Hi gang, as you can tell from the title here, I’m launching a brand new podcast called The High Five. The idea is that I love pop culture so much and want to get the word out to as many people as possible, so I’m creating High Five lists each week that celebrate the worlds of film, TV, comics, books, toys, music and even other podcasts!

To kick things off, I’m doing a series of episodes looking back on the very bad year that was 2020 with an eye towards some of the great media I put into my brain. This first one gets into my favorite comic and book reading experiences of the year. You might notice a lack of horror titles and that’s because I’m going to do a whole separate list focusing on just that genre for most of these categories because I absorb so much of it.

I hope you enjoy the episode. If you’re looking for a rundown of what I talked about, hit the jump and see the comics and books as well as some other helpful links!

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My favorite comic-reading experiences of 2020 were going through all of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series from the first volume through Tempest. I also loved Jason Aaron’s Thor run — here’s the reading guide I mentioned in the episode — as well as Greg Rucka and Michael Lark’s Lazarus at Image. Marvel’s various Star Wars comics also rocked my world as did a full re-read of the Death and Return of Superman event that absolutely changed my life.

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Though I read far more horror novels last year than anything else, I still really enjoyed my friend Elizabeth Keenan’s Rebel Girls, all three of Carrie Fisher’s autobiographies — Wishful Drinking, Shochaholic and The Princess Diarist — as well as Joe Simon: My Life In Comics by Joe Simon, The Lady From The Black Lagoon by Mallory O’Meara and Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City!

I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you want more of me, check out @high5tj on Instragam, @poppadietsch on Twitter or drop me a line at high5tj at the Gmail!