Living comics

I’ve been thinking about when and how superheroes are “alive” in the culture. Swing a stick right now, and you’ll hit someone telling you that all is roses. Superheroes are in! They are arrived! They are (gasp) cool at last! … whereas all my little eye sees is that they are in the cage. They have “arrived” in the sense of at rest. They are tamed at last.

Batpulp

I encountered Batman oddly.

The year of the comics

It’s Jerry Grayson’s fault. He knows all these people with opinions about comics and culture, and as the geek social fallacies would advise, said, “Hey, if I get all my friends together, they’ll be friends too!!” Which actually worked this time, for a jam let’s-all-try-it discussion for his own 1972 Project.

A Marvel guy, a DC guy, and an Image guy walk into a comic book store

Everyone’s life is more structurally framed than they think. Consider the humble comic book store.

Context Too!

The industry-history story of U.S. comics is about DC. There’s no history of Marvel, Dell, Fawcett, Archie, and Gold Key, or their related media without DC in place for the bigger context.

Gone ape indeed

In 1974 the big SF-media push was to “Go Ape!” I was so enamored of doing so at age 10 that I made it a point to imitate Roddy MacDowall’s ape-walk everywhere until brought to sanity by an unkind comment from my mom.

Marvelous, meet miraculous

Superman, Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel, Marvelman. Marvelman, Captain Miracle. Marvelman, Marvelman reboot. Marvelman reboot, Miracleman. Paralleled by a completely different Captain Marvel too, oh wait, then another one, which is to say, four of those, plus Ms. Marvel, oh wait, three of those. What th’fuck?

Context!

I love me a timeline. This one’s built mostly from Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, mainly because I couldn’t help but scribble it out as I went along. In the year since I did that, so many of my posts presume knowledge of the content that it’s simply good sense to get the thing on-line for reference.

Crawling & trawling

With Adept Comics under way, it’s time to show what a year hath wrought upon me as a webcomics reader. Namely, 365 days ago, I wasn’t reading any.

Stillborn

This is the fourth post in my accidental series regarding several retries to recapture the early Marvel spirit, including Give me liberty, I, said the Fly, Striking twice, some day, and here, as promised at last, the New Universe.

It is unwise to annoy cartoonists

One does not discuss superhero comics without considering John Byrne most seriously.

Uh-huh uh-huh

Don’t give me that look.