It’s not often that a syndicate gets praise for how they handle the transition on a legacy comic. This is the biggest example I can think of, and one of the biggest transitions in decades. By comparison, the new Flash Gordon artist this year is more typical: breathing new life into a beloved old feature…
Spider-Man: Cosmic Chaos!By Mike MaihackAmulet/96 pagers/#1299 (hardcover), $9.99 (digital) I like Mike Maihack’s artwork, which I find accessible and lots of fun. I feel bad for taking him to task for his popular Cleopatra in Space, but that was years ago, and lately, he’s been producing material far more to my liking. Here, we have…
How do any of us choose the next book to read? Looking at a big list of possibilities – all things you don’t know well, all things new and different – what sparks the thought “that one”? This time, it was hair. On the cover of Time Under Tension , her major 2023 graphic memoir,…
As an avid child of television, Friday nights were something to look forward to as ABC had the coolest shows from 8-11 p.m. Nestled between The Patridge Family and The Odd Couple was Room 222, more a dramedy than a straightforward sitcom. As school let out in January 1974, the network clearly wasn’t done with…
Babies are hard. I think everyone knows that intellectually, but maybe not emotionally. My own first child was a needy, demanding, unhappy baby – I don’t want to claim too much; this was a quarter-century ago, and I wasn’t the main caregiver, either – so I have some insight but nothing like expertise. The mother…
Before Buffy, there was Nikita. French filmmaker Luc Besson’s fifth film caused an international stir as he provided the world with a female protagonist with a dark edge reflecting the times. His 1990 film, La Femme Nikita, proved such a smash that it was remade in America as Point of No Return and spawned a…
It’s not quite tripping myself up, but…I sometimes specifically pick really short books to read so that I can have something to write about here the next day. (More often when I’m doing a Book-A-Day run, but at other times, too. Like right now.) But then I usually find that the really short books don’t…
Few military regiments are better known than the 54th Massachusetts, thanks to Ed Zwick’s brilliant 1989 film Glory. Based on the letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the books Lay This Laurel (1973) by Lincoln Kirstein and One Gallant Rush (1965) by Peter Burchard, the screenwriter Kevin Jarre humanizes the black men who volunteered…
There are times when I don’t have much to say here. I read a book, I mostly liked it, I’ve already read a number of things by the same creator, I don’t have anything particularly new or specific to say this time. And that sounds so horribly minimizing, doesn’t it? But “this is good stuff,…
David O. Russell was having a moment about a decade back, with a series of releases that Made him a director well worth paying attention to. The highlight was American Hustle, a black comedy focused on crime and corruption. It boasts a strong cast, led by Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Bradley Cooper, but nearly…
It can be easy to lose track of just how much work and time goes into a single comics panel – to think of a graphic novel like prose, where you can strike out a line and rewrite it at any time. But comics are much more architected than that, built up in stages, and…
First up, this is not non-fiction; there’s a disclaimer on the copyright page: “This book is a work of fiction inspired by actual events.” It does use the real names of all of the people involved, was written or co-written by the main character, and roughly follows the real history as far as I can…
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