Summer Reading (Patreon)

Happy July, everyone! Made great progress on my book yesterday (should finish today!) so was able to take a short break and hammer out another little two-tone pinup piece. I'm kind of on a summer beach kick right now I guess.

One of the fun things about this Patreon is it gives me a place to show some of the alternate ideas/designs I go through before landing on whatever final one I choose to highlight. However, I never know if I'm making the right decision so feel free to LMK what y'all think. Haha.

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I also thought it'd be nice to start sharing a few book recommendations from time to time on here. Not full-blown reviews or anything; Simply, "I enjoyed this book, here's why" kinda stuff. So to start, a bunch of sequential stuff...

The Aquanaut
My ten year old, Oliver, picked up this book up from book fair close to the end of his school year and I finally got around to reading it myself. It ends a bit abruptly (as most middle-grade novels seem to do these days) but I thought the premise pretty great and the story emotionally engaging enough to keep me flipping pages. Dan Santat's art is creative and fun as usual.

Sheriff of Babylon
I've read about four books by Tom King now and have been impressed with every one. He has an incredible knack of weaving a narrative without sacrificing theme or character development. This is the best book I've read by him thus far. Based on his real-life exposure toward the end of the Iraq war, it also kinda explains the bleakness that runs through a lot of his stories (a bit worried about reading his Supergirl book because of this). My pal Mitch handled art chores on it and you can tell he poured everything he had into it. Probably one of the better graphic novels I've read all year.

Banned Book Club
Read this because another friend of mine, Ryan Estrada, handled co-writing chores. Interesting insight on South Korea in the mid-80s (and a glimpse at what fascism really looks like). Great based-on-real-life characterization with a fast-paced story. Really enjoyed this one.

Paper Girls
This is what I'm reading right now so I'm only about half way through the first deluxe edition. I tend to like most of what Brian K Vaughan has written, adore Cliff Chiang and I'm a sucker for any sort of Amblin-esqe story of a bunch of kids in the 1980's running into science-fiction type stuff while riding bicycles. I'm honestly not sure why it took me so long to pick this up. Anyhoo, so far so good and I heard there's a tv show coming out at the end of the month based on it so I think this will be my July reading leading up to that. Hopefully it's a better adaption than that Y-The Last Man show.

A bunch more I could probably recommend (I read a lot), but that's enough for now. Feel free to share some of your current reads! Doesn't have to be comics. I'd love to hear what you're enjoying these days. :)