All out of deconstruction puns

I read Reading the Vampire Slayer edited by Roz Kaveney today. As the title suggests, it is a collection of academic essays about BtVS. As usual with these things, its a mixed bag. Some of the essays are very insightful, others just miss the point and one is so badly researched I don't know why they bothered. Certainly worth a read if you are a fan of the show and have an inclination to academic analysis. A couple of big minus points though..
1 - List price is $60. No way is that value for money for a 270 page B size paperback. Perhaps a specialist text book might command those prices. Certainly nothing aimed at the mass market is worth that. Dymocks sold it to me at 75% off (i.e. $15 for the math impaired) which is closer to the mark.
2 - It only goes up to the end of S5 of Buffy and S2 of Angel. Apart from just missing out on all that good stuff, the later shows actually invalidate some of the arguments made in the essays.

Sucker

My but there seem to be a lot of streams of the X-men comics these days. I suppose I could do some research and find out just how many but I just really don't care that much. I am not really a big comic fan, but X-Men rates high enough that I will read it if it comes past me. But I will not go out of my way to read it let alone buy it. But, I am a big time Joss Whedon fan. I am hardly alone in that - he has a huge following from his TV work. Which is why Marvel got him to write the first 6 issues of the new Astonishing X-Men stream. This isn't new - the comics people have been getting celebrity guest spots to kick off new series for a while. Neil Gaiman seems particularly prone to this. It isn't as if Joss Whedon hasn't done comics before either - I also have a copy of the very good Fray. So combining all that, it was inevitable that I would buy the graphic novel style collection of the six Joss penned stories.

( Is it any good? )