HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Here we are once again. I had another pretty productive year, dedicating the entirety of my Monday and Wednesday postings to John Byrne's FANTASTIC FOUR. Of course I stopped doing Wednesday posts about halfway through the year to make certain I'd have enough of a backlog to keep going after my son was born in July. Things have worked out well and I intend to keep doing Mondays only for the foreseeable future.

Fridays will remain in the rotation as well, and this year's Fridays covered a plethora of items. My Dreamwave TRANSFORMERS posts from Fall of 2015 carried over into January, and that was followed by the conclusion of my three years'-long look at GUNDAM: THE ORIGIN. From there it was an assortment of books from various publishers covering things as varied as THE LEGEND OF ZELDA, Walter Simonson's RAGNAROK, Terry Dodson's MUSE and RED ONE, and a MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE graphic novel from my childhood. Conan and Red Sonja followed these various items, then we looked at the Marvel work of Alan Davis and a couple other Marvel books before jumping into The Summer of ROBOTECH. And when ROBOTECH wrapped up, it was back to Dreamwave's TRANSFORMERS for the remainder of the year.

This year, Fridays should be just as varied. With GUNDAM: THE ORIGIN finished, I have a new manga project to look at through February, which will be announced next week. After that I have about two solid months of vintage DC planned, followed by an assortment of IDW items I picked up in a digital sale last year. Then we'll have this year's "Summer of...", which is something I've wanted to read for a long time and which I'm really looking forward to finally examining. Then the Fall TRANSFORMERS tradition will continue, with another continuity from a publisher other than Dreamwave, Marvel, or IDW.

Mondays, meanwhile, should be Marvel-centric for the entirety of 2017. Thanks to the great state of California (a statement I'm not sure I've ever uttered before now), I spent the final six weeks of 2016 on paid paternity leave, and during feedings and naptimes I binged on yet another classic Marvel run, and I've already written up posts for every single issue. So my Mondays are already filled through September, which I think is the furthest ahead I've ever managed to work since I started this blog. I'll announce that project this Wednesday, following a final look back at John Byrne's FANTASTIC FOUR tomorrow.

Then there are Sundays, where The Unboxing will continue every month. I've also got two more X-Men collections to review, THE TRIAL OF GAMBIT and OPERATION: ZERO TOLERANCE, in January and February, which will conclude that monthly project I started back in October of 2015. At the moment I have no plans for something new to take the X-Men series' place, but we'll see if I come up with anything. Of course anything else that strikes my fancy will pop up on Sundays as well, though currently there's nothing slated for the near future.

So thank you once again for your patronage over the past year. I continue to have fun writing up these posts and I hope they bring some small amount of entertainment to those who read them!