a graphic novel and a graphically enhanced novel

Finally read Illuminae! (Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff.) It's a found-document story that also sometimes uses elaborate graphic layouts to convey action, like, sentences about fighter ships moving through space being laid out in white along curving lines on a black background. Definitely gimmicky, and some of the dark grey-on-black felt like it would be hard to read for anyone with worse eyes than mine (there was this one page especially that I thought *must* have a printing problem... except it happened right at a major turning point so who knows...), but mostly well done and more engaging than I thought it might be. They used the format in some interesting ways for pacing and managed to pull off some stuff I didn't see coming, which in the world of YA science fiction is a good trick! I wouldn't recommend it unless you like both YA and fun-with-typography, one or the other of those things will annoy you if you don't, but I did enjoy it and will probably read the rest of the trilogy.

The Witch Boy is a 2017 middle-grade standalone graphic novel written and drawn by Molly Ostertag, who draws Strong Female Protagonist. Very good, with a "fuck arbitrary gender restrictions" message, and my kids have both enjoyed it (I think Q is more looking at the drawings than following the plot). I'm gonna nominate it for the Graphic Hugo, a category in which I'm often flailing for things to nominate.

movie catchup

Ok, I had dreams of writing a long review about everything I loved about Last Jedi, and, earlier, a long writeup of how I would have fixed Justice League, but I'm not sure I'm going to prioritize either of those any time soon, so here's a placeholder review for my own recordkeeping.

Justice League was a flat, incoherent mess without tension or conflict or urgency, topped off with patriarchy. I only saw it because I didn't want to miss a minute of Diana but many of those minutes were actively bad. I had a lot of fun thinking about how I would fix it though, so I guess it was useful as an exercise.

The Last Jedi was amazing and blew me away with what it dared to do and is certainly the most personally meaningful Star Wars movie I've seen. I don't know what Small Me would have thought about it - the one who dressed up in the sheet and side buns - but Big Me felt like it had been made for me. Was it perfect, no, of course there are things I could poke at. But I'm just so pleased that this is what someone decided to do with the Star Wars franchise, right now. People have done other things before and they might do other things later but this year, we got this one.