My free trial of kindleunlimited has turned into my first month of Paying For It...and it's beginning to look like I might be on this train for a while. I keep turning up things that I really want to read...and the cost of them far exceeds the $10+ monthly fee, so as long as that remains true, I am going to stick with it.
For instance...I was looking through the comic books available on kindleunlimited*, and I happened upon this beauty:
Teenagers from the Future: Essays on the Legion of Super-Heroes edited by Timothy Callahan. I've just finished reading this one--and it took a few days, despite the fact that I was leaning into it pretty hard. Which is a good thing. According to the details posted on Amazon, its 336 pages long (I read it on my Kindle, and the pages weren't numbered), and it includes 18 essays, 16 of which were quite good, and one of which was excellent. The excellent one was "Radical Experimentation, and Dystopia in Giffen’s Legion" by Julian Darius, who was the founder of Sequart Research and Literacy Organization, which published this book.
I liked this essay--which was quite long, about 50 pages--so much that I was seriously tempted to put down $125 for
And I still might do that. (Christmas is coming, after all, and I don't get presents these days.) I did buy the first issue of this run from ComiXology, just to get a taste of what Dr. Darius was talking about. It was only 99¢, and it certainly did make me want more, but the rest of the run was $1.99 per issue, and for a total of 48 issues (the omnibus includes the 39 Legion of Super-Heroes issues plus some other stuff related to that story line), that would take the ComiXology price up to $77.61, and that seemed too close to the hardback omnibus price for me. Of course, it'd be a lot easier to read on the Kindle, and the danger of being crushed because I fell asleep reading would be eliminated. We'll see how that works out. But the point is that I wanted (hell, want) to buy this, and it's because Dr. Darius' essay was so good.
I also discovered that there were a few other Sequart books that I want to have a look at...starting with another Julian Darius item, The Weirdest Sci-Fi Comic Ever Made: Understanding Jack Kirby's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
As for this Teenagers From the Future...there were some nice surprises to be found here, too. For instance, the introduction is written by Matt Fraction, and even though I've given up on Matt, I have to admit that he does have some skills. And the essay "Liberating the Future: Women in the Early Legion" was written by one John G. Hemry, who is the real guy behind the pen name Jack Campbell--whose Lost Fleet series is good reading. Also, there was an essay entitled "The Amethyst Connection" by Lanny Rose, which brought the That's News To Me news that there was a strong connection between Amethyst / Gemworld and the Legion.
Definitely glad that I happened upon this book and Sequart in general. If you're interested in having a look without paying for it, remember that kindleunlimited offers a month's worth of free trial, which should be ample time to knock back a couple of titles from Sequart if you miss The Comics Journal but don't miss the shitty attitude that often (usually?) went along with its articles.
* It's not as good as having ComiXology, but there are quite a few titles I want to read, so I probably won't rejoin ComiXology Unlimited until I decide to leave kindleunlimited behind. (Assuming that that ever happens.)
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