HAPPY NEW YEAR!

As is tradition, the time is upon us for the annual Year in Review post, with a glance at what's upcoming. And I don't think I need to mention that it's been an... interesting and unusual year in the real world. But fortunately for all of us, this blog is about as far divorced from reality as is possible! So with that in mind, let's recap the past year's worth of posts.

It's been no secret that I had trouble keeping up my normal twice-weekly posting schedule beginning the middle of 2019. So 2020 started out with (mostly) one post per week, on Mondays -- and as I try to do every year, I opened things up with some manga, looking at DRAGON BALL SUPER and a couple of other DB items of note. That was followed with a "Springtime Grab Bag" consisting of a European comic series called LADY S and an assortment of items from DC, Dynamite, Dark Horse (by way of Marvel), and IDW, running a gamut of characters such as Conan, Red Sonja, Wonder Woman, He-Man and the ThunderCats, and the Transformers and the crew of the starship Enterprise.

Then we looked at Joe Casey's AVENGERS mini-series from the mid-to-late-00s, EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES I and II, and AVENGERS: THE ORIGIN. After that, we stuck with Marvel, but went a different direction, examining several years worth of Spider-Man newspaper strips by Stan Lee and a variety of artistic collaborators.

The newspaper strip motif continued as we moved into the adventures of SECRET AGENT X-9 by Alex Raymond, and then checked in on that strip again decades later after it had become SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN by Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson. That strip wrapped up last month, which led into a Monday hiatus for the final few weeks of the year as I geared up for 2021.

And around the same time I started looking at X-9, I also finally brought back Friday posts, looking for the first time ever at a TV series on an episode-by-episode basis -- and in keeping with the subject matter of this blog, it was a comic book-inspired show, AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES. In fact, that run of reviews is still ongoing (we haven't even finished season one yet), and should contnue well into 2021. But beginning next week, when we look at the comic book tie-in mini-series, I'm moving it to Mondays for the rest of the run, which should free up Fridays for other posts, assuming I can keep the twice-weekly schedule going.

As far as that schedule goes, my plan is to start off with a repeat of the year we just looked back on: that is to say, we'll continue DRAGON BALL SUPER and get through all volumes available to date, which should take us into February -- and then I want to look at another European series. I have a few in my digital backlog, so I just need to choose one (or maybe two). After that it will be springtime, and I think I want to get back to looking at a comic series issue-by-issue, after more than a year of not doing so. But rather than a specific run from an ongoing title, I'm thinking maybe I'll just cover the entirety of a series that only ran a couple years before being cancelled. I have a few candidates in mind, all Marvel, but I haven't settled on which to look at just yet.

After that, who can say? Though my time is more limited than ever before, I still enjoy running this blog, and I look forward to another year of whatever I wind up posting about. Thanks to everyone who reads along, and I hope you'll stick with me as we continue!