Author Archive | Pat Shand

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Rise of the Tracksuit Draculas

Every great superhero has a nemesis. Batman has the Joker, Superman has Lex, Iron Man has the Mandarin, Spidey has Green Goblin (and, like, three other arch-nemeses, because f@#$ Spidey, right?), and so on. These villains have risen above the rest of the ne’er-do-wells to provide a real and ongoing challenge for the heroes we […]

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A Look at Black Widow #1

Marvel is putting out some damn good comics. That’s been the case pretty much always, I think, but the House of Ideas seems to be on a winning streak that doesn’t end. Brian Michael Bendis is soaring high on Guardians of the Galaxy and his X-Men titles, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie are pretty much […]

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Hawkeye and Black Widow… The Story So Far…

I know I’m not alone here when I say that I’ve seen Marvel’s The Avengers about twenty-seven times. Joss Whedon is my favorite writer, the Marvel Studios flicks are my favorite superhero films, and each of these actors seems veritably born to play their respective roles. The film – and those leading up to it […]

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Jimmy Olsen … Boy Wonder!

Jimmy Olsen is not your average hero. He’s a dorky, bowtie-wearing, camera-toting, “super-duper”-saying, down-on-his-luck ginger. (It’s cool, I can say it – Jimbo and I are pals in our gingerness.) He’s most often referred to as a step below a sidekick – he’s not Superman’s crime fighting second-in-command. He’s the guy’s pal. Superman’s Pal, Jimmy […]

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Supergirl, Batgirl and Comics

That. Right there. That is one of my favorite comics of all time. It’s written and drawn and colored (and maybe even lettered?) by the legendary Adam Hughes. It showed up in the landmark seventy-fifty issue of SUPERMAN/BATMAN back in ye olde pre-New 52 days of August 2010. But we’ll get to all that. First, […]

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dreams

Asgard, Oklahoma

  …Asgard, Oklahoma. (Just giving folks unfamiliar with J. Michael Straczynski’s Thor run a moment to process that. We good? We’re good.) It’s one of those ideas where you have to wonder what the writer was thinking. It’s one of those ideas that shouldn’t work – the kind that can’t work, that fans will detest, […]

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The Women of Thor: The Dark World

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following piece contains a couple of references to events in THOR: THE DARK WORLD that you owe it to yourself to experience without knowledge aforethought, so if you haven’t seen the film yet but you intend to, just bookmark this piece and come back after you’ve watched it. Here endeth the lesson. […]

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THOR Is the Best Marvel Movie

  I mean, besides The Avengers, of course. Let’s not get crazy. I remember going into Thor fully prepared to hate it. I didn’t want to, as some of my favorite comics take place in either Asgard or Asgard, Oklahoma, but there were just so many things that could have gone wrong. The Marvel Cinematic […]

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Swamp Thing and His Magical Buddies, Part II

  So, magic is pretty much the coolest. It wasn’t until looking back on this Swamp Thing arc that I started to ask myself why so many of the most iconic and defining stories in geek culture deal with the use of magic. Harry Potter. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Hell, the Marvel and DC Universe […]

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Swamp Thing and His Magical Buddies

When you’re thinking about magic in comics – as folks who frequent such a website may be inclined to do – Swamp Thing is probably not the first book you think of. With folks like Doc Strange, Zatanna, and… well, pretty much the entire cast of Sandman running around the comicsphere, a slow-speaking Earth elemental […]

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Welcoming the Future, Treasuring the Past.