NANP: Names In Jan Xu

For today’s Names: A New Perspective, I have Singaporean SFF author Joyce Chng stopping by to talk about the names in her Jan Xu series. Joyce also writes short fiction under the name J. Damask and is one of the very few Asian authors that I know of and interact with. Her work came to my attention rather recently and I’ve been meaning to give it a go for a while. Hopefully, the fast-incoming New Year means that I’ll get that chance soon. I read very little in the way of SFF that is not West-centric, but I’ve read some stuff here and there and have been exposed to some really great stuff, and its clearly a vibrant up-and-coming market as well. Besides, I’m always on the look-out for something new and the Jan Xu series seems like a good place to start. In the meantime, here are some of Joyce’s thoughts on the topic of names.

Wolverine and the X-Men #38 (Comics Review)

Thanks to the recent Battle of the Atom crossover event for the X-books, I’ve started reading more than Brian Wood’s X-(Wo)Men ongoing and this has been an interesting month after all that wrap-up since the books are now dealing with the fall-out of the event. Things were a bit removed in Bendis’ Uncanny Avengers #14 but Jason Aaron’s Wolverine and the X-Men #38 takes a much more immediate approach to things.

We saw at the end of the event that SHIELD maintained its own stocks of Sentinel robots and Maria Hill arrives at the Jean Grey school in this issue to make some things clear to Wolverine and the other teachers at the school. Namely that the X-Men are all much more trouble than they are worth and she isn’t afraid to play some really hard ball. But that’s not all that happens as there are some new students as well and so there is a lot going on in this issue, to varying degrees of success.