No column last week because I was sick but this week I am fully recovered and I have some stuff that I am really excited to tell people about. Comics, TV, music, books, podcasts: just another week for me.

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Purging Comics: Silent War and Siege: Embedded

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I took a little time to look through my 16 longboxes and pare them down to 15. (And then fill that newly emptied longbox right back up with comics that I didn’t previously have room for.) Some of the cuts were fairly easy as I’d outgrown them, while others were harder to make. I had to ask myself — even if I really liked these comics, would I really, honestly, ever read them again? If the answer was anything softer than a “Yeah, probably,” they were history. By the end of the evening I had two Bankers’ Boxes full of comics, some of which I’d never even read, that are (eventually) going to go out my door. I took time to give some of them a final/first read, and a couple of them deserve special mention. And they both happen to be Marvel mini-series that are small tie-ins to bigger recent comics events.

The first was a series that I liked, though I think it flew under the radar of most people: 2007’s Silent War. It’s a sequel to Son of M, which is a sequel to House of M, and usually event comics twice-removed are skippable, but Silent War has two big things going for it. The first is that it’s a book about the Inhumans, a group of Marvel characters whom I have always been intrigued by. A sampling: king Black Bolt, the ruler who cannot speak without blasting everything to smithereens by his powerful vocal folds; queen Medusa, she of the living prehensile hair; Gorgon, bodyguard to Black Bolt and cloven-footed powerhouse; and my favourite, Karnak, the warrior philosopher who can find the weak point in anything. These characters are noble outcasts even by Marvel standards, and anything they’re featured in I will give at least a cursory look.

The second big strength of the book is that the art is by Frazer Irving, who is just a phenomenal artist; expressive and painterly and not afraid to go for the weird angles when the story calls for it. He and writer David Hine craft a story where the Inhumans go to war with the United States of America in order to regain control of the Terrigen Crystals, which are sacred artifacts to the Inhumans and also the source of their incredible powers. The story has a few interesting turns but for me the plot is entirely secondary to seeing Irving’s take on the Inhumans. No slight to David Hine, who wrote the superb District X (speaking of underrated and underread Marvel books), but the story just establishes the Inhuman status quo for the late 2000s, a status quo that has changed at least twice since the end of this story. It works well enough, but the visuals stand head and shoulders above the plot.

The second series worth mentioning is Siege: Embedded, a tie-in to Marvel’s 2010 Siege event, in which Norman Osborn leads his team of Avengers on a trumped-up mission to conquer Asgard, which has taken up physical reality in Broxton, Oklahoma. Siege: Embedded focuses on two parallel stories. In one, Todd Keller, a neo-conservative talk show host, gets recruited by Osborn to report on the war as an embedded journalist; in the other, journalist Ben Urich and his colleague Will Stern travel to Broxton along with a disgraced Asgardian, the fantastic Volstagg the Voluminous. The two stories slowly start to dovetail over the course of the four issues, but as this is a tie-in story and not the event, the main story beats are more subdued than “bad guys look like they’re going to win until good guys get the upper hand.” Which is one of the best parts of the book; since writer Brian Reed and artist Chris Samnee know they’re essentially telling a peripheral story, they can tone down the bombast and tell a character-driven story that is funny and actually has a message that doesn’t hit me like a two-by-four in the face. I laughed at least once an issue at Reed’s dialogue, and Samnee’s art is always worth seeing in my estimation. (Also, the book has Volstagg. I have never read a book with Volstagg in it that I haven’t enjoyed at least a little bit.)

I may be getting rid of them but both Silent War and Siege: Embedded are good examples of event tie-in books exceeding expectations. If they can be tracked down I would heartily encourage giving them a look.

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Last week wasn’t just me enjoying Marvel ancillary event mini-series, each featuring a character that would make for an incredible buddy-cop-esque comic book. (I’m not kidding. I would pay upwards of a hundred dollars for a Volstagg/Karnak mini-series. I even have a plot idea in mind, so call me, Marvel.) Here’s what else I’ve enjoyed this week.

Books: I’ve raved about Megan Abbott before, and I’m about to do it again. The End of Everything is a fantastic book and I had a very hard time putting it down. Set in an American suburb in the 1980s, it’s the story of two 13-year-old best friends and what happens to their small community when one of the girls goes missing one horrible summer. It’s a very dark, black, troubling book, and given the subject matter it’s hard to say that I liked it per se, but I am extremely glad I read it. The narrator is on the knife edge of childhood and maturity, and I found her oblique, unreliable grasp of the situation incredibly effective as both a way of conveying the story and obscuring some of the important details. It’s a book full of dread and hope — as the story built, so did my internal tension, and even though I thought I knew how the story would end, I could not have predicted every aspect as it fell into place. Again: it is a dark book, and definitely not for everyone, but as someone who enjoys creeping into the darker corners of life I can’t recommend it strongly enough.

Podcasts: I listen to a lot of podcasts and rarely do I go back to revisit old episodes of my favourite shows, but lately I have found myself re-listening to quite a few episodes of My Brother, My Brother and Me. It’s a show where three brothers (Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy) take questions from listeners and then make a lot of jokes about it and sometimes even give a little bit of advice, as well as goofing on the most ridiculous questions that can be found on the Yahoo! Answers site. In the past year or so that I’ve been listening it has gone from “an okay show, I guess” to one of my Top Five podcasts, and I always listen the day it comes out. The old episodes hold up as well, and there are even best-of compilations and samplers for those people who want to get their feet wet before diving in head-first. The McElroy brothers never fail to put a smile on my face, and deserve many hundreds of thousands of listeners.

Music: This will make the second time I’ve talked about Lake Street Dive in this column but dang it, I can’t stop myself. I just acquired their 2012 Fun Machine EP and it is a lot of, well, fun. Fun Machine is a collection of six soulful and jazzy songs, five covers, and one original, and while the original (“Clear A Space”) is a groovy little potboiler, some of the covers are just spectacular. There’s a plaintive, slow version of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” that blew my brain open when I first heard it, and their cover of Hall & Oates’ “Rich Girl” is so catchy that it’s in my head any time I’m not listening to something else. It’s a swinging release that is well worth the $4 I spent on it.

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Before I go, a couple updates. I am happy to report that my Doom Patrol re-read is going along swimmingly — two words: Beard Hunter — and also that BoJack Horseman did finish strong, which was a pleasant surprise. And that’s a fairly full week for me! Until next time, try to find a few overlooked gems in your pop culture collection, and I’ll see you in seven days.