The Update This Week

154. The World Below by Paul Chadwick. Somewhat pulpy adventure. Beautiful artwork, as always from Chadwick.
     
155. Superman/Shazam!: First Thunder by Judd Winick & Joshua Middleton. I haven't heard a lot good about Winick's current Shazam comic, but this was supposed to be pretty good, and it is.
     
156. Superman: Strange Attractors by Gail Simone, John Byrne, et al. Nice, solid storytelling. Not fantastic, but quite a bit better than a lot of comics.
     
157. Athena Voltaire: The Collected Webcomics by Paul Daly & Steve Bryant. Definitely pulpy, rather choppy in places. But it began as a weekly webcomic, and if you're telling a pulp story and you have to pick between action & smooth storytelling, the choice is clear.
     
158. The Drifting Classroom, vol. 4 by Kazuo Umezu. More histrionic adventures of a grade school transported to a nightmarish landscape. I swear in the entire volume, there's something like two bits of dialog that don't end in exclamation points or question marks. (Checked out of the library.)
     
159. Monster, vol. 5: After the Carnival by Naoki Urasuwa. I like this series a lot, but I'm not sure what to say about it. Very tense. (Library.)
     
160. Infinite Crisis by Geoff Johns, Phil Jimenez, et al. DC's latest word in "event" comics. Some very nice art, but I can't say the story impressed me terribly. And I do hope we never see emo-Superboy again. (But I know we will.) (Library.)
     
161. Usagi Yojimbo, vol. 3 by Stan Sakai. For the third week running, I finish my book update with Sakai's wonderful stories of feudal Japan.

Movies

• Land of the Lost: The Complete Second Season. Not as good as the first season, probably due to the loss of David Gerrold as the story editor. Still fairly entertaining, though.
  
• The Magnificent Seven. I find it somewhat ironic that this movie is a remake of The Seven Samurai when Kurosawa was inspired by westerns. Full circle.
  
• Children of Men. What an amazing movie. It's the best film I've seen in a long time. Very powerful.
  
• The Simpsons: The Complete Fourth Season. Oh man, this show used to be good. Teena & I laughed all the way through the episode where Homer becomes head of the union at the power plant.
  
• The Simpsons: The Complete Third Season. I forgot to write it down in the journal where I keep track of these things, so I don't know when we finished it, but several months back, Teena & I watched this.