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Wizard World Comic Con—Nashville Notebook: Day One
Howard Chaykin may have sounded like he was auditioning for Glengarry Glen Ross, but his was the most enjoyable panel I’ve attended in three years of convention-going. [more]
Portraits in Alienated British You, Circa 1989-90, Part Thirteen : All’s Well That Ends — Well?
With the shit having already hit the fan, the eleventh and final chapter of Garth Ennis and Warren Pleece’s True Faith plays out more like an epilogue than anything else — but it’s a highly… [more]
Project Greenlight Shines So Far in Season 4
It’s been a decade since season three of Project Greenlight and viewers could be forgiven for giving up the series for dead. As we’ve written here, the series and the concept seems to come from… [more]
Portraits In Alienated British Youth Circa 1989-90, Part Twelve : Where It All Hits The Fan
There’s no doubt about it — chapter ten of Garth Ennis and Warren Pleece’s True Faith, entitled “False Gods,” is an absolute barn-burner. Or church-burner, I guess, as the case may be. The authorities —… [more]
Invisible Republic Touches Greatness in Issue #6
Everyone wants the Reveron journal. That’s been true since issue #1 of Invisible Republic, and it’s, if anything, even more true as we pass into the second major story arc here in issue #6. Once… [more]
Negative Space: Wonderful Comics Medicine
Like many other people who struggle with depression, I sometimes feel as if there is some sort of malevolent force lurking in the sky, consciously plotting to sabotage my happiness at every turn. This can… [more]
Manifest Destiny #17: How Many More Monsters?
Manifest Destiny has great moments when it combines the absurd with the profound, or the fantastic with genuinely powerful character moments. And both are to be found in its most recent issue, #17. What could… [more]
Smorgasbord #27: Happy Anniversary!
The Smorgasbord is a year old! To celebrate this milestone, Tom and Shawn offer a giant-sized extravaganza in which we discuss the last Previews of 2014, Bad Luck Guillermo, Batman walking in on Robin in… [more]
Tiptoeing Through the Tulips with Neil Gaiman
While some of the points Gaiman makes in his “Tulip Speech” are less relevant than they were in the early ‘90s, his overall prescription for saving the industry is as simple and true today as ever. [more]
“There Was No Hand To Hold Me Back. That Night I Found The Ancient Track”: Transgressive and Transfigurative Acts in Providence #4
“That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of indigent eld — Nor, when the wicked are expressly… [more]
Fantastic 4X4 Part 1: Fantastic Four Masterworks Vol. 1
The one upside of the recent Fantastic Four movie slinking into and out of theatres is that Comixology had a flash sale on several starting points in the continuity of Marvel’s First Family. I bought… [more]
Alan Moore brings Satire and Subtext to Spawn: Writers Writing Spawn, Part 1
Believe it or not, Alan Moore wrote an issue of Spawn. In the midst of a crass and embarrassing era of comics, could Alan Moore steer Image Comics to substance? [more]
The Chair Showed the Limits of Film Taste and the Director’s Role
The first season of the Starz TV series The Chair came to an end almost a year ago, yet it seems to have generated very few ripples of lasting influence, if the blogosphere is any… [more]
“Shambling After the Mad Ones”: Bob Dylan, Alan Moore, and Jack Kerouac
A couple of weeks ago, I broke down and got a copy of Bob Dylan’s 1970 album, Self Portrait. For many fans, this album represents the low point in Dylan’s discography. Throughout most of the… [more]
Deborah Whaley on Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime
Dr. Deborah Elizabeth Whaley is an Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. A scholar of race, gender, and popular culture (as well as other fields), Dr. Whaley… [more]
Why I Am Not A Superhero Fan
I’m fairly open about my own tastes and predilections when it comes to comics, or any other medium. I’ll freely admit to anyone who cares to ask that, while I love comics, I’m not that… [more]
A Look at Zombies Throughout History
Following the recent premiere of new AMC series Fear the Walking Dead with its record-breaking number of viewers, we can once again confirm that our fascination with the reanimated corpses is alive and well. With… [more]
Plutona #1: Another Great Jeff Lemire Comic
From Descender, we know that Jeff Lemire can be a very skilled science fiction storyteller, a genre quite far removed from his realist roots in books like Essex County. With his uncanny ability to adopt… [more]
Cult Classics: Starship Troopers
“War makes fascists of us all.” That’s the line that best describes the attitude and approach Paul Verhoeven takes in his science-fiction masterpiece Starship Troopers. The film was neither a flop nor a success at… [more]
Smorgasbord #26: Totes Outrageous
Kevin Feige flees from under the thumb of Ike Perlmutter, Mockingbird finally goes to pilot, Secret Wars multiplies, the alluring possibilities of avant-garde author Mark Z, Danielewski taking a crack at writing Deadpool… these are just some… [more]
Something’s Wrong: Queen of Earth
So I just googled “Queen of Earth chronological order” on a faint suspicion, and sure enough I found something that confirmed one of my initial reactions to the film: “The shoot itself makes for an… [more]
The Sky is Not Falling: Steven Spielberg and the Death of the Superhero Movie
In a recent interview with the Associated Press to promote his upcoming Cold War thriller, Bridge of Spies, director Steven Spielberg said that the superhero move would eventually “go the way of the Western.” He… [more]
Eiji Tsuburaya’s Death and the Changing Face of Kaiju Films
On January 25th in 1970, the landscape of kaiju films changed forever. Eiji Tsuburaya had started work on a new television series by this point, a horror anthology show known as The Unbalance Zone. The… [more]
“How’d you do, my little Siren?”: Sensuality, Sentiment and Solipsism in Providence #3
Let’s begin by returning to the idea of Alan Moore infusing the Mythos with an emotional current and introducing the alien to well, the alien. I am undoubtedly one of those strange folk who doesn’t… [more]
The Martian: Already a Problematic Adaptation
Like many fans of literate, thoughtful, plausible science fiction, I greeted the news that Ridley Scott would be directing the film adaptation of Andy Weir’s the Martian with great enthusiasm. The fact that the script… [more]