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…
Gail Simone, comics writer, chief architect of Lion Forge’s Catalyst Prime line, and contributor to Mine! had many thoughts on the closing of Bongo Comics. With her permission, we reprint her essay here. So, this is painful to talk about. Apparently, Bongo Comics is shutting down production, and the last issue of Simpsons Comics will…
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…
Let’s say there was a little-known Disney comic: Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories: Mickey’s Quest, which was published somewhere obscure for most of the 1960s and entirely forgotten since then. And let’s say there was a serial in that comic, called “Mickey’s Craziest Adventures,” a single page a month for almost that entire decade, with…
Any self-respecting family story needs a flashback. Whether it’s a Ross Macdonald novel finally explaining just what horrible thing happened twenty years ago in Canada or a family saga that stops in the middle of Chapter Two to explain just how Sadie McGuffins first came to the Maritimes from Scotland as a teen domestic servant…
So there’s a time-war, right? People further up the timeline (the “kids”) are trying to fix things they don’t like in history, and people closer to our time (the “parents”) are trying to keep history as they experienced it. It’s not entirely clear if they really are two subsequent generations of the same population —…
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