HAPPY NEW YEAR

I'd say it was a pretty good year around here. I started with some DC, covering the full initial Marv Wolfman/George Pérez run on NEW TEEN TITANS, at roughly two issues a post, in a less "in-depth" format than I normally do for my Marvel stuff. But the in-depth style stuck around as well, first with MOON KNIGHT on Fridays in the spring and then with IRON FIST and MARVEL TEAM-UP by Chris Claremont and John Byrne for a good chunk of the middle of the year. After that we looked at "The Evolutionary War" from 1988, and now we've closed out the year the same way it began, with less-structured DC material in the (pleasing) form of POWER GIRL as drawn by Amanda Conner.

Along the way, I filled up my Fridays with some Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale Marvel stuff and GUNDAM: THE ORIGIN early on, followed by the afore-mentioned early MOON KNIGHT by Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz. As last year, there were some odd mini-series from Marvel Unlimited, and then we moved into our summer popcorn season with UDON Studios' STREET FIGHTER, following the tradition begun last year with DANGER GIRL. A year's worth of Fridays were then capped off with another round of TRANSFORMERS comics, this time from the brief Dreamwave GENERATION ONE era.

On top of all that, I kept up my regularly scheduled "Unboxings" one Sunday a month, and I decided to review one X-MEN collected edition per month as well, which will continue through 2016 and perhaps even a bit into 2017.

So what else have we got coming up in 2016? Tomorrow, I'll announce the next long-term review series, and this one is a doozy; a Marvel run consisting of over sixty issues by one of the premier creative talents of the eighties. That should run all the way through August, then I'm thinking about jumping back over to DC for the remainder of the year, but that's still up in the air.

Fridays will see the completion of the Dreamwave TRANSFORMERS in January, followed by the third and final round of GUNDAM: THE ORIGIN volumes in February. After that I have a non-Marvel/DC "Springtime Grab-Bag" lined up, consisting of multiple series from various publishers, for which the following random keywords would apply: Zelda, Dodson, Simonson, DANGER GIRL, and the Hyborian Age. Make of that what you will. Then I'm looking at a little more Marvel Unlimited action spotlighting Alan Davis, and that will take us into the summer.

This year's summer popcorn project is going to be an early 00s nostalgia revival of a popular eighties property, and will be a bit shorter than the previous DANGER GIRL and STREET FIGHTER projects, only filling about half the season. After that, I'm keeping my schedule open for a few weeks, but the fall will hopefully see another round of TRANSFORMERS, this time most likely looking at the remainder of the Dreamwave canon I didn't cover in 2015, including the series left unfinished by the company's demise (WAR WITHIN, MICROMASTERS, TRANSFORMERS/G.I. JOE, etc.)

So there are a few holes to fill, but I always like to leave some things up in the air in case something new pops up. Even now, I'm debating a few different ways to fill in the rest of the summer. But at any rate, I think I have a pretty good outline for the year, and I look forward to another dozen months of reading and writing about comics.

Thanks as usual to everyone who drops by to read and comment on this stuff. I hope it's as entertaining for you as I imagine it to be in my head! And thank you as well to those who click my Amazon links to purchase something. I don't overtly advertise around here, but anytime you do that, it costs you nothing extra while putting a few cents in my pocket, so I really appreciate your patronage, especially if it's one of my collected edition reviews that gets you to pull the trigger on something.

And now it's on to the new year! See you tomorrow for the announcement of the next big Marvel project.