A couple of comics notes ( Read more... )

Back home from travels, for now. One of my more interesting experiences during the trip was taking an eleven-year-old girl (middle daughter of friends) to a comic book store for the first time. This actually arose through cunning and subterfuge. I love to give books to kids, but this particular kid has been a reluctant reader because of pretty ( Read more... )

So Marvel's got MARVEL DIVAS and DC's got DC SIRENS or something, apparently. I haven't been paying attention to it, but neither of them seem to be pleasing my flist. The only one I've glanced through is MARVEL DIVAS, which is kind of tooth-grating in that there are a couple of glimmers where you say, "Oh, hey, I see how this could be a half- ( Read more... )

One of the things I appreciated -- actually, the main thing I appreciated -- about the late, lamented scans_daily was the boundless discovery. That's true of the larger comics blogosphere, but scans_daily was frigging huge and you never knew what weird shit somebody might post. If not for scans_daily, for instance, I wouldn't be hunting back ( Read more... )

Just wanted to throw this out there: I haven't seen anybody mention it, but BIRDS OF PREY's latest issue did something that made me extraordinarily happy. THE CLOCKTOWER IS BACK ( Read more... )

Got a couple of comics I'd been thinking about -- no, I didn't make the comic store; a couple of trades came to me via the good folks at Amazon.

Jane Irwin's VOGELEIN has a beaut of a premise: a clockwork fairy makes her way through the modern world, with the help of human friends who wind her up. I'd picked up a preview excerpt of the second ( Read more... )

Before I read Fantagraphics's POPEYE reprints, I honestly had forgotten everything about Wimpy except that he loved hamburgers. Maybe that's all I'd known: like most people in my age bracket, I only knew Popeye and his friends from animation. But then the Fantagraphics books came out, and I got them, and I dang near had a heart attack. Because ( Read more... )

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This post made me realize what the Marvel Universe should do with Dazzler when they inevitably revamp her concept. There's only one solution for a heroine so much of her time: *she's an accidental time traveller.* She fell forward in time from the 1970s, and now, like Howard the Duck, she's in a world she never made ( Read more... )

In my last post, I mentioned that old-time radio had led me to hypothesize about the use of narration, and captions, in comic books. Briefly, there are two kinds of narration that you'll find in dramatizations: observer and participant. Observer's narration is provided by an omniscient, disembodied individual not represented in the drama, while ( Read more... )