Things have been kind of slow around here, so I thought I’d start a series of posts on some of the weirder superhero comics I’ve come across. In recent years, many of these long-forgotten oddities have fallen into the public…
I’ve always been interested in the ways comic books imagined the future, especially when I was living in the “future” in question. As a kid, I read a reprint of an old Captain Marvel (“Shazam” variety) tale that featured a…
I didn’t grow up as a fan of Stan Lee. In fact, it’s fair to say that as a kid, I didn’t “get” Marvel at all. Weaned on Superman and Batman, I viewed superheroes as unflappable paragons of confidence, competence…
One of the key architects of the “Marvel Age of Comics,” Steve Ditko passed away last week at age 90. I was going to write that he “left us,” but for most of his career he wasn’t really among us,…
The city of Los Angeles arranged a nice tribute to Adam West yesterday, flashing the bat-signal on the side of City Hall. The cool part is they got the symbol right: there have been several iterations over the years,…
Last month I got got to see my personal “most anticipated” Marvel film: Dr Strange. The good doctor has always been my favorite Marvel character, and while I don’t know if I’d call this entry my favorite Marvel film, I was very…
Comic book artist Murphy Anderson passed away on Oct. 23, and while I always knew I liked his work, it hadn’t occurred to me until now just how many of the most powerful and best-remembered images of my childhood flowed from his brush. I…
Why wait ’til 2016? It was better in 1949.
Superman’s one-time supremacy on the newsstands meant that by 1965, girl reporter Lois Lane was well-established as the first (and I think, still only) character to headline a comic by virtue of being the girlfriend of a superhero. Given that…
Fifty years ago this month, the world met Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. Okay, so technically we’d already met Nick a couple years earlier as a tough-as-nails three-striper in “Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos,” but that book was set in…
