So about six weeks before AVENGERS: ENDGAME came out, I began re-watching the entire Marvel Studios filmography and commenting about it on social media. Just because, I guess. (Although truth be told, I didn’t finish until much after ENDGAME’s debut, for reasons not worth getting into here.) With ENDGAME poised to return to theatres with […]
One of the things Jud and I are proudest of when it comes to Blastoff is our podcast, which ran throughout 2017. We wanted our podcast to be just how we had envisioned the store and the website: steeped in comic-book history and emotionally relevant. All of these podcasts are the work of many hands: […]
When Jud and I opened BLASTOFF seven years ago, it was important to us to be a different kind of comic-book store. And we’d often be complimented about our store’s appearance, which was certainly gratifying. But we wanted to be different not merely in appearance and practice, but in philosophy. In my many years of […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about Bill Mantlo in recent days, the amazing cinematic success being enjoyed by his creation Rocket Raccoon, and the tragedy of Mantlo’s own medical condition. Mostly, though, I’ve been thinking about what a great writer Bill Mantlo was. Which made me want to go back and re-present this look at […]
Last week, we were talking about the forgotten heroes of World War II comics, Hillman’s Airfighters, and their star attraction, Airboy, a kid pilot with an amazing robot plane named Birdie. Let us continue: In time, Airboy becomes an authorized if unofficial member of the Air Force, often going out on missions at the behest […]
First: a disclaimer: We’ll be discussing comics published during a particularly incendiary period in our nation’s history. It’s no secret that the portrayal of minorities in all forms of American media in the 1940s was often stereotypical and demeaning, and the fervor of wartime patriotism during World War II ratcheted the rhetoric up even further. […]
The year was 1962, and Marvel editor Stan Lee was feeling the pressure. Stan had come out of the gate three for three: his first three new “Marvel Comics” had been met with unexpected success at the newsstands. THE FANTASTIC FOUR, the INCREDIBLE HULK and the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN were not only selling like hotcakes, but […]
Okay, it’s been three and a half weeks or so since the release of AVENGERS: ENDGAME, and if you haven’t seen it by now, I’m sorry, but it’s on you. So, since spoilers can safely be dispensed with, we can talk about something I’ve been wanting to discuss since opening night: The Top 10 Biggest […]
Excited at the appearance of Professor Hulk in AVENGERS: ENDGAME? I know I was. So what better time to get to know everyone’s favorite Green Goliath a little better? Our story begins, as many of these columns seem to, with Marvel Editor-in-Chief Stan Lee. It was 1962 and Stan was looking to follow up the […]
In a lot of ways, AVENGERS: ENDGAME, directed by the Russo Brothers and starring pretty much everyone who has ever been in a Marvel Cinematic Universe film, is kind of review-proof, in the sense that it’s less a single film and more of a grand finale to the entire Marvel Studios experiment. Can a new […]
So I got a call from a friend a couple of weeks ago. He’s not much of a pop-culture guy, more of an academic who sticks to his studies and rarely looks up. But he’d begun hearing about something a lot and it had piqued his interest. So he asked me: “What the hell is […]
As has been discussed many times in these pages, a large part of the strength of THE AVENGERS as a concept is its ever-rotating roster of teammates. However, that doesn’t mean that every now and then, a real lemon doesn’t somehow find his or her way on to the team. Let’s take a look at […]
Shazam! (or the original Captain Marvel, as has been discussed ad nauseum all around the Internet, including many times here in these pages) has, for as long as I can remember, been one of my all-time favorite comic-book characters. One of my earliest memories is my dad telling me about the Shazam! comics he bought […]
