Savage Sword of Conan #1-5: Comic Review

Top portion of the cover to Savage Sword of Conan #4

There aren’t a lot of fantasy comics out there, and the ones we get in the US are generally licensed from another property, whether Games like D&D or Pathfinder, or literary works like Game of Thrones, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, or Conan the Barbarian. So, when Marvel got the license to Conan comics again, I was interested, and when they re-launched their classic Conan titles – Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword of Conan, I added those books to my pull list.

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20th Century Boys: Manga Review

If I was going to describe 20th Century Boys in a high concept manner to someone in an elevator, I’d describe it as It meets The Stand. It’s a story that takes place over a vast scope of time, almost 30-40 years, with multiple time skips, and an apocalypse in-between, with a fundamental premise of a group of childhood friends being forced to face a great evil as adults. The difference is, the evil in It is a clearly supernatural, unearthly evil. The evil in 20th Century Boys is very, very human.

There are some spoilers below the cut.

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As a quick heads up – for the foreseeable future, my streams will be on hold. My last few attempts at streaming had about 65% of the frames dropped, and that was with attempting to shut down any system processes that used network traffic and after replacing my router.

Part of these issues were what lead to the Lost Episode of my Super Robot Wars V Let’s Play, which I got into on the May 30th installment. Going forward, Let’s Play installments will be recorded offline, and then uploaded to YouTube. This may lead to something of a delay in cases where I run into footage that triggers automated copyright bots.

I apologize for the hassle – I do want to start streaming again at some point in the future. Some bandwidth tests outside of Speedtest that I’ve run have lead me to suspect that my upstream bandwidth is being throttled.

This is something of an unwanted reminder of the importance of Net Neutrality – and I recommend readers contact their legislators in their country of residence to make sure that no-strings-attached Net Neutrality is made the law of the land.

Food Wars Vol. 1: Manga Review

Cropped cover of Food Wars Vol. 1

When I reviewed Today’s Menu for Emiya Family, I was impressed not just by the charm of the story, but how well the anime depicted the act of cooking – how well it showed its work. It was a manga about family meals. This wasn’t just represented by the choices of food prepared in the work, but on how the series depicted eating. However, Food Wars Volume 1, which I’m reviewing today, kicked off a sort of boom of cooking anime and manga that lead to series like Emiya Family, and Food Wars could not be more different.

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