If you can read the stories of a whole bunch of women pioneers — such as the ones in the book I’m about to discuss — without being at least a little bit annoyed at men in general, frankly there’s something wrong with you. And you can take “men in general” as expansively as you…
The parade of odd would-be world-conquerors continues in this collection of Squirrel Girl’s exploits — I almost said “latest collection,” but I’m still running almost two years behind, so it’s not. She hasn’t turned grimdark in the meantime, has she? That would be sad. Anyway, in the five issues from late 2016 collected in (deep…
I debated whether to categorize this post as “Horror.” At the moment, I haven’t, but maybe I’ll change my mind as type. Let’s see how that goes. Fran Krause has been making a comic called Deep Dark Fears online called 2012, working from the submitted worries and fears of mostly anonymous contributors. (He’s also an…
First up: I’ll repeat what I said when I looked at a Nancy volume by John Stanley, also part of “The John Stanley Library”: these are handsome, well-designed packages that badly fail at telling the reader where they fit in the overall picture. This is the third Tubby volume in the series, but that number…
How far back am I looking today? Well, Formerly Known as the Justice League collects a miniseries that came out in 2003, so that’s fifteen years. But that miniseries was itself explicitly a throwback to the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Justice League series, which launched in 1987 — so that’s another fifteen-ish years further back, for a total…
I don’t know if superhero conflicts are required to be based on the stupidest possible interpretation of premises, but it certainly seems that way. Subtlety or nuance don’t exist in superhero universes; in a world where people can punch each other through brick walls, that’s the only way to do anything. Ms.Marvel Vol. 6: Civil…
A couple of weeks ago, writing about the previous Gilbert Hernandez Love and Rockets book Human Diastrophism , I said that those stories came from a ten-year span, because Hernandez was busy with other things as well during that time. Well, Beyond Palomar collects two of those things between one set of covers: two full-length…
There are some comics that look like they should be broadly popular, but aren’t really. I don’t mean everyone’s favorite parlor game, Why My Favorites Should Be Everyone’s Favorites. I mean that there are comics that look like the kind of stories Americans love: broad, funny, with sturdy vaguely stereotypical characters, easy-to-follow plots, clean lines,…
If you had asked me “is physics more interesting than history?,” I’d probably have to think about it. Both are fascinating in their own ways, full of convoluted intricate stuff that’s fun to learn about or think through. It wouldn’t be obvious at all. So when I saw that Larry Gonick, author of multiple volumes…
I wouldn’t say that all of modern mainstream comics comes from Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. Frank Miller’s work on Daredevil and The Dark Knight was just as influential, alongside the Claremont X-Men and the event frenzy kick-started by the Wolfman/Perez Crisis. And there have certainly been major developments in the thirty years since then. But…
There are two ways of discovering beginnings. If you were there at the time, you see it as it happens, and watch as it becomes itself and turns into middle. But most of us aren’t there at the time, particularly for creative works — the point of beginnings is that creators come out of a…
I’m here because I’m looking backwards. Why else would any of us be reading the first collection of a nearly thirty-year-old comics series? [1] I recently read the first collection of the current Shade the Changing Girl series, which reminded me of this Peter Milligan/Chris Bachalo/Mark Pennington version, which began in 1990 and ran through…
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