Last time I probably spent too much time rebutting Colin Smith’s review of The Ultimates and extrapolations about its creators and publisher made from a single comic book. I said people needed to look at things in context. I want to make something clear: no one can tell anyone else what to be offended by. [...]
This is going to be a quick one. I’ve been thinking about canon, alternate takes on Marvel/DC properties, cultural ownership and the artificial rules of storytelling in fictional storytelling over the last couple of days. I’m still working through some ideas on the latter two, but I want to spend a little time on the [...]
“Writers don’t do stories specifically to piss off fans. Writers write stories about which they feel passionate and invested. As a reader, you’re entitled to one thing and one thing only: a reading experience in exchange for your purchase. And if you like that reading experience, the expectation is that you’ll come back for more. [...]
Iron Man 2.0 #6 came out this week, the second part of the book’s tie-in to Fear Itself. And by tying into Fear Itself, I mean that Nick Spencer really wanted to write an Iron Fist/Immortal Weapons series, and I guess all of the editors were so busy coordinating a summer crossover that he snuck [...]
It’s Thursday morning and DC is still parceling out its Big Relaunch News, with 48 of 52 books officially announced. I’ve been keeping track of them in a Google Spreadsheet! The only books left unannounced as those in the Superman Family, which is obviously being saved for tomorrow. Given their weird press junket (USA Today, [...]
DC has been issuing press releases left and right lately, hyping up their Big Overhaul in September. I’m sure their press department is working like mad, but some really goofy things have slipped out as a result. For instance! On the subject of the oft-delayed Batwoman #1: It’s very important in several different ways [...] [...]
Comic Book Hippies were really getting it from all sides, weren’t they?
I’ve been in hardcore research mode for some upcoming BHM posts, and wanted to share this panel I came across. It illustrates an overlooked cost of corporate monoculture: modern labor protesters have only giant inflatable rats to rent. What happened to the Peace Missiles?
We celebrate New Year’s all month long at Funnybook Babylon. Here’s more of the top ten pamphlets of 2010 not named Daytripper. 6) Amazing Spider-Man #630-633: “Shed” (Zeb Wells, Chris Bachalo, Emma Rios: Marvel Comics) “Shed” was the highlight of a great year for the Amazing Spider Man title, as the long-running Gauntlet plotline (in [...]
Sterling Gates’s about-to-conclude Supergirl run — twenty six issues plus two annuals — is a respectable tenure on any Big Two comic these days, but for Supergirl this is an achievement comparable to Dave Sim’s 300 issues of Cerebus! In the thirty three issues prior to Gates’s run, the Girl of Steel had to put [...]
I’ve spent entirely too much time on a post I hope to have up on Tuesday, but in preparing it I stumbled upon something amazing. Hoping to find photos of that scary looking Chapel cosplayer that went around to signings with Rob Liefeld back in the 1990s, I dug up the copy of Extreme Studios [...]
From Superboy #26 And they say Geoff Johns doesn’t do long-range planning.
While working on another sales analysis post, I started writing a brief aside about Marvel’s Heroic Age Pedestal Variant Covers. You’ve probably seen them, they all follow the same template:
Amazingly enough, I don’t think this sequence even cracked the Top Three for things that bothered me about this issue!
There’s already been plenty of coverage elsewhere of Mark Millar’s hissyfit about getting his idea of Vampires vs. Superheroes “swiped” by the X-Offices. I think Mark’s onto something: just as he introduced the concepts of gay superheroes and “a superhero comic set in the real world”, I see no reason to think he didn’t also [...]