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Magazine Archives for:
April 2014
On Your Left: A Review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier
ALERT: THERE BE SPOILERS HERE!! Let me be upfront: The Avengers is a fantastic movie. It is. If you haven’t seen it, you are missing out. But, it really missed an emotional core that left… [more]
“An Arrogant, Aristocratic Batman?”: The American Superhero Comics of Mark Millar, Part 13
Continued from last week. But how were Morrison and Millar to explain away the Batman’s aloof and frequently contemptuous attitude towards even his fellow super-heroes? If the Dark Knight was to be cut away from the… [more]
Jodorowsky’s Dune: Where Trying Matters
Francis Coppola once said (while making Apocalypse Now) that to reach for greatness and not get there is the greatest artistic sin. A film that aims for the top and doesn’t get there is “shit!”… [more]
Alan Moore, Oscar Zarate, and One Killer of a Graphic Novel
I was reconnecting with some of my former professors at a reception this past weekend when one of them asked what I was working on. I said I had almost finished writing a book about… [more]
Review of Arrow Season 2, Episode 17
I didn’t take any notes while watching “Birds of Prey”. Not to say I’m a prolific transcriber of material when I’m watching TV, but generally when I’m watching something I intend to write about later… [more]
Capital Thoughts: Captain America #18
Cap #18 has our heroic team racing off to a top-secret SHIELD installation. But Mindbubble is already there and has used his psychotropic powers to convince Fury and his agents that Hydra has taken over… [more]
Review of Community Season 5, Episode 10
Season Two’s Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was one of the best Community episodes ever. It was a perfect melding of form and theme. The episode’s gimmick was telling the entire story through a Dungeons and… [more]
Perfect Chaos: Why the Joker is the Greatest Comic-Book Villain
Simply put: the Joker is the greatest comic book villain of all time. But before I get into the whys, let’s define “great”. The greatest villain doesn’t need to defeat all other villains in a… [more]
Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol #19, A Companion Reader
The first four issues of Grant Morrison’s run of Doom Patrol are rife with allusions to popular culture and the fine arts bound by a love of opposites. [more]
Manifest Destiny #1-5, or “Lewis and Clark vs the Vegetable Zombies”
The slug-line description of Manifest Destiny, a comic by Chris Dingess and Matthew Roberts, is “Lewis and Clark go west to fight monsters”. That would be interesting enough right there, but thing that gives this… [more]
X-Men: To the Outback & Beyond… Part 2
Writer: Chris Claremont Penciler: Marc Silvestri Inker: Dan Green Colorist: Glynis Oliver Letter: Tom Orzechowski Editor: Ann Nocenti continued With the eulogy to their previous lives delivered last issue in Deadly Games! , with this… [more]
The Crying of Timeline 919: Casanova
In the backmatter for issue #1 of Casanova, (Image, June 2006) Matt Fraction compares the story to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound production technique—where hundreds of different instruments and sounds are compressed down to a… [more]
“This is Not a Dream, but a Plan”: The American Superhero Comics of Mark Millar, Part 12
Continued from last week. There are other indications that Millar might have been a major contributor to the new JLA’s origin tale. In the Justice League’s own title, Morrison had scrupulously ensured that his innovations were… [more]