The Justice League books needed an overhaul, and badly. After a few years of second and third-stringers manning a quartet of different Justice League teams, branches and spinoffs, DC finally seemed to realize that they had wandered too far away from the book’s central concept, a simple tenet that for years was plastered across the […]
Sometimes great comics just slip under the radar. Either the creatives aren’t well-known enough yet to break through the clutter of an already crowded shelf, or a book’s tone and style is just a bit ahead of its time, or who knows what the reason is; it just doesn’t click with the comic-reading audience at […]
I’ve always loved John Byrne’s work, as long as I can remember. Even when I was little and not paying much attention to creator names, it was his issues of MARVEL TEAM-UP that were always my favorites. Through his epic run on FANTASTIC FOUR, and then SUPERMAN, back to Marvel for books like SHE-HULK and […]
When you’re a little kid, standing at the comic-book spinner rack with a dollar in your hand to choose a couple of comics, you’ve gotta get the most for your buck. This was a situation Li’l Scott was very familiar with down at the Quik Stop back in the day. Sometimes, the decision was easy, […]
Even today’s casual comic-book readers are familiar with the work of painter Alex Ross. Between his yearly treasury-sized DC books with writer Paul Dini and the numerous series he’s created for Marvel and DC, not to mention the hundreds of covers, paintings and prints he’s produced, the Alex Ross style has become an easily recognized […]
The original Justice Society of America was a pretty formidable group. You’ve got guys like Hourman, who can throw cars around like luggage, and the Flash, whose blinding speed makes him practically untouchable. Then there are folks like Green Lantern and Dr. Fate, who possess unthinkable power at their very fingertips. As if that wasn’t […]
It looks as though the upcoming BLUE BEETLE film has managed to survive the budget slashings at the now-tumultuous Warner Brothers/Discovery Studio, so it looks like we’ll be seeing the Jaime Reyes version of Blue Beetle making its way to the big screen in some form. Personally, I’ve always been a huge Beetle fan, but […]
ENDANGERED SPECIES – HAWKMAN, PART III For those who came in late:In previous installments of Comics 101 , we’ve explored the origins of the 1940s Hawkman character, as well as his 1960s counterpart. When last we convened, the question was: How would Hawkman fare in the wake of DC Comics’ sweeping editorial restructuring of their […]
Julius Schwartz had found a formula, and he was not letting go of it. The DC Comics editor had spearheaded a revival of the publisher’s line of superhero comics, which by the mid ‘50s had dwindled to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, with second-stringers like Aquaman and Green Arrow hanging on as backup features. Starting […]
The enormous feathered wings. The bare chest with the crossed straps. The freakish-looking beaked mask. “He fights the evils of the present with the weapons of the past.” There’s no two ways about it. In its purest, most visceral form, Hawkman is just plain cool. How then did DC Comics manage to screw up this […]
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that comics, like everything else, don’t exist in a vacuum. Everything that comic-book readers think of as conventions, as benchmarks, even as clichés of the genre, had to appear somewhere first. Even something as basic as, say, the team-up. Before 1941, despite the fact that the newsstands were positively overflowing […]
He’s a water-breathing strongman from the ocean’s depths, he’s the rightful king of Atlantis, and he’s often been allied with some of Earth’s most powerful superheroes. And he’s not Aquaman. DC’s Aquaman may get better publicity, but the original, accept-no-substitutes undersea hero is Marvel Comics’ Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, who first appeared a full two […]
Previously in Comics 101: As our mammoth coverage of James Robinson’s STARMAN series winds down, we find Jack Knight in an unexpected place: with the help of his friends, he’s saved Opal City, and even found the son he’d thought lost forever, but at a heavy price: the death of his father, Ted Knight, the […]
