There are days when I think that Evan Dorkin exists so I can be regularly reminded that I’m not the most cynical, negative person in the world. But most days I manage not to be that solipsistic. Dorkin is probably the most cynical, negative person in comics — I could remove the “probably” if I…
I don’t think anyone’s hired Kyle Baker to write screenplays for romantic comedies yet. But, from the evidence of books like Why I Hate Saturn and I Die at Midnight and this book, I think he’d be really good at it: he has a knack for screwball complications and the kind of dialogue that only…
Even in a comics superhero continuity entirely controlled by one creative team and contained in one series of stories, there can be retcons and changes. And sometimes you don’t notice them unless you’re specifically looking for them. Take Strong Female Protagonist by writer Brennan Lee Mulligan and artist Molly Ostertag, originally a webcomic, which has…
More time has passed since these stories per published than had passed for the whole history of the Doom Patrol to that point. As with so many things in corporate comics, in 2018 we’re now deep in second- or third-order nostalgia, memories of particular revised versions of things that have been around, and generating income…
Some media are better for some stories than others. I’d like to think that’s obvious, but the way mass culture obsesses about adapting everything into movies and TV shows makes me think it’s either a minority opinion or that a lot of people are just dim. For example: you can do a strong, mostly silent…
Michael Moorcock has “ended” his Eternal Champion cycle many times over the past decades — I think he did it for the first time back in the late ’60s, when it was still almost entirely Elric and just a bit of those other guys. But none of those endings have taken; he’s come back time…
Disclaimer No. 1: I’m not related to Shannon Wheeler, as far as I know. We both carry an ancient Anglo-Saxon name, and probably have at least one ancestor in common, somewhere in the misty dawn of time, but there are a lot of Wheelers in this world. Disclaimer No. 2: Wheeler has a recent book…
There was an era in books for younger readers where the standard message was to conform, to become just like everyone else was supposed to be, to follow the prescriptions of life and fit your feet to the path. And we all make fun of those books now, when we see them or think about…
There’s a point where, as a reviewer and critic, you either need to engage fully with your material or just walk away from it. Holding it at arm’s length doesn’t do anyone any good. And I’m very aware that all of my posts about the great female-centric comic Lumberjanes — see my posts on volumes…
Alan Moore famously has a love-hate relationship with superhero comics. Well, I mean, a lot of people love or hate superhero comics, and plenty do both. The difference is that superhero comics hates and loves Moore back. In the late ’90s, after he’d cast a magic incantation cursing DC Comics and all of its wares,…
I spend more time than is reasonable worrying if I’m doing things right. Even worse, often what I mean by “right” is “fitting the rules I made up myself, which I haven’t bothered to clearly codify.” Obviously, a healthy person would not spend time on anything like that, but I am a blogger, and so…
I read the first volume of Martian Confederacy nine years ago, around the time it came out, but clearly didn’t love it enough to jump into the second book any time quickly. But time wounds all heels, and, during a business trip recently, I remembered that I had The Martian Confederacy, Vol. 2: From Mars…
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