Super bad

Meet the Plutonian. Kiss your ass goodbye.

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.

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.

Lurking everywhere

Steve Long and I are gearing up for our showdown to conclude the jointly-written series on comics vigilantes, or at least a particular cultural wave of them, but I decided I was just not feeling done. Here’s one more – that is, before the finale – for a brief look at other strong contributors, responses, and alternatives within the 80s-90s more-or-less mainstream comics vigilante scene.

The raw and real deal

This is more 1990s comics talk, specifically during the mix of wild-rad and utter grind that was my Ph.D. process. It was a lot more fun than the Master’s.

A dangerous vision

September is Cosmic Zap month here at Doctor Xaos Comics Madness. I’m talking now about what was going on in science fiction and fantasy at the time, which is too huge to summarize – it has to be like one of those fragmented memory/epiphany scenes in a movie, with rapid, too-short shots interspersed with someone’s face going “AAAAH!” and maybe cloth-ripping or fake-Latin chanting sound effects.

Justice comes by night

What would you do?

BONUS POST: Thanks to Larry Lade and his June pledge at the Doctor Xaos Patreon! When I talk about “stepping out of the river,” I’m talking about Marvel superheroes and titles very similar to them. It doesn’t mean no comics at all, and that holds especially for 1992 or so, when I phased out of superheroes but continued buying tons of titles, and became a dedicated comics pusher upon my entire social life for about the next 15 years.

The way underground

My kind of Old School dungeon crawl, ya punks.

Hey, I kept this post mostly SFW but most of the links in it go to a great big NOT SFW, so go ahead and click on those and lose your job, if you want.

There were a lot of other comics around during my childhood besides the ones I bought at the newsstand, spelled a wee bit differently.

The river

I know why Heraclitus cries

Picture the Marvel I first encountered, as a multi-year pile roughly centered on 1971: comics as physical objects are pure junk product; the brand is known to everyone but beholden to nobody; the Perfect Film & Chemical Corporation (soon renamed Cadence) seeks Hollywood but the actual product is still selling ad space to X-Ray Specs and plastic rats.

The beginning

Home neighborhood: Del Monte Park, in the middle of the peninsula, at the north bend in Highway 68, in the top ridges of the next-to-highest mountain range. Not as idyllic as advertised, if you’re not rich.

2010: this genetic monster is 52 in this photo

My next-oldest brother’s name is Danny. He’s an athletic bad-ass; you can see him do crazy-athlons online, and if you’re into MMA, he devised the only sensible scoring system known. But back in 1970, he was a buck-toothed 12-year-old whose big brother called him “Toothpick,” with a hyper-imaginative six-year-old brother reading at his grade level, and one thing he could do to make me less obnoxious was to read comics with me. Later, when he got all jock-ish and grew up and stuff, he left the pile to me.