Anime

Anime Review: Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included

Often with an anime series, you get the caveat of “Oh, it has a weak start, but it really sticks the landing in the conclusion” or the warning of “Oh, it has a good start, but really fumbles the landing”. Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included has the weird instance of being a series with a weak start, a weak end, but a really strong middle portion of the series. The series, which I’m going to just call Studio Apartment for the sake of brevity – starts out as a pretty standard magical girlfriend series, and ends as a magical girlfriend harem series – but there’s a moment in the middle, where the series really finds its feet as the supporting cast builds up – and where it has some interesting humor to go with it.

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comics

Book Review: Making Comics

When I was in college at Clackamas Community College (where I also met David, one of my co-hosts of the Anime Explorations Podcast) – one of my campus jobs I worked was in the library, where I worked the check-out counter. As one of the classes that was thought (occasionally) was Comics as Literature, a selection of graphic novels were on reserve at the front desk, and during terms where the class was not offered, I would help myself to read them during downtime. One of the books I read during this time was Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, and this inspired me to go on later to check out Reinventing Comics from my local library. It wasn’t until this year that I found out there was a third book in the series – Making Comics – and having found out about it, I checked that out from my local library as well.

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Books

Book Review: Barrayar

A little bit back I reviewed Shards of Honor, the start of the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold – which was a Swords & Laser book club pick. Well, that’s not exactly correct – it’s half of a Sword & Laser book club pick – it was instead selected as Cordelia’s Honor – a book that combines it with the novel Barrayar, which follows up right after it (and was originally intended to be the same book) – but got a few more passes for a later publication after the Bujold decided to split the two parts up, and which were later recombined. So, now it’s time for the rest of the story.

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