Run run Runaways

I have been enjoying binge-ing (bingeing? binging?) Marvel's Runaways on Hulu, so much so that I've also read the first two trade paperback collections as well.  I like to know the source material, although I'm not a big comics reader.  I'm not well-suited to it: I read very quickly and I don't give the artwork enough attention.  But the television has been a lot of fun and I'm glad to have had both perspectives.

For those who don't know, Runaways (written by Brian K. Vaughn et als.) is about a group of runaway kids who discover that their parents are a secret and very evil cabal of Los Angeles millionaires.  After seeing their parents sacrifice a young girl, they run away and adventures follow.  The girls have superpowers - Nico is/becomes a witch, Gert has a telepathic link to a sentient dinosaur, Molly has super-strength, etc. - and the boys are smart and/or assisted by tech stolen from their parents.  Nico is my favorite character in both the show and the comics; I also like sarcastic Gert  (especially the show's iteration) and her dinosaur, Old Lace.

PC: Ars Technica

While the show hews closely to some of the source material, it varies wildly in some regards.  I'm being vague on purpose as I don't want to spoil anything.  In the show, the parents are much, much better developed.  I find this to be a double-edged sword, however: the character development makes them much better villains ... but I also resent time spent away from the kids.  I like the kids.

I only have one episode left and then I'm up to speed on the series.  I'm torn as to what to watch next.  It would make sense to move straight to Cloak and Dagger, as that is also based on a Marvel comic that has connections to/crossovers with Runaways.  But over on Netflix, the new Dark Crystal series is out (and I love The Dark Crystal) plus I'm starting to get in the mood for horror movies in advance of this year's Scarelicious October Movie Series.  What to do, what to do.

Vacation reading

Mr. Mouse, the new dog - a/k/a Boy Genius, for his propensity for accidentally locking himself in rooms - and I were recently down in the southern Utah desert for a week's vacation.  We did active stuff in the mornings (mountain biking and hiking) but hunkered down through the middle of the day, in the A/C and out of the sun, napping and reading.

I read all of the above books.  Well, technically I'm not quite done with Swan Song yet, and I didn't read Witches Abroad because I picked it up out of order.  But I did read the rest of them, plus the last two books of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, so that's a decent number of pages read.

Joe Hill's Stranger Weather is not his strongest outing; his other short stories are much better.  Similarly, his father's Elevation is a slight thing, a novella very much of its time.  I appreciate King's politics but this little book was a wee dite preachy.  The Girl With All the Gifts seems to be the novelization of the movie that stemmed from a short story.  I really liked the movie and am inclined to re-watch it, now that I've read the book.

Next up: back to the library to keep working my way through Discworld.