Yeah this looks really appealing but I'd prefer a collected print edition. I just like flicking through real pages.

I read a bunch of trades this week, including…

Wow, you were really racking them up there.

I'm so glad that Mignola is back to drawing Hellboy again. Duncan Fegredo does an admirable job but there's nothing quite like Mignola's style, all thick black shadows, hard, craggy edges and Kirby-esque dynamism. In my mind, BPRD should be the book that is farmed out to other talents; I want Hellboy to be all…

Yup, Hellboy is just numbered. At some point in the story *SPOILERS* he leaves the BPRD, which is about when that title started up. Quite a bit later BPRD was renamed/renumbered as BPRD: Hell on Earth, but now it's back to just being BPRD. I think. I'm a little behind, myself.

I think it's just Jaime's books that have the character keys. My copy of Heartbreak Soup doesn't (it's the recent Fantagraphics softcover version), and I imagine it's because the characters' appearances change pretty drastically in some cases from story to story, so it'd be difficult to reconcile them all. My approach…

I read the first volume of Gilbert Hernandez's Love and Rockets stories, Heartbreak Soup. I'll admit it took me a while just to get used to the idea of not having Maggie and Hopey in a Love and Rockets book (I got into Jaime's Locas stories in a big way a while back), but I really grew to appreciate the small town…

Wow. So souls. Such dead. Wow.

I played Dark Souls as a knight and quickly learned that parrying was one of the more unreliable things to try in a fight, so I stopped using it past the Undead Burgs. Didn't need it.

Oh uh, Cartman. It would be weird if it was Catman.

The reveal of the Gaping Dragon in Dark Souls had me shrieking in terror. I'm hoping there's a similarly terrifying boss lurking somewhere in DS2.

Good luck! Praise the sun!

It's a common snowboarding term, meaning to have your right foot forward instead of the more usual left. Probably you just needed to switch your feet around?

Oh my god yes. They're just presented in such a confusing way, I was sitting there thinking, "What? I'm pushing the goddamn stick down then up! What do you want from me?!" while every time you fail you have Catman or whoever going, "No dude, you fucking suck. Do it like this" over and over. Terrible.

Okay, I'm not much of a manga guy, but Phantom Thief Jeanne sounds pretty much like the worst thing ever.

Speaking of Avengers titles, is anyone reading Uncanny Avengers? I hear it sort of follows on from Remender's run on Uncanny X-Force, which I loved, so I'm interested to try it out.

Wow, that's pretty in-depth, dude. I just ordered the first TPB of Quantum & Woody and am very much looking forward to some crazy superhero humour. Those Valiant trades are pretty dang cheap, as you say, so I will probably crack into Archer & Armstrong as well sometime.

Thanks! I guess I should just bite the bullet and take the plunge and mix my metaphors.

In an ideal world they would slim down their X-men, Avengers and Spider-man output a bit to make room for some other heroes. How many X-books are there at the moment? Like six? I wouldn't even be surprised if it was more than six.

Also, speaking of Doop, when is Marvel going to rerelease X-Statix in non-omnibus form? I know a lot of people really go for those 1000-page-plus deluxe versions, but am I the only one who finds them too massive and unwieldy?