From Wikipedia: Critics have generally received Ender’s Game well. The novel won the Nebular Award for best novel in 1985, and the Hugo for best novel in 1986, considered the two most prestigious awards in science fiction. Ender’s Game was also nominated for a Locus Award in 1986. In 1999, it placed #59 on the…
“I grew up reading superheroes where the most important element of that name was ‘hero’ rather than ‘super.’ But, lately, a number of the books from the big two superhero publishers, DC and Marvel, seem to have forgotten the hero part of the name.” My friend and fellow writer Corinna Lawson, the woman some of…
DC released Young Romance this week, using the title of one of the overlooked and (imho) underappreciated gems of comics history, the seminal romance comic that was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and was published from 1947 to 1975. I’m old enough to remember many of the stories contained within those pages; they…
No, this is not a column about that. Get your minds out of the gutter, people! I was working in the Special Projects department at Marvel Comics as an assistant editor when my boss, Executive Editor Bob Budiansky, called me into his office. “I have something for you that will be absolutely perfect,” he said,…
Last week I told you about my family’s celebration of my dad’s 90th birthday. This week I’m going to talk about another birthday. The Doctor’s. Doctor who? That’s right. He turns 50 years this year, plus another 1000 – give or take. And tonight – uh, last night, actually – all us Whovians are –…
Last night the whole family went out to dinner to celebrate my father’s 90th birthday. And as regular readers of this column know, this is a birthday to truly celebrate. Less than a month after suffering a stroke with seizure complications, less than a month from bringing him home to die, my father is up…
Is it Khan Noonian Singh or is it Gary Mitchell? Or could it be someone else from out of the Star Trek TOS mythos? Ever since the first teaser debuted on theater screens around the world, Trekkers have been debating the identity of the villain. Here’s my take: I don’t think it’s Khan. There are…
I was listening to NPR the other day – I think it was Leonard Lopate’s show – and the guest was television critic Alan Sepinwall, who used to write for New Jersey’s Star-Ledger and now has a regular column discussing television on Hitfix.com. Mr. Sepinwall is the author of the just published The Revolution Was…
This is a story I told to Joe Kubert. He loved it, said to write it up and he would use it as a backup in Sgt. Rock. 1943. Somewhere over Burma. The Dragonfly Squadron, inheritors of the famed Flying Tigers, is returning to base after flying a coverage mission for Merrill’s Marauders. First Lieutenant…
According to many interpreters of the Mayan calendar, December 21, 2012 was to be the last day of the world. Were we going to go quietly, or in another Big Bang? No one knew. But some portents started happening as December matured. A woman slept while a tornado ripped off her home’s roof. More than…
One of my favorite episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is Season 2’s “Lie to Me” in which a friend of Buffy’s from her old school in Los Angeles comes to Sunnydale with the (secret) intention of giving Buffy to Spike in exchange for having Spike sire him… i.e., turn him in to a vampire….
I met Karen Berger in 1983. Thirty years ago. Thirty years is a long time. A lot can happen. And a funny thing happens as the years pass. You look back and you can see how you ended up where you are today. How the chalk drawings of your life have made a graphic novel…
