As April winds down, our first meeting for May approaches! We will be meeting at the shop at 6 PM on Sunday, May 3rd with Black Hole, the Harvey and Ignatz award winning tome from writer/artist Charles Burns, about grotesque mutations being passed between teens. Yeech! Our other reading group for The Invisibles will be meeting at 6 PM on Sunday, May 17th to discuss volumes 4+5 of the series. We still have some copies of Black Hole and The Invisibles vol 4 + 5 available for purchase, and as a reminder our current Reading Club titles are 20% off of the listed price.
And here’s our schedule for the next two months, all reading groups meet at 6 PM at the shop.
Sunday, May 3rd: Black Hole
Sunday, May 17th: The Invisibles vol 4: Bloody Hell in America + vol 5: Counting to None
Sunday, June 7th: Junko Mizuno’s Cinderalla
Sunday, June 21st: The Invisibles vol 6: Kissing Mister Quimper
If you’d like to join come on into the shop and sign up. The Club meets at the shop on the first Sunday of the month to discuss a previously selected graphic novel, and club members will also choose the next month’s reading after finishing the discussion. The club currently also meets on the third Sunday of the month to discuss The Invisibles, and these discussions have been my favorite so far. If you’ve missed the first two and would still like to come, don’t hesitate. Read the summaries below for more information on Black Hole & The Invisibles volume 4 + 5.
Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the out-set that a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways – from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) – but once you’ve got it, that’s it. There’s no turning back. As we inhabit the heads of several key characters – some kids who have it, some who don’t, some who are about to get it – what unfolds isn’t the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself – the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape. And then the murders start. As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it.
In a world where paranoia is a survival skill, the only hope for humankind is a group of unconventional occultist freedom fighters called the Invisibles. In this collection, the team launches an assault on an underground New Mexico lab to free the cure for the AIDS virus from the alleged inventors of the disease: the U.S. government.
The exploits of the secret society of anarchists continue. This collection includes the groundbreaking stories “Time Machine Go,” “Sensitive Criminals,” “American Death Camp,”and “And We’re All Police Men.”