I caught Sam Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN on TV the other night, and enjoyed once more the way Willem DaFoe and James Franco perfectly captured the fractured relationship between Norman Osborn (secretly Spider-Man’s arch-enemy the Green Goblin) and his son Harry, Peter Parker’s best friend and roommate. I was recently inspired to go back and take a […]
We love comics. And there’s no better way to show it than by taking our love for comics out into the world and doing some good. Every month, we donate a portion of all Blastoff proceeds to a different charity or non-profit organization. As you are no doubt already aware. we lost a great actor, […]
Time for another time-travel trip in the Wayback Machine. Set the dials for the year 1975. Li’l Scott has been forcibly called inside from playing in the front yard. Visibly miffed at this development (though not really able to verbalize it at age 4), Li’l Scott is plunked down in front of the TV while […]
It’s a mark of how much I loved Adam West as a kid that this I even watched this and liked it. Originally published June 8, 2005. As the superhero movies come and go faster and faster these days, your humble professor gets the same question over and over, with each successively worse movie: “Aren’t […]
There was a famous review from Janet Maslin at the New York Times back in 1982 for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, in the wake of the somewhat blah reaction to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. “Now,” wrote Maslin, “this is more like it.” Well, after a long run of uninspiring DC movies […]
With the death of William Moulton Marston in 1947, the WONDER WOMAN strip was entering into a new phase of its publication. No longer singlemindedly focused on issues of gender equality and submission, WONDER WOMAN instead took on a more straightforward adventure style, being handled primarily by writer Robert Kanigher and artist Ross Andru. Andru’s […]
By all accounts, M.C. Gaines was no dummy. The publisher of All-American Comics (publisher of FLASH, GREEN LANTERN, HAWKMAN and many others, and sister company to DC Comics before the two merged in 1944) had read an article in a recent issue of FAMILY CIRCLE, which, while it wasn’t outright attacking comic books, seemed to […]
It’s awfully hard to capture lightning in a bottle twice. Writer/director James Gunn’s first outing in the world of Marvel Studios, 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, was the first true breath of fresh air in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, which was by no means stale, but had by then settled into a relatively safe-feeling pattern of […]
You know, some superheroes have it better than others when it comes to origins. Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider; irritating, but hardly traumatic. Superman’s rocketship ride to Earth from Krypton? Maybe crippling emotionally, but hey, he was young – he adjusted. When it come to origins, nobody had it worse than the Spectre, […]
Let’s take a look at a few new arrivals here at Comics 101 HQ, some very nicely put together hardcover releases for the Marvel fan. Kicking things off is DK’s Avengers: The Ultimate Character Guide, by Alan Cowsill. Although it’s been out for a year or two, I’d never seen it before discovering it recently […]
April 10, 2017 – Word has reached us of the death of artist Carolyn Kelly, daughter of POGO creator Walt Kelly, and guardian and custodian of his work and legacy. Carolyn Kelly had been spearheading the recent beautiful hardcover reprint collections of POGO from Fantagraphics, and even drew the strip herself during a brief revival. […]
Your humble professor is freshly returned from this year’s WonderCon 2017, returned to its rightful home in Anaheim, California, across the street from the House of Mouse. And a great show it was, feeling much like what was to me the heyday of the San Diego Comic-Con, the late 1990s, when the scale was still […]
“There came a time when the old gods died…” So begins the first issue of Jack Kirby’s NEW GODS #1, the centerpiece of what many consider the crowning work of his career, the “Fourth World” saga of interconnecting titles for DC Comics. But in a way, that opening also served as notice to comics fans […]
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