Jex

The ending was beautiful.

This one truly was miserable. The slight variation to the formula could have been interesting but it didn't really work well. Saved only by a thrilling final few chapters.

I don't like the sci-fi stuff as much as the horror stuff, but there are plenty of interesting ideas here and the final two issues hit right. 

Nice to see the formula shifting some as the series continues. 

Best sex scene in comics history. 

Weird ableist detour toward the end but overall a worthwhile read with some really great bits of writing. 

Profoundly impactful. Once again Alison Bechdel proves herself a master of the graphic memoir. 

Wound up liking this a lot but it had some rough spots. Worth sticking with. 

Full of a lot of really remarkable prose and ideas, Acceptance doesn't fully cohere until the very end, which makes it a bit of a slog at times. I liked it, in the end, but it was a long and winding road to get there. 

Very different from its predecessor in both tone and form, but still very good. A much slower read and a very different voice. There comes a point when it becomes a different book than the one you've been reading, and for a moment you wonder if that was the right choice for the author to make, but you stick with it, and are grateful for doing so.

Understated and tragic character study of a man who keeps fucking up and just won't take responsibility for his actions, leading to a ... haunting of sorts. 

“You don't work through a thing, or remove it, it just stays there, metastasizing like a cancer.”

The art isn't my favorite and honestly the story is bleaker than I usually go for, but I was hanging on every word all the same.

Cute but not essential.

I found the format of the first two sections less impactful than the previous volumes. I think I understand why it was written with a sort of distancing effect, but I'm not sure if was the right call. The third part, with the big family dinner, was very good (and satisfying – I am a Tori fan forever)

Like doing inner child work with my (closeted, bisexual) teenage self 

I don't know that I expected to, but I really enjoyed this one!

The “message” at the end feels a bit on the nose, but overall a good read.

This is an interesting series. Imperfect but ambitious, The Woods feels a bit like a story from another era of comics. A lot of it feels to me as being of a piece with something like Y: The Last Man, which was important for its time but didn't age well in many ways. A big part of it is the protagonist, or at least who's introduced to us as the protagonist, an utterly unlikable kid who's cooler and smarter than everyone around him. It's the kind of protagonist who was all the rage in the late 90s and early 2000s, and I found The Woods really difficult to get into because for much of the book, it seems that he's who we're supposed to relate to and root for. It almost feels too late by the time we are certain that he's the villain, but by then we've come to care about the rest of the cast of characters, and Tynion pulls his biggest trick – making us actually see the humanity in our villain for just long enough to make it heartbreaking when it's sniffed out.

I didn't find the act of reading this particularly enjoyable for great portions of it, but the way it all comes together at the end is actually quite remarkable.

Just in case you were wondering, the title is literal.

All kidding aside, I really liked this. Great sense of place, interesting intrigue, and a perfect sense of dread permeating all of it.

Fun adaptation of the podcast. Loses a little coherence in the final act but a very enjoyable read nonetheless.

This hits at something real

This is a lot of fun!

Great, thorough introduction to acceptance and commitment therapy.

A bit more, I don't know. Intellectual? Academic? Heady? Than something like the Happiness Trap, but still a worthwhile introduction to ACT and an effective transformation into a self-help book (though I'd recommend working through it with your therapist). I'm still not convinced that understanding relational frame theory is necessary to understand ACT but this book is a pretty good job of explaining it in a fairly accessible manner.

A playful reimagining that delights in its love for language, and all the quirks thereof.