Readings

Like many, when I discovered My Favorite Thing Is Monsters seven years ago I instantly was taken in by the art, and the story introduced an interesting family dynamic, the neighborhood added colorful characters, the time period—late 1960s—introduced some interesting conjectural elements, and the “murder” mystery led us to explore the horror of the past which went well with the monster themes.

Set against the tumultuous political backdrop of late ’60s Chicago, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is the fictional graphic diary of 10-year-old Karen Reyes, filled with B-movie horror and pulp monster magazine iconography. Karen Reyes tries to solve the murder of her enigmatic upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a holocaust survivor, while the interconnected stories of those around her unfold. When Karen’s investigation takes us back to Anka’s life in Nazi Germany, the reader discovers how the personal, the political, the past, and the present converge.—Fantagraphics

And now, seven years later, the second and last book is here. I suspect that it’s the last because Fantagraphics had to sue Emil Ferris over issues surrounding publishing rights. When I finished reading that second volume, I felt that it was not supposed to end that way as almost nothing is properly wrapped up.

If there is one crossover event in the comic book history to know, it’s Crisis on Infinite Earths. After all, there is a before and an after “Crisis,” as its conclusion led to the first major relaunch/reset/reboot (call it what you want) at DC Comics.

Apparently, at some point, Marv Wolfman received a letter from a reader suggesting that it may be time to clean up the timeline. See, for all of its history up to that point, comic book was not about continuity. There was some, but who cared? Writers invented new Earths in the multiverse with new iterations of their superheroes. Sometimes they met, sometimes they just appeared and disappeared in the same issue.