I’ve gotten out of the habit of reading individual comics issues – because I first got out of the habit of buying them. There were a lot of factors there, but an already-ebbing stream turned to nothing after the 2011 flood destroyed all of my existing floppies. Since then, if it’s not in book form,…
“Wednesday’s child is full of woe.” When Charles Addams was helping turn his amusing gothic New Yorker cartoons into a television series, the little girl needed a name, and he used a line from an old-time children’s poem. He’d been at the drawing board with these characters since 1938, although Gomez and Morticia’s daughter didn’t…
We all have holes in our reading, some more surprising than others. I started reading “comics” seriously about 1986, when I went off to college to a town (Poughkeepsie) with a good shop (Iron Vic’s) and bought mostly the weirdest stuff I could find on the racks at that time. There’s a lot that I’ve…
Phenomena: Matilde’s Quest (Phenomena Book 2) By Brian Michael Bendis and André Lima Araújo Abrams ComicArts/156 pages/$24.99 It has to be said that writer Brian Michael Bendis rarely, if ever, repeats himself. His Ultimate Spider-Man is unlike his New Avengers, which is nothing like his Legion of Super-Heroes, his self-created Takio, or Murder Inc. He…
The underperforming and much-mocked Madame Web has arrived on streaming services for purchase or rent, allowing audiences to make their own decisions. SYNOPSISMadame Web tells the standalone origin story of one of Marvel publishing’s most enigmatic heroines. The suspense-driven thriller stars Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb, a paramedic in Manhattan who may have clairvoyant abilities….
In 2011, I watched Contagion and found it a gripping thriller with an all-star cast–Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Elliott Gould, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Ehle, Sanaa Lathan, and Gwyneth Paltrow–then promptly stopped thinking about it. I was, though, reminded of it in 2021 when the global pandemic became a reality….
We are all haunted by history, one way or another. For some, it’s personal; for others, it’s public. After the 20th century we had, for all too many it’s both, intertwined. Tessa Hulls is in her thirties, the second child of two first-generation immigrants to the US, brought up in a tiny Northern California town…
Fall Through By Nate Powell Abrams ComicArts, 192 pages, $24.99 Artist Nate Powell gained international acclaim for his work on the March trilogy of graphic novels recounting the life and career of the much-missed John Lewis. However, he is more than just that; he’s an acclaimed writer/artist, as seen in the just-released Fall Through. Powell…
Space Wars: Quest for the Deepstar very much wants to be one of the plethora of low-budget 1970s knock offs of Star Wars riding the comet tail of that phenomenon. It’s just not bad enough to be lumped in with Bartle Beyond the Stars or the 3-D mess of Spacehunters. Nor is it good enough…
Climate change has become the Go To dystopia for stories these days, each with an apocalyptic feel, showing little hope for humanity. Paramount released the film adaptation of Megan Hunter’s novel The End We Start From, the latest such installment, in December. Now available for streaming rental, the film, starring Jodie Comer, explores the aftermath…
Paramount+ was called, by some, the Star Trek channel when it first launched, but it rapidly was changed to the Taylor Sheridan channel, as his various series fuel their original programming slate. Thankfully, they are different and distinct, each with its own genre. After conquering the modern and historic Western, he gave us the gritty…
Some cultural artifacts are so rigorously assembled that one hesitates to criticize them, expecting that the answer from the trufans will be something like “well, but you see, the figure at the top left of the back cover is obviously there to explain your complaint, and you are a churl for missing that, and therefore…
