Spaghetti Westerns and their American counterparts brought much to a genre that was nearing irrelevance by the mid-60s, when Sergio Leone released “A Fistfull of Dollars.” They dispensed with the silly white hat/black hat view of morality for a much more ambiguous, and bloody, take on the most romantically perceived segment of American history, instead…
There are certain things that should go unsaid. One of them is “I love Longshot.” But see below for an example of me violating this very protocol. But the other, more heinous, one is “somewhere I have the Nick Fury movie starring David Hasselhoff recorded off TV.” My skin crawls at the very thought that…
A few weekends ago I sat down for a quick bite at a Little Rock diner with a large table full of some of the biggest names in comics history. I should rephrase that: the biggest historians in comics. Among them, Ed Zeno, who has published a few high quality books on the personal histories…
I hate to admit, but I had gone most of my comic-reading life without checking out Marv Wolfman’s “classic” tale that set the DC universe (multiverse? anti-matterverse?) straight. After plowing through the lead-up to Infinite Crisis, I decided to pick up the newest TPB and get caught up. It’s a little unfair to write about…
I’m tired of it all, kids. Amongst the multitudes of X-Men jibber-jabber and ballyhoo about Wolverine and Gambit (blech!), there’s always the characters that get pushed by the wayside. If I mention to anyone that Cyclops is my favorite X-Man, I get 1) blank stares (mostly from non-comic readers) or 2) guffaws (mostly from mouth-breathing…
Recently, a local used bookstore came upon a big shipment of Batman trades. With all the “Jason Todd is back” hysteria going on, I thought picking up “A Death in the Family,” “A Lonely Place in Dying” and “Hush” volumes 1 & 2 would serve as a good Robin retrospective. I remember reading these “A…
I went to see James Kakalios from the University of Minnesota speak at the Union tonight, and man, it was a fun presentation. He was really funny, in a good comic-book-nerd kind of way. I tried to write down funny things he said, which might not be that great out of context, but maybe they’ll…