Comic Books

One of the most relaxing things I would do when in the grips of the initial plague months was watch food documentaries. As I didn’t have the ingredients or skills, watching these shows helped me feel like I was connected in some way to what was on the screen—I could sit and savor with the… Continue reading

Wrestling is a weird storytelling medium. Most people who watch go from ardent believers of the violence happening in the ring—to the point where many a sibling’s broken bone can be attributed to a swanton bomb off the top bunk—to realizing the artifice when seeing a man having to wrestle his boss in tag team match… Continue reading

At the dawn of the Golden Age, Superman and Batman were the biggest heroes. Other publishers wanted to capture that lightning in the bottle with their own sci-fi or detective stories. Only when Fawcett Comics debuted their own super-clone, this time with a magical incantation, did the full fantasy of comics really arrive. Shazam was… Continue reading

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I wanted to be a spy. For a second grade child, espionage seemed a viable career path with all the spy-adjacent material that I could pick up at the Scholastic Book Fair. Or maybe I would re-watch my VHS copy of Harriet the Spy until the tape turned translucent. Either… Continue reading

How much has fallen into the ocean—not simply own abominable trash islande, but the objects that we’re not responsible for like meteorites and space debris? What else might we find if we were to dive deep beneath the surface? What could be dredged up if we were looking? Ram V, Christian Ward, and Aditya Bidikar… Continue reading

A while ago I took at look at the first issue of Mark Russel, Steve Lieber, Dave Stewart, and Dave Sharpe’s One-Star Squadron and its approach to a heroic office comedy. At the time, the book was this oddity of a mini-series: Red Tornado, Power Girl, and a collection of z-tier characters from the DC Universe get involved in… Continue reading

Tie-in comics occupy a weird space in the medium. While the Bionicle comics from the early 2000s that came with my issues of Lego Magazine were the first comics that I consistently read as a kid, there were always other tie-ins hanging around. Either prequels to movies, set-ups for shows or games, or even panel-by-panel re-tellings of… Continue reading