I went to the comic shop a couple of days ago for the first time in AGES. They still require masks! I was really surprised; you don't see that here much anymore. But the store is also a gaming room where people spend hours in close contact, so I guess that makes sense.

Anyway, it's been a really long time since I just loaded up a bag with interesting-looking TPBs. I also got some new dice and TTRPG supplement books for writing inspiration. A quick report on the books I've read so far:

Lore Olympus Vol. 1 by Rachel Smythe - Easily my favorite of the books I bought! This is a really beautiful, charming retelling of Hades & Persephone in a modern-day setting (but they're still gods - it's just Olympus with cars and cell phones and so forth). It's also on Webtoons if you want to read it there. (I had read a few pages a while back, liked the art, but dislike the Webtoons scrolling interface so thoroughly that I didn't end up wanting to read an entire book there; then I impulse-bought it in the comic shop after recognizing the art.) I considered buying vol. 2 when I picked up vol. 1, decided not to since I didn't know if I'd like it enough to read two books of it, but I definitely do and will be back for vol. 2 soon! The character designs are adorable, and I love the author's take on the various deities. Content warning: contains a very realistically depicted, though not graphic, sexual assault, although not between the main pairing.

Elfquest: Stargazer's Hunt vols. 1 & 2 by Wendy & Richard Pini - Well, I knew what I was getting into here, so I went in with rock bottom expectations and genuinely did enjoy a lot of it. The art is very pretty, and I'm not on board with a lot of the turns that the plot has taken over the years (or the fact that a core feature of this miniseries is one of my favorite characters spending like 200 years moping), but it was nice to see everybody again. Someone on FFA referred to Cutter 2.0 as Chad Cutter and I will never stop thinking of him as this.

Legion of Superheroes: Millennium & The Trial of the Legion (written by Bendis; various artists) - So I haven't picked up any LSH in a looooong time and decided to see what they're up to these days, and these collections, which are chronological with each other, looked like a little bit of a reboot/jumping-on place for new readers. And the art's nice. Unfortunately ... it's absolutely incoherent. I realize there are a kajillion characters, but let me just say, as a longtime reader of superhero team books, it is possible to handle a large cast without being nearly this confusing. It was sort of a perfect storm of plunging us IMMEDIATELY into a group scene with about 40 characters, frequent timeskips/location skips all over the place for no reason, AND a general tendency to switch back and forth between a verticle and two-page-spread panel layout with the result that I often lost track of where I was supposed to be reading on the page. Adding insult to injury, the Legion members all have little holographic pop-ups showing their superhero names and symbols, which was a great idea (in-universe and also for readers) ... rendered absolutely useless because 90% of the time the art is structured in such a way that you can't read them.

Let me give you an example of the timeskipping. In book 2, there's a sequence in which various characters are testifying at a mass trial involving like 50 participants. Then, apropos of nothing, there's a caption "30 seconds later" and now everyone is yelling at someone who, up to that point, had done nothing wrong. Next panel is captioned "12 seconds ago" and you see him punching down someone in the courtroom. WHY. WHY WOULD YOU NOT JUST SHOW THIS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. It's so stupid. And large parts of BOTH books are structured that way.

Other questionable writing choices: the first volume opens with AT LEAST one individual issue, possibly two, that are an endless series of timeskips following an immortal from modern-day Earth to the Legion's time period. She doesn't even end up being a major character in the rest of the series! I sort of see what they're going for - showing the passage of time - while also finding it excruciating to actually read; it's just an ongoing, absolutely endless series of vignettes in which she spends a page or two in one time period, then it skips to a new setting some unspecified time period later. It gives you very few cues as to how much time has passed or where she is now, and as soon as you get oriented in a new location, it time-skips again. And sometimes it skips backwards in time too? I think? Thought it's sort of hard to tell, but it would abruptly whiplash from her being alone in space to back in Gotham fighting a Batperson, or whatever. WHERE ARE WE? WHEN ARE WE? WHO KNOWS?

So that was definitely A Choice, and then she finally catches up with the Legion in the aforementioned establishing group scene involving ALL OF THEM, and then there's a timeskip 1000 years backward to the Justice League and ANOTHER giant group scene with all of THEM (which matters to the rest of the book only in that it's how Superboy gets to the LSH's time period), and .... look, I have read MANY superhero team comics, including a number of older LSH ones, and I can't remember off the top of my head anything that handled a large team this badly.

It's not until a couple of issues after this, which continue to be an absolute blitz of characters and fragments of plot, that it FINALLY gets around to introducing them one by one and actually doing some origins stuff in which you get to know them individually and see how several of the mains joined the Legion in this timeline. WHYYYYYY not lead with this?! Especially since other aspects of the comic seemed to be aimed at introducing new readers to it! Except VERY BADLY!

Oh well. Things I liked: the art was nice, and several of my faves (including Saturn Girl and Brainiac 5) got a lot to do. I like some of the new character designs a lot; the tri-colored Triplicate Girl in particular is really nice. (Although Element Lad's modern design looking so much like Brainiac 5 bothers me; he basically looks like Brainy on a bender.) And Mon-El actually has a nice little mini-arc, and also kids?! So parts of it were fun. But seriously, it would have been so much better if more of it was more linear with less jumping around and more character introductions front-loaded. I get that it's a little dated to do this, but seriously, there's a reason why so many superhero comics for so many years told you who everybody is up front. It's because if you don't, you have to keep several dozen characters in your head all at once and who has time for that!