I’m taking abreak from reviewing my comic stack today in order to join in on First Comic Week (as started by Chris at 2 Guys Buying Comics). I’ve got three books I consider to be significant firsts for me. The First One I Read Amazing Spider-Man #314, April 1989 Back in the day before I…
No kid loves anything more than they love snow days. You get out of school. You get to go sledding. You can learn to urinate in cursive. After college, however, snow days become the thing you despise more than anything else. It’s hard to drive, mostly because other people don’t know how to drive in…
So three weeks of “One Year Later” books have come out…and where are we? Superman has no powers. Supergirl is apparently in the future (won’t understand that til next week) and yet also Clark’s Metropolis call-girl. Everyone thinks the Outsiders are dead, but now their cover is blown. Meanwhile, Jason Todd has been posing as…
Summer is approaching, which means the trees are budding, flowers are in bloom, swim suits are coming out of storage and Marvel is preparing to blow all of us away with yet another SERIES THAT YOU MUST READ!!! As the summer of ’05 with “House of M” and summer of ’04 with “Avengers: Disassembled,” the…
Writers! Robert Kirkman, Warren Ellis, Paul Jenkins, Brian K. Vaughan, and Peter David. Not a bad set of comic writers. Combined, they do the funny, the emotional, the action-packed and the weird better than any other five writers you could lump together. Yet none of them are “superstars” like Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Millar or…
I’ve been reading Amazing Spider-Man for about as long as I could read. When I was younger, my mom would take me to the Belmont public library, which had a subscription to the title, and I’d check out dozens of issues at a time. I started reading in the era of the “superstar” artists, guys…
The Rann-Thanagar War miniseries has been quite maligned in these parts and elsewhere, largely because of its apparent irrelevance. The only real Crisis moment came at the conclusion of the series, and seemed completely unrelated to the events of the miniseries. While recent exposition has shown that incidents leading to the war were much more…
With the release of Astonishing X-Men #13 last week, I decided to re-read the original 12-issue “season” of Joss Whedon’s take on mutantdom. I’d remembered enjoying it greatly at the time, but much had passed in the world of comics between issues 12 and 13. Most notable, as far as Marvel is concerned, was House…
Ahh, fan fiction. There’s nothing quite as dorky as writing stories featuring pop culture icons for your own amusement. So of course, I’ve done it. What follows is the first in a series of short battles I wrote in my senior year creative writing course. If you like this, there’s plenty more where it came…
Quick, which publisher am I talking about (minor spoilers ahead, but it’s in the solicits so I consider it fair game): -a hero is forced to forget a portion of their life by someone they considered a friend -a major crossover begins with a oversized one-shot, followed by four mini-series focusing on specific aspects of…