and a ton of fic which I never include in these round ups. And I’ve watched almost nothing – not even mini dramas

But there’s couple of things I did want to talk about and I thought it would be nice to post about the last little bit of 2025 media before I start a new running notes document for the new year.

Crush of Music—This Chinese reality show is the one thing I have been watching recently. Crush of music is a show where songwriters demo original songs and then through a mildly gameifed process are matched with a singer (or two) who then performs the song. It’s the second season of Melody Journey, but I have no idea why the English title is different (the Chinese title is the same) It's a really fun low stress show and features some of my favorite singers! (Liu Yuning and Zhou Shen) I can't really rec the show though because the subtitles are very very bad -- I'm just watching anyway even though I can only understand about half of what people are saying. But it turns out that not understanding the show makes for very slow watching

Off Menu: A Graphic Novel written by Oliver Gerlach drawn by Kelsi Jo Silva—Cute YA graphic novel in D&D-ish world. It’s about a cook called Soup – kind of a coming of age thing with lots of cooking and community. Very Charming!

The Fellowship of The Ring— R has been reading LotR to the kid, they haven’t quite finished but they are close enough to done that we watched the 1st movie. I’ve never been huge into LotR but it was fun to watch – so many classic lines! I did kinda find myself wishing that the characters' names would show up on screen the first time they appear the way they do in the cdrama I watch. NZ remains very beautiful!

Lately I've been saving up dramas until I'm done watching them and then posting about them here, but right now I am watching several things and I want to talk about them. I also read a couple of things and watched a movie since the last time I posted one of these.

Kill My Sins ep 1-14—This is a cdrama about a woman who is a “mind healer” in not!Tang China. (And also some dude but I don’t care that much about him) There’s a lot I like about it, it's got women who are friends with each other, excellent costumes, including some crossdressing women, a character inspired by one of my favorite historical figures (Shangguan Wan’er), and a woman ruler. The plot is a twisty revenge story, and its very tense, so I have been watching very slowly.

Content notes: harm to animals, gore, backstory featuring sexual assault, torture, self harm, domestic violence

Mu Guiying Takes Command ep 5-11— I picked this drama back up because I wanted something very unstressful to watch. It’s not really very good, but the things that are bad about it make it easy to follow. like everything is a bit exaggerated, and I'm not super invested so it's less stressful. It’s got women in armor

Justice in the Dark eps 1-4 —This show sounds like it's made in a lab to be not for me. It’s got police, violent crime, bad things happening to kids, a CEO, a romance where the couple met when one was a kid and the other was an adult, and probably some things I’m forgetting. But it's the new show that my groupwatch picked, and that’s an important event in my social calendar so I decided to watch at least the first couple of episodes. Who knows maybe I will end up liking it, it’s happened before.

It does have some really nice food details, but I wish it wasn’t so visually dark – it's hard to see a lot of the time.

( Ash's Cabin, House of Flying Daggers, and A Rome of One's Own )

As the title says I've actually read some of the pile of graphic novels that I got from the library! Things have been busy and I've been sick so progress has still been slow.

The Worst Ronin by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Faith Schaffer — A graphic novel about a teen girl who wants to be a samurai and an older jaded ronin. The tech level is handwavy feudal Japan but with cell phones, which I found distracting. I didn’t think the cell phones added enough to the book to be worth it. Content note: gore, grief and dying

Anzu and the Realm of Darkness by Mai K. Nguyen and Diana Tsai Santos— Graphic novel about a Japanese American girl named Anzu who has just moved to a new town and get accidentally swept into the underworld. I thought it was pushing a little hard on we can solve systematic problems like bullying with individual choices but it was mostly sweet. I liked the kind of cartoony art style and all the different mystical critters.

Dragon of the Lost Sea by Laurence Yep —I read this Chinese mythology inspired MG fantasy novel to the kid at bed time. I had read these books myself as a kid and I was a little worried that they wouldn’t hold up, but the suck fairy has not gotten them! It’s maybe a little weird that the dragons all have wings. Chinese inspired stuff written in English these days tends to be very strict about not mixing in more western elements like that but actually the mixing is fun. Anyways this is a fun adventure story with lots of characters with big personalities.

Navigating With You by Jeremy Whitley,Casio Ribeiro, and Nikki Fox —A graphic novel about two girls who are both new at their high school. They decide to go on a quest to find all 7 volumes of an out of print manga they both never finished reading. I loved this! Both girls are charming and quirky in a geeky way, the manga story within the story was lovely. One of them does have a dead mom, something I generally avoid but by the time that was revealed I was hooked. It was super fun and charming!

Himawari House by Harmony Becker —A graphic novel about three young women from different places who move to Japan and end up living in the same house. It's a very slice of life with lots of food and friendship but also some sad moments. The author has a heartfelt note at the end explaining that she wrote on the accents because she wants to destigmatise having an accent. I have mixed feelings about it though because I find written accents way harder to parse than spoken accents.

I thought I would have gotten father with my pile of graphic novels form the library by now since I think of them as such quick reads, but I guess I've been reading other things.

Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China by Linda Cooke Johnson —Read for my FTH bibliography. This didn’t have a huge amount about textiles but it did have a lot about interesting and badass women.

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite —A murder mystery novella set on a space ship. Very much in the style of classic murder mysteries, complete with an older woman detective. There's a bunch of interesting memory based tech in here including something like a replicator that works off memories which is a cool idea but replicating the thing you remember exactly how you remember it doesn’t seem like it would work out for most people. Fabric is mentioned as something that’s easy to replicate, but I don’t remember even fabric I’ve sewn with that precisely. Most of my memories are just not very precise – I would just end up with a lot of blobs if I tried this.

This kind of mystery really depends on the quirky cast, and I liked the characters but felt like we didn’t really get to know them, I think it would have benefited from being longer so the characters could be a bit more developed.

This makes it seem like I didn’t like the book, but actually it's very charming. I especially liked the the main character is a knitter and there are lots of yarn details.

Hovergirls by Geneva Bowers —One of those graphic novels I mentioned checking out from the library. Cousins Jalissa and Kim have recently moved to a new city and have to deal with challenges like working at a coffee shop and fighting mysterious glowing fish. This was fun! I really liked the art style, which was very bright and colorful.

The Moth Keeper by Kay O'Neill —Another graphic novel by the author of The Tea Dragon Society books. This one is actually written before A Song for You & I and it’s not quite as good as that one, there’s few places where it's hard to follow the action. I did really like all the night time desert landscapes, and the moths though!

( Mysteries of the Terracotta Warriors, My Uncanny Destiny )

Since it's more than halfway through the year I started to write a reflection on my reading goal for the year: "Read Joyfully" But I found I didn't have much to say about it other than it turns out its easier to engage with new to me fiction when I actually get enough sleep.

However I do have some thoughts on things I've read and watched recently to share:

The Truth Season 3cases 9 and 10 — The last two cases, I’m sad that this is over now! This was so, so much fun! The second to last case featured my favorite costumes of the whole show in show with many excellent costumes. This really a fairly frivolous show but I love it so much! (Content note: the final case involved a dead kid)

Mu Guiying Takes Command ep 1-4— I wanted to love this. It is an adaptation of The Generals of the Yang Family, a story dating back to at least the Ming Dynasty that features women in command of the military. The FL is very badass. However I got fed up with how childish both the leads were acting.

Also this was released in 2012 which isn’t really that long ago but it feels like a whole different era.

Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300–1400 by Patricia Blessing, Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, Eiren L. Shea— This is a novella length overview of the topic. About 80 pages with a lot of pictures. I liked how it tied together such a big area and a long time period. Zooming out helped me put the stuff I know about (Chinese textiles, mostly Tang dynasty) into a larger context. I read it for the FTH biography I’m creating on Liao textiles.

A Song for You & I by Kay O'Neill— My friend Maureen, who is a children’s librarian, recced this graphic novel by the author of the Tea Dragon Society books in her most recent newsletter. And I’m glad she did because I haven’t been keeping up with recent releases and this was really good. It's a very gentle story that’s kind of coming of age with a lot of travel. One of the characters has a flying horse! The art is really good. I kept stoping to admire the color gradients. Just a very lovely book.

Please Be My Star by Victoria Grace Elliott— Reading a A Song for You & I reminded me that my library has lots of graphic novels and I checked out a whole pile of them including this one. Please Be My Star is a YA romance featuring teens putting on a play. It was very cute though once or twice I got a little too much second hand embarrassment.

Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born ep 1-4— This kdrama sounded so exactly my thing. It’s got preforming arts, tons of women, and crossdressing girls! It’s also very pretty and well done. So I’m baffled as to why after four episodes all I feel about it is “meh”