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Magazine Archives for:
April 2014
Peter Jackson, We Need to Talk About The Hobbit
Dear Mr. Peter Jackson, It’s time for an intervention. I wasn’t going to write about the Desolation of Smaug, I really wasn’t. Everything I felt about that film had been succinctly expressed elsewhere. Then you… [more]
The New Star Wars Cast: Lucky VII?
This photo is destined to become one of the most famous, or one of the most notorious, in popular culture. The image of the first assembly of the Star Wars Episode VII cast is right… [more]
The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Defending the Reboot
Wasn’t it strange that the prospect of a sequel to the hit franchise reboot of Sony’s Amazing Spider-Man was not greeted with the excitement of, say, Bryan Singer’s new X-Men chapter? How about the rampant… [more]
(Almost) the World’s Finest Team: The American Superhero Comics of Mark Millar, Part 16
Continued from last week. Millar was hardly the first comics scripter to bridle at the constraints of continuity. But few can equal his predilection for heedlessly flouting the more obvious aspects of a property’s backstory. The… [more]
Spider-Man and Science: Exactly Who is Responsible Enough for Great Power?
Spider-Man is kind of unique amongst superheroes in his relationship with science. No, not the science of how he actually swings on those webs without dislocating his shoulders or ripping his arms out of their… [more]
Review of Arrow Season 2, Episode 20
For a good portion of “Seeing Red” I was convinced that the variety and complexities of this season’s plotlines might have finally gotten the better of the writers. Roy’s trail of carnage simply wasn’t illuminating… [more]
The Spider-Man Moment
This is not the essay you were supposed to read today. When I first heard that we were having a Spider-Man week at Sequart, I knew pretty quickly what I wanted to write about. While… [more]
Review of The Raid: Berandal
Gareth Evans’ Indonesian action movie The Raid: Redemption was pretty much a perfect action movie. The actual story was pure minimalism – there was exactly enough to sustain the movie, and not a drop more… [more]
It’s Spider-Man Week on Sequart!
In celebration of the release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Sequart will be publishing content related to Spider-Man all this week. Look for the first piece tomorrow morning. Spider-Man Week is Sequart’s seventh themed week.… [more]
Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter: My Favourite Comic Book
I sometimes get asked what my “favourite comic of all time” is. All of us who reflect on creative works, whether that be music, film, TV, theatre, literature or any other kind of art, have… [more]
X-Men: To the Outback & Beyond… Part 4
Writer: Chris Claremont Penciler: Marc Silvestri Inker: Dan Green Colorist: Glynis Oliver Letter: Tom Orzechowski Editor: Ann Nocenti & Bob Harras From the demon filled fields of Limbo and the drama of the Rasputin family… [more]
Buffy: Time of Your Life
This arc of Buffy Season 8 is complex and more than a little confusing for those who don’t pay strict attention. This has to be said up front for those playing the home game because… [more]
Capital Thoughts: Captain America #19
It took a long time in coming, but the pay-off is finally here. After what seems like half a year of paralyzing misgivings, Cap, the ultimate, ethical hero is back! “Fallen into weakness in the… [more]
Review of Community Season 5, Episodes 12 and 13
“What does this look like, an hour long episode of The Office?” The Dean says that, somewhere near the beginning of Basic Sandwich, the second half of Community’s two-parter season finale. The reason this episode’s… [more]
Rat Queens: Smart, Funny, Sassy Fantasy
The slug-line description of Rat Queens that I heard continually at Vancouver Fan Expo last weekend as “LOTR as if it were written by Tarantino”. That might sound intriguing, but the more I thought of… [more]
Brian’s Comic Book Grab Bag: Catwoman Volume 2 #20
This Christmas my brother gave me a booster pack of random, non-sequential issues from a variety of popular comic book titles that syndicated in the late eighties to mid nineties. The nineties was a time… [more]
2010: The Year We Make Contact: An Adaptation of an Adaptation
For those who, like me, are longtime readers of Science Fiction, we’re very familiar that classic literature in this genre falls into a few recognizable categories. In general, either it’s concerned with plausible technology and… [more]
Bugged Out!: Scarab Reconsidered 20 Years On, Part Ten
Welcome back to the nominally fictitious town of Whitehaven, North Carolina and the most delightfully repulsive story to ever go out under the Vertigo imprint — if you thought that the opening installment of Scarab’s… [more]
“Nice to Meet You, Big Guy”: The American Superhero Comics of Mark Millar, Part 15
Continued from last week. November 1998′s Superman Adventures #25 gave Millar one last substantial shot at depicting The Batman. Putting the overwrought misjudgements of the JLA Paradise Lost mini-series behind him, he returned to the conception… [more]
Examining the Two Acts of Noah
Some major spoilers for a movie based on a 24,000-year-old portion of the Bible follow: The world in the first act of Noah is magical. It’s not just the Watchers, angels punished to serve their… [more]
“‘Cause It’s Witchcraft, Wicked Witchcraft”: Wicked, Broadway, and Revisionist Super-Heroes
When you write a weekly column, it doesn’t take long before you find yourself talking about something you don’t know anything about. For me, that moment is now, and I just want to get that… [more]
Review of Community Season 5, Episode 11
This season of Community has, admittedly, been a little up and down. The show has been good, and is still better than the majority of network TV out there, but there have been a few… [more]
Capital Thoughts: An Open Letter on The Winter Soldier
Dear Steve Englehart, This past week, I took my Graphic Novels class to the cinema to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The class has both serious and not-so-serious comic book readers: A few are… [more]
Drugs, Bugs, Capitalist Thugs, and Deathless Communists: Impressions of Charlie Gillespie’s The Many: Once Upon a Time in Utopia
Charlie Gillespie, a longtime contributor to 2000AD and Judge Dredd magazine, ventures into new territory later this month with the digital release of The Many: Once Upon a Time in Utopia, a graphic novel written… [more]
Comixology, Monopoly, and Technology: Comixology’s Acquisition by Amazon as a Short-Term Gain for a Long-Term Risk
I’ll come right out and say it: Amazon is amazing. Think about the lower prices, the short wait times and the amount of products that they have on their website. Think about the sheer volume… [more]