Sara

Before I really begin I just want to say that my original plan was to talk about all the series that involve Tim Hunter at once. This was before I saw everything that would encompass. Yes, I know about the original limited series, the proper Books of Magic series, the Books of Faerie as well as a vague knowledge that there were some other titles out there. Once I started going through the digital comics collection I found, I realized that there were entirely too many books to consider in one discussion. Moreover it became clear that some of the offshoots were completely different stories about different characters or even completely different facets of Tim. As such it only made sense to break things down a bit, and the logical point was to take Tim's introduction to magic and his halting, stuttering, tragedy filled first steps into magic on their own. I will admit that when I was reading these, I started with the LS, then read the Children's Crusade storyline (after a brief hiccup involving me going from the LS straight into the proper run wherein I discovered that all those weird allusions to other stuff they made were from CC so I backtracked) before launching into the main series anew.

This wasn't the first time I had ever read BoM although it was the first time that I was lucky enough to be able to get my hands on all the issues. I only vaguely remember when I got the TPB containing the LS. It would have had to have been sometime during high school. Thanks to my English teacher I was completely and utterly in love with both Sandman and Neil Gaiman. As such I was sort of on a quest to find and devour every Neil Gaiman related thing I could get my hands on, which I'm sure is how I found the BoM LS. I know that I got either the first or the second BoM TPB when my father dropped me off at college for orientation/classes. I know that because I took it to the dance mixer some of the girls on my floor dragged me to, and since I just sat there reading it instead of dancing like an idiot I was chided a little by the upper class men supervising the event. It should come as a surprise to no one that I went to a dance and read rather than be social when I didn't know anyone.

I had always wanted to get more of the TPBs and finish reading the series. It was just one of those books that didn't demand my attention, though. It was quiet and somber so it was sometimes easy for me to forget about. It also had the misfortune of not being entirely written by Neil Gaiman. Had it been I'm sure I would have found ways to get it all much sooner. As it was I eventually put the other TPBs on my Amazon wish list and then promptly forgot about them each and every time I made an order. Once they fell out of print I removed them from my list assuming that was that. This occurred during my mostly out of comics phase so it was a lot easier to accept. So you can imagine how excited I was when I got back into comics and discovered all the BoM comics in that beautiful digital comics cache I had. I won't lie. There were times when I was reading the series that I honestly considered stopping because I just didn't feel like the series was at all worthy to is LS predecessor. In the end, though, it pulled together, and I am really glad that I read it because it contains worlds inside of it.

( Books of Magic *possible spoilers* )

Just a few days ago I finished reading the Children's Crusade crossover story on my Kindle. Despite being a Books of Magic reader (via TPB years after it was published), I had never actually heard of this story arc. I knew nothing about it until I was reading a website that had an article about some of the top story arcs not collected in TPB form. As a side note a lot of them were DC. That's understandable as DC has been pretty notorious about making things hard to get. They're improving, though. Not only when it comes to releasing things as TPBs but also with digital. This is very off topic, but I just bought all of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run digitally through comiXology for 99 cents as issue. It's a great price considering the cost of the TPBs. It also means that at some point I'm going to be talking about Swamp Thing here in more depth than what I'm going to hit at in this entry.

Anyway we're going back to the topic of the entry now. I just sort of wanted to lambaste and extol DC in the same paragraph because that's fun for me. It's also going to be the theme of this entry so everything sort of works together in ways that I had not originally foreseen or planned. Bad me for not doing that on purpose, but I just very recently finished a rather large cup of coffee so it makes me a little spastic.

The Children's Crusade story arc was a Vertigo crossover, which might mark the first and only one of its kind. It was presented in Children's Crusade #1, Black Orchid Annual #1, Animal Man Annual #1, Swamp Thing Annual #7, Doom Patrol Annual #2, Arcana Annual #1, and Children's Crusade #2. As previously stated it's not available as a TPB or at least it wasn't when the article I was reading was written. (For those of you interested in these sorts of things, the article in question is here.

( Children's Crusade *possible spoilers* )

Things are going pretty well. New position is so much less stressful although getting used to the new schedule still has me thrown for a bit of a loop while I get used to it. Then there's the fact that our IT department didn't install everything on my computer properly, and I can't do parts of my job because of it. That does worry me, but my boss knows that I've been emailing them every week for a month. Mostly because I put him on the email chain. He even emailed, and they ignored him too. Excellent.

Going out of order, I decided on a forum setup for the game I had been talking about. I am currently working on building it and all the various things included in setting up a forum game. You can actually see if here and feel free to give me feedback. I've mostly just been trying to figure out how to make someone else's CSS behave since I have no idea how to write my own.

The best (and worst) thing about the new position by far is that one of my co-workers is about on the same level of comic book geek as I am so we spend a good bit of time talking about them. He has a tendency to read things I don't so I've been learning a lot about Captain America. He's also a really big DC fan. I have hit and miss DC knowledge. All his talk about the new 52 perked my interest, though, and I actually pre-ordered eight TPBs yesterday: Legion of Super-Heroes, Legion Lost, Teen Titans (Scott Lobdell FTW hopefully), Animal Man (per co-worker's suggestion), Birds of Prey (ZOMG, thank goodness someone is using Katana because I loved her in Batman and the Outsiders forever and ever ago), Justice League Dark, Justice League International (one word: ICE!) and Suicide Squad (Harley Quinn, nuff said). We'll see how they are.

Also thanks to our conversations, I ended up buying the comics edition of Collectorz as well as the app that turns my phone into a bar code scanner.