Comics Are for Everyone - Less Escapism, More Veganism
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Killer Shark likes kale shakes for his Rumi. Obviously.
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Comics Are for Everyone: Civil War #1-7 (2006)
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The original Civil War comic is undeniably intriguing but also flawed in its execution.
Read MoreComics Are for Everyone: Less Capitalism, More Telepathy Please
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Recently, I dived back into reading comics (thereby neglecting my movie watching) and my collection of comic examples has become crazy huge, so today I’ll celebrate my 300th blog post (seriously, 300! 280,000 words! But who’s counting?) with an extra-long comic edition. And if you think “I can skip this one, I don’t care about comics”, please give it try anyway, maybe you’ll see that it doesn’t always have to be about superheroes.
Read MoreComics Are for Everyone - Moon Knight #6
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I’m using the holidays to read lots of comics, so it’s comic time again. It is what it is.
Read MoreComics Are for Everyone: 1940 Edition - Spanking During War Times [1940 Week]
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(Coincidentally, this is the 200th post on this blog! Yes, go and count, it's true. Hooray!)
Comics in 1940 were very different than they are now. If you know anything about comics history you know that publishers back then didn’t really care about artists or writers, let alone royalties. Stories were cobbled together with no time and not much care. That the mess of the origin of many famous characters is the basis for what we still read and watch today is somewhat amazing. If you actually look at those comics, you see no great art in most cases and certainly no stories that are well-written. I decided to take a look at some #1s that came out during that year and focus on the most interesting, funny, weird or problematic panels.
Read MoreComics Are For Everyone - Y, the Last Letter
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It’s time for some comics again. Whenever I read comics, I note anything that seems interesting to me and collect it until I another comics post is up. Like, now. Today we talk about things that end on –y, like humanity, democracy, authority and anarchy.
Read MoreComics Are for Everyone: 1988 Edition [1988 Week]
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Because of the amazing comics that have been released in 1988, I decided to have another comics section in this theme week. Grant Morrison and Alan Moore are big enough names for this, I guess, but we shouldn’t forget Jamie Delano. I’ll just focus on the issues published in that year, since that’s enough already. Let’s go!
Read MoreComics Are for Everyone: 2012 Edition - Occupying Jokers, Transgender Aliens and the Web of Life [2012 Week]
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As I mentioned before, 2012 had a lot of comics in it and I read many of those. So I thought today I spent some time flipping through more than 1,000 issues to see what is noticeable in those comic books. What, you say that’s crazy? Too much? You’re right, actually. I’ll try to focus on which current events were portrayed in some of those comics and also look at some interesting messages regarding humanity. So, the usual.
Read MoreComics Are for Everyone - Africa, Five Years From Now (Futures End)
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This time around, I thought I look at a collection of relatively recent comics at things I noticed. Much like Daniel Quinn, I’m trying to avoid Africa for now (until I work on it with my current course), but it doesn’t hurt to take a look at it from time to time. It’s one of my favorite topics because its stereotypicalization is so widespread and accepted. It’s AFRICA, one continent where all the problems are the same everywhere and no distinct culture is really known. Africans are starving, poor and need our help. That’s the short version.
In Action Comics: Futures End, one of the issues of DC’s Futures End month, we see Clark Kent in the future (five years from now… don’t ask, it’s complicated – or rather convoluted) being another white savior.
Read MoreComics Are For Everyone: The Last of the Greats/Avengers vs. X-Men #6
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“Humans are flawed and this is why they destroy the earth.” Would anyone doubt that assumption? Probably not. I do because I think it’s not humans but culture that is flawed. Anyway, I want to look at two comic books today that ask the question: What would happen if all the problems in the world could be solved? What would humans do then? Those are intriguing questions that revolve around the notion of humans being flawed or not. If they are not flawed, solving all the problems would save the world. If they are flawed, all the problems will just come back. Looking at these questions are Joshua Hale Fialkov and Brent Peeples in their mini-series The Last of the Greats, published by Image in 2011 and 2012, and Jonathan Hickman and Olivier Coipel in the best issue of the event comic Avengers vs. X-Men (or just AvX because it’s so cool), published in 2012 by Marvel (which was written by every major Marvel writer but was quite a mess overall).
Read MoreComics Are For Everyone: Mara #6
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Mara, a six-issue limited mini-series written by Brian Wood and illustrated by Ming Doyle and published by Image Comics in 2013, is the story of a woman who is the best and most famous sports star in a slightly futuristic world. The comic mostly shows how stardom and the media are connected and the consequences this has, thereby directly reflecting upon our society’s treatment of stars and sports (as Brian Wood rarely writes a comic without reflecting upon our society). It’s a great if slightly weird comic because it does never go where we expect it to go and the ending can’t do anything but leave you astonished in its boldness. It’s a really great comic and I can only recommend it, but since I don’t want to spoil it, I’ll just focus on one aspect today.
Read MoreComics Are For Everyone - Fear Itself #1
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Fear Itself is a Marvel event comic. Every year one of the Big Two (Marvel and DC) publish a series of comic books that ties into every major character they have and tells of some big world-changing event after which nothing is the same. Which normally means a big character dies (and comes back 1-2 years later). As you probably can see, event comics are a mixed bag. They are mostly event- or hype-driven and rarely story-driven. Some are good, most are okay, some are bad. Fear Itself is, in my opinion, one of the worst Marvel events, despite being written by the mostly good Matt Fraction and illustrated by the always good Stuart Immonen. It looks great, but the story is not really interesting and gets caught up in too many details that don’t necessarily make sense.
Read MoreComics Are For Everyone - Captain America Comics #1-19
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Comics are of course no exception when it comes to depicting stereotypes, dealing with authority and discussing our society. I have a long list of comics that deal with various topics and now is a good as any to start digging through my archives. And when I say “archives”, it sounds like going way back in time, so let’s do that.
Read MoreComics Are For Everyone - DMZ: No Future
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Tying in to yesterday’s post about Four Lions, I thought this is a good time to write about something that I also care about a lot but haven’t mentioned yet, which is comics. In fact, since I started again trying to watch every movie ever produced, my comic reading has been strongly reduced. Anyway, I recently read another volume of DMZ, the post-9/11 analogy by Brian Wood and I liked it a lot and thought it was worth writing about.
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