Unexpected Comic Review: Injustice, Year One

What is the interest of an Elseworlds or, though not as relevant here, “What If…”, story? The interest stems from looking at what might be different from the known: how what you know of a character or a world might differ, given some change or other. It relies on that existing knowledge to create a […]

How Bendis Broke the Marvel Universe (—and What I Mean by “Broke”)

PREFACE: This is another Reddit post, this time from 5/31/2021 Should I have split this up? Maybe. Probably. Sure. But I haven’t, so I guess I just need to live with that. Take comfort that there are 10 12 whole footnotes which I guess you can totally ignore if I wrote them right! For those who asked/desired that I […]

Thanos is horrendously, persistently misunderstood and mis-described

NOTE: This is actually a post I made over on Reddit ages ago (12/18/2020, for posterity), but it occurred to me it basically belongs here as well. Surprise, people who are here for movie reviews! There are two common complaints I hear of Jim Starlin’s version of his character Thanos: “He’s just fan fiction: he’s […]

Watchmen (2019)

It wasn’t until someone at work with whom I occasionally discuss comic books lent me a copy of Doomsday Clock that I got around to reading the follow-up, in writing, to Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen. I was…not impressed, in that it seemed like a reasonably coherent story, but one that had no good reason to […]

Those 1990s Comic Characters That Got Me Collecting Again

I started collecting comics, like, for real about 7 years ago. I “collected” in the sense that I bought them off the grocery store spinner when I could as a kid, and that I had subscriptions to Amazing Spider-Man and Green Lantern (v3) for a time. I would occasionally buy a back issue excitedly (Morbius, […]

What the…?! Retcons…ahoy?

So, I often complain about the way that I feel Bendis destroyed one of Marvel’s core elements: a sense of desire for continuity. Yeah, problems always occurred–the No-Prize would come from making everything fit together, but usually because “why was this costume looking wrong right then?” or “wasn’t so-and-so over here at that time?” […]

Constantine: City of Demons

Not gonna lie. I haven’t actually finished this yet. Very quickly, I realized I was not going to care much about this. Two fronts didn’t help things, despite the promise of a J.M. DeMatteis writing credit: the animation and the fact that this is most emphatically not John Constantine. To start with, they still can’t […]

The Essays of Brubaker/Phillips’s Kill or Be Killed

Recently ended, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s most recent collaboration, Kill or Be Killed, ran for 20 issues. Each one had an essay from a variety of writers, and typically they related back to (mostly) noir films, though it started more broadly with themes–first revenge, then deals with the devil, and then Kim Morgan came on […]

A Trivial Post on a Funny Thing:

There are a lot of characters in comics with super-convoluted histories, or confusing legacies. Hawkman is notorious for the impossibility of consolidating his identities and origins at this point. Katar Hol, Carter Hall, reincarnated Egyptian or alien cop. They’re the same person! One’s a legacy! Who knows! Some are less confusing if you read the stories, […]

100 Bullets, Legion of Super-Heroes, and Artistic Choices

I’ve been alternating comic reading, despite appearances, with watching things lately. I’ve mostly been plowing through this, 100 Bullets, which I started late last year (volumes 1 and 2 of the Deluxe Editions, which I read most of on a train in California) and finished in a reasonably quick run over the last two months […]