I just plowed through the first 10 volumes of collected Ms Marvel strips, covering 2014-2019, in like two days. They are sooooooooooooo good, and there is so much to discuss. I’m trying to figure out how to best discuss them here, and I think some form a readalong would be the way to do it, but only if there is interest.
Comic Books! They’re CONFUSING!!! I have never managed to read comic books the way they were intended, where you pick up an issue every week and occasionally have to cross to different serieses to see the rest of the story. But I am very big on the nice hardbound collections where it is one storyline start to finish collected for me.
That’s how I read Ms Marvel. There are 10 collected volumes that cover her first 5 years as a comic book character, when she was written and edited by the same team straight through. The beginning is clear, gaining powers and blah blah, and then the 10 volumes end with a nice “no matter what happens in the future, I will always have my friends and my home” ending.
The 10 collected volumes are available digitally from your library probably (Hoopla! It’s a THING!), or pretty cheap used from bookstores. I am honestly planning to buy them all for myself, I enjoyed them so much and will want to reread them and loan them out.
IF anyone is interested in a readalong, we could start with Volume one and break it down by chapter within the volume. Or we could do the whole volume in a week.
Or, IF anyone is interested in a readalong, we could jump around a bit and go to Volume 3 which is where I think it really hits its stride, no more character introductions and boring things.
Or, IF anyone is interested in a readalong, we could each read at our own pace and I could put up 10 posts right now for you to comment on.
I’m leaning towards the first option, I don’t think reading one or two chapters of a comic book should overwhelm folks too much and it would be fun to talk about it in that much detail. But again, ONLY if people actually are interested in a readalong!!!!
dontcallitbollywood 
I would revisit them and comment along for sure. No opinion on order or pacing, except that it usually takes me a couple of days to put my thoughts together and then find space in my life to write them down. I haven’t finished all ten either, so the last few would be new for me.
And only hardcore comics geeks read floppies. Fun fact, comics found a mass audience when Barnes & Noble and Borders came along, they were the first big book chains to take seriously the audience for comics, but they stocked bound volumes not floppies. This also coincided with the first manga boom, partly because bookstore customers skewed female and manga were more likely to have stories that appealed to teenaged girls and young women. I see Ms. Marvel and other new female heroes as the superhero comics publishers finally catching up to this much wider potential audience.
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I feel so much better knowing I am part of the comics reading majority! If nothing else, I can’t wrap my head around doing all that work for a tiny little comic I will read in 5 minutes. The collections at least take me an hour to get through.
Yaaaay, at least one person to join me! I’ll wait and see if we can get any others in our club.
On Sun, Jun 13, 2021 at 6:15 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Something else I found about local libraries. Many have subscribed to Kanopy that has many many movies that you have to pay to watch otherwise. I watched Another Round on Kanopy. Lucky Grandma which I have been meaning to watch is also on Kanopy. You can add multiple library accounts and that helps to expand the collection Kanopy gives access to.
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Yes Kanopy! It doesn’t have the mainstream stuff, but it has a lot of really interesting hard to find things. Either Hoopla or Kanopy (can’t remember which) also has a surprising number of 1970s Indian films.
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