Something For The Weekend: Your Weekly Round-Up Of Reviews, Interviews And More

by Olly MacNamee

Another weekend, and another week of no new comics. But, that hasn’t stopped us here at comicon.com HQ to get our thinking caps on and come up with a few inventive and, we hope, entertaining new columns over the past few weeks. It looks like we’re doing the right thing too, as many of these new spots have been greeted warmly by you.
So, what were people reading this past week with many of us self-isolating or following of politicians’ advise to stay in and stay safe? Here’s ten to take away.

While there are no new comics being printed and distributed at the moment, many of use are delving into our longbows and digging up some past classics, such as our very own Tony Thornley who looked back at Joss Whedon and John Cassady’s run on Marvel’s The Astonishing X-Men. You can read his thoughts on this run here in his new New To You Comics column.
A number of comic book companies continued to update fans with their rescheduled printing plans, such as Rebellion here in the UK, and Humanoids in the US.
While there are no new comics coming out over there in the Colonies, we here in the UK are still getting our weekly dose of Thrill-power thanks to Rebellion continuing to distribute 2000AD, which is handy as they’ve only just started their big new epic, starring Judge Hershey. Richard Bruton took a long look, as ever, at this week’s prog here.
Another new and popular feature we introduced to readers was our Shooting the Breeze interviews where we set the same 10 questions to various comic book professionals to see what they’ve been up to during this pandemic. We’ve had a lot of great answers from the likes of Paul Cornell (Doctor Who), June Brigman (Power Pack) and Richard Pace (Second Coming) and even better jokes. Do check them all out here, and catch them every day next week (or, until we run dry). I must admit, I wasn’t expecting so many take-ups by comic book creators and I certainly didn’t;te except such insightful and entertains answers either.
Meanwhile, outside of comics, readers were still keen to read up on news coming from other entertainment industries with Gary Catig covering gaming news such as the announcements that Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid became available for anyone with an XBox Game Pass and the news of a Lineage 2: Revolution update. Now more than ever, it seems, it’s a good time to spend some quality time with your favourite online game, whether on a console or on a mobile device.
Sticking with home entertainment, and many of you have obviously been watching Amazon Prime’s new slow burning sci-fi series, Tales from the Loop, which we’ve been reviewing episode by episode across the past week. You can read all our reviews of this Scandic-sci-fi series here.
Rachel Bellwoar reviewed the 1970’s film, Song of Norway, this week charting the early struggles of composer Edvard Grieg and his attempts to develop an authentic Norwegian national music. A bizarre DVD curio, but one that readers enjoyed, even though the subject matter was not something I thought comic book fans would go for. Go figure.
Back on the comic book front we took a look at John Carpenter comics coming from Storm King Productions, an advance review of Genu Vol. 1, news of new comic book titles coming to Marvel Unlimited, as well as a preview of new comiXology Original graphic novel, Quarter Killer. The comic book industry may seem like its on lockdown, but it’s good to see there still plenty of fuel in the tank still.
Rounding off the past week, and another popular interview, was a catch-up with Ian Edginton and Leigh Gallagher, who talk about their new graphic novel collection, Kingmaker: A Lost World, just yesterday. A great, long read worthy of your time. Check out the whole interview here.
Finally, and to leave you with a smile on your face, how could we not mention the #SixFanartsChallenge burning up the Twittersphere, which we looked at at the start of the week? Maybe something worth returning back to next week as more and more comic book pros get involved, such as the ever-amazing Otto Schmidt, who managed to knock out not one, not two, but three sets in total! And, here they are now.