As always, let’s start with the numbers …

Physical Comics Read:  0(163/231)
Digital Comics Read: 0 (471/471)
Trades/Graphic Novels Read: 0 (7/11)
Books Read: 2 (115/123)
Movies Watched: 3 (184/194)
TV Series Watched: 0 (57/58)
TV Seasons Watched: 0 (102/105)
Podcast episodes remaining: 219

It’s better than it looks.

What seems like a light month really wasn’t because I tackled a whole pile of Teen Titans comics that I’d read before and that I’m considering offloading (hopefully selling them to my LCS). I had been meaning to mark all of these on the counter I keep on my phone, but at some point in the last month and a half, I’ve completely forgotten to do that. So I’m abandoning the counting thing this year but still tracking my Uncollecting via a piece of paper in my day planner like I usually do.

The podcast number is now down as well, mainly because I’ve started unsubscribing and deleting podcasts that I’m no longer interested in, mainly ones that had a pretty big number of unlistened to episodes. I don’t consider that against my mandate even though I said I was going to listen to everything, but I think that there’s also something to be said about offloading those things you know you are not going to “consume.”

Still, the stuff continues to be in various piles. Comics that are clearly in the “read or throw away” pile are just sitting there, books are overflowing from shelves, and movies are sitting in queues on various streaming services. But how much guilt can you really feel about this?

One highlight of this weekend–since I’m writing this a full week after I had intended–was Free Comic Book Day. My LCS–which has rebranded to Hello Comics–has a great FCBD policy where if you bring cans of food for the local food bank, you can get five extra comics. So I wound up with ten comics instead of just five. They are:

• DC’s Knight Terrors preview
• Marvel Voices 2023
• Star Trek: Day of Blood (IDW)
• Fright Night (American Mythology)
• Resistance: Uprising (AWA Upshot)
• Trese (Ablaze)
• Conan the Barbarian (Titan Comics)
• Runescape: Untold Tales of the God Wars (Titan Comics)
• Shadowman: Darque Legacy (Valiant)
• West of Sundown (Vault)

I’ve only read through four of the ten at this point. The DC book was underwhelming, but most of DC’s big event comics have been underwhelming to me for the last several years. In fact, I think the last big event I read when it was published was the stuff that came out of Rebirth. I’ve read a few of the big event books via the DC app, but for the most part they haven’t sucked me in the way that they would back in the day. I also put off reading any big event until it appears on the digital apps–DC or Marvel–because I just don’t feel like paying that much money for something that I may or may not enjoy. Marvel’s Voices was solid with a focus on a number of non-white characters who have also been showing up in MCU movies and television shows. In fact, what I enjoyed about that book was that unlike DC’s offering, the Marvel book was a little lighter in tone and felt very much like a superhero comic.

The other two I’ve read so far are IDW’s Star Trek offering, which is the prelude to an even that looks like some sort of war with the Klingons–it looks decent, but I’m still neck deep in older Trek books. The book-length Lower Decks story was great, though, and harkened back to What The–? and some of the other humor comics of my youth. And Fright Night–which is based on the class 1985 horror film–was a really fun read, although I don’t know if I’ll be buying anything that’s ongoing.

So I’ve got a nice solid pile of comics to read at the moment, especially since I just finished that Titans read through (blog post is coming up). Plus, some of the podcasts I listen to have been doing some great work and the school year is about to come to an end, so I’ll be able to watch way more television and movies.