Funnybooks, funny and otherwise.
The inexorable march of the Marvel Cinematic Universe* goes on, and its latest manifestation is the Netflix series Luke Cage. Debuting earlier this month, it stars Mike Colter as the black Harlem-based action hero, based on the bruising ’70s comic book creation and brought to life by Cheo Hodari Coker. Luke …
We kill our idols at such an alarming rate, you’d think we could afford to replace them. At a time when great artistic achievement is increasingly hard to find, we have been gripped with a mania for casting the few geniuses our culture manages to mint aside with great force, …
Preacher was a comic of its time, and that time was the 1990s. To put it another way, Preacher was a comic of the time when many of its biggest fans — fans who are now television-watching adults, and, for that matter, television-criticism-writing adults — were in their 20s. Which is all …
SERGEANT’S DUTY LOG Week ending 04/29/2016 31 incidents of jawin’ with intent to slanderfy 26 incidents of reported sinful doin’s involving minors, blood kin, livestock and tree hollers 16 incidents of a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ 9 lynchings without a permit 8 incidents of Katie-bar-the-door Saturday night dust-ups 6 incidents of ee-legal …
I like continuity. No, scratch that: I love continuity. I realize that’s unfashionable to say these days, when the artist is king (unless it means giving them control of their own work) and there’s a reboot of the entire Marvel or DC meta-history every other month; but continuity is what keeps …
Lately I’ve been thinking about the revivalists. That is, the wave of writers – whose God is Roy Thomas and whose Jesus is Grant Morrison (Neil Gaiman, I guess, would be the Holy Ghost) – who specialize in rescuing old characters from Marvel & DC’s equivalent of limbo and then …
I take Rosa Luxemburg very seriously. Since feminism and class consciousness have been two of my passions my entire adult life, it’s easy to see why I’m drawn to women who vocally espoused both, and Rosa Luxemburg is perhaps the greatest of them all. I’ve read her writings, studied her …
With this week’s release of the long-delayed and possibly awaited conclusion to Secret Wars, Marvel wraps up it most pointless event comic ever and finally prepares fans for the all-new, all-different NEW Marvel Universe. No, not that one. No, not that one either. This is the NEW new new new …
With new installments of both Star Wars and Star Trek on the way, it could not be more clear that nerd culture has had its revenge on cinema. Rather than waiting to see either of them — I don’t really care to, since I’ve never been especially interested in either franchise — I …
Years ago, my pal Calamity Jon Morris came up with an occasional series called Ask the Defenders, the conceit being that Marvel’s infamous superhero ‘non-team’ of the 1970s was actually an aggregation of dysfunctional, if highly entertaining, personalities who featured into a sort of workplace sitcom. Jon and I encouraged our readers to …
“HO HO HO! And what is your name, champ?” “Thulsa.” “And do you have a last name, Thulsa, so Santa can find your house from the mailbox?” “Doom.” “Well! Er, ho ho! That should be easy to remember! How many little boys named Doom can there be on your block?” …
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Jessica Jones, the new Netflix series based on the troubled but fascinating Marvel Comics heroine, isn’t noir. That word has gotten tossed around endlessly by just about every critic that’s written about it, but it’s so far from accurate that it’s not …
So, yesterday, we talked about problematic art, and how it can be dealt with in a productive and respectful way and not in a way that’s just griping that doesn’t accomplish anything. Hooray! I’m solving all the world’s problems! Now let’s talk about the concept of “allies”. Like “problematic”, this …
The genius of Stan Lee — and he was a man possessed of genius, despite the bad press he’s generated in recent years since translating that genius into a fortune that was denied to many of his employees — is that he was able to see the way the wind …
For many first-time visitors to the United States, an understanding of its culture can be hard to come by. Despite the American entertainment industry’s never-flagging efforts to export the nation’s finest bullet- and fart-joke-imbued movies and television programs to far-flung parts of the globe, many foreign tourists have been insufficiently …
