The cliche is that the happiest-looking people have the darkest secrets. I don’t know if that’s consistently true in real life — how would you design a study to test that, anyway? — but it’s a surefire winner in fiction, where contrast and irony are the go-to tools. Nate Powell’s new graphic novel Come Again…
You have to give Fox credit for attempting to bring the spectacle of the X-Men to the small screen and finding a way to maintain the themes without duplicating the film series. The Gifted arrived in an abbreviated season last year and in its own quiet way, makes its mark. It lack the glossy of…
No one’s perfect, y’know? You’re always going to have to deal with some things that aren’t exactly what you’d want when you’re in a relationship with someone. Sometimes it’ll be a dealbreaker — there’s an entertaining double-page spread in this book headed “Douchebags I’ve Dated” with some examples — but some things you might just…
I think every reviewer has a high-spirited streak inside, where they want something to fail just because thereâÂÂs a great headline for it.àI remember when the Green Lantern movie was coming out, and there was a negative buzz preceding it, we came up with a list of reviewer headlines like âÂÂOa No! Lights out…
“Insane is what we do best.” To appreciate fully the CW’s Legends of Tomorrow, you just have to lean in with the crazy. An antidote to the overly grim Arrow, the spinoff show embraces its sloppiness. The “legends” wear their inefficiency as a badge of honor and each episode of the third season amplifies this…
Those who attended Solo: A Star Wars Story during its theatrical run were treated to an entertaining adventure story, leavened with the patented humor derived from the original trilogy. It was well cast, well produced, and enjoyable. All the behind the scenes contretemps in no way spoiled the final product, which is out tomorrow from…
There is a great urban-fantasy comic from the Philippines called Trese. I’ve written about the first three volumes here a few years ago — and there have been three more volumes since then, plus a seventh in progress. The books are difficult to find on this side of the Pacific, though. (Difficult to find in…
First up, the consumer note that I wanted but didn’t get: this is indeed Volume 1 of the books reprinting the 2012 Captain Marvel series written by Kelly Sue DeConnick. (It contains twelve issues and the second volume has five more.) That was preceded by comics called Captain Marvel (just by Marvel, with various people…
It is pretty hard to have a team-up book where one of the two team members has no way to actually know the other one’s name. (Not to mention everyone else in the world, who know that name by some kind of comic-book-world telepathy, I think.) And, on an entirely different level, it is hard…
Comics has not been a terribly fertile ground for good science fiction. Oh, there’s been a lot of space opera, since comics are excellent at depicting coruscating beams of lambent force striking overwhelmed ray-screens and control panels exploding with showers of colorful sparks. But actual stories about people and their societies, in which the details…
There is so much to like about the CW’s Supergirl that you want it to be brilliant, entertaining, and empowering for its young female viewers. That it is such a muddled mess more often than not spoils that because you admire their intentions and scratch your head at how the execution too often misses the…
I haven’t read Dave Sim’s Cerebus in years. At least ten, probably more like twenty. I fell off the horse sometime before the big ending — Cerebus famously was a self-published series whose creator declared he would do three hundred issues, monthly, and by gum he did it — during what I think of as…
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