Comic Books

After looking at The Power Fantasy the other week, I had another look at the ever-dwindling backlog still gathering dust on my shelf. I assumed the issues of Wonder Woman I went through were the oldest thing in the pile, but there’s a series from Kieron Gillen tucked away under some other series that I’ve somehow put off reading… Continue reading

Earlier last year, I had looked at the first issue of Spirit World in conjunction with the recent re-launch of Shazam. I had looked at the ways in which each series approached magic and how they differed in their overall structures. Since then, Spirit World has reached its six-issue conclusion and showed us how Alyssa Wong, Haining, Sebastian Cheng, and Janice… Continue reading

Don’t you miss the weekends where the existential dread didn’t set in? Me neither, now let’s talk about Wonder Woman. And this is an evergreen character for the moment as she is meant to represent hope, compassion, and the goodness that we can find in most people. Most, of course, being the key word there.… Continue reading

 I often forget that Zatara, one of the earliest magicians in the DC Universe, made his first appearance in Action Comics #1 in his own set of adventures alongside Superman’s. And that his daughter, Zatanna, turns 60 this year after decades of guest spots and appearances over any medium a comic character could show up in, is… Continue reading

While meta-narrative detective stories in which the titular character must find out who killed him in his own story can be interesting, I feel suspicious whenever this trope crops up. Peter Milligan, Raül Fernandez, Giada Marchisio, and Jeff Eckleberry’s first issue of Profane uses the trope to perfection. From the opening panel, Will Profane lays out… Continue reading

You didn’t think the pile was over already, did you? That first run that I wrote about last week was only the tip of an old iceberg that’s been sitting on my shelf collecting dust between house moves. Since we have nearly four years worth of stories to catch up on, we may as well keep going… Continue reading

Since the onset of Covid and how that affected my comic buying habits over the past few years—my home shop began shipping out pull lists early in the pandemic and never really stopped—my to be read pile had become uncharacteristically large. Here in 2024, when I pulled an issue from October 2020, I knew I… Continue reading