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Scary Monsters and Super Creeps: An Appreciation of Steve Ditko

July 10, 2018 // 7 Comments

So I’m sure that, if you’re reading this, you’ve heard about the passing of Steve Ditko. A true giant of comics, Ditko stands in a position sort of opposite Jack Kirby in the funnybook pantheon. If Kirby is a pugnacious Thor, the god of a feisty heroic ideal, then Ditko is a nervous Hades, the god of dark obsessions and paranoia, his art best-suited to supernatural horror and shadowy urban crime drama. It seems ironic, then, that his most famous creation is the wisecracking [...]

The Toyetic Kirby

June 12, 2018 // 6 Comments

So at some point in the early 80s, Jack Kirby was asked to do some concept drawings of his New Gods characters for the Super Powers toy line. He obliged with some cast drawings… …albeit mostly of the bad guys. Which makes sense. The Super Powers line was based largely on the Superfriends cartoon show, which already gave them a large cast of heroes. Also, to be honest, the New Gods villains are better than the heroes, for the most part, so concentrating on Apokolips was probably a [...]

Fantastic Four Re-Mix, Part Seven: The Trial of the Thing!

April 1, 2018 // 0 Comments

So it’s been a while since we did any Fantastic Four Re-Mix. A full year, in fact. What can I say? I hit a snag in the plot and let myself get tripped up on it. And I’ve always felt just slightly silly doing these things, anyway, so it seemed better to just wander off. But I re-read the earlier chapters recently, and realized that I liked them quite a bit. That lead me back in, and I had enough story left to tell that I decided to unsnarl my plot and keep going. (And then, of [...]

Randoming Random Randomness: FUNNYBOOKSINREVIEWAREGO!!!

March 20, 2018 // 2 Comments

So I was thinking… You know what we haven’t done in a while? Just a bunch of random reviews with no connecting theme. And it’s probably a good time. We’ve got a couple of new number ones in the stack, some old favorites returning, some on-going concerns we can’t escape from… So let’s get right to it. Eternity Girl 1 by Magdalene Visaggio and Sonny Liew I bought this book primarily off the strength of the previews of it that ran as back-ups in last [...]

Murder, Gods, and Art

February 13, 2018 // 0 Comments

So I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here… The Wicked + The Divine: 1923 Special by Kieron Gillen and Aud Koch At times, I think The Wicked + The Divine is brilliant. It’s an exploration of mythology and godhood, well-researched and with hidden depths that reveal themselves when you really look at the gods the various cast members represent. And I love crap like that. At other times, I find The Wicked + The Divine tedious. It’s also a meditation on [...]

Two Weeks in the Funnybook Life

February 6, 2018 // 1 Comment

So last week, my attempt to answer a reader question turned into a discussion of my reading preferences, and why I generally prefer indie comics over work-for-hire stuff. This week, I thought I’d continue along the same lines, and take a look at every new comic I’ve read in the last two weeks. Not because it’s been a particularly great time for funnybooks. In fact, it’s been anything but. Few of my real favorites came out in the last two weeks, and in their absence I [...]

Waiting for the Killing Blow: Alan Moore’s Twilight of the Superheroes, Part Three

January 9, 2018 // 10 Comments

So here we are, three parts deep in our coverage of Alan Moore’s Twilight of the Superheroes, the great DC Comics cross-over that never was. In Part One, we discussed Moore’s thoughts on cross-over comics in general, and how prophetic his warnings about them have become. In Part Two, we looked at the story itself (a dystopian future where the super heroes have become the defacto rulers of society), discussed Moore’s take on the various iconic characters at the top of the heap, [...]

The Terrifying Notion of Survival: Alan Moore’s Twilight of the Superheroes, Part Two

January 2, 2018 // 8 Comments

So a couple of weeks back, we took a long, rambling look at the introduction to Alan Moore’s proposal for Twilight of the Superheroes, a 1987 DC Comics crossover comic that never happened. To be fair, our discussion was no more rambling than Moore’s own, but it still went on so long that we never quite got around to discussing the actual story he wanted to tell. Though I suppose we did give a hint: But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Moore’s proposal is sprawling, a fully [...]

Funnybook Heart of Darkness: If You Could Only Have Ten Comics, What Would They Be?

December 19, 2017 // 3 Comments

So I know I promised the second part of our look at Alan Moore’s Twilight of the Superheroes this week, but well… There’ve been some technical difficulties. I had that column almost entirely written, but it was lost in a hard drive malfunction, and I don’t have time to recreate it tonight. So instead, I thought I’d plug in a question a friend asked last week on social media that completely distracted me for two or three days: If you could only have ten single [...]

Being Fair to Bendis: A Queasy Look at Jessica Jones

July 11, 2017 // 1 Comment

So a couple of weeks ago, I really trashed Brian Michael Bendis’ new Defenders series, calling it the worst comic I had read in a while. But I’m hardly a knee-jerk Bendis hater, so I thought it was only fair to look at a Bendis comic I actually DO like, just for a balanced view of the man and his work, circa 2017. Not that I’m going to pull any punches; 2017 Brian Bendis is not the writer that 2007 Brian Bendis was. But every once in a while, he still plays in interesting [...]