Monday 2 February 2015

What I've been reading - historicals

Mondays ought to be an update on my current saga progress (whether Morland or Plaidy - or both) but since I finished The Long Shadow I haven't been getting very far into The Chevalier.  I blame Annunciata-fatigue.

But I have been reading historicals - of a sort.

I've been reading Marvel 1602.

Yes.  That Marvel.

There's a long chain of events that brought me to this (I totally blame Tansy Rayner Roberts) but basically, this is a collected comic series written by Neil Gaiman that inserts a whole lot of Marvel universe characters into the very late Elizabethan period, combining James VI and I's ascent to the English throne with mutants and superheros.

Yes there's dodginess (a white Native American, sigh), and it was written pre cinematic universe, so Nick Fury is also still white, which is a bit of a shock every time I see it.  But this really is such a fascinating blending of the worlds of Marvel superhero/X comics and Elizabethan/Jacobean history.

I'm really loving it.

I'm also really only just getting into reading comics this year, mostly thanks to G Willow Wilson's Ms Marvel and expanding into Wilson's run of X-Men as well.  Because of my general unfamiliarity with comics reading, I really appreciate Comixology's "Guided View" for digital comics.  It's almost making me want to buy future Ms Marvels in digital rather than paper form, but I also feel like it's important to have Kamala Khan's story in hard copy.

Meanwhile: I'll try to review 1602 more fully when I have finished it, probably while I simultaneously try to decide whether I need to get 1602: The New World, 1602: Fantastick Four and heaven forbid, Spiderman 1602...