Posted on by Alexander Case

5 Favorite Anime of 2019

Well, another year come and gone, so it’s time for me to give some thoughts on my favorite shows of 2019 that I’ve seen. The keyword here is that I’ve seen. There are plenty of great shows this year that I missed, whether because they’re sequels to earlier seasons (Symphogear), or they just slipped under my radar, so I’ll need to come back to them later. As with all of my lists, these are in no particular order, so don’t consider a lower spot in the list, nor an absence from the list, as a slight against that work.

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Posted on by Alexander Case

House of X/Powers of X: Comic Review

Excerpt from the cover of House of X #1, with Cyclops, Jean Grey, Magneto, Wolverine, and an unknown 5th X-Man

A while back I gave some thoughts on my concerns about the upcoming X-Men series House of X and Powers of X by Jonathan Hickman, and where the X-Line was going to go from there. Well, Hickman’s first two series – House of X and Powers of X – are now out and I’ve read them, and now it’s time to re-assess some of my analysis, as we’ve gotten into the series coming out of those series.

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Posted on by Alexander Case

Scorching Ping-Pong Girls: Anime Review

Sports Anime is something of a blind spot in my viewing habits. A lot of the top shows of the past few years (Kuroko’s Basketball, Haikyu, Yowamushi Petal) are on my to-watch list, and a few other shows (Giant Killing, Free, Princess Nine) I’ve never gotten around to finishing. So on a recommendation I decided to sit down and watch Scorching Ping-Pong Girls, on the one hand I found it an enjoyable and brisk watch – but on the other, it left me hanging.

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Posted on by Alexander Case

My Hero Academia – Two Heroes: Anime Review

From Left, Iida, Ochako, Midorya, Bakugo, Todoroki - in their hero outfits on I-Island.

When it comes to anime films that tie-in to ongoing shonen series, generally they tend to not be canonical – and basically exist to show a whole bunch of additional cool fights. My Hero Academia: Two Heroes is basically that, except with the nice addition of showing a little bit more of All Might’s backstory, through the introduction of an old friend from his earlier career.

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Posted on by Alexander Case

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid: Anime Review

After this past year’s horrific fire at Kyoto Animation, I found myself looking at all the animated series that Kyoto Animation had done in the past, and found that I had seen so very few of them, and that they were also all on my to-watch list well before the fire. The body of work of the studio was at a level that I’d compare to GAINAX at their prime. So, having read the first volume of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid a couple jobs ago, while I was working in Downtown Portland, I decided to bump that show up on the list. Also, as a part of the weekly anime viewing nights I’d started with my parents after I got my Dad into anime, I decided to add that show to the rotation, sight unseen. The results were favorable, with an asterisk.

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Posted on by Alexander Case

Rivers of London – Action at a Distance: Graphic Novel Review

In the Rivers of London series, there’s always been something of a gap between what Thomas Nightengale, The Folly’s “Gov”, was up to between the end of the Second World War and the start of the series. There’s an implication that he’s been involved in varying degrees with the Met, but not heavily – if he had, then the Met wouldn’t have had to come up with the procedures they did when Peter Grant started working out of The Met. The most recent (as of this writing) collected graphic novel in the series, Action at a Distance, helps to answer some of those questions, though not without a few problems of his own.

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