reading wednesday

I read The Umbrella Academy, Vol. 1: The Apocalypse Suite, by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá. I enjoyed this, but I don't think it would have worked for me if I hadn't already watched the Umbrella Academy tv series. The book puts a lot of cool bits on the page, but leaves it to the reader to provide the connective tissue to make a story.

The tv show used its gradual reveal of their Mom's nature to show things about the kids' characters, their relationships, and their history. In the comic book, as soon as we see the Mom, Diego rips off her clothes to show us that her body is a combination of anatomical model and dressmaker's dummy. Why? Because it's cool! But what motivates him to do that? No idea!

The female characters are crap. As a child, one of the sisters gets to save some children; as an adult, she can't even manage that. The other is -- surprise! -- the most powerful of the seven, but first she is brainwashed and drugged out of being able to use her power, and then she is reprogrammed to use it in service to someone else's evil plan. Both sisters are there to fail, to be shouted at, to be told they're useless, to BE useless, and to be the object of incestuous love. And both sisters finish the book hospitalized and depowered.

Growing Good Food: A citizen's guide to climate victory gardening

Growing Good Food: A citizen's guide to climate victory gardening, by Acadia Tucker

Your own personal Climate Victory Garden can suck tons of carbon out of the air and store it in the soil and in the bodies of plants, animals, and all the other kingdoms. This is carbon storage, not carbon sequestration, because all those carbon atoms are still part of the carbon cycle; but the actions of each gardener can keep carbon in the carbohydrate step of the cycle for years or centuries, instead of sending them to the landfill, where they will undergo anaerobic decomposition and turn into methane.

Eating fresh tomatoes from your garden is also good. Tucker talks a bit about how to do both, producing tomatoes out of the soil while still driving carbon into the soil.