As I discussed in our previous installment, Planetary finishes in a comics world quite different than the one it entered. Sure, Marvel and DC still have an effective oligarchy and pervert suit/nurse novel/ammonite pimp/fanmen still rule the land, but they do so in a different — and I will be so bold as to suggest [...]
Planetary #1 came out on February 3rd, 1999. Britney Spears was still a chipper seventeen year old whose debut song “Hit Me Baby One More Time” was on top of the Billboard charts. New shows like Family Guy and The Sopranos had debuted days earlier on television. Nobody knew what The Matrix was and people [...]
Camp Twilight (from movieset.com)
I just read an editorial by Sarah Jaffe of Blog@Newsarama that largely centered around the negative reaction we’re seeing to the Twilight fans practically storming San Diego as we speak. I don’t disagree that a lot of the negative reaction to their presence this year is instigated by either overt or covert [...]
Gonna go ahead and say it: David Aja is the best thing to happen to comic book art since J.H. Williams III.
His technical and formal inventiveness is off the goddamn charts, and recently my co-Savage-Critic-ite Tucker Stone brought up what was a really damn great piece of storytelling from last week, Ed Brubaker and David [...]
What? It’s President’s Day, there’s no school, people are off work… it’s still Valentine’s Day Weekend!
All of the smaller images are thumbnails, so click if you’d like a better look.
1. Hellcat
2. Liver Blow!
3. Thing’s Trenchcoat, Hat and Glasses
Since it’s close enough to Valentine’s Day for government work, some of us at FBB have decided to once again put aside the women in our lives to reflect on our true passion: comic books. We decided to each list twenty-five things we love about comics, be they creators, characters, moments, plot devices, instances in [...]
Faces of Evil: Kobra came out two weeks ago, and if you’ve forgotten about it already, or never knew about it in the first place, that’s forgivable. A book like this would have normally passed us by more or less unnoticed, but we’ll be giving it a more extended look than usual, because it’s [...]
Even now I curse the day–and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,–
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men’s cattle break their necks;
Set [...]
It is said you must blog a mile in a man’s shoes before you may criticize his convention panel reports. So today, I have laced up another blogger’s shoes and covered the DCU panel yesterday at the New York Comic Con. Circumstances mean this is not nearly as timely as a professional site’s coverage, but [...]
I was chatting with Chris Eckert and David Brothers about how a lot of villains in comics seem to have no plausible motivation for doing what they do. This seems pretty obvious; for every Dr. Doom, who has an overabundance of motivation, you have a Bullseye who is just CRAZY and HARDCORE. If you’ve listened [...]
Awhile back I came into a big pile of copies of The Comic Reader, a fanzine/comics magazine published through the 1970s into the early 1980s. I picked out an issue released during the month of my birth (#162, November 1978) to kick off the series.
The most striking thing about The Comic Reader is how much [...]
So, hey, people sure are excited about this whole “Spider-Man Meets Barack Obama” thing. Here’s a few things I wanted to address about the excitement.
Politics! Superhero comics! THE TOPIC OF TODAY!
Superman #24
Anyone reading comics news sites has surely seen the 175-car pile-up that is the Robot 6 comment thread to Bill Willingham’s article on politics and superheroes. (I love how the Superman picture chosen there is the Alex Ross pose that mirrors the famous Alex Ross Obama t-shirt.) The [...]
I know I’ve been hip deep in the Distinguished Competition’s “summer” event for a while, and I apologize to the House of Ideas. (I won’t even bring up everybody else; I’m still a goddamn troglodyte making my way through 100 Rooms in the first Maggie the Mechanic trade, so please speak to me in short [...]