Author Archive | D. Jason Cooper

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An Avengers Secret

If you haven’t seen Avengers: Infinity War, your bucket list isn’t done. But the movies have missed a theme of the Avengers and its spin-offs in the comics. Criminals keep joining. They commit crimes and then sooner or later afterwards, they join the Avengers and you’ll be surprised how many Avengers that includes. And in […]

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Treasury Editions

Once upon a far away time, when superhero comics had just begun, comics were 64 pages long and cost a dime. Came the war and with it paper restrictions. Ended the war and with it expanding bureaucracy in government and businesses and with it, increases in the price of paper. Comic books got shorter and […]

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Children, Your Heroes

All this month, we’ll be helping Children’s Hospital Los Angeles‘ Make March Matter campaign, which aims to raise over a million dollars in March alone for CHLA through the efforts of its corporate partners, among which we are proud to be numbered. Children’s Hospital Los Angeles sees over 528,000 patient visits annually, and is the […]

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The Real Reason

There are things in comics which we talk about and take sides on, and yet this very attention makes us miss some obvious points. We get so caught up in the popular byways of the point that we depopulate the highways of the main point. If someone points out those main points, we are suddenly […]

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They Can Only Fly

There are writers who complain all Hawkman can do is fly. They say that makes him boring. If you could fly in real life, you would not sulk and ask why all the other kids got better Christmas presents. If you could fly, you would be free of the ground. Go back to the beginning: […]

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If It’s Broke, Fix It

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” goes a relatively recent saying (honest, 1977). The obvious other side of the coin is if it is broke. fix it. In an era when every change any comic book publisher makes is somehow apocalyptic in scope, conspiratorial in nature, and incompetant in execution, perhaps we should remind […]

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It’s About the Spiders

Back in the beginning of Batman there was another bat-themed vigilante, the Black Bat. There was some talk of lawsuits, but nothing interesting came out of that. The Black Bat was created in 1939 to star in Black Book Detective. He was D.A. (not a joke) Anthony Quinn (not a joke) who was blinded and […]

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Whence Wonder Woman and Whither…?

Everything you think you know about Wonder Woman is true. However, it’s probably not true in the way you think it’s true and it’s certainly not true all the time. When Wonder Woman started out in 1941, women weren’t doing well in society. As often happens when war looms, people focus on it and the […]

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Logan: A Belated Review

ONLY THE FINEST SPOILERS WERE USED IN THE MAKING OF THIS REVIEW I’ve read and watched a lot of reviews of Logan. They universally agree the acting is brilliant, and Jackman and Stewart have indeed made the most of their final chances to play these characters. In that much at least, I agree. Unlike X-Men: […]

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Guardians of the Galaxy, Old and New

In January 1969, before Neil Armstrong stepped upon the surface of the Moon, but lasting until well after Harrison Schmidt returned to Earth, there was an unsuccessful fiction about traveling through space, colonizing worlds, and fighting invaders. Like the Lunar trips, it was very much a product of its times, but they were not all […]

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My First Comic Books

All this month, we’ll be helping Children’s Hospital Los Angeles‘ Make March Matter campaign, which aims to raise over a million dollars in March alone for CHLA through the efforts of its corporate partners, among which we are proud to be numbered.  Children’s Hospital Los Angeles sees over 528,000 patient visits annually, and is the […]

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Empty Tomb of Dracula

The path to the Tomb of Dracula was long and convoluted. Vampires had been around for a long time. They peppered stories in the Golden Age but they were basically one-shots who got re-killed at the end of the story. But vampires plagued a great many superheroes including The Shield, Mr Justice, and Batman, among […]

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Welcoming the Future, Treasuring the Past.