Blog Archives
No pants necessary
The Spectre wears a green Speedo over bare, pasty white skin. And he is scary as shit, man.
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. Read the rest of this entry
Super bad
It took a lot of working out the context in my mind, but I’m finally ready to look at a very interesting species of comics villain.
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?
I just want to talk to him
Ollie ollie oxen free
Politics and autobio sing a duet in this post! This title was central to my big dive back into comics, in the flush of First, Comico, Eclipse, and specifically Dark Horse, itself on the heels of the now long-forgotten “black and white boom.” Read the rest of this entry
Plastic or fantastic
I’d like to learn more about the ~1980 transfer of personnel from Marvel to DC, many of them returning. The one thing I’m certain of is that the breakout hit which put DC back on the map, The New Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, could only have been produced by people who’d thrown everything they had into mid-late 70s Marvel and formed very definite notions there. Read the rest of this entry
Sheba knows her daddy
I can imagine the senior editor logic easily, upon seeing the mid-late 80s Suicide Squad pitch: “hey, the fans evidently want raw meat, Marvel’s massacring mutants, we have all these useless and unmarketable villains lying around, might as well blow’em up, one by one, or two by two if the plot needs it.” Oooh, awesome, here’s a fictional context for using them as cannon fodder so we can enter the “we’re gritty too” body count competition.
And the horse you rode in on
Ask any comics fan: over thataway is Marvel and it’s [insert string of fervent adjectives and loaded nouns], and over thisaway is DC and it’s [insert string of fervent adjectives and loaded nouns]. You choose your flag and you wave it. The rest are fringe. As my Brit Lit informed me, it’s “RCs to the right, Prods to the left, and fancy buggers in the middle.”
What was the question again?
Tom Artis
Note to readers: this post was supposed to be scheduled for August 30, but I accidentally posted it along with the August 27 post. The new/next post arrives on schedule September 3rd.
So I’ll tell you an anecdote from the late 80s. This was during the two years between college and grad school, when I was living in Chicago and working at the Field Museum, living in a studio in Hyde Park, and living life as a series of daily adventures. Read the rest of this entry