Lady Mechanika – Joe Benitez and MM Chen writing; Peter Steigerwald, Martin Montiel, and Joe Benitez art Steampunk is a strange genre. It is books, comic books, movies, television shows, cosplay, objects, music, and much else. To find an art genre which is also a movement you’d have to go to art deco in the […]
In culture, comics, science fiction, and politics there has always a confusion between mutation and mutatis mutandis. A mutation is a random change of the genetic structure. Mutatis mutandis is Latin for “after the necessary modifications.” In the popular mindset evolution makes everything better and better .So it was that the first mutant superhero was […]
The Silver Age is remembered as a return of civilization following the Wertham-MSM-book burning Dark Ages. Like all turns in history there is truth in this and much more truth that gets away. In the Golden Age there were many comic book companies. All American, DC, EC, Timely, Centaur, MLJ, Quality, Fox Feature Syndicates, Fawcett, […]
Comic books started with comedy, and have returned to it in its down periods ever since. Originally, comic books reprinted newspaper comic strips. This is where we get the ‘comic’ in comic books. Superheroes and drama took over – mostly. There were still comic sidekicks almost none of whom are ever remembered by anyone except […]
It was cold. But that was not the heart of it. It was cold that lay around the heart of it. There had been a series of volcanic eruptions, but the big one occurred in the year that Napoleon was defeated. Mt. Tambora in Indonesia exploded in one of the most massive volcanic eruptions since […]
In comic books, superhero is the king of genres. But over time there has been strong representation of other genres like war, horror, cowboy, humor, science fiction, police, and romance. Some genres, like the family saga and literary have never found a place in comics: Odyssey can be a comic but Ulysses never will be. […]
In its first weekend out, the latest 20th Century Fox offering for slaughter racked up $25 million, coming insecond to Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, which was in its second week. That’s with 3995 theaters. Given three days, Friday to Sunday, and 30 sessions all up, that’s at best about 20 people per session on […]
Americans experienced 1344 days of World War II, about three and a half years. Many Americans were defined by those years for the rest of their lives. Some of them even until today. It defined America. Every candidate for office was questioned about their war record – Kennedy was accused of staying on crutches for […]
Of all the superheroes, Henry Pym was the first of his type and there are now only three. This has not served the character well but may serve him better in the future. Henry Pym first appeared in Tales to Astonish 27, which was back in its all-monster days. In fact, Tales to Astonish […]
We may think of pulps or pulp fiction as gritty crime noir in which cynical not-the-cops characters fight the basest kind of criminal committing the basest kind of crime. But “pulp” is actually a kind of paper, just as “tabloid” is actually a newspaper with a single, central fold. But the pulps took on the […]
Pulp noir fiction is a medium and genre that is dark and cynical in tone and involves crime. The person investigating is not an official like a police officer or detective, which would make it hardboiled fiction. The hero of the story is a victim, a suspect, a perpetrator, or a vigilante. The system itself […]
Al Ries and Jack Trout came up with a theory about advertising. They called it positioning. Basically, you can’t own the whole market for long so you have to associate your product with a position in the mind of the prospect and own part of the market for a long time. So Coke is the […]
In the beginning, and in fact before that, superheroes had girlfriends. It was a significant part of the story but virtually every history only looks at heroes as a group but the girlfriends (and occasional boyfriends) are treated almost as an afterthought. The evidence isn’t really happy with that assessment. The original super powered crime […]
