The Week That Was 012725

Skeleton Crew, Russell Dauterman trading cards, and shameless plugs

Skeleton Crew

The first (only?) season of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew wrapped week before last. Outside of Andor, it's probably my favorite of the various Disney+ Star Wars shows, being a celebration of the tropes of 80s action-adventure movies starring kids (like Goonies and Stand by Me) while also being a thoroughly Star Wars story, one that speaks to a foundational theme of the saga just as vociferously as Andor does (albeit a different theme). I've enjoyed the other streaming shows (some more than others...) but there's something...definitive and declarative about both Andor and Skeleton Crew that elevate them above the "Dave Filoni playing with action figures" premises of most of the other shows.

It sounds like viewership was, sadly, low, so another season seems unlikely. Which is fine. The final episode needed at least one or two more scenes to give the show a proper denouement, but it didn't end on a cliffhanger or anything like that. But I also wouldn't object to another season, with at least some of the characters returning. Or to see some of those characters get picked up and put in Filoni's toybox. 

I reviewed each episode of the show for Comicon.com; you can check them out here if you're interested. 

Russell Dauterman Trading Cards

Last week, I received the first delivery of my rewards from the Art of Russell Dauterman Kickstarter, a full set of trading cards featuring Dauterman's art in the style of the 1992 Jim Lee X-Men cards. 

While the art isn't new — these are trading card versions of the trading card variant covers of Gerry Duggan's Krakoa Era X-Men series, which make them a weird kind of multimedia ouroboros — it's simply a delight to have them as trading cards, with the same cardstock and weight as the cards of old. All the little touches — from the Cerebro Scans and X-Tra Facts on the cardbacks to the way the team cards represent each of the different rosters of Duggan's run — put them over the top. There's even a checklist card, and the set finished with a nine card connecting image celebrating "The Dark Phoenix Saga" (though it's clear this was an existing image cut into nine segments vs an image designed to be formed by nine separate images from the way at least one, if not two, cards would make terrible standalone cards. 

Shameless Plugs 

I started covering the latest volume of Uncanny X-Men along with Adam Reck over at ComicsXF, the flagship series of the current "From the Ashes" publishing line. It remains a truly befuddling book, but I'm having fun digging into it; the current issue is functionally an homage to New Mutants #2. 

Over at Comicon, I reviewed Iron Man #3, the trade collection of Chris Claremont's nostalgia series Wolverine: Madripoor Knights (which takes place in the wake of Uncanny X-Men #268), Bereavement, a fun sci-fi murder mystery currently running a Kickstarter campaign, and contributed to the site's "New Year, New Comics" series, writing about my relationship with GI Joe comics and desire to revisit them.

Also, my ongoing "Trading Card A Day" project has reached Marvel Universe Series 4, with a new card being posted each day across nearly every major social media platform. For this set, I'm using scans of my own cards, which in addition to sparing me the characters to credit other scans, also means you sometimes get to see the little nicks and dents on the edges that indicate these cards were well-loved and oft-handled back in the day. So if you're not following that (or my daily series celebrating the 50th anniversary of the all new, all different X-Men this year), be sure to check it out on your preferred platform.  

What Else? 

What I'm Listening To 

I recognize that it's basically just an audiobook, but I've enjoyed revisiting Sherlock Holmes stories via Noiser's "Sherlock Holmes Short Stories" podcast, in which Hugh Bonneville of Downton Abbey fame reads a (seemingly) randomly selected story (usually broken into ~25 minute chunks). 

What I'm Selling 

Last year, I started having my brother post a few things of mine on his eBay account, and by the end of the year, I decided to start doing it myself. I'm mostly selling trades and hardcovers to make space for new ones, along with some slabbed comics. If you're in the market for such things, check it out. 

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'Til next week, Excelsior!